Today’s News 2nd January 2021

• Ex-CIA Officer: The Dark Past Of Biden's Nominee For National Intelligence Director
  Ex-CIA Officer: The Dark Past Of Biden’s Nominee For National Intelligence Director

  Authored by John Kiriakou via ConsortiumNews.com,

  Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell, who has disingenuously argued for years that he had nothing to do with the agency’s torture program, but who continued to defend it, has taken himself out of the running to be President-elect Joe Biden’s new CIA director.

  The decision is a victory for the peace group Code Pink, which spearheaded the Stop Morell movement, and it’s a great thing for all Americans.  Now, though, we have to turn our attention to Biden’s nominee to be director of national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines.

  

  Haines is certainly qualified on paper to lead the Intelligence Community. A longtime Biden aide, she has the president-elect’s confidence. But that’s not good enough. Haines is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be in a position of authority in intelligence. She is the kind of neoliberal intelligence apologist whom so many of us have opposed for so many years.  Don’t just take my word for it, though.  Look at her record.

  Haines first began working for Biden when she served as deputy general counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chairman.  When Biden became vice president in 2009, Haines moved to the State Department, where she was the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs.  After only a year, she moved to the White House, where she became deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, the National Security Council’s chief attorney.

  That’s quite a position. What it means was that her job was to legally justify President Barack Obama’s decisions on such intelligence issues as drone strikes and whether to release the CIA Torture Report.  She served there under CIA Director John Brennan.  Obama apparently liked the job she did for him because in 2013, he named Haines deputy director of the CIA (DD/CIA).

  Haines was the first woman to be named DD/CIA, and she served again under Brennan, who proved time and again that he was no fan of congressional oversight. Haines’s attitude was similar to Brennan’s: The CIA was going to do what it was going to do, and she would make no apologies for it.

  There were three controversial areas where Haines made a name for herself and for which she should have to answer in a confirmation hearing: The CIA’s refusal to release the Senate Torture Report and the decision to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer system; the CIA’s decision to not punish those officers who carried out the hack and who killed and tortured prisoners beyond even what the Justice Department said was permissible; and the government’s drone program, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians were killed.

  

  Haines’ Torture Cover-Up

  You may recall that in December 2014, the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a heavily redacted version of the executive summary of the committee’s torture report, the result of years of investigation using primary-source CIA documents. The executive summary was about 525 pages long, just a fraction of the nearly 6,000-page complete report. And the release of the 525 pages was the result of protracted negotiations between the committee and the CIA.

  In the end, the public heard a few details of what the CIA’s prisoners underwent at secret prisons around the world. But the full story was never made public. It likely never will be. And that’s thanks to Avril Haines.

  Earlier that year, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor in a very unusual display and accused CIA Director Brennan of spying on her committee’s staff members. Specifically, Feinstein said that CIA officers had hacked into the Senate’s computers to see what it was that committee investigators were focusing on.

  The hacking was unprecedented, and Feinstein referred it to the Justice Department for prosecution.  Attorney General Eric Holder, however, chose not to pursue the case.  Brennan took responsibility for ordering the hacking and he made no apologies for it. But his top aide, his assistant, his legal adviser through the episode was Avril Haines. She has never explained her decisions in support of the hack.

  Furthermore, it was Haines who overruled the CIA’s inspector general and who decided not to punish those CIA officers who hacked into the committee’s computers, or those CIA officers who had gone over and above what the Justice Department had authorized in its “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” program, killing and maiming prisoners.

  In the end, not only were no CIA officers punished, but the leaders and most prominent officers in the torture program were promoted, in some cases into some of the most sought-after positions in the CIA.  I know this to be true. I worked for them.

  Haines and Drones

  One area in which Haines has not received a great deal of media coverage has been her role in the drone program.  When Haines was the National Security Council’s top lawyer, Brennan was the keeper of the so-called kill list. It was Haines who took phone calls in the middle of the night asking her for legal authority — permission — to launch missile attacks from drones.  She has never answered for her actions.

  Now is the time for Americans to put down their collective foot on Biden’s national security appointees.  Morell was utterly inappropriate for a senior position in the Biden national security apparatus. Haines is, too. She has, very simply, committed crimes against humanity.  I’m under no illusions that Biden is a progressive or that he will differ greatly from previous Democratic presidents on national security.

  But I do believe that wrong is wrong.  Avril Haines is exactly the kind of person we don’t want running the Intelligence Community.  This is the moment for opponents of her nomination to lobby senators on the Intelligence Committee. There’s still time to defeat her.

  * * *

  John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act—a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 23:25

• Queens Neighborhood Terrorized By Hyperaggressive Squirrels
  Queens Neighborhood Terrorized By Hyperaggressive Squirrels

  Between the devastating springtime COVID-19 outbreak to the protests, violence and looting inspired by the killing of George Floyd, New York City has had a difficult year.

  But as 2020 draws to a close, residents of quiet Rego Park, best known to many Americans as the neighborhood from “King of Queens”, are facing off against a fresh horror: hyperaggressive squirrels.

  

  According to the local Patch website, at least five people in the neighborhood have been bitten or scratched by squirrels on 65th Road and 65th Drive within the last month. One woman who spoke to the reporter was forced to seek treatment at a nearby hospital for squirrel bites and scratches after one such attack, which began when she opened her front door to let in a team of movers, and the squirrel lunged at her.

  Here’s more from Patch:

  They include Micheline Frederick, who had to go to the hospital after a squirrel attack so vicious that it left her hands and arms covered with bites – and her snowy front yard stained with blood. “He was angry and he was vicious,” Frederick told Patch of the Dec. 21 attack.

  “This was more than just a bite. This thing was fighting with me.” Frederick said she was holding her front door open for two movers when the squirrel ran up to her and scurried up her leg. She threw the squirrel off of her, but it pounced back onto her and started biting and scratching her.

  Residents have reportedly sought help from 911 and filed complaints with 311, the citywide hotline for quality of living complaints, to no avail. Though rabies is reportedly extremely rare in squirrels (the city apparently hasn’t recorded a single case of rabies in squirrels since the early 1990s) the victim interviewed by Patch said she was tested for the disease as a precaution due to the number of bites.

  The attack left her pinky finger “pretty chewed up” and her hand bruised black and blue for days, she said. She had at least eight bites, prompting physicians at a nearby urgent care center to send her to the emergency room for rabies shots. “Because I had so many, they wanted to be safe rather than sorry,” she said. The NYC Department of Health says squirrels are rarely infected with rabies. Since the agency started tracking New York City rabies cases in 1992, it has never identified a case of a squirrel with the disease. With rabies being an unlikely, but not impossible, explanation, Rego Park residents say the city has declined to intervene.

