- Fragile And Unsustainable Lies
Fragile And Unsustainable Lies
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/29/2020 – 00:00Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute,
Many times throughout history, policymakers have doubled down on their own mistakes, refusing to believe that they were wrong or hoping that somehow doing the wrong thing twice or thrice would somehow make things right. Then it all came crashing down at once and the rulers lost their minds, and sometimes their necks or heads.
Economic, governance, and social systems often rely on each other in ways not readily discerned by narrow technocrats. When one crumbles, the others fall in rapid succession while all the putative experts express surprise. Look at the way that the U.S.S.R, one of the world’s two “super” powers, fell apart in the late 1980s when it lost enough feathers from its peacock tail in Afghanistan that its lies about the superiority of its command economy became obvious even to its own systematically deluded subjects.
When NPR proved inadequate to prevent Americans from seeing the few feathers left in America’s peacock tail, as evidenced by the surprise victory of Trump and his MAGA messaging in 2016, mass media joined forces with various “progressive” elements to create a propaganda machine that puts the old clunky Soviet state media to shame.
Precisely because it is ostensibly private and domestic, America’s mass media, tarnished as its reputation is becoming, retains more credibility than any state-run media ever possessed. Many pundits have noted how 2020 resembles 1984, except the propaganda so far has come from a political resistance movement backed by parts of the government (FBI, CDC) rather than “the” state per se.
The phalanx of private media and sundry have convinced tens of millions of Americans that:
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we are better off imposing lockdowns that cause far more harm than the virus itself (and sundry cognates, like the virus is super serious and novel, spreads easily via asymptomatic people, yet is stopped by irrational policies like curfews, as if people won’t simply start drinking earlier!);
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the current president is somehow illegitimate (Russian election interference, Ukrainian quid pro quo);
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nation-altering Constitutional reforms are necessary (de facto elimination of the electoral college, creation of additional states, SCOTUS enlargement);
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calling all people of Euroamerican descent racist isn’t itself racist;
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a virus can differentiate between good protests (pro-BLM and pro-Biden) and bad ones (anti-lockdown and pro-Trump);
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the American people chose a candidate who essentially did not campaign or set forth a coherent policy platform over one who, for all his faults, was president when the economy finally palpably improved and made enough progress in the Middle East to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Most impressive of all has been the way the mass media censored or downplayed Biden’s many weaknesses, his deplorable record on race, his almost half-century of self-serving political machinations, and his family’s dealings with Ukraine and China.
Thankfully, the Truth always prevails, it is just a matter of when and how. When the real world is heavily involved, Lies quickly die. So many a hubristic tyrant from ancient times to Hitler has fallen in war; many a fiat currency, including confederal Continentals and Confederate graybacks, has evaporated when their nominal value in circulation rapidly outstripped the real value of goods brought to market.
The most robust, sustainable Lies cannot even be properly called such because they make no real world predictions at all but instead appeal to emotion and faith, to Revealed Truth. Some have lasted for millennia and though less popular than previously in many places they will surely outlast 2020’s Lies, even though some of those have appealed to faith, oddly in the name of “science,” as in phrases like “follow the science” reminiscent of Sunday sermons beseeching congregants to “follow Scripture.”
But religion appeals to people’s inner worlds so it can get by on dodgy slogans like “God works in mysterious ways.” The Lies of 2020, by contrast, make real world predictions and no amount of media censorship, irrational analysis, or outright obfuscation can permanently hide the fact that lockdowns impose large net burdens, Trump is no more incompetent or flawed than previous presidents, Constitutional checks and balances need to be strengthened and not dismantled, and Americans/America are no more racist than any other people/country.
Just as a fiat currency can quickly lose value through the self-interested actions of market participants, so too can lockdowns dissolve. In fact, in both cases governmental attempts to bolster its Lie (that its monetary policies or lockdowns work) will serve to speed the inevitable. If policymakers do not take the “Thanksgiving Rebellion” as a serious warning, they are dumber or more hubristic than even the most pessimistic have claimed.
In fact, Americans should use social media, a tool like all tools that can be used for good as well as evil, to pick a time to sing some vintage Twisted Sister in unison to underscore the point: “Oh, we’re not gonna take it anymore! … This is our life … oh You’re so condescending/Your gall is never ending … If that’s your best, your best won’t do. … We’re right … We’re free … We’ll Fight … You’ll see.”
I practice what I preach and drove 12 hours from Georgia to New Jersey to spend time with my family this Thanksgiving, which as usual is gathering near one of the branches of the Atilis Gym, the owners of which gained fame earlier this year by proving the state’s restrictions on places of exercise was not just wrong but wrongheaded. To this day, not a single case of coronavirus has been linked to the establishment and, in fact, its regular patrons stand (and run, bike, squat, and row) as bulwarks against the spread of the coronavirus.
What kind of public health system bemoans the fact that 40 percent of the population is so unhealthy that they are at higher risk of developing complications from the coronavirus and then shutters workout facilities (and even at points boardwalks, parks, etc.)? A coercive state that truly cared about its people would have forced them to exercise instead of shuttering gyms, walking paths, and bike trails!
The longer policymakers allow the pandemic to play out through forced restrictions on natural interaction, the more Americans who will conclude that the public health system and Big Medicine have formed a “complex” akin to the military-industrial and scientific-technical-research complexes that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about when he left office in 1961, in the wake of another election apparently won with the aid of dead Democrats.
This third complex is not interested in Americans’ health but rather their debility. Its goal is to make people dependent on pills and fancy vaccines (the kind now being tested, not the much easier and cheaper live vaccines that might have provided safe, voluntary herd immunity in a month or two, without lockdowns) and to charge through the nose for them, indirectly through taxes or insurance premia. Indirect billing renders the exorbitant costs easier to hide, but like all Lies with real world implications its effects are fragile and unsustainable as even indirect healthcare expenses become unbearable. That led to dropout (most uninsured Americans rationally opted out of insurance that was too costly relative to the expected benefit) and calls for “reforms,” all of which attempt to force everyone to pay tribute to the healthcare complex.
The big risk that I see is that some Americans are coming to understand 2020’s Lies much more quickly and clearly than others. There is a chance, therefore, that instead of The People rising up against feckless government tyrants a la Twisted Sister, tensions between the Still Masked and the Unmaskers, which started in March and intensified over the summer, may boil over into violence. That would be lamentable and counterproductive and could cause the deaths of more Americans in a single day than have perished thus far during the entire pandemic. Violence is a contagion to which nobody can become immune.
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- CCP Imposes Tough New 'Social Credit Score' Rules
CCP Imposes Tough New ‘Social Credit Score’ Rules
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 23:30China will consider individuals who seriously endanger people’s health and safety, or disrupt markets’ fair competition and normal social order, as threats to society under its new social credit guidelines.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that the measures were discussed during a recent meeting of the state council citing a state council meeting led by Premier Li Keqiang, President Xi’s point man for handling the fallout for the coronavirus.
Among these new punitive measures, China will promote quality development of the credit reporting industry, while encouraging the sharing of credit information related to finance, government administration and public utilities Speed up orderly use of government-related data Strengthen information security and privacy protection.
The meeting, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday, decided on measures to refine the bad-faith deterrent mechanism to promote the orderly and healthy development of the social credit system.
The principles include adhering to laws and regulations, protecting rights and interests, taking a prudent and appropriate approach and implementing list-based managemen The scope and procedures of credit information shall be formulated in a science-based way, while those for sharing credit information shall be standardized, the meeting said.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, Fox News explains that China’s social credit system is a government program being implemented the People’s Republic of China regulate its citizens’ behavior based on a point system.
Citizens with higher scores have had an easier time getting bank loans, free medical checkups and discounts on heating. Points have been deducted for traffic violations, selling faulty products or defaulting on loan payments. In some cases, people with bad social credit scores have been barred from buying airline or train tickets.
Other infractions including smoking in non-smoking areas, along with buying – or playing – too many video games, according to various media reports.
- Inequality And The Gold Standard
Inequality And The Gold Standard
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 23:00Authored by David Howden via The Mises Institute,
[First published by Mises Canada, December 2013.]
Imagine that you earn $40,000 a year and your boss doubles you at $80,000 a year. Business was good to you both in 2013, and you received a 25% raise for your efforts. Not bad, and your boss gets to share in this good fortune too with an extra $25,000 (about 30%). You’re going to make $50,000 in 2014 and your boss will pull in $105,000.
Are you happy with this deal? Probably. But wait, income inequality just increased! Your boss originally outpaced you by 100%, but now his salary is 110% higher than yours.
To read the brouhaha going around right now, this situation is cause for alarm. Income inequality has increased and despite the fact that everyone is doing better than they once were, one group is doing relatively better.
What about if we reverse the example, starting from the original salaries? Instead of having a great year, imagine things were very bad and salary cuts are going around. You get a 25% pay cut so that you will now be earning $30,000 a year, and because he has more responsibility about the direction of the business and its lack of success, your boss gets a larger pay cut of $25,000. (This situation is the mirror image of the first example.)
You are making much less than you did last year. Are you upset about this? Probably. But wait, apparently there is a silver lining. Your boss now “only” makes about 80% more money than you, versus the 100% salary differential that existed last year. Income inequality decreased!
Apparently you can take solace in knowing that the playing field has been levelled, even if your kids are going to have a tough Christmas morning one year from now.
This is admittedly a very simple example. What I am trying to show is that the income inequality debate is not as straight forward as it is commonly framed. It is not just a question of one group getting a larger piece of the pie, but of increasing the size of the pie so that everyone can benefit.
John Cassidy recently entered the melee with a very digestible look at American income inequality over time. In his “six charts” there is some of the same (the top 1% of earners have seen their share of the pie rise rapidly over the past decades) and also some surprises.
Relying on data from Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, Cassidy shares the following graph showing changes in real income growth over the past century.
First let’s look at the top 1%. There seem to be about three distinct periods their incomes have gone through. The first from 1913 to roughly 1973 is more or less flat. Real incomes for the top 1% were no higher in 1973 than they were around 1930. After 1973 however there is a sharp and mostly uninterrupted spike upwards which seems to stop around the year 2000. After 2000 their real incomes have ebbed and flowed, primarily in response to capital gains and losses on their stock portfolios. Even though the volatility of their income has increased, it still remains quite high relative to any time over the past 100 years.