  With the city presumably occupied with other more pressing efforts like fining restaurant owners and other small business owners, the people of Rego Park have mostly been left on their own.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 22:50

• Deception And Suppression: A Year Of Beijing's Virus Coverup
  Deception And Suppression: A Year Of Beijing’s Virus Coverup

  Authored by Nicole Hao and Annie Wu via The Epoch Times,

  Around this time last year, Chinese authorities acknowledged that an “unknown” form of pneumonia was spreading in the city of Wuhan.

  

  But it was already too late. What we now know as COVID-19 had already broken out across the city and possibly beyond.

  In the months that followed, authorities bungled prevention measures and covered up the number of infections. They enacted travel restrictions weeks too late – as Chinese travelers seeded outbreaks around the world – and prevented international researchers from visiting the country to investigate the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19.

  A global pandemic ensued that has claimed millions of lives, brought economies to a halt, and disrupted people’s livelihoods.

  

  People wearing facemasks as they wait at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan on Jan. 24, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

  As the virus spread around the world, the regime in Beijing began an aggressive campaign to spread disinformation claiming that the virus didn’t originate in China; that propaganda offensive continues today.

  Meanwhile, the regime punished citizens who dared to publicize information that didn’t fit its narrative: that authoritarian control had succeeded in containing the disease.

  But in interviews with The Epoch Times, citizens tell of a different reality: draconian lockdown measures have deprived them of basic rights, while authorities continue to suppress information about new clusters around the country.

  As a new wave now hits Beijing and parts of northeastern China, locals are once again kept in the dark as authorities seal off neighborhood after neighborhood.

  

  Residents wait for groceries delivered to an entrance of a sealed residential compound, after new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Dalian city, Liaoning Province, China, on July 23, 2020. (China Daily via REUTERS)

  Coverup Culture

  China’s initial response was rife with missteps.

  Wuhan health authorities only confirmed the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019, after whistleblower doctors had shared information on social media.

  Government documents leaked to The Epoch Times have since revealed that COVID-19 cases may have surfaced months earlier. Wuhan hospital data shows that patients were hospitalized with symptoms similar to COVID-19 as early as September 2019, while several people died in October 2019 from pneumonia, lung infections, and other COVID-19-like conditions.

  In the early weeks of the epidemic, the Chinese regime continually downplayed the crisis and denied that the disease could be transmitted among humans. The World Health Organization repeated Beijing’s claims, and would wait until Jan. 30 to declare the outbreak a global health emergency.

  Chinese authorities didn’t implement containment measures until Jan. 23, with a lockdown on Wuhan. However, by then, 5 million people had already left Wuhan, amid a typical peak season for domestic and international travel for the Lunar New Year holiday.

  

  Chinese officials in protective suits checking on an elderly man wearing a facemask who collapsed and died on a street near a hospital in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 30, 2020. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

  Tight Control

  Chinese authorities soon adopted a so-called “fire blanket style” procedure to contain the disease domestically.

  Once a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, the local government detects the patient’s recent close contacts and the places he has recently visited, via China’s ubiquitous surveillance camera system. One internal Chinese government document obtained by The Epoch Times shows that more than a million people nationwide were being closely monitored for their risk of contracting COVID-19 during the month of May.

  During lockdowns, people are prevented from leaving their homes. Usually, authorities mandate that only one person per household can go outside every two to three days, and can only spend an hour or two to shop for basic necessities.

  Suspected patients are isolated at government-designated quarantine centers, including some that reportedly had unsanitary conditions and a lack of medical care.

  In areas with serious outbreaks, such as Wuhan, Suifenhe, Beijing, and Shanghai, authorities created makeshift hospitals with only wall partitions separating one patient from another. Some complained that the hospitals were “like death camps.”

  

  Patients with mild symptoms of the COVID-19 are resting at night in the makeshift hospital set up in a sports stadium in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 18, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

  A Year of Outbreaks

  Despite the containment measures, new clusters continue to emerge throughout China.

  Authorities usually require mass nucleic acid testing soon after. During an outbreak in October in the eastern city of Qingdao, authorities claimed that after testing all 11 million residents, they found zero new infections.

  International experts and local residents view such glowing accounts with skepticism. A day after authorities made that announcement, some residents told The Epoch Times that they hadn’t yet received their test results.

  Local governments also continued to cover up the scale of new outbreaks. The Epoch Times has on several occasions obtained internal government data that revealed figures much higher than what had been publicly reported, such as in Beijing, and Shandong, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces.

  Governments typically shared little information with citizens. In one classified document issued in February, Chinese authorities explicitly stated that epidemic-related documents were to be treated as top secret.

  “During the time period of combating the virus, all types of urgent documents, urgent notices, urgent events… internally shared sensitive information, and any information that the [government] leaders haven’t approved to disclose to the public” would be considered state secrets, the document said.

  

  Chinese students hold a memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, who was the whistleblower of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and caused the doctor’s death in that city, outside the UCLA campus in Westwood, Calif., on Feb. 15, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

  Disinformation

  The Chinese regime switched tactics around March, as countries around the world were responding to their own outbreaks.

  On March 12, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, claimed in a Twitter post that the CCP virus was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army. His baseless claim, and other similar accusations by Chinese diplomats, sparked widespread condemnation by Western officials.

  On Nov. 29, the Chinese state-run Global Times published an article suggesting that the virus originated on the Indian subcontinent. Recently, Chinese state-run media misquoted scientists’ research to claim that the virus originated in Italy.

  The Chinese regime and its media have also been promoting the theory that local COVID-19 outbreaks stemmed from frozen food supply chains. Authorities claim they detected virus strains on imported frozen salmon, shrimp, pork, beef, and other foods from a range of countries, such as Norway, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Germany.

  The WHO states that the possibility of infection from contact with food and food packaging is slim. Disease experts also say it’s unlikely the virus can spread through frozen food.

  

  Residents wait to be tested for the COVID-19 in Qingdao, eastern China’s Shandong Province on Oct. 12, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

  Censorship

  From the beginning, Wuhan authorities silenced whistleblower doctors such as Ai Fen and Li Wenliang, who were first to note on social media that their hospitals were admitting patients with a new, potentially contagious, pneumonia-like disease. They were summoned by police and reprimanded.

  Li, who later died of the disease himself, has been described as a martyr.

  Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, and other citizen journalists who documented the Wuhan outbreak, including visits to local hospitals and funeral homes, have gone missing. Fang and Chen’s whereabouts remain unknown.

  On Dec. 28, Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison, becoming the first known citizen journalist to be sentenced for providing first-hand information about the epidemic in China.

  Netizens also reported being detained by local police after they posted outbreak-related information on social media.

  Internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times showed that propaganda authorities heavily suppressed information about the pandemic that didn’t align with official narratives.

  

  Chinese security personnel wearing protective masks march through Tiananmen Square in Beijing on April 4, 2020. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

  The populace is getting fed up with the way local authorities are handling the situation.

  In March, residents under lockdown in Wuhan heckled a group of Chinese officials touring the area, shouting complaints from their apartments, such as, “It’s fake, everything’s fake!”

  Recently in the northeastern city of Dalian, college students were barred from leaving campus as the city reported new COVID-19 cases. They complained about the suddenly imposed quarantine.

  “I believe if the Dalian government continues to insist on not allowing students to leave, students could become restless. They could even join together to resist,” one student said.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 22:15

• Iran Puts Maritime Forces On Higher Alert As Top General Warns 'Ready To Respond' To US Pressure
  Iran Puts Maritime Forces On Higher Alert As Top General Warns ‘Ready To Respond’ To US Pressure

  While populations across the globe rang in the new year and are now enjoying the holiday, wondering what 2021 will hold, tensions in the Persian Gulf between the US and Iran just grew hotter.

  CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr reports Iran’s forces in the Persian Gulf are now on high alert, possibly in preparation for some level of either offensive or defensive action.

  “Iranian maritime forces in the Persian Gulf raised readiness levels in last 48 hours,” Starr writes based on a US defense official. But it remains that it’s “not clear if moves are ‘defensive’ because expect US attack, or are signals Iran preparing for operations in the Gulf against the US,” the official said. 

  

  The Pentagon is bracing for many “unknowns” ahead of Sunday, which marks the one year anniversary of the killing of IRGC Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani by US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport. Days ago the US flew a pair of B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf as a “warning” aimed at deterring any Iranian attempt at retaliation for the Jan, 3rd, 2020 death of the popular Iranian general.

  Threats and counter-threats have continued to be issued throughout the week, with the latest coming from Iran’s military on Friday, according to the AP:

  The top commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard [Gen. Hossein Salami] said Friday that his country was fully prepared to respond to any U.S. military pressure as tensions between Tehran and Washington remain high in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s administration.

  So essentially both sides are poised with fingers on the trigger in anticipation of a provocation by the other side in an intensifying standoff which could very easily escalate into the very conflict both hope to avoid. Iran’s Foreign Ministry has further charged that Trump is attempting to generate a provocation or “pretext for war” – specifically with the prior B-52 flyover.

  Just In: Iranian maritime forces in the Persian Gulf raised readiness levels in last 48 hours: US official with latest info. Not clear if moves are “defensive” because expect US attack, or are signals Iran preparing for operations in the Gulf against the US, official said. #Iran

  — Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) January 1, 2021

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  Gen. Salami said at a commemoration event Friday at Tehran University that “Today, we have no problem, concern or apprehension toward encountering any powers. We will give our final words to our enemies on the battlefield.“

  Iran’s official media accounts in English have also been active ahead of the Soleimani death anniversary under the hashtag #WillNeverForgetWillNeverForgive.

  By committing a craven act of terror against Gen Soleimani, the US violated int’l law & the UN Charter in a blatant violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

  The US’ lawlessness in full show.#Iran won’t rest until bringing those responsible to justice.#WillNeverForgetWillNeverForgive pic.twitter.com/nUscWM2CDo

  — Iran Foreign Ministry 🇮🇷 (@IRIMFA_EN) January 1, 2021

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  Meanwhile there’s been mixed signals out of Washington: on the one hand there’s been clear and aggressive ‘deterrence’ messaging such as the latest bomber flyover, but on the other yesterday the Pentagon announced it is bringing the USS Nimitz supercarrier home from the gulf region.

  As the AP explained of the move: “Sending the aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, home to the U.S. West Coast would seem at odds with the idea that a show of force is needed to deter Iran. This might reflect a split within the defense establishment on whether Iran poses a heightened threat to strike in the waning days of the Trump administration.“

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 21:40

• Boycotts, Bans, & Book-Burning: 8 Outrageous Incidents Of Ivy League Leftism In 2020
  Boycotts, Bans, & Book-Burning: 8 Outrageous Incidents Of Ivy League Leftism In 2020

  Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

  The Ivy League is a group of the United States’ eight most prestigious universities. The schools produce many of the nation’s future political leaders, businessmen, scientists, and engineers.

  The Ivy League is also rife with leftism, as Campus Reform reported throughout 2020.

  

  1. Harvard University

  Students at Harvard asked administrators to ban Trump administration alumni from serving as faculty members, teaching fellows, and guest speakers.

  An open letter to Harvard administrators said that although Harvard usually hires officials from outgoing presidential administrations, students are “extremely concerned” about the Trump administration’s impacts on “fundamental democratic institutions.”

  The students request a “system of accountability” for “high-level political appointees and Trump administration consultants before they are invited as fellows or to teach or speak on campus.”

  Harvard, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s second highest-ranked university.

  2. Cornell University

  Students at Cornell University can use their status as a “person of color” to exempt themselves from the university’s flu vaccine mandate.

  “Students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a Person of Color (BIPOC) may have personal concerns about fulfilling the Compact requirements based on historical injustices and current events,” said Cornell Health’s vaccine requirement FAQ.

  Cornell, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s eighteenth highest-ranked university.

  3. Yale University

  The U.S. Department of Justice concluded an investigation into Yale, stating that it illegally discriminates against White and Asian-American applicants in its undergraduate admissions process in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  White and Asian-American applicants have a one-tenth to one-fourth chance of admission compared with African-Americans who have the same or similar qualifications, according to the Justice Department.

  Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Eric Dreiband stated that it is “past time for American institutions to recognize that all people should be treated with decency and respect and without unlawful regard to the color of their skin.”

  Yale, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s fourth highest-ranked university.

  4. University of Pennsylvania

  Students at the University of Pennsylvania boycotted classes on Election Day in the interest of “wellness.” However, they also used the boycott to push demands oriented toward defunding the school’s police department.

  One student told Campus Reform that canceling classes on election day is “unreasonable all around,” since it teaches students that “if you don’t get your way in something or don’t like the result of something, you can just avoid your responsibilities.”

  The end result is a “breed of entitled citizens,” the student added.

  Penn, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s eighth highest-ranked university.

  5. Dartmouth College

  More than 1,000 students, alumni, and faculty at Dartmouth signed a petition demanding that the school dissociate itself from the conservative student newspaper the Dartmouth Review.

  The Review addressed the letter with an editorial entitled “An Overdue Response to the College Jacobins.”

  “It was only a matter of time before the crosshairs would be set on The Review, and in the typical fashion, it manifested in an attempt to stifle rational discourse by appealing to a higher power,” the conservative newspaper stated. “It’s unfortunate that this type of intellectual cowardice has come about on campus, and I would argue that it is antithetical to the pursuits of liberal institutions such as our own wherein debate ought to be fundamental in the search for higher truth. I guess in the post-modern age, truth no longer matters much. Go figure.”

  Dartmouth, according to US News and World Report, is the nation’s thirteenth highest-ranked university.

  6. Brown University

  Students at Brown created a “Burn Brown Book,” which contained a progressive wish list that included defunding the police and “free” college.