Compare this with the bottom 99%. There seem to be about four distinct periods of real income growth. From 1913 until the end of the Great Depression, real income remained more or less constant. The 1940s, 50s and 60s saw a rapid increase in real income growth, far more rapid than what the 1% experienced. This came to a sudden end around 1973 and a stagnation until the early 1990s. Then from 1993 onwards we see the same final stage as the 1%. Increasing real incomes (though much slower than the 1%) but more volatility as well.
There are many things which are the same in these two trends, but the one year that probably pops out for people who think income inequality is a bad thing is 1973.
This year marked the end of the steady advance for the 99%’s real income gains and set in motion the rapid advance of the 1%. In other words, the marked income inequality we see today is a product of the post-1973 world.
So what happened in 1973? Many things as it turns out. Decreased unionization was getting underway in the U.S. economy around this time, as was the spike in the price of oil.
Russ Roberts over at Café Hayek has a different explanation. He thinks it has to do with changes to the family unit. Large increases in the divorce rate and a steady increase in the number of households headed by women could be to blame for the sudden jump in income inequality.
Maybe, but although this could be a reason why, I doubt it is the primary reason.
Let’s try an informal test. What was the biggest event to occur in 1973?
Americans probably will answer Roe v. Wade, the completion of the World Trade Center as the world’s tallest building or the beginnings of the Watergate hearings. Maybe the start of withdrawal of troops from Vietnam or Britain joining the European Economic Community. Or for sports fans it could be Secretariat winning the Triple Crown and getting immortalized on the cover of Time.
Actually the most important thing to happen in 1973 actually happened in 1971, August 15th to be exact.
On that date Richard Nixon closed the gold window. The U.S. dollar was convertible by foreign governments into gold under the then-existing Bretton Woods system at the great price of $35 per ounce. Continued redemption demands by some belligerent countries (primarily France) drained the U.S. of its gold reserves until the breaking point when it became questionable how much longer this could continue for. In what could have been the most important day of the 20th century, Richard Nixon decided to renege on the U.S.’s promises to foreign governments and essentially default on its currency. No longer was the U.S. dollar tied to gold and the U.S. no longer had to worry about spending beyond its means.
Well, almost no longer. While there was no convertibility into gold after 1971 there was still that old bugaboo of fixity in the exchange rate. The U.S. dollar still functioned on a fixed exchange rate standard relative to gold until 1973, even if there was no convertibility. This meant that the U.S. was still not free to expand its money supply or incur ever increasing budget deficits at will. It had to target a dollar price of gold, which was reset a little higher in 1971 to $38/oz. Even though there was no redeemability, the U.S. was legally obliged to target this gold price, something which tied its hands concerning the extent to which deficits could be run and expansionary of the money supply policies could be pursued.
The effect on the deficit is easy to understand in light of this.
Since the late 1880s (and before) the U.S. government ran a somewhat balanced budget. Minor blips appeared during the two World Wars, but by-and-large the deficit hovered very close to the zero line. In the late 1960s we can witness the a growing deficit, partly in response to the cost of the Vietnam War but even that is relatively mild to what would come later. Likewise, 1971 also witnessed a growing deficit but the year which defines the point of no return is clearly 1973. At that point the U.S. deficit went into freefall and besides a few surplus years in the late 1990s it has never recovered.
The effect was also pronounced on prices.
Prices were indeed climbing throughout the 1960s, but 1973 was also the year that set off the most inflationary episode in America´s history. Being unhinged from that relic of gold, the Federal Reserve could increase the money supply and monetize the Federal government’s budget as it wanted. This culminated with 15% annual inflation in 1980 something which took a very strong-minded Federal Reserve chairman by the name of Paul Volker to tame by putting the breaks on money supply growth.
Inflation looks tame today, though the experience following the 1973 decoupling showed what happens when you let the government spend at will without any restraint. Gold provided restraint, just as political gridlock should today. But in the period of the mid to late 1970s there was no such luck.
All this takes us back to the original question: why did income inequality increase so much after 1973? We can look to two factors both related to the loss of the gold exchange standard in 1971 and the arrival of flexible exchange rates two years later.
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First, as the U.S. government no longer had to worry about redeeming U.S. debt held overseas in gold, it was able to spend without restraint. Of course, this created a large budget deficit quickly, something which needed a solution.
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This brings us to the second point. By monetizing the U.S. budget deficits, the Federal Reserve set off a period of high price inflation.
The reason why there is growing income inequality since 1973 is a direct result of this monetary mayhem. All this new money needs an entry point into the economy. Someone has to get it first and spend it. When they spend this newly created money they do so at the existing set of prices, but in the course of making these expenditures prices will rise. Those who get the money first “win” in the sense that they get a free lunch – they have a greater income and can spend it before prices rise. Those who get the money last are the “losers” – they get access to this money eventually as it is spent (trickles down?) but by the time that occurs, prices have already risen. They are no better off.
The 99% that have become relatively poorer over the past 40 years are those who get access to this new money last. (Remember however that these people are still, thankfully, wealthier than they were 40 years ago.)
Who are the remaining 1%, then? Well, who gets the money first?
Government officials and contractors, to the extent that they gets the proceeds of all the newly created money are the first and primary beneficiaries. Big banks and financial institutions also win as they are the enablers who help this newly created money enter the economy. Incidentally, 99 times out of 100, when we think of someone in the 1% who is getting ahead of the rest of us, they probably either work for the higher echelons of the government or are involved in the financial industry.
Coincidence? I doubt it, and you just have to go back in time to 1973 to understand why.
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- Visualizing 50 Years Of Gaming History, By Revenue Stream (1970-2020)
Visualizing 50 Years Of Gaming History, By Revenue Stream (1970-2020)
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 22:30Every year it feels like the gaming industry sees the same stories—record sales, unfathomable market reach, and questions of how much higher the market can go.
We’re already far past the point of gaming being the biggest earning media sector, with an estimated $165 billion revenue generated in 2020.
But as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach illustrates in the infographic below, it’s important to break down shifting growth within the market.
Research from Pelham Smithers shows that while the tidal wave of gaming has only continued to swell, the driving factors have shifted over the course of gaming history.
1970–1983: The Pre-Crash Era
At first, there was Atari.
Early prototypes of video games were developed in labs in the 1960s, but it was Atari’s release of Pong in 1972 that helped to kickstart the industry.
The arcade table-tennis game was a sensation, drawing in consumers eager to play and companies that started to produce their own knock-off versions. Likewise, it was Atari that sold a home console version of Pong in 1975, and eventually its own Atari 2600 home console in 1977, which would become the first console to sell more than a million units.
In short order, the arcade market began to plateau. After dwindling due to a glut of Pong clones, the release of Space Invaders in 1978 reinvigorated the market.
Arcade machines started to be installed everywhere, and new franchises like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong drove further growth. By 1982, arcades were already generating more money than both the pop music industry and the box office.
1985–2000: The Tech Advancement Race
Unfortunately, the gaming industry grew too quickly to maintain.
Eager to capitalize on a growing home console market, Atari licensed extremely high budget ports of Pac-Man and a game adaptation of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. They were rushed to market, released in poor quality, and cost the company millions in returns and more in brand damage.
As other companies also looked to capitalize on the market, many other poor attempts at games and consoles caused a downturn across the industry. At the same time, personal computers were becoming the new flavor of gaming, especially with the release of the Commodore 64 in 1982.
It was a sign of what was to define this era of gaming history: a technological race. In the coming years, Nintendo would release the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console in 1985 (released in Japan as the Famicom), prioritizing high quality games and consistent marketing to recapture the wary market.
On the backs of games like Duck Hunt, Excitebike, and the introduction of Mario in Super Mario Bros, the massive success of the NES revived the console market.
Estimated Total Console Sales by Manufacturer (1970-2020)
Nintendo looked to continue its dominance in the field, with the release of the Game Boy handheld and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. At the same time, other competitors stepped in to beat them at their own game.
In 1988, arcade company Sega entered the fray with the Sega Mega Drive console (released as the Genesis in North America) and then later the Game Gear handheld, putting its marketing emphasis on processing power.
Electronics maker Sony released the PlayStation in 1994, which used CD-ROMs instead of cartridges to enhance storage capacity for individual games. It became the first console in history to sell more than 100 million units, and the focus on software formats would carry on with the PlayStation 2 (DVDs) and PlayStation 3 (Blu-rays).
Even Microsoft recognized the importance of gaming on PCs and developed the DirectX API to assist in game programming. That “X” branding would make its way to the company’s entry into the console market, the Xbox.
2001–Present: The Online Boom
It was the rise of the internet and mobile, however, that grew the gaming industry from tens of billions to hundreds of billions in revenue.
A primer was the viability of subscription and freemium services. In 2001, Microsoft launched the Xbox Live online gaming platform for a monthly subscription fee, giving players access to multiplayer matchmaking and voice chat services, quickly becoming a must-have for consumers.
Meanwhile on PCs, Blizzard was tapping into the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) subscription market with the 2004 release of World of Warcraft, which saw a peak of more than 14 million monthly paying subscribers.
All the while, companies saw a future in mobile gaming that they were struggling to tap into. Nintendo continued to hold onto the handheld market with updated Game Boy consoles, and Nokia and BlackBerry tried their hands at integrating game apps into their phones.
But it was Apple’s iPhone that solidified the transition of gaming to a mobile platform. The company’s release of the App Store for its smartphones (followed closely by Google’s own store for Android devices) paved the way for app developers to create free, paid, and pay-per-feature games catered to a mass market.
Now, everyone has their eyes on that growing $85 billion mobile slice of the gaming market, and game companies are starting to heavily consolidate.
Major Gaming Acquisitions Since 2014
Console makers like Microsoft and Sony are launching cloud-based subscription services even while they continue to develop new consoles. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google are launching their own services that work on multiple devices, mobile included.
After seeing the success that games like Pokémon Go had on smartphones—reaching more than $1 billion in yearly revenue—and Grand Theft Auto V’s record breaking haul of $1 billion in just three days, companies are targeting as much of the market as they can.
And with the proliferation of smartphones, social media games, and streaming services, they’re on the right track. There are more than 2.7 billion gamers worldwide in 2020, and how they choose to spend their money will continue to shape gaming history as we know it.
- 2021 Would Be A Great Time To Audit The Fed
2021 Would Be A Great Time To Audit The Fed
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 22:00Authored by Nick Hankoff via The Mises Institute,
Gone are the days of the Federal Reserve hiding in the shadows. Now it’s a woke central bank fighting for climate and racial justice. Progressives must not fall for this but instead team up with the populist right to audit the Fed and demand transparency.
Let the healing begin! If it is going to be President Joe Biden a couple months from now, then there will be all the more incentive for antiestablishment Democrats to join forces with populist Republicans. What better issue than auditing the Federal Reserve System?
There is strong precedent for progressives and the populist right to unite around an “Audit the Fed” movement. In early 2009, Congressman Ron Paul introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which garnered 320 House cosponsors by the summer of 2010.
Since then, the antiestablishment factions of both parties have grown and at least one of the 2009 House cosponsors now holds a Senate seat. Audit the Fed has passed the House on three occasions, so it could see as much or more success this coming session.
Another development over the last eleven years is the Fed’s evolving public image. Before Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential run, the central bank lurked in near-total darkness. Two thousand nine was a breakout year for its public relations campaign, and the Fed has failed to return to its prior obscurity.
Now the secretive power center larps as a super–social justice warrior, fighting for climate and racial justice, the top pet issues of the progressive left. Many grassroots progressives expressed their distaste for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but even those who held their noses to vote for them shouldn’t feel at all obliged to apologize for the Fed’s virtue signaling.
Meanwhile, inflationary monetary policy most harms those people and communities whom the progressive left claims to champion. Saving becomes more difficult or impossible, while prices of goods rise.
All the more reason for the Fed to adopt the likeness of a woke institution. Just as it has blamed “irrational exuberance” for boom-bust cycles, it can now blame systemic racism or climate change for poor economic growth that’s actually fueled by its own monetary policy.
This week, the Fed officially sought membership in the Network for Greening the Financial System, an assemblage of central banks and other international forces that “support the transition toward a sustainable economy” for the sake of the climate.
This past summer, Fed chairman Jerome Powell promised to improve “diversity” within the Fed’s structure. Will the new friendlier, kinder, and woker Federal Reserve System win the trust of progressives or irk them for stealing their thunder and undermining their vision?
Most Americans already don’t trust the Fed, especially Democrats, people forty-nine and under, and those making less than $50,000 a year. Those would be natural progressive constituencies.
Republicans in the House and Senate, especially if the president is unable to secure a second term, will be in a strong position to take on the Fed. Trump has long criticized the bank and its chairman, whom he picked. Although more recent frustration expressed was over interest rates not being low enough, Trump also supported auditing the Fed during his 2016 campaign.
Republicans will also likely control the Senate, so any other Fed-related bills that Democrats might propose would have more trouble finding enough votes for passage. Take for instance the Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Equity Act recently introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand and cosponsored by Bernie Sanders.
This FRREE Act seeks to “minimize and eliminate racial disparities in employment, wages, wealth, and access to affordable credit.” That amounts to overhauling the Congress’s instructions for the Fed, which have focused the bank’s duties on job creation and price stabilization since 1977.
Unfortunately, its champions Warren and Sanders have opposed auditing the Fed in the past. It will take a groundswell of grassroots pressure to turn them around, but it can be done.
Any hope for real political unity that actually benefits the American people depends on the success of projects like Audit the Fed. If populist movements from the left and right can coalesce on this one thing, they will find their time well spent.
Even if a President Biden or Trump vetoed the legislation, it would amount to progress in the pursuit of transparency at the Fed. Both the left and right side of grassroots politics could claim a piece of the same victory. That would be a nice turnaround from 2020.
- Cali Mansion Once Listed For $100 Million Sells For "Only" $48.4 Million
Cali Mansion Once Listed For $100 Million Sells For “Only” $48.4 Million
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 21:30Today in “a look into a luxury real estate market you will never likely participate in” news…
A famous L.A. mansion called “Opus” that was once listed for $100 million and has been on the market for over three years has finally sold – at a more than 50% haircut.
The 20,000 square foot mansion sold for $48.4 million this week, furniture included, according to Bloomberg. It is also the latest canary in the luxury real estate coal mine, selling for a large discount during a pandemic which has seen foreign buyers dry up and an exodus from city areas.
Additionally, as we have noted this year, California is seeing an outflow of residents as poor state management, higher taxes and more government are driving citizens to tax havens like Florida and Texas.
Source: BBG Jonathan Miller, president of appraiser Miller Samuel told Bloomberg of the original price tag: “It was never worth that to begin with. High-end properties are moving, but they’re not moving for prices that are disconnected from the market.”
The house sports 7 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, and was custom built by movie producer turned real estate developer (of course) Nile Niami. He first tried to sell the house “with a PR campaign involving a hyper-sexualized video of mostly-naked women in different parts of the house, including one shot of four women slathered in gold paint posing around a golden Lamborghini”.
When that didn’t work, we guess he ran out of ideas and simply decided to start cutting the price 3 years ago.
Niami is currently developing a $500 million private residence called “The One” that has 4 swimming pools, a nightclub and a bowling alley. We can’t prove it, but we’re sure this insanity is somehow Neel Kashkari’s fault. Niami says he won’t budge on the $500 million price tag.
Umansky said of the project: “He just won’t listen to the market. If he would just sell and not try to hit a grand slam on every deal, he would be great.”
Source: BBG The lack of a bid in general is isolated to speculative luxury homes over $100 million, the article notes (we can’t imagine why). The rest of the real estate market has been showing signs of lack of supply, mirroring demand nationally in places like South Florida, the Hamptons and Greenwich, Connecticut.
Mauricio Umansky, chief executive officer of the Agency, said: “There’s a big gap between what the owners are willing to sell for and buyers are willing to pay. They didn’t underwrite correctly.”
While the bid/ask spread on real estate has narrowed, some celebrity real estate sales have seen their prices drop. Lori Loughlin, before heading to jail, sold her Bel Air mansion for almost 50% less than the $35 million she was asking. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi also recently sold their home for $33.3 million after it was originally listed at $40 million.
- The Strangely Unscientific Masking Of America
The Strangely Unscientific Masking Of America
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 21:00Authored by Jenin Younes via The American Institute for Economic Research,
I remember vividly the day, at the tail end of March, when facemasks suddenly became synonymous with morality: either one cared about the lives of others and donned a mask, or one was selfish and refused to do so. The shift occurred virtually overnight.
Only a day or two before, I had associated this attire solely with surgeons and people living in heavily polluted regions. Now, my friends’ favorite pastime during our weekly Zoom sessions was excoriating people for running or socializing without masks in Prospect Park. I was mystified by their certitude that bits of cloth were the only thing standing between us and mass death, particularly when mere weeks prior, the message from medical experts contradicted this new doctrine.
On February 29, the U.S. surgeon general infamously tweeted:
“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS. . . They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.”
Anthony Fauci, the best-known member of the coronavirus task force, advised Americans not to wear masks around this time.
Similarly, in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, the CDC maintained that masks should be worn only by individuals who were symptomatic or caring for a sick person, a position that the WHO stood by even longer.
As rapidly as mask use became a matter of ethics, the issue transformed into a political one, exemplified by an article printed on March 27 in the New York Times, entitled “More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection.” The piece was heavy on fear-mongering and light on evidence. While acknowledging that “[t]here is very little data showing that flat surgical masks, in particular, have a protective effect for the general public,” the author went on to argue that they “may be better than nothing,” and cited a couple of studies in which surgical masks ostensibly reduced influenza transmission rates.
One report reached its conclusion based on observations of a “dummy head attached to a breathing simulator.” Another analyzed use of surgical masks on people experiencing at least two symptoms of acute respiratory illness. Incidentally, not one of these studies involved cloth masks or accounted for real-world mask usage (or misusage) among lay people, and none established efficacy of widespread mask-wearing by people not exhibiting symptoms. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that healthy people ought to wear masks when going about their lives, especially outdoors. Yet by April, to walk the streets of Brooklyn with one’s nose and mouth exposed evoked the sort of reaction that in February would have been reserved for the appearance of a machine gun.
In short order, the politicization intensified. President Trump refused to wear a mask relatively early on, so resistance to them was equated with support for him. By the same token, Democratic politicians across the board eagerly adopted the garb; accordingly, all good liberals were wearing masks religiously by the beginning of April. Likewise, left-leaning newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post unequivocally promoted mask-wearing after that March 27 article, with no real analysis or consideration of opposing views and evidence.
The speed with which mask-wearing among the general public transitioned from unheard of to a moral necessity struck me as suspicious. After all, if the science was as airtight as those around me claimed, surely masks would have been recommended by January or February, not to mention during prior infectious disease outbreaks such as the 2009 swine flu. It seemed unlikely that the scientific proof became incontrovertible sometime between late February and late March, particularly in the absence of any new evidence surfacing during that time period.
Perhaps none of this is particularly surprising in this hyper-political era. What is shocking is the scientific community’s participation in subverting evidence that does not comport with the consensus. A prime example is the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation’s (“IHME”) rather astounding claim, published in the journal Nature-Medicine and echoed in countless articles afterward, that the lives of 130,000 people could be saved with a nationwide mask mandate.
As my colleague Phil Magness pointed out in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the IHME model was predicated upon faulty data: it assumed that 49% of Americans were wearing masks based on a survey conducted between April and June, while claiming that statistic represented the number of Americans wearing masks as of September 21. In fact, by the summer, around 80% of Americans were regularly wearing them. (Ironically, had Dr. Fauci and the Surgeon General not bungled the message in March, mask use probably would have reached much higher rates much earlier on).
This called into question the accuracy of the 130,000 figure, since many more people habitually used masks than the study presumed.
Although Magness contacted Nature-Medicine to point out the problem, after stalling for nearly two weeks, the journal declined to address it. Needless to say, the damage had been done: newspapers such as the New York Times undoubtedly would fail to correct the error and any retractions certainly would be placed far from the front page, where the initial article touting the IHME figure appeared. Thus, as expected, the unfounded claim that 130,000 lives could be saved with a nationwide mask-mandate continues to be repeated, including by president-elect Joe Biden and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
That the science behind mask-wearing is questionable at best is further exemplified by a letter to the editor written in response to Magness’s article. Dr. Christopher Murray acknowledged that rates of mask-wearing have steadily increased, but then concluded that masks should be used because they are “our first line of defense against the pandemic” and current IHME modeling indicates that “if 95% of U.S. residents were to wear masks when leaving home, we could prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans” because “masks work,” and “much deeper pain is ahead if we refuse to wear them.”