  Written entirely in memes and slang, the book tells students — who pay nearly $60,000 in tuition each year — how to “dismantle” the institution.

  A series of articles shows readers the necessary information to successfully carry out their insurrection. One essay argues that Brown should adopt Critical Muslim Studies and Critical Hawai’ian Studies departments as valuable “decolonial disciplines that unsettle white, liberal, secularism as normative.”

  7. Princeton University

  The Daily Princetonian — Princeton University’s student newspaper — published an editorial encouraging the university to punish “racist speech.”

  “For too long, White people, and particularly White men, in this country and on this campus, have held the power to decide what constitutes acceptable speech and action,” says the piece. “They have consistently deemed racist, and particularly anti-Black, fictions acceptable.”

  The Daily Princetonian suggests “anti-racist training for those who transgress the harassment policy.”

  8. Columbia University

  Columbia Law’s Human Rights Institute criticized the Trump administration on its website in a piece entitled “Human Rights Must be at the Top of the Biden Agenda.”

  “The past four years highlight how calculated disregard for human rights at home and abroad disrupts lives, fuels fear and insecurity at our university, and leads to injustice in our communities and around the world,” said the group.

  The group then suggested that the Biden administration undo Trump’s “regressive policies” that inflicted “significant harm.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 21:05

• Home Depot Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Detach, Injuring People, While In Use
  Home Depot Ceiling Fans Recalled After Blades Detach, Injuring People, While In Use

  Home Depot is recalling more than 19,000 ceiling fans after reports that the fan’s blades can detach, fly off and cause “injury or property damage” while in use.

  The product in question is the King of Fans Hampton Bay 54 inch Mara Indoor/Outdoor fan, according to NBC News. Of course, if you’re about to look up and check to see if you have the same fans installed at your house, make sure you turn it off first.

  The company says it has received 47 reports of blades detaching from the fan, “including two reports of the fan blade hitting a consumer and four reports of the blade causing property damage”.

  #Recall: Hampton Bay 54-inch Mara Indoor/Outdoor Ceiling Fans. Blades can detach while in use, posing an injury hazard. Get replacement. CONTACT: 866-443-1291, MaraRecall@kingoffans.com, or https://t.co/7JpA5LbS3Z. Full recall notice: https://t.co/bpKY0Of1mS pic.twitter.com/wn95trBbgF

  — US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) December 23, 2020

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  The King of Fans said that the decision to recall the fans is voluntary and in cooperation with U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies. 

  The company said in a statement: “The Hampton Bay 54 in. Mara Indoor/Outdoor ceiling fans are being voluntarily recalled in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada. There have been consumer reports that the fan blades on the Hampton Bay 54 in. Mara Indoor/Outdoor Ceiling Fan may detach due to an isolated manufacturing defect with the assembly of the fan blade’s locking clip to the fan flywheel, where one of the two screws retaining the locking clip is not adequately secured to the flywheel. If this occurs, the blade may detach from the fan during use, posing an injury hazard.”

  

  “On behalf of King of Fans and The Home Depot, we apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you. We take pride in the quality of our products, and the safety of our customers is our priority,” the notice continues – because “sorry we’ve decapitated your and/or your family members” doesn’t quite have a great ring to it.

  The fans were sold exclusively at Home Depot and online from April to October, the article notes. There were about 182,000 fans in the U.S. and 8,800 in Canada in total. Home Depot says about 80,000 of the fans were sold.

  “We’re committed to the safety and quality of our products so we contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission and voluntarily recalled the product and stopped sales when we discovered the issue,” the retailer said.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 20:30

• 2 Minnesota Lawmakers Say State's COVID-19 Deaths Inaccurate, Demand Nationwide Audit
  2 Minnesota Lawmakers Say State’s COVID-19 Deaths Inaccurate, Demand Nationwide Audit

  Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times,

  Two Minnesota legislators who believe their state’s COVID-19 death count is inaccurate are calling for a nationwide audit to find out how many people died from something other than the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus but were added to the pandemic death totals.

  

  Republican State Rep. Mary Franson said she has enlisted a team to examine data provided by Minnesota’s health department. Her team allegedly found that COVID-19 was blamed for some deaths clearly not linked to the respiratory disease.

  “We found clear-cut examples from the Minnesota Department of Health’s own files—public records—of suicide, a drowning, an auto accident where the passenger was ejected from the vehicle, we found dementia … and strokes,” Franson said during an interview with Fox News, adding that she was “so shocked at what I found that I just could not keep silent.”

  “The citizens of our country are being led in fear, and that fear is leading them to make irrational decisions based on the governors with their shutdowns,” she added.

  “So we need this audit. We need the truth.”

  Franson was joined by Republican State Sen. Scott Jensen, a practicing physician. Jensen has become the subject of two state probes earlier this year for arguing that the federal and state guidelines on reporting COVID-19 deaths could pressure local authorities to misclassify and inflate their numbers, and that doctors and hospitals are motivated to do so for more health care dollars.

  https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6218807692001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

  “If you could hit a threshold of 161 admissions to your hospital with COVID-19 diagnosis between January and June, you received $77,000 of additional money for each one of those admissions” through the CARES Act, Jensen told Fox News.

  “I don’t think there’s any questions that reverse incentives have been created.”

  In response to the allegations, the Minnesota Department of Health said the way it classifies COVID-19 deaths is consistent with the guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  “We’re absolutely following the national guidance on how we are doing our death reporting from COVID-19,” Infectious Disease Director Kris Ehresmann told Fox News. “If someone had tested positive for COVID and then subsequently died, we would review the death certificate and motor vehicle accident would be the cause of death and so it would not be considered a COVID death.”

  According to the state health officials, more than 413,000 Minnesotans have tested positive for the CCP virus since March and 5,262 people have died. The Health Department reported on Wednesday that 38,284 people across the state have received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:55

• ​​​​​​​"Oh S***!" – Blue Glowing UFO Startles Hawaiian Residents 
  ​​​​​​​”Oh S***!” – Blue Glowing UFO Startles Hawaiian Residents 

  Footage has emerged of an unidentified flying object spotted in the skies over Leeward Oahu, Hawaii, earlier this week. 

  Hawaii News Now says multiple videos show “what appears to be a glowing‚ oblong mass — both in the sky and in the water.” 

  

  The incident occurred on Tuesday and was immediately reported to law enforcement authorities. Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration were also notified. They said “no aircraft incidents or accidents” were in the region at the time.” 

  “Something is in the sky. What is that?” a resident said in one video. 

  Misitina Sape filmed the blue, glowing UFO and told Hawaii News Now the footage was shot in the late evening near Haleakala Avenue in Nanakuli.

  

  Minutes later, a woman named Moriah spotted the mysterious flying object passing over Princess Kahanu Estates.

  “I look up and then I was like oh s***!,” she said. “I started calling my husband and them because they were all in the garage. I was like hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see. They all said yea!.

  “I don’t know what it was. This one was going so fast,” Moriah said. 