None of this accounts for the failure of either Nature-Medicine or the IHME modelers to recognize and correct the error. Moreover, neither the IHME modelers nor Dr. Murray provide any evidence that masks work. They assume masks are extremely effective at preventing spread of the coronavirus, and then claim that the model is correct for that reason. This sort of circular reasoning is all-too typical of those who so vociferously insist that masks are effective without going to the trouble of substantiating that contention – or differentiating what is likely a modest benefit from mask-wearing in specific indoor locations and around high-risk individuals from the media-driven tendency to depict masks as a silver bullet for stopping the virus in all circumstances.
Coverage of a recent mask study conducted in Denmark likewise epitomizes the failure of the scientific community to rigorously engage with results that do not fit the prevailing masks-as-a-panacea narrative. The first randomized and controlled study of its kind, it found an absence of empirical evidence that masks provide protection to people wearing them, although it apparently did not assess whether they prevent infection of those who encounter the wearer. The report was covered in a New York Times article bearing the patronizing headline, “A New Study Questions Whether Masks Protect Wearers. You Need to Wear Them Anyway.”
Noting that the results “conflict with those from a number of other studies,” primarily “laboratory examinations of the particles blocked by materials of various types,” the author remarked that, therefore, this research “is not likely to alter public health recommendations in the United States.” Notably, laboratory examinations, as opposed to the Danish study, do not account for the realities of everyday mask usage by non-medical professionals.
The author then quotes Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania, who claims that the study indicates a trend: “‘in the direction of benefit’ even if the results were not statistically significant. ‘Nothing in this study suggests . . . that it is useless to wear a mask,’” according to Dr. Ellenberg.
Nor does anything in this study suggest that it is useful to wear a mask, a fact that Dr. Ellenberg (and the headline) conveniently ignores. Furthermore, if a result is statistically insignificant, it should not be used to make the case for any proposition — as even I, a layperson, know.
Scientists ought to dispassionately analyze data that contradicts their biases and assumptions, and be open to changing their beliefs accordingly. That the results of the only randomized, controlled study were and continue to be automatically discounted demonstrates that, when it comes to the subject of masks, anything approximating the scientific method has gone out the window. That is all the more evident given the lack of interest that mask proponents have shown in conducting a randomized, controlled study themselves.
An article in the Los Angeles Times went even further: it twisted the findings of the Danish study to argue, incomprehensibly, that the research demonstrated more mask-wearing is warranted. The author cited, as supposedly compelling evidence that masks work, the low Covid-19 death rates in Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Indeed, according to the latest YouGov poll, administered in mid-November, 83% of Americans now wear masks in public, higher rates than Vietnam (77%) and Taiwan (82%).
Furthermore, there are other explanations, apart from widespread mask usage, for the remarkably low death rates in these countries. Some scientists believe that previous exposure to other coronaviruses in these regions may confer partial or total immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Others have speculated that obesity, environment or genetics could be the reason that Europe and the United States have substantially higher death rates than many Asian and African countries; after all, obesity is one of the most significant risk factors for severe illness.
To conclude on the basis of low death rates in several countries that masks prevent coronavirus transmission is patently absurd, illogical, and unscientific. A casual observer might also note that coronavirus cases (albeit not necessarily deaths) are rising in many parts of the world, regardless of mask mandates or rates of implementation. While not a controlled experiment, this fact at least ought to be addressed when making such sweeping claims.
Ultimately, I do not have the credentials to determine whether or not –or to what extent — masks work. But it is obvious that the issue has become so politicized that mainstream media outlets, politicians, and even scientists seize upon the slightest bit of favorable evidence, dismiss out of hand anything that conflicts with their theory, and most egregiously of all misrepresent the data, to support the conclusion that masks worn by asymptomatic people prevent coronavirus transmission.
And masks are only one part of this story: school closures, lockdowns, and social distancing all have been dogmatically embraced as a means of controlling infection. The substantial evidence that these mechanisms are not effective, particularly beyond their duration, has been automatically rejected for too long. This is not science: it is politics, and those within the profession who have refused to examine their confirmation biases, or manipulated the evidence to score political points, are utterly unqualified for the job.
- The 2021 Liquidity Supernova: Step Aside Fed – US Treasury Will Unleash $1.3 Trillion In Liquidity
The 2021 Liquidity Supernova: Step Aside Fed – US Treasury Will Unleash $1.3 Trillion In Liquidity
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 20:30One of the most poignant (and painful to some) lessons of the past decade – especially to contrarian, bearish investors such as Odey and Horseman – is that the Fed can keep print money far longer than any short can remain solvent. And while it was considered in poor taste until earlier this year to admit that the market levitation is entirely due to the Fed’s manipulation of markets- a task best left to fringe, tinfoil wearing blogs – all pretense disappeared after Jerome Powell nationalized the bond market in March, and just last week Morgan Stanley’s chief rates strategist, Matthew Hornbach, admitted that central bank liquidity is the most critical component of rising macro markets: “It both greases the wheels of transactional finance and changes the opportunity set available to investors.”
It’s also why Morgan Stanley has been especially bullish on markets in 2021: as Hornbach summarized it simply: “When it comes to liquidity, our focus is on both “narrow” and “broad” measures… We expect both types of liquidity to expand in 2021.“
Last Monday we discussed the expansion of the first type of liquidity, namely that provided by central banks. The math was, in a word, staggering: combined, the 8 DM central banks are expected to purchase US$304 billion of securities ($238 billion of which will be government bonds), on average, from private markets every month in 2021 (with the Fed and the ECB naturally doing most of the buying).
Putting this number in context, in total these 8 central banks are expected to add liquidity worth 0.7% of annual nominal GDP, on average, every month in 2021. “That is a rapid pace of global liquidity injection, the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of 2020” Hornbach casually inserts.
What is even more striking is that this may not be enough: as we showed two weeks ago, after the Fed monetized virtually every dollar of net Treasury issuance in 2020, in 2021 Treasury supply will significantly outstrip Fed purchases (and this is even without factoring in the possibility of another major fiscal stimulus).
Said otherwise, while the Treasury faces net Treasury issuance of roughly $2.4 trillion, the Fed is expected to monetize less than half of this total, or $960 billion. Considering that in 2020 under the auspices of “helicopter money” (from which we remind readers there is simply no coming back) the Fed will have monetized virtually every dollar of net issuance, this is a huge cliff and one which could lead to a shock drop in Treasury prices if the market reprices (lower) its expectations for Fed monetizations.
In other words, the Fed needs to more than double its scheduled monthly QE in 2021 just to catch up to where it was in 2020; and the Fed is hardly alone – in just the past month, the RBA, the BOE and most recently, the Riksbank, all announced expansions to their current QE.
And here comes the twist, because in what may come as a surprise to some, in 2021 liquidity injections won’t be limited to QE.
As traders who lived through the reserve squeeze of Sept 2019 recall all too vividly, central bank purchases of securities via QE aren’t the only way liquidity can find its way into markets. In the US, the Treasury can increase liquidity by allowing its cash balance – held at the Federal Reserve – to decline. When Treasury issues debt, it can either spend the money on government mandates or it can keep the money in its checking account at the Fed, known as the Treasury General Account (TGA).
To be sure, from a liquidity perspective Treasury debt issuance and the subsequent spending does not impact liquidity on net, in general. When Treasury issues debt, banking system reserves decrease. And when Treasury spends the money, banking system reserves increase.
However, as Hornbach reminds us, 2020 was unique in that Treasury issued lots of debt without spending the money, resulting in over $1.6 trillion in Treasury cash available for deployment at a moment’s notice, yet due to Congress’ inability to reach agreement on a fiscal stimulus, this money was never spent (and may have cost Trump a victory in the election).
As a result, the cash balance in the TGA increased dramatically, resulting in a massive liquidity drain; in fact were it not for other sources of liquidity injection – such as the Fed injecting hundreds of billions with monthly periodicity – that may have been a huge problem for markets. In any event, as the chart below shows, despite the Treasury’s liquidity drain reserves increased in 2020 regardless, surpassing a record $5 trillion.
So what happens in 2021 with all this cash already sloshing around?
Well, as Hornbach writes, in 2021 the Treasury General Account will experience more volatility due to the debt ceiling deadline, but will initially result in a very large injection of liquidity. The debt ceiling deadline is August 1, 2021. On this date, the US Treasury will not be able to issue any additional debt above and beyond what it needs to cover existing debt obligations. However, what few may be aware of, is that there is a clause written into the law that prohibits the TGA from rising above levels prior to the debt ceiling deadline, which was in 2019.
This means that based on the 2019 debt ceiling, the Treasury cash will need to be at $200 billion by August 1, 2021. As such, there will be significant T-bill paydowns in 2021 through August in order for Treasury to reduce its cash balance – leading to a massive increase in reserves which is entirely apart from those injected via Fed QE, which continues at a pace of $120 billion per month. With the TGA cash currently at just under $1.5 trillion, it means that the US Treasury will unlock $1.3 trillion in liquidity over the next 8 months, more than doubling the liquidity coming from the Fed over the same time period which will be roughly $1 trillion ($120 x 8 months)!
We hope this massive liquidity injection explains why Biden was so interested in getting a former Fed chair – Janet Yellen – in charge of the Treasury. After all, the amount of liquidity to be injected by the Treasury Department will match, almost dollar for dollar, what Jerome Powell will do in 2021.
So when will this liquidity impact markets?
The Fed first announced its QE-driven foray into liquidity provision on Sunday, March 15, and as Morgan Stanley notes, “it took a couple weeks for the liquidity to flow to where it was needed most: the S&P 500 bottomed and the Fed’s broad trade-weighted US dollar index topped on March 23.”
Since then, the US dollar index has lost 9.4% and the S&P 500 index is up 60%. In addition, US 10y real yields have fallen 100bp while 10y breakeven inflation rates have risen 100bp. In that sense, the injection of liquidity in 2020 has already had an immense impact on markets.
So how do we know markets will feel the impact again in 2021? In the end, liquidity doesn’t have to find its way around markets if it doesn’t have an incentive. And it certainly doesn’t have to find its way into risky assets.
As we saw ahead of the US election, US$ 1 trillion found its way into money market funds (MMFs), given the uncertainty of a well-telegraphed risk event. However, according to Hornbach, in 2021, the sheer size of liquidity entering markets will make it hard for investors to keep it sitting in cash accounts, earning next to nothing. And, given virtual guarantees that most central bank policy rates will remain at effective lower bounds (ELBs) in 2021, and many will remain there in 2022 as well, Hornbach concludes that “investors will have a (performance) incentive to move cash into higher yielding assets.”
In the end, it’s not possible for us to say exactly when the liquidity will impact market prices throughout the year. Still, once the race for returns begins as we enter the new calendar year (the new fiscal year for many investors), we expect liquidity to venture out of its safe-haven cash-cave – just as long as new, unforeseen uncertainties aren’t mounting at the same time.
Translation: buy everything ahead of an unprecedented dollar devaluation orgy.
- Watch: CNN Admits There Are "Legal & Constitutional" Ways For Trump To Stay In Office
Watch: CNN Admits There Are “Legal & Constitutional” Ways For Trump To Stay In Office
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 20:00Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
In a video released before the election but attracting fresh attention, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria explained the “legal and constitutional” case by which President Trump could stay in office even if he loses the election.
In a moment of actual journalistic integrity, which is incredibly rare these days for CNN, Zakaria outlined how Trump could retain the presidency “without actually winning the vote.”
Explaining how the system worked, Zakaria said electors are determined by that state’s popular vote, but that this is “not a constitutional obligation.”
The host then outlined the exact scenario that happened on election day, with Trump leading on November 3rd but then mail-in ballots swinging the result for Biden, prompting a flurry of challenges and lawsuits.
“Taking account of the confusion, legislatures decide to choose the electors themselves,” said Zakaria before pointing out that eight out of nine key swing states have Republican legislatures.
CNN: “So, the outcome would be to re-elect Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t need to do anything other than to simply accept this outcome, which is Constitutional.”
Biden voters, here’s your chance to *scream internally.*🔻 pic.twitter.com/2ZDKa4NwKr
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 28, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marked by irregularities, they could send what they regard as the legitimate slate of electors, which would be Republican.”
Adding to the confusion, Democrats from the same states would also send their electors to Washington, which Zakaria suggested could be “part of the Republican plan.”
“Because you see when Congress convenes on January 6 to tally the electors’ votes, there would be challenges to the legitimacy of some electors,” explained Zakaria.
This would prompt Congressional Republicans to argue that disputed states should not be counted, which would ensure Biden’s could not reach 270 electoral college votes.
CNN.🚨
Straightforward from here:
▶️GOP controls state legislatures in key swing states
▶️Legislatures convinced of fraud; send own/no electors
▶️Biden deprived of 270
▶️State delegations in House re-elect Trump 26-23“So the outcome would be to re-elect Donald Trump.” 🔻 pic.twitter.com/vZAnvtgNBz
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 28, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“At that point, the constitution clearly directs that the House of Representatives vote to determine the presidential election, but it does so with each state casting a single ballot,” said Zakaria, noting that this process would result in the re-election of Donald Trump.
“Trump doesn’t have to do anything other than accept this outcome, which is constitutional,” concluded Zakaria.
The video has caused consternation amongst some Biden supporters, who are eagerly pointing out that it was released before the election.
However, this makes no difference whatsoever. Zakaria’s explanation of how Trump could still win is still in play.
* * *
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- "I Want To Build A World Where Someone Like Me Is Impossible" – Meet The Trust Fund Brats Trying To Destroy Capitalism
“I Want To Build A World Where Someone Like Me Is Impossible” – Meet The Trust Fund Brats Trying To Destroy Capitalism
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 19:30Roughly 18 months have passed since New York Magazine published a cover story declaring that, in the age of President Trump, all the new “it” kids in Brooklyn (we use the term “kids” loosely; most are well into their 30s) are avowed socialists.
As the reporter explains, the new generation of Brooklyn cool kids have blue check marks on twitter and low-paying editorial jobs at digital magazines like the (now defunct) Outline, Deadspin (a media outlet ostensibly dedicated to sports but realistically covered whatever its reporters and editors felt like writing about on any given day) or Jacobin, a magazine that has been described by some as “straight up Marxist” in its editorial slant. Almost all of them were white women, the most oppressed class.
One year later, a staff uprising at the NYT exposed just how deeply embedded these new crypto-marxist values have become in the modern American media environment. Staffers successfully ousted Opinion Page editor James Bennett over his decision to curate an essay from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton despite the fact that the opinion page is supposed to be an entirely separate editorial entity from the NYT’s newsgathering operation.
This week, the NYT has published a story about a handful of wealthy heirs who have embraced the socialist credo, and who see their massive piles of inherited wealth as a symbol of shame, not a blessing for which they should be extremely grateful.
Take 25-year-old Sam Jacobs, for example. Described as “a socialist since college”, he reportedly sees his family’s “‘extreme plutocratic wealth’ as both a moral and economic failure”.
“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.
Fortunately for Jacobs, his grandfather was one of the founders of Qualcomm, the ubiquitous chipmaker. And even if he gives $30 million away, he’ll still have another $70 million or so coming to him over the course of his lifetime. And what’s more, he’s not alone. As the NYT reports, for all their kvetching about student loans, American millennials will soon become the beneficiaries of what social scientists are calling “the great wealth transfer”: tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass from the hands of baby boomers to their millennial and Gen X spawn over the coming decade.
However, most American millennials won’t inherit anything, except for “debt, dim job prospects” and a “figment” of the social safety net (that seems like an exaggeration, especially considering that literally every single American citizen who reaches the required age will receive a monthly check from the federal government, part of a program called “social security”, not to mention medicare/medicaid).
But as both a “trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist”, Jacobs “is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality”. And he’s hardly along in trying to navigate “what it means to be with the 99%, when you’re the 1%” – embracing the type of reductive, us-vs.-them thinking promoted by Bernie Sanders and his allies.
30-year-old Rachel Gelman is another example. Her wealthy family gave generously to liberal causes growing up. Now, as a 30-year-old preparing to inherit millions from her parents, Gelman is trying to find a way to give back since most of her family’s money “comes from stocks…which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery.”
Of course, no story about modern day socialism would be complete without a quote from professor Richard Wolff, an “economist” who currently teaches at the New School in Manhattan (an overpriced university dedicated to serving the overprivileged elite who could score high enough on their SATs to get into NYU).
As Wolff, known to millions of millennials for his guest appearances on the left wing podcast “Chapo Trap House”, explains, all the money being inherited by today’s millennials came from “a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the expense of a fleeting American dream.”
Later on in the story, one of the heirs whose wealth comes from a chain of strip malls, said the business model just reeks of “intersectional oppression”.
Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
In reality, most of the wealth held by baby boomers wasn’t redistributed, but was in fact created during the 20th century during the post-war economic boom – an economic movement that generated more prosperity, and dragged more people out of poverty, than any earlier period in human history.
- Glenn Greenwald Opines On Ilhan Omar's Misguided Defense Of John Brennan
Glenn Greenwald Opines On Ilhan Omar’s Misguided Defense Of John Brennan
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 19:00Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com
The right to dissent from, and to work against, the official foreign policy of the U.S. Government is vital: foundational to Constitutional liberties. There is very little such dissent in the U.S. Congress, where many of the core tenets of the Foreign Policy Community (from CIA drone warfare and clandestine coups to steadfast support for Gulf State and Middle East tyrannies as well as Israel) enjoy overwhelming, at times virtually unanimous, bipartisan support.
That is one of the reasons that — as I’ve said repeatedly — I am glad that there are now members of Congress such as Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan who so vocally and unflinchingly dissent from this general foreign policy orientation and especially from those policies which most members of Congress either cannot or do not want to denounce.
Whether or not one agrees with these two lawmakers on every issue, having members of Congress questioning and objecting to highly consequential foreign policies is inherently healthier than full-scale agreement or fear-driven acquiescence. Dissent strengthens all democracies. That is why I have relentlessly defended Congresswoman Omar, even in the face of less-than-ideally-phrased proclamations, from what I regard as bad faith accusations of bigotry and a lack of patriotism (just as I denounced moronic claims that Trump was a “traitor”): bad faith accusations of bigotry or treason are often designed to demonize attempts to question pieties and ostracize those who do it.
For that very reason, I was quite surprised to see that late Friday night, Congresswoman Omar, in response to something I wrote, defended not only former CIA Director John Brennan — who as Obama’s CIA Director presided over the bombing of numerous countries including Somalia — but also The Logan Act. The Logan Act is nothing more than an unconstitutional attempt to criminalize foreign policy dissidents, like her, and is so dangerous in the hands of the CIA, FBI and federal prosecutors precisely because it lacks any clear definition or meaning.
Despite this, Congresswoman Omar depicted that ancient statute not as what it is — an impossibly vague and overly broad attempt to criminalize the core Constitutional right to dissent — but instead as some kind of specific, precisely defined, and well-established precedent, the contours of which are clearly established and easily applied. None of that is true.
This 219-year-old statute is one of the most unconstitutional and dangerous laws in the U.S. Code. Because it has never been used to prosecute anyone, and was only used to obtain an indictment one time in its entire history — back in 1803, against someone who wrote an op-ed criticizing U.S. foreign policy toward France — nobody knows what it actually prescribes or allows because there is no binding judicial precedent interpreting what it means. It is precisely because it has never been used to prosecute anyone that there is no judicial clarity about what it means, and that’s how the U.S. Government wants it (for the same exact reason, the DOJ has never made good on its threats to prosecute any journalist who publishes classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917: they prefer to weaponize the fear of uncertainty regarding the law’s scope and application rather than prosecute journalists under it and thus risk a judicial ruling declaring it unconstitutional or inapplicable to journalists).
The wildly broad vagueness and lack of clarity is what makes it so dangerous to leave the Logan Act on the books. These are exactly the kinds of ambiguous laws that can serve as an abusive pretext in the hands of the FBI, empowering it to investigate anyone it wants under the rubric of this archaic, ambiguous law. A law can be so vague that it can be unconstitutional for that reason alone: a failure to clearly advise citizens of what is and is not legal violates the right of due process.
But while all such vague laws are dangerous, the Logan Act is particularly menacing to those who dissent from core U.S. foreign policy and are thus often accused of disloyalty, such as Congresswoman Omar. All members of Congress, but particularly foreign policy dissidents, should be working to repeal this ancient and repressive law, not wielding it as a weapon against adversaries and pretending that it is some highly specific, clear and valid criminal constraint on the conduct and speech of U.S. citizens.