  She was able to follow the flying object for a few miles until – how she put it – the “object appeared to drop into the ocean.” 

  Moriah can be heard in one video saying, “(It) went land in the water. Whatever it is.”

  She told Hawaii News Now that the object appeared to be larger than a telephone pole and made no noise. 

  “We called 911,” Moriah said, “For have like one cop or somebody for come out and come check em out.”

  FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor said the agency was notified of a plane that may have crashed in the area “but had no aircraft disappear off radars. And no reports of overdue or missing aircraft.”

  

  Meanwhile, the latest COVID-19 relief and government funding bill includes a 180-day countdown for the government to reveal what they know about mysterious flying objects. 

  During the pandemic, sightings of UFOs in the skies over New York City surged on a year over year basis. 

  Earlier this month, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper that aliens exist and have been waiting to show themselves but added they remain secret because “humanity isn’t ready” for the reveal. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:25

• Seattle Bill Could 'Legalize Crime' For Those In Poverty Or With Behavioral Issues
  Seattle Bill Could ‘Legalize Crime’ For Those In Poverty Or With Behavioral Issues

  Via PlanetFreeWill.news,

  In what can only be described as turning morality on its head, a Seattle council member has introduced legislation that could allow courts to dismiss misdemeanor crimes, such as theft and assault, that were committed because of poverty or while a person was experiencing symptoms of a mental illness or substance abuse, reports the Seattle Times.

  

  Introduced by city Council member Lisa Herbold in late October, the legislation is a continuation of the cities “woke” social justice efforts in the wake of the George Floyd police encounter. With the bill crafted under the label “poverty defense,” its defenders say that it aims to ease the burden of usual court rulings on lower income residents but has some worried it will pave the way for crimes like assault, harassment, communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, and more, to go unpunished.

  “I think when you’re talking about folks who are committing offenses to survive or because of underlying mental-health or substance-use issues, incarceration does not have the deterrent effect people believe it has,” Herbold said.

  King County Director of Public Defense Anita Khandelwal, when defending the bill, used the example of someone without shoes stealing a pair from Goodwill and explained an attorney could acquit the thieve of wrong doing on the basis that they didn’t own a personal pair of shoes before the crime.

  A similar example would be a person guilty of a carjacking being acquitted of the crime based on the fact they did not own a car because they could not afford one.

  From the Seattle Times:

  Drunk or high driving and domestic-violence assault are carved out as exceptions in the bill, but what’s left in has been troubling to some who point to misdemeanors like non-domestic assault, harassment, communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and more.

  In a statement published Friday, police- reform group Mothers for Police Accountability worried that a person committing assault would be acquitted “by simply asserting that they were suffering from anxiety or depression or the ‘triggering’ of some past trauma or some other symptom of a mental disorder, including alcoholism and addiction.”

  Some also expressed concern about what would then happen once people with behavioral health issues were back on the street, and criticized the idea for lacking a plan to then address the behavioral health and economic issues at the root of people’s behavior.

  University’s Crime & Justice Research Center director Jacqueline Helfgott says the bill could have a huge impact on public safety, likening the effect to decriminalizing up to 90% of misdemeanor crimes in Seattle if attorneys follow the bill strictly.

  Seattle police, who have seen their departments become the target of the leftist movement to “defund the police,” have come out against the bill, saying it would “endanger the safety and rights of all people of Seattle.”

  “Seattle Police Department officers will continue to focus on holding individuals accountable who commit one of the thousands of assaults or thefts that occur in our community each year,” a statement from the city’s police force reads.

  After first being introduced in October, the bill was tabled over a budget process but it is expected to come back up for consideration over the winter.

  The leftist force behind the bill

  Behind the push for this piece of legislation, which couldn’t come at a worse time for Seattle residents as homicides in the city have recently climbed to their highest level in more than a decade, is the leftist organization called Decriminalize Seattle that opposes policing and the criminal legal system.

  As Judicial Watch reports:

  The group has called for defunding the Seattle Police Department by at least 50% and reallocating the funds to “community led health and safety systems.” It also demands the release of protestors arrested during recent violent uprising without charges. An organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, identified as one of the law’s catalysts in the media, says “what we’ve already known is that the misdemeanor system is basically a system of cycling people in poverty through municipal court over and over again without meeting their basic needs.”

  This is yet another example of the city falling under pressure from radical left wing organizations.

  When signing off on the city’s 2021 budget, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan slashed the SPD’s budget by nearly 20% and diverted the funding into “community spending” which King 5 news reports was a hat tip to the “defund the police” movement but ended up disappointing activists who said it was not enough.

  The Irony

  Council member Lisa Herbold’s lax stance on law enforcement is being highlighted after she reportedly called the police after someone threw a rock at her house on Dec. 11.

  Herbold reportedly told police that “she was on the west side of the living room near the kitchen when she heard a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot and dove into the kitchen for cover.”

  How ironic that she would want this person punished but is promoting the idea that if a crime was committed, the potential criminal could be allowed to walk scot-free if they were acting on their poverty or mental ill-ness. How inconsiderate of her …

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 19:00

• "Bomb Cyclone" Detonates Over Alaska's Aleutian Islands Unleashing Hurricane Force Winds
  “Bomb Cyclone” Detonates Over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands Unleashing Hurricane Force Winds

  A monster storm explosively intensified in the northern Pacific near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on New Year’s Eve, battering the region with hurricane-force winds, heavy seas, and torrential rains, according to Reuters. 

  “It’s the most intense storm ever recorded in the North Pacific, excluding typhoons,” said Brian Brettschneider, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist with the National Weather Service (NWS). 

  The storm is classified as a “bomb cyclone” after meteorologists recorded barometric pressure of 921 millibars, a record-low reading for the region, equivalent to the center of a Category 4 hurricane. 

  Wind Speed Map

  

  In western Aleutians, waves greater than 50 feet were seen with winds more than 80 mph, or on par with a Category 1 hurricane. The islands are barely populated, and the storm poses a limited risk to humans, but the area is a heavily used commercial shipping route between Asia and the US. 

  Wave Height Analysis 

  

  Brettscheneider said the real threat of the storm is aircraft or vessels in the region. 

  Unlike hurricanes, these large and powerful storms go unnamed,” Capital Weather Gang’s weather expert Jeff Halverson wrote back in 2015. 

  The National Weather Service’s (NWS) Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) tweeted Thursday night: 

  “Here is the latest surface analysis showing a strong storm with winds to #hurricaneforce moving toward the Bering Sea. The central pressure is 921 MB making it one of the strongest storms to ever impact the North Pacific. Winds are expected to reach 95 kts near the low center!” 

  

  Satellite imagery of the storm is impressive. 