* * *
The context of the exchange with Congresswoman Omar, and the key role played in it by former Obama CIA Director John Brennan, is necessary to understand Rep. Omar’s point. Far more importantly, this context illustrates the severe, ongoing dangers of allowing this dangerous law to fester on the books.
On Friday, reports emerged that, just days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a key Iranian nuclear scientist was ambushed and murdered by gunmen. U.S. officials told The New York Times that Israel was behind the assassination — which should be unsurprising given that Israel assassinated several senior Iranian nuclear scientists during the Obama years.
This news provoked indignation from MSNBC’s John Brennan, formerly Obama’s Director of the CIA, an agency heralded worldwide for its righteous opposition to assassinations. Along with condemning the assassination of this Iranian scientist as “a criminal act and highly reckless,” Brennan also used his tweet to send an explicit message to Iranian officials: urging them not to retaliate but instead to wait for the Biden administration to take over, promising the new U.S. administration would “respond against perceived culprits.”
In other words, Brennan, like many people (including myself), is concerned that the Trump administration and Israel are seeking to escalate tensions with Iran during the transition — either because they seek war with Tehran or, more likely, because they want to provoke a cycle of retaliation that would prevent the incoming Biden administration from re-implementing the Iran Deal which Trump nullified and which Israel vehemently opposes.
Thus, Brennan sought to subvert what he perceives as the current foreign policy of the U.S. Government — to provoke and punish Iran — by encouraging Iranian officials to ignore the provocation and therefore not derail efforts by the incoming U.S. administration to establish better relations once Biden is inaugurated:
There are so many amazing ironies to this Brennan statement. To begin with, it’s just stunning to watch Obama’s Chief Assassin — who presided over a global, years-long, due-process-free campaign of targeted assassinations, under which the official “kill list” of who was to live and who was to die was decreed by Judge, Jury and Executioner Brennan in a secret White House meeting that bore the creepy designation “Terror Tuesdays” — now suddenly posture as some kind of moral crusader against assassinations. I have denounced these Israeli assassinations as terrorism — both in the past and yesterday — but I have also denounced with equal vigor the Obama/Brennan global assassination program.
The audacity of Brennan’s moral posturing became even more evident as he tried to explain why his and Obama’s assassination program was noble and legal, while the one that resulted in Friday’s killing in Iran was immoral and criminal. After all, this is the same John Brennan who got caught red-handed lying about how many innocent civilians were killed by Obama’s global assassination program, and who even claimed the right to target American citizens for execution by drone without any transparency let alone due process: a right they not only claimed but exercised.
When you’re reduced to sitting on Twitter trying to distinguish your own global assassination program from the one you’re condemning, that is rather potent evidence that you are among the absolute last persons on earth with the moral credibility to denounce anything. That’s particularly true when you directed your unilateral assassination powers onto your own citizens, ending several of their lives.
But that’s the Trump era in a nutshell: the most bloodthirsty monsters and murderers successfully whitewash their own history of atrocities by deceiving people into believing that none of this was done prior to Trump, and that their flamboyant opposition to Trump — based far more in stylistic distaste for him and loss of their own access than substantive policy objections — absolves them of their own prior, often-worse monstrosities. Call it the David Frum Syndrome.
But to me the most glaring irony — as I pointed out — is how similar is the transition message sent by Brennan on Friday to the Iranians when compared to the one sent by Gen. Michael Flynn to the Russians during the 2016 transition after the Obama administration sanctioned Moscow. The message of both Flynn and Brennan was virtually identical: don’t over-react or excessively retaliate: a new administration will soon take power and wants to work with you, so don’t do anything rash now that could prevent that from happening.
But the difference is that while Brennan was predictably celebrated for his message to the Iranians, with viral likes and re-tweets, Flynn was criminally investigated by Jim Comey’s FBI for his. After Comey, then the FBI Director, ordered the investigation into Flynn’s ties to Moscow closed at the start of 2017 due to lack of evidence, FBI agents deeply hostile to Trump seized on Flynn’s December, 2016, intercepted phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — when Flynn was a national security transition official just weeks away from taking over — to continue the criminal investigation on the ground that he may have violated the Logan Act by attempting to subvert current U.S. foreign policy with his message to Moscow not to overreact and instead to wait for the new administration.
Read the rest of the report here.
- "Washington Is Exhausted": Swamp Gears Up For Post-Trump Power Orgy
“Washington Is Exhausted”: Swamp Gears Up For Post-Trump Power Orgy
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 18:30Washington elites are breathing a sigh of relief, as power players on both sides of the aisle gear up for ‘business as usual’ following a four-year disruption in swamp-activities – thanks to one Donald J. Trump, whose perhaps prematurely anticipated departure from the Oval Office has the DC establishment licking their chops.
“The classic friendly-rivals dinner party will be back, likely bigger than ever, with VIP guests from the Biden administration, a few formers from the Obama crowd, a senator or two seated next to a Supreme Court justice,” according to the Washington Post‘s Roxanne Roberts
Shoving the Uniparty’s collective excitement in our plebeian faces, Roberts writes in. full. stops. “Washington is exhausted. Washington is optimistic. Washington is desperate for change. The aristocracy of this city is ready to move on, daring to hope that the last four years was a fever that finally broke and life can get back to normal.”
Poor Washington.
“Normal, as in a respect for experience and expertise. Normal, as in civility and bipartisan cooperation. Normal, as in not wanting to punch someone in the face,” Roxanne continues.
And who’s about to usher in this period of ‘bipartisan cooperation’ and controlling one’s violent delights? Joe Biden, of course!
Biden and wife Jill Biden “know how to get around Washington, how to be a part of the establishment, how to make it work for them in their everyday lives,” says an influential Republican hostess who, like many of the city’s social leaders, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly without retribution. “People who have always enjoyed the Washington scene are yearning to get back to that, have some semblance of what they enjoyed so much before. There are a lot of Republicans who sat out the Trump years and bit their tongues for four years who are thrilled to have Biden.” At the heart of this optimism is the belief that politicians on both sides of the aisle get more accomplished when they like each other. -WaPo
And of course, no self-respecting DC power-player can survive without attending establishment soirées, fundraisers, diplomatic corps and ‘historical traditions’ underpinning the ‘business of Washington’ – which Roxanne says needs ‘bipartisanship to really thrive’ after the Trump administration made everything a ‘test of loyalty.’
“Washington’s elite social world can pivot faster than a prima ballerina,” Roxanne continues – noting that a COVID-19 vaccine and a ‘call for comity’ will allow them to ‘press the reset button and start fresh.‘
According to the report, the ‘permanent establishment’ was polarized by a White House that referred to them as the ‘swamp’ or ‘deep state.’ Not anymore, writes Roxanne – who looks forward to DC’s return to its ‘former glory.’
For the last four years, the tone from the White House was contemptuous of Washington, dismissing the permanent establishment — the longtime politicians and former administration officials who call it home — as the “swamp” or “deep state.” The social arbiters, traditionally respectful of a new administration, quickly found themselves between a Trump and a hard place: To invite or not to invite?
…
Back to normal will mean more state dinners, a prestigious and glamorous way of reestablishing global ties. And it means that Washington events traditionally attended by the president and first lady for the better part of five decades — the Honors, the Alfalfa dinner, the Gridiron, the Ford’s Theatre gala and the correspondents’ dinner — will likely return to their former glory. -WaPo
“The president-elect has a great number of friends who are Republicans that he served with,” says Clinton and Obama administration veteran, Ambassador Capricia Marshall. “And he will be inviting them into the White House because that’s how you get work done: creating those relationships in these social atmospheres, making people feel invited and welcomed.“
Bipartisanship equals money
Perhaps the biggest relief to Washington insiders from a lack of Trumpian politics will be the restoration of bipartisan fundraising – as “The quickest way to attract money is to have support from both sides of aisle: a Republican and a Democrat prominently displayed at the head table, with the corporate support and underwriting that greases all those wheels.”
“This idea that we are a democracy, we disagree on a lot, but we come together around certain moments. You may not be happy with who wins, but you understand and recognize the power of it,” says event planner Philip Dufour.
Capricia Marshall fondly recalls a textbook scene from every movie about corrupt Washington officials, which DC elites have been unable to recreate in Trumpian times:
I fondly remember Senator [Daniel] Inouye and Senator McCain all getting into these wonderful debates about various issues on the environment and on the economy,” says Marshall. “It was very entertaining to watch. And in the end, they would lift their glass, give each other a toast, a smile, a great laugh and carry on.”
- A Key Time For Gold
A Key Time For Gold
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 18:00Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,
I wanted to offer some thoughts on Gold on this Thanksgiving weekend as Gold has reached a key price pivot and has seen sizable selling in recent weeks as the rest of the market continues to melt into the stratosphere and speculative bubbles are spreading across asset classes.
So why not Gold?
There are multiple factors at play: The more obvious is that market participants thought Gold to be a safety hedge in an uncertain world and with Covid vaccines being announced weekly that uncertainty is being presumable priced out of the market and the safety hedges unwound.
Yet Gold has also been presumed to be a central bank currency printing trade as the dollar is being pounded into the ground. That correlation worked all year but has stopped working as both dollar and Gold have been dropping together lately and that has to be concern for Gold longs. If Gold can’t rally with the dollar dropping then when can it rally?
This is where technicals are coming in and they suggest a key time for Gold.
Now those that are following our market videos know I’ve been cautious Gold ever since the target got hit in the summer:
$GLD target reached pic.twitter.com/5p5D3Dib48
— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) July 28, 2020
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The main reason being technical, once targets are reached and charts show negative divergences I’m of the mindset to sit back and wait for new chart patterns to evolve.
As market video subscribers know I’ve been watching key patterns that could suggest Gold to be buying opportunity here.
Firstly, the most obvious chart aspect is the support of the 200MA which probably most people are watching, also in context of bullish falling wedge/bull flag that has formed:
Note this pattern was challenged late last week, but also note Gold has been following one bullish pattern after another which we identified ahead of time in 2019 ( Gold Going Bull, Gold Bull Part II ).
So Gold continues to follow bullish patterns, also note Gold is getting oversold, but has room to become more oversold.
What’s more interesting to me here is how Gold has precisely reached the retrace target zone I’ve been outlining in the market videos since the summer, the .382 fib along with the 2012 bounce highs as support:
That is confluence support and holding this confluence zone would support the notion of this corrective move in Gold off of the weekly negative divergence having the opportunity to build a larger cup and handle pattern which would be tremendously bullish Gold long term for a target north of $3,000.
I need to outline two caveats here.
First, note how similar the rip rally in 2020 is to the one of 2011. That period was followed by a steep correction similar to the current one. Gold then chopped up and down in price for 2 years before finally dropping to the 2015 lows. The similarity of the structure certainly leaves room for a similar outcome. One argument to support such a price development is to say that incremental central bank intervention will be diminishing in the years to come. They went all in this year and there are frankly less assets for them to buy, certainly in comparison to the magnitude they bought in the short time period in 2020.
Second, and this goes to my earlier point: Watch the US dollar:
Gold should’ve been able to take advantage of the recent dollar weakness, but hasn’t been able to. That’s a concern. Note Gold peaked in the summer near the time when the dollar bottomed. Now the dollar is retesting these lows with a potential falling wedge which could play as bullish pattern and firm as a potential double bottom.
If Gold can’t rally with a falling dollar how will it cope with a potential rising dollar? As the dollar has yet to show strength it is an academic question at the moment, but it’s something to keep a watchful eye on it as correlations are to be viewed with extreme caution at the moment.
Let’s not forget: We are inside the largest asset bubble of all time:
179.9% market cap vs. GDP.
The widest market disconnect from the economy ever.#documentingreality pic.twitter.com/YLCpEEYD6U— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) November 28, 2020
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Distortions having been created that central bankers are fully aware of, but rarely admit. But when they do one best pay attention:
Thanks @CNBCJou for asking the question.
Rosengren: “It does distort markets but that’s what monetary policy does”.
Finally a key admission of the obvious. Central banks and their policies distort markets and hence we find ourselves in a historic asset bubble. https://t.co/B9f4l8Y4pd
— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) November 11, 2020
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Distortions brought about by the loosest financial conditions in history:
Pedal to the metal risk on. Except in Gold in recent months.
Bottomline: Gold has continued to follow technicals beautifully and the recent weakness is no surprise to those that have followed the technical chart structures. Now Gold has reached key confluence support and has the opportunity to rally from this support. But the caveats need to be watched and risk managed as we live in times of broad market correlations having been mercilessly raped by central bankers and their policies.
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For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.
- COVID Antibody Drugs From Regeneron, Eli Lilly Raise Concerns About Supply Shortages
COVID Antibody Drugs From Regeneron, Eli Lilly Raise Concerns About Supply Shortages
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 17:30Powerful drugs recently authorized by the FDA are expected to help patients suffering from the earliest stages of COVID-19 avoid the most severe symptoms. President Donald Trump even once referred to Regeneron’s antibody treatment as a “cure” for the virus.
But there are still some issues that have yet to be resolved.
The US, like several other developed nations, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to secure supplies of Eli Lilly and supplies of the Regeneron.
Officials are working to establish sites to infuse the medications to patients with mild to moderate disease who had until recently been advised to stay home.
Both the Eli Lilly and Regeneron monoclonal antibodies mimic proteins the body normally makes to block the virus from entering cells; they were cleared by the FDA earlier this month. They’re the first drugs authorized specifically for non-hospitalized patients, and are targeted at those at risk of severe symptoms because of older age, obesity and other chronic conditions.
Experts told Bloomberg that while Trump touted Regeneron’s therapy after receiving it in October, infectious disease doctors noted that the evidence supporting the drugs’ use in Covid-19 is not yet definitive. Yet there’s hope they could help the country battle its worst-ever coronavirus surge, as average daily infections soared to almost 170,000 over the last week. About 90,500 Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Thursday.
Coronavirus-beset hospitals around the US are grappling with more infected staff, said Allison Suttle, chief medical officer at Sanford Health, a nonprofit health system based in South Dakota. Treatment that keeps patients from being admitted to overcrowded hospital wards is offering a tantalizing reprieve, she said.
The US has paid Eli Lilly $375 million to lock in supplies of its antibody medication – the amusingly-named “bamlanivimav”, equivalent to 300,000 vials of the antibody, bamlanivimab, over the next two months. The government has also awarded Regeneron $450 million to make and supply enough doses of its antibody cocktail for another 300,000 patients through the end of January. Both companies intend to scale up supply for the U.S. next year.
- NY Gym Owner Rips Up $15,000 Lockdown Fine On Live TV: "We Will Not Comply"
NY Gym Owner Rips Up $15,000 Lockdown Fine On Live TV: “We Will Not Comply”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 17:00Submitted by Rusty Weiss of The Mental Recession,
Robby Dinero, the owner of Athletes Unleashed gym located in Orchard Park, New York, tore up a $15,000 fine from the Erie County Health Department during a live Fox News interview.
Dinero got hit with the extraordinarily hefty fine following a confrontation in which roughly 50 business owners attending a meeting inside the gym refused to allow a pair of sheriffs and a health inspector entry to the building without a warrant.
“They picked a fight with a Marine and a whole bunch of patriots,” the gym owner said in a separate interview with WBEN, before pointing out that “The Constitution protects those rights.”
The moment tonight when Athletes Unleashed gym owner Robby Dinero ripped up the $15k fine he received today from @ECDOH LIVE on @FoxNews. The fine was for holding a rally inside his gym Friday night. @NewsRadio930 pic.twitter.com/FUk6sOSCX4
— Tim Wenger (@TimWBEN) November 25, 2020
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New York Gym Owner Rips Up His Fine, Says He Will Not Comply
Dinero, speaking with Fox anchor Sandra Smith, reiterated that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s lockdown edicts infringe upon his rights.
The veteran, having pointed out Cuomo’s and Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz six-figure taxpayer-funded salaries, challenged them to look their constituents’ children in the eyes and tell them their parents’ work is not “essential.”
The lockdown rules, he believes, deny citizens their Constitutional right to earn a living.
Dinero then ripped up the fine on camera while supporters behind waved American flags and shouted, “We will not comply.”
Robby Dinero, the owner of Athletes Unleashed, tells WBEN that this protest today is about one thing: Freedom. They’re protesting the continued lockdown and he said they’re not able to get customers and because of the shutdown, they can’t replace them. pic.twitter.com/zf1wHgcloy
— WBEN NewsRadio 930AM (@NewsRadio930) November 23, 2020
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Confrontation With Business Owners and Authorities Goes Viral
Last week, Dinero held a meeting with business owners inside his gym. He explained that the meeting was a protest of New York’s regulations that have closed gyms, salons, and other businesses deemed nonessential.
Oddly enough, despite the state’s blind eye to riots under the guise of ‘protests’ over the summer, authorities took issue with this particular peaceful protest. Sheriffs and the health inspector showed up and things escalated as the business owners refused to let them on the property without a proper warrant.
“Get out! Get out!” they repeatedly yelled.
As the authorities leave, one protester can be heard shouting, “Take your Commie s*** elsewhere!”
Cuomo has been regulating everything in his state during the pandemic, from what time New Yorkers can eat in restaurants to what they can eat in restaurants, and on to what people can do in their own home. His constitutional overreach has prompted several sheriffs to refuse to enforce his orders.
Cuomo responded by calling any sheriff who refuses to enforce his edicts a “dictator.” He said that without a hint of irony.
- Saudi King Was Not Informed Of Netanyahu's Visit & Meeting With MbS
Saudi King Was Not Informed Of Netanyahu’s Visit & Meeting With MbS
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 16:30Some fascinating new details have emerged regarding last Sunday’s (11/22) unprecedented visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Saudi Arabia.
First to recap, amid widespread reports that the Saudis will be the next Arab country to normalize ties with the Jewish state, after the UAE and Bahrain were the first to do so, Netanyahu met with crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MbS) the Saudi city of Neom. It was also in the presence of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Via Daily Sabah This was reported as a “covert meeting” – also given Riyadh officially denies it took place while it was widely acknowledged in Israeli and international press. The two leaders reportedly discussed joint efforts to counter Iran, an issue which already saw intelligence and operations sharing in places like Syria.
Reuters on Friday released new bombshell information alleging the whole meeting with Netanyahu was done without the approval or even knowledge of the Saudi head of state, King Salman bin Abdulaziz.
The Times of Israel also underscored that “Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was reportedly kept out of the loop about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s secretive trip to the kingdom this week for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.” And further:
Quoting a Saudi source and a foreign diplomat in Riyadh, Reuters reported Friday that normalization with Israel appeared off the table as long as the Saudi monarch is alive — an analysis also made Thursday by a senior Israeli source cited by Israeli TV.
Given the king’s age and increased reported senility, MbS has in recent years acted as de facto head of the kingdom, but it remains an incredibly bold move (the meeting with Israel’s leader) especially given King Salman is said to be against any ‘normalization’ with Israel.
And then there’s this incident from thie G-20 the prior week… the video was said to have been intentionally leaked:
#Saudi King Salman does not remember where was the last #G20 summit and he doesn’t remember if he participated in that summit.
Saudi CP #MBS tells him that he (MBS) went instead of the King for the Japan summit. https://t.co/Zk43ChU69b— Nabeel Nowairah (@NabeelNowairah) November 21, 2020
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“A video was leaked during the G20 summit which showed MbS correcting the confused king’s recollection, a leak which sources said was intentional,” according to Reuters.
It appears MbS plans to further sideline his father especially when it comes to foreign policy, relying on the ‘poor health’ angle to argue Salman is incapable of making crucial decisions as official head of state.
- Rare Video Games Are Attracting Top Dollar
Rare Video Games Are Attracting Top Dollar
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 16:00Submitted by Market Crumbs,
Last month we wrote about the strength in the sports card market and how blue chip sports cards may actually be a better investment than blue chip stocks, at least over the last decade.
The Daily Mail says data from PWCC—which manages the largest trading card auction venue in the world, shows the index of the top-performing 500 cards had a return on investment of 216% since 2008 compared to 135% for the S&P 500.
“The market’s just on fire,” PWCC director of business development Jesse Craig told the DailyMail.com.
Another corner of the collectors world that is on fire is the market for rare video games. Driven by nostalgia and a flood of money, the last few months has seen record prices paid for video games.