  Global mosaic visible/IR imagery shows just how large the strong low impacting the North Pacific is. Notice how far the sprawling cold front (long band of clouds stretching SW) extends from the cyclone. pic.twitter.com/276m3z4Xlq

  — NWS OPC (@NWSOPC) January 1, 2021

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

  Late last night, NWS-OPC tweeted:

  “The #HurricaneForce low near the Aleutians continues to produce extreme conditions. Buoy 46071 (circled in red) is observing seas greater than 50 ft. Note in the insert the 58 ft measurement.”

  

  The jet stream is likely to carry the weather disturbance into the Pacific Northwest next week. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 18:35

• How To Make Loans Scarce In Three Words: Cap Interest Rates
  How To Make Loans Scarce In Three Words: Cap Interest Rates

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

  Here’s a perfect free-market example of what not to do about allegedly high interest rates.

  

  Interest Rate Caps

  Reuters reports Peru Passes Law Allowing Central Bank to Cap Interest Rates on Bank Loans.

  Peru’s Congress approved on Wednesday a law that will allow policymakers to cap interest rates on loans granted by banks, a controversial measure that has been deeply critiqued by the Andean nation’s government and financial institutions.  

  The law empowers the country’s central bank to set maximum and minimum interest rates every six months in order to regulate the loan market, a measure lawmakers said is necessary to protect Peruvians from abusive lending practices.

  Loophole

  The loophole in the bill is that it “allows” rather than “requires” the Central Bank to cap rates on bank loans.

  Regardless, this is a horrible idea.

  If the Central Bank or government set rates that are too low, loans will dry up. 

  This is similar to Venezuela setting the price of gasoline at 10 cents a gallon. That’s the official price but the supply at that price is zero.

  The government set the price of gasoline but it cannot secure the supply. 

  The result is a huge black market. 

  What About the Fed?

  The Fed does not set bank loan rates directly, but it does influence them. 

  For example, mortgages loan rates are generally tied to interest rates on 10-year US Treasuries that the Fed does manipulate.

  Interest Rate Floors and Subsidies

  Unlike the setup in Venezuela, the Fed can indeed provide all the supply of dollars it wants. And as long as borrowers use the money for speculation, housing, and other items that do not show up in official inflation stats, the Fed can get away with it.

  Low interest rates helped fuel the stock market bubble and other speculative activities. The result is three major bubbles in 20 years, with allegedly low inflation. 

  Few see the current bubble only because it has not popped yet.

  These are all good reasons to end the Fed and let the market set rates.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 18:10

• Here Are All The Banks That Paid Janet Yellen $7.3 Million In Speaking Fees In The Past 2 Years
  Here Are All The Banks That Paid Janet Yellen $7.3 Million In Speaking Fees In The Past 2 Years

  When openly bribing a politician, financier or any other power figure is too – how should we put it – illegal, there is a well-known loophole that has been used for decades to circumvent the straight to jail hazard: the old “pay for speeches” shortcut, where otherwise boring, insipid and uninspirational figures who have nothing original or creative to say, getting paid $100,000, $200,000 or much more for an hour of their time to “speak.” Of course, even five-year-olds realize that this arrangement, despite what it is called, is just a way to either buy future favors from said “speaker”, or repay them for previous preferential treatment (such as taxpayer-funded bailouts), while making them filthy rich in the process.

  It certainly worked with the Clinton Foundation, where the tens of millions spent by foreign US adversaries, especially those in the Middle East, to fund such a “generous” and noble pursuit as a (fully tax-exempt) foundation generated amazing “returns” when Hillary Clinton ran the State Department. Of course, it wasn’t just rich petrostates that sought payback for their bribes donations: for all those who couldn’t afford a $5 million check to this Clinton Foundation initiative or that (where miraculously, the foundation kept around 94% of the “donations” to cover “overhead“), there was always the 2nd tier of influence peddling better known as “paying for speeches”, and as the following list of Hillary Clinton speeches delivered in the 2013-2015 period clearly shows, many were convinced that Hillary would replace Barack Obama in 2016 and be the next US “president for hire” to special interests and generous lobby groups.

  

  Of course, when it comes to Hillary Clinton, it is hardly a secret that the former first lady would do anything to wave in some influence cash. It’s also hardly a secret that one Clinton’s chances of becoming next president, donations to the Clinton Foundation “unexpectedly” collapsed.

  What, however, may come as a surprise is that none other than arguably the most boring speaker of the 21st century, former Fed chair Janet Yellen – and future Secretary of the Treasury, a post which also doubles as the top bank supervisor in the US – who would send Red Bull stock limit up every time she spoke (or she would, if Red Bull wasn’t a private company) has been raking in millions from – you guessed it – speeches.

  

  According to Yellen’s financial disclosure document, the 74-year-old former Fed chair has raked in a whopping $7.3 million in speaking fees in just the past two years from Wall Street banks and large corporations including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Google, City National Bank, UBS, Citadel, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Salesforce. Did we mention Citadel? We did, but we should mention it again because for some odd reason the high frequency trading firm which was recently busted for frontrunning its own clients (and everyone knows what Citadel has been doing with Robinhood option orderflow) has been Janet Yellen’s biggest customer, paying her over $800,000 (!) for three speeches (in Oct 2019, Dec 2019, and again Oct 2010). And yes, this is the same Citadel where Yellen’s predecessor at the Fed, Ben Bernanke remains a “senior advisor” although how this man, who has never traded one share in his entire life, is advising hedge fund and trading giant like Citadel, remains a mystery. 

  What isn’t a mystery is why all these Wall Street firms, on at least 57 occasions, decided to fork over on average $127,310 to listen to Janet Yellen’s confoundingly boring monotone: the reason is simple – to buy influence from the one private sector individual that virtually everyone knew would soon return to “public service” under whatever administration followed Trump, and that’s precisely what happened now that Janet Yellen will not only be in charge of the Treasury, but effectively in charge of the Fed too thanks to recent quasi fusion between the two institutions, which was required to launch helicopter money/MMT. That alone explains why Citi almost $1 million listening to Yellen on at least nine occasions in the past two years.

  The result: Yellen is now literally in the pocket, and  of virtually every Wall Street investment bank and trading firm.

  The full breakdown of Yellen’s bribes speaking fees is shown below. What is also notable is that since March 2020, or around the time covid forced all conferences to be via zoom, Yellen has collected over $1.7 million in zoom appearances, not even “speeches”, on at least 24 occasions since March! 

  

  Here is a full list of all the Wall Street companies that have paid Yellen since the start of 2019.

  

  For those wondering if Yellen actually needs all this money, the answer is of course not: in addition to millions in various financial assets listed, including between $1 and $5 million in a “cash account”, Yellen also has a Stamp Collection worth between $15,001 and $50,000 or more than most Americans are worth. Oh, and Yellen also has some miracle investment in the Vanguard Short Term Bond Index Fund and the Vanguard European Stock Index Fund which has a value of “none” and yet generated over $115,000 in annual income.

  

  As Politico notes, Yellen’s financial disclosure is one of three filed by the Biden team at the end of 2020 “that could become politically problematic with the left wing of the Democratic Party when confirmation hearings begin in January.”

  If you’re embarrassed that your party just put in charge of the Treasury Dept someone who got wildly rich by collecting $250k checks from Wall St for 1 hour of “work,” then pressure your party to change.

  Don’t exploit misogyny smears to try to deter reporters from revealing it.

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 1, 2021

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

  We, however, doubt this will be an issue: with Wall Street now delighted that the person it had bribed paid so generously for hours of intelligible and muffled stammering will now be Treasury Secretary, and quite happy to bail all Wall Street firms yet again after the next crash, we are confident that Wall Street – which just happens to be the puppet-master controlling both the president and Congress – will steamroll all opposition and in a few weeks, Yellen will be signing all newly printed dollar bills until early 2022 of course when all fiat currency will be “printed” digitally by the Fed and distributed directly by the central bank to any and all Americans it deems worthy.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:55

• US COVID Cases Top 20MM As California Deaths Hit New Record
  US COVID Cases Top 20MM As California Deaths Hit New Record

  Summary:

  • US cases top 20MM
  • California sees new death record
  • Russia new cases topped 27K
  • Portugal reports nearly 7K new cases

  * * * 

  Several US states have been plagued by reporting delays over the holiday, but with California expanding lockdowns around the state, and more cases of B.1.1.7, the mutant strain first discovered in the UK, Joe Biden, Dr. Fauci and others are stepping up their warnings about the worst of the outbreak lying ahead.

  With hospitalizations – supposedly the most reliable indicator of the outbreak’s trajectory, according to the COVID Tracking Project – still close to record levels, hospitals in LA County and elsewhere have struggled to accept new patients.

  

  One year after Beijing first notified the WHO about the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the central city of Wuhan, the US has just seen its total number of confirmed cases top 20MM.

  The 20MM number is almost 2x the 10.3MM tally from India, the second-worst-hit country. New York state’s infections remained high, with 16.5K new cases recorded over the last 24 hours, just below the record set Wednesday, as the positivity rate for NYC climbed toward 10%.

  California, meanwhile, saw its fatalities reach a new record. In a single day, the Golden State added 585 new deaths, bringing the total to just under 26K. The state also reported 47.2K new cases, pushing its total to 2.3MM.

  The pandemic entered 2021 with no signs of slowing down. Global daily deaths reached record highs this week. Countries from Germany to Japan to South Africa ended 2020 with record daily cases. Turkey, China and Brazil became the latest to report infections of the new, highly transmissible virus strain.

  

  Globally, the tally of confirmed cases neared 84MM, while deaths neared 2MM.

  

  Offering hope that the global pace of vaccinations might pick up in the new year, the WHO announced Friday tthat it has issued its first emergency-use designation for a Covid-19 vaccine, making the Pfizer/BioNtech the first immunization to receive a green light from the Geneva-based body.

  Here’s a rundown of more COVID-19 news from overnight:

  Italy registered 22,211 virus cases on Friday, from 23,477 the day before. Daily deaths declined too, with 462 fatalities reported, compared with 555 on Thursday.

  Portugal reported 6,951 new confirmed cases, below the record of 7,627 announced the previous day, taking the total to 420,629. The number of hospitalized cases fell by 34 to 2,806.

  Russia recorded 27,039 new cases of Covid-19 over the past 24 hours, taking the total number to 3.186 million, according to the country’s task force for combating the pandemic.

  * * *

  Over in Japan, authorities are seeing their stance on emergency measures shift, as Tokyo’s metropolitan government is considering a request to declare a state of emergency. According to reports from Japanese national broadaster NHK, Yasutoshi Nishimura, the minister in charge of Japan’s coronavirus response, said Wednesday that the country could consider an emergency if infections continue at the current rate. This follows several other comments and reports from officials, including a top official in Tokyo about the prospect of pursuing other

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:45

• 2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
  2020 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

  One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2019, we pointed to a certain undertone of artificial stability permeating capital markets and society, with the economy firing on all cylinders (thanks to the massive dual deficits and debt that had exploded under the current administration), with the market surging 30% last year and at all time highs (despite flat earnings and entirely thanks to the Fed’s resumption of “NOT QE” last September in order to bail out JPMorgan and a handful of hedge funds’ treasury basis trades), and with Trump cruising to re-election victory in what we thought one year ago would be the most important even of 2020: the US presidential election. It’s also why we said that “with the Fed fully behind Trump and helping the S&P return nearly 30% in 2019, 4 more years of Trump is now virtually assured (barring some unexpected calamity in 2020).”

  Oh how prudent that disclaimer proved to be, as well as this next caveat we casually mentioned in our last year review, warning that “with the 2020 elections looming, it is certainly true that anything can still happen, only as with all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected.”

  It certainly wasn’t because around the time we were penning our year-end wrap post exactly one year ago, a highly contagious coronavirus strain had escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology (China’s first and only biosafety 4 lab) whether purposefully or intentionally, and was set to spread around the globe, unleashing the biggest global black swan in the past 100 years, triggering personal and economic hell for hundreds of millions around the world who lost their jobs or loved ones as a result of the China virus, markets nirvana for millions of 16-year-old Robinhood and hedge funds traders who benefited from the greatest stock market rally in history, and ultimately helped Joe Biden emerge from complete obscurity and with virtually no chances of defeating Trump, to eventually winning the Nov 3 presidential election, Trump’s ongoing challenges to the outcome notwithstanding.

  

  The arrival of the virus that would eventually be called Covid-19 by the global scientific community (to remove any links to China) – and which would lead to a historic pandemic the likes of which nobody expected one year ago – shook the world, and would lead to a slew of historic events taking place in just a few months, including a staggering lockdown of the global economy, the official arrival of global Helicopter Money, tens of trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus, an overhaul of the global economy punctuated by an unprecedented explosion in world debt, an Orwellian crackdown on civil liberties by governments everywhere, and ultimately set the scene for what even the World Economic Forum called simply “The Great Reset.”

  Needless to say, it would be impossible to describe everything that happened in 2020, or all the black swans that the pandemic and its associated lockdowns let loose upon the world, in one article: those looking for a detailed breakdown of all the major events this year are urged to read the latest magnum opus “Year in Review” by David Collum (part 1 here and part 2 here), but a quick recap of some of the most prominent and bizarre events that shook the world in the past 365 days, what Mark Orsley called “the year of years“, is as follows:

  • WW3 fears run rampant on social media as the US strikes Iranian army general Soleimani
  • Black swan health event that leads to a historic equity market crash, and funding strains
  • Fed takes US policy rates to near 0% and institutes QE at a magnitude that puts the post GFC period to shame
  • Treasury institutes trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus
  • Unprecedented lockdowns lead to Tiger King craze
  • The world learns how to school and work remotely, changing the office space landscape forever
  • WTI front month contract trades with a negative price
  • Subsequent epic equity bull market recovery rally that pierces March highs
  • Australia burns
  • Kobe Bryant tragically dies
  • We begin to watch sports with no fans
  • Pentagon releases UFO footage
  • Quantas offers flight to nowhere
  • California wildfires burn uncontrollably and wipe out parts of Napa
  • US social unrest turns violent
  • Murder hornets
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies
  • Overhyped US election event that leads to a volatility collapse, year-end rally
  • A middle-aged skateboarder, drinking Cranberry juice to a 70s rock hit brings calm to the world

  That list could have gone on forever. The point is, there could not have been more regime shifts, volatility moments, and memes than 2020 (we hope).