In July, a copy of Super Mario Bros. brought a winning bid of $114,000 and set a new record for the most ever paid for a video game. The video game, which is the first in the popular Super Mario Bros. series, was one of the first variants produced after Nintendo began sealing the games in shrink-wrap in 1985.
“The demand for this game was extremely high, and if any lot in the sale could hit a number like that, it was going to be this one,” Heritage Auctions’ Director of Video Games Valarie McLeckie said.
With just over four months having passed since the copy of Super Mario Bros. set a new record, it was easily topped by a $156,000 winning bid last Friday for a sealed copy of 1990’s Super Mario Bros. 3. Heritage Auctions said 20 bidders were trying to acquire the video game following an opening bid of $62,500.
This particular game is a rarity for the way the word “Bros.” is printed on the front cover, slightly covering Mario’s famous white glove. This particular cover indicates it’s the earliest version of Super Mario Bros. 3 that was produced.
“We couldn’t be more pleased about breaking the world record for the second time in the same year,” McLeckie said. “That said, it’s no surprise that another Mario game, which so many of us grew up with, would set the new bar.
It’s not just Super Mario Bros. games attracting top dollar. A Pokémon “Red Version” for Nintendo’s GameBoy auctioned for $84,000 last week, marking a record price for a Pokémon title and more than four times the pre-sale estimate. At July’s auction, 27 bidders attempted to acquire a copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! before it ended up selling for $50,400.
With virtually every asset soaring in price, who knows which nostalgic item from your childhood will be the next hot collectors item.
- "This Is No Free Country": Anti-Lockdown Protests Rage In London, Dozens Arrested
“This Is No Free Country”: Anti-Lockdown Protests Rage In London, Dozens Arrested
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 15:30Over 60 protesters were arrested in anti-lockdown demonstrations on Saturday, as activists clashed with police who sought to break it up.
If only it was a BLM demonstration.
Nobody can answer the question sufficiently.
Why is there a 2 tier policing system in the UK that treats lockdown protesters like criminals while literally kneeling and bowing for Black Lives Matter? https://t.co/yTkabMfVEa
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 28, 2020
According to The Guardian, “officers were attempting to disperse the protesters after the Metropolitan police argued the demonstration was unlawful under coronavirus bans on gatherings after the removal of the specific protest exemption.”
Rights groups, however, believe the protests should be permitted under the “reasonable excuse” law, and called the de-facto ban as “alarming.”
First arrest at antilockdown protest taking place at King’s Cross Station, London. Police cited covid restrictions before the arrest. #kingscross #antilockdown pic.twitter.com/AuqMKk2h0P
— Urban Pictures (@Urban_Pictures) November 28, 2020
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Officers faced jeers from demonstrators and chants of “shame on you” and “choose your side” as they sought to end the protest and enter crowds to make arrests, some forcibly. They were also pelted with missiles on at least one occasion, video footage showed.
The Metropolitan police tweeted: “Officers have made over 60 arrests following groups gathering in London today. These were for a number of different offences, including breaching coronavirus restrictions. We expect this number to rise. We continue to urge people to go home.” –The Guardian
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“Please ensure you have access to social media throughout the day, as the rally will need to be reactive to circumstances,” wrote anti-lockdown group StandUpX in a Telegram post. “Bring pots, pans, whistles, party horns and anything you can to be heard,” the post continues.
“I got pushed about by police for no reason earlier, just cause they’re squashing up anybody that wants to complain. This is no free country,” one protester told Sky News, while another held a sign saying “Your fear leads to losing our liberty.”
The protest comes weeks after 190 people were arrested on Nov. 5 during another lockdown demonstration.
According to police spokesman Stuart Bell, “This type of behaviour not only breaks the law, it also risks spreading the virus between multiple areas of the country. It is for this reason that we urge people not to travel into London and this is also why we will be taking appropriate enforcement action if this happens.”
We assume he’s OK with BLM protests.
Here we go again. Why do the Met #TakeTheKnee to #BlackLivesMatter & soft-soap #ExtinctionRebellion – yet send in the bovver-boys to an anti-lockdown protest, or when somebody they don’t like speaks at Speaker’s Corner?
It’s blatant two-tiered policing #londonprotest pic.twitter.com/jq2Pn5fRpL
— Martin Daubney (@MartinDaubney) November 28, 2020
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“In practice, police are increasingly treating protests as banned,” said Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo, who has campaigned for civil liberties during the lockdown. “The incompetence and casual authoritarianism demonstrated by the Met police here is breathtaking. The right to protest is the bedrock of any democracy. It’s clear to me that there’s a deliberate attempt to chill that right and misrepresent the law,” she added.
“As the government takes unprecedented steps to interfere with our rights, sidelines parliament and attacks the rule of law, undermining protest is another threat to our ability to hold it to account and stand up to power. Protest and dissent are the lifeblood of a healthy democracy, and even more so important in a public emergency,” said Gracie Bradley, interim director of rights group “Liberty.”
- Moral Decay Leads To Collapse
Moral Decay Leads To Collapse
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/28/2020 – 15:05Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Our national claim of moral superiority is no longer plausible.
A very strong case can be made that America is now a moral cesspool. Consider just three cases: Jeffrey Epstein, the CEO of Pfizer and JPMorgan Chase.
Sadly, Epstein is the epitome of America’s elite: getting away with abusing children for years, if not decades; when finally caught a few years ago, escaping with a legal wrist-slap; acquiring a fortune of $200 million without creating any jobs, innovations or value; buying his way into the good graces of Harvard, MIT and a seemingly endless parade of celebrities, politicians, scientists, etc.
And very par for the course in America’s elite: Epstein’s crimes were known by America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but rather than indict him, they made him an “intelligence asset” that had to protected from exposure to the consequences of the rule of law.
When some tiny sliver of light was shed on his decades of blatant corruption and exploitation, a sliver that implicated the wealthy and powerful, then Epstein was dispatched in classic Deep State fashion, in a manner that speaks volumes about the banana “republic” nature of America.
Pfizer’s CEO arranged a massive sale of Pfizer stock and then timed the release of overhyped vaccine data to maximize his private gains.
Nothing illegal here, just another example of what I call legalized looting.
JPMorgan Chase manipulated markets to maximize its gains, and its $1 billion fine is just the cost of doing business in a pervasively corrupt society and economy. Nobody ever goes to prison for these billion-dollar skims, scams, frauds amd embezzlements; financial criminals get a get out of jail free card with every crime.
These three examples are just a few of thousands of examples of insider skimming and gaming the system, abuse of power, fraud, pay-to-play, embezzlement, racketeering and other forms of corruption that enrich the few at the expense of the many.
Whenever I mention America’s moral decay, somebody is always quick to discount the decay with cliches such as “there’s always been corruption” or “it’s human nature, you’ll never get rid of it.”
These pathetically flimsy excuses mask the reality that America’s moral decay has reached extremes that eventually trigger collapse in the financial, social and political realms.
The decay of civic virtue and the social contract is so gradual that only the few who recall specific set-points from previous generations even notice the advancing rot.
A third of the Roman Senate was killed in combat during the disastrous defeat at Cannae; can we imagine a third of the U.S. Senate putting their own lives at risk? No, we cannot; that level of sacrifice is unthinkable in America today. The protected elites have no real skin in the game. The consequences of their mismanagement fall on the unprotected many.
Can we imagine the two eldest sons of a present-day political scion volunteering for combat overseas, with one killed in combat and the other severely wounded? (Joe Kennedy, Jr. and John F. Kennedy in World War II.) Such elite sacrifice is unimaginable in today’s America.
As for the social contract: to saddle young people with highly uncertain prospects with $1.7 trillion in student loan debt would have been unimaginable, If not criminal, two generations ago. Now this ruthless exploitation of students–in essence, punitive debt-serfdom that enriches the wealthiest few who own the student loans–is now the norm. Parasitic elites sucking the powerless dry is now the status quo in America.
This academic paper (via A.P.) sheds light on the severe consequences of moral decay: Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past.
In summary, the authors examined premodern states / empires with an eye on socio-economic systems that generated a social environment which provided real benefits to citizens via a moral code and good government practices.
(I would include the early Tang and Song dynasties in China of examples of such systems that were not democratic but which offered a judiciary of recourse, investment in infrastructure and other forms of public good, rule of law and social mobility.)
Yes, elite corruption is ever-present, but good governance requires limiting elite corruption as part of the social contract in which citizens support the state (paying taxes, etc.) because the state provides for the common good.
The authors point out that citizens expect relatively little of autocracies in the way of public good because the citizenry know the autocracy is a self-serving, corrupt elite. But governments that earned the consent of the governed by providing for the common good are held to a higher standard.
When the moral code that requires service to the public good decays, the legitimacy of the state collapses. Here is a quote from the paper:
“Moral failure of the leadership in this social setting brings calamity because the state’s lifeblood–its citizen-produced resource-base–is threatened when there is loss of confidence in the state, which brings in its wake social division, strife, flight, and a reduced motivation to comply with tax obligations.
In the resulting weakened fiscal economy, services that citizens have come to depend on fail, including public goods and administrative control of corruption.
To realize and sustain good government is especially difficult owing in large part to the importance of shared moral obligations between citizens and the state.”
In other words, a strict moral code that requires elites to devote resources and leadership for the public good is the critical foundation of the entire social, economic and political order. When this moral code decays, the state and its elites both lose legitimacy and the consent of the governed.
Put another way: once the elites have decayed to exploitive, self-serving, profiteering parasites, the public has no interest in supporting the state or its elites. Rather, they will cheer the collapse and ruin of the parasitic elites.
The explosive rise of elites’ wealth and power in the past few decades has been documented and charted, and I’ve repeatedly posted charts showing that virtually all the real income gains of the past 20 years have flowed to the top 0.1%. This RAND study found that America’s elites siphoned $50 trillion into their own pockets in the past two generations: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.
This is the chilling summation of America’s terminal moral decay from Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past:
“Many citizens perceive that they have little stake in what should be a democratic society.
Decline in citizen confidence is compounded by a great economic transition in the US, a U-turn over the last five decades in wealth and income inequalities.
These economic shifts are undergirded by a new ethos and practices that enshrine shareholder value, personal freedom, nepotism, cronyism, the comingling of state and personal resources, and narcissistic aggrandizement in ways rarely seen in the early history of our Republic.”
Our national claim of moral superiority is no longer plausible: America is a moral cesspool that cannot be drained.
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My recent books:
A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).
Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).
The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF).
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).
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