  Yet for all the chaos and panic unleashed by covid, a certain undertone of pre-determination and almost tangible order was felt just below the surface: after all, the virus, crash, lockdown and recession provoked an unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy panic which sparked a record $22 trillion of stimulus in just the past 9 months around the world. As a result, central banks spent over $1 trillion a month on financial assets via QE, crushing yields, volatility, and spreads, and pushing stocks to all time highs at the end of 2020 even as earnings continue to slide.

  

  It’s almost as if the world’s richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic. It wasn’t just them however: politicians the world over would benefit from the transition from QE to outright helicopter money and MMT which made the over monetization of deficits widely accepted in the blink of an eye. And in the span of just a few months, $14 trillion in fiscal stimulus was announced, with central banks monetizing most of it, and pushing the quantity of global debt to a record $277 trillion, a number which the Institute For International Finance expects to hit a record $360 trillion by 2030…

  

  … while thanks to central bank intervention, the price of world debt dropped to a record 5,000 year low, with global negative yielding debt now at an all time high $18tn.

  The common theme here was simple: no matter what happens, capital markets can never again be allowed to drop, regardless of the cost or how much more debt has to be incurred. Indeed, as we look back at the news barrage over the past year, and past decade for that matter, the one thing that becomes especially clear amid the constant din of markets, of politics, of social upheaval and geopolitical strife – and now pandemics –  in fact a world that is so flooded with constant conflicting newsflow and changing storylines that some say it has become virtually impossible to even try to predict the future, is that despite the people’s desire for change, for something original and untried, the world’s established forces will not allow it and will fight to preserve the broken status quo at any price – even global coordinated shutdowns – which is perhaps why it always boils down to one thing – capital markets, that bedrock of Western capitalism and the “modern way of life”, where control, even if it means central planning the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the USSR, and an upward trajectory must be preserved at all costs, as the alternative is a global, socio-economic collapse.

  And since it is the daily gyrations of stocks that sway popular moods – and why none other than the US president was tweeting almost daily ahead of the November election at what level the S&P closed on any given day to boost his approval rating and bolster his credibility – the interplay between capital markets and politics has never been more profound or more consequential. Indeed, in a historic moment when the president was impeached by the House (if not the Senate), Trump’s natural response was to point to the record high hit that very day in the S&P500.

  The more powerful message here is the implicit realization and admission by politicians, not just Trump but also his peers and challengers, that the stock market is now seen as the consummate barometer of one’s political achievements and approval. Which is also why capital markets are now, more than ever, a political tool whose purpose is no longer to distribute capital efficiently and discount the future, but to manipulate voter sentiments far more efficiently than any Russian election interference attempt ever could.

  Which brings us back to 2020 and the past decade, which was best summarized by a recent Bill Blain article who said that “the last 10-years has been a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis. Now central banks face the consequences and are trapped. The distortion can’t go uncorrected indefinitely.“

  He is right: the distortion will eventually collapse, but so far the establishment and the “top 1%” have been successful – perhaps the correct word is lucky – in preserving the value of risk assets: on the back of the Fed’s firehose of liquidity the S&P500 returned an impressive 15.5% following the 28.50% return in 2019. It did so by staging the greatest rally off all time from the March lows, surpassing all of the 4 greatest rallies off the lows of the past century (1929,1938, 1974, and 2009).

  

  Yet this continued can-kicking by the establishment – all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs – has come with a price… and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed’s response to the the pandemic “worsened inequality in 2020” as the value of financial assets – Wall Street –  relative to economy – Main Street – hit all-time high of 6.3x.

  

  And as we said previously, with the system now caught in a vice operated by a handful of people, there is no longer any chance that the status quo will change without a revolution, a revolution which is increasingly unlikely in a world where “generous” governments hand out $600 “stimulus checks” to a population that has no other means of providing for itself besides relying on the same government that is pillaging and plundering the middle class.

  In other words, going back to what we said above, 2020 helped further crystalize the realization that politics is now markets, and markets have become political weapons, and why the past decade was, as Bill Blain put it, “a story of massive central banking distortion to address the 2008 crisis.” The problem is that this distortion has only made the mess even greater, and the only hope central banks have – in their own words – is if government fiscal stimulus takes over where monetary stimulus ends, and this is where covid came in: almost overnight it ushered in MMT – the fusion of fiscal and monetary policy, the fusion of the Fed and the Treasury. In other words, 12 years after we predicted it would come, helicopter money finally arrived. 

  Only there is just one problem, or rather 277 trillion problems as shown above, because whereas one could argue that fiscal stimulus is a credible option if the world’s wasn’t drowning in debt, when global debt to GDP is 330%, it is tantamount to saying that only more debt can fix a debt crisis. Which is effectively what the world’s smartest people are saying.

  Meanwhile, the trends observed in recent years will continue: coming years will be marked by even bigger government (because only more government can “fix” problems created by government), higher stock prices and dollar debasement (because only more Fed intervention can “fix” the problems created by the Fed), and a policy flip from monetary and QE to fiscal & MMT, all of which will attempt to spark an unprecedented inflationary wave. As Hartnett writes, “if 2020 was year of COVID-19 pandemic; it will, according to Hartnett, “also be remembered as the secular low point for both inflation & interest rates.”

  He is, of course, right because once all other conventional methods to spark reflation fail, central banks will activate Plan B which is also the core pillar of the coming Great Reset: the roll out of digital currencies which can be deposited by central banks directly into digital wallets, bypassing the entire commercial banking fractional banking infrastructure, in a last ditch effort to spark the inflation that will be needed to inflate away the $300+ trillion in debt suffocating world growth. For those wondering when this will happen, tentative schedules show this historic transfer to an all digital payments infrastructure taking place as early as the second half of 2021…

  

  … so it is very likely that while 2020 was an insane year, it may prove to be just an appetizer to the shockwaves that will be unleashed in 2021 when we see the first stage of the most historic overhaul of the fiat payment system in history.

  Here we should note one thing: in a world undergoing historic transformations, any free press must be throttled and controlled, and over the past year we have seen unprecedented efforts by legacy media and its corporate owners, as well as the new “social media” overlords do everything in their power to stifle independent thought. For us it was especially “personal” on not one but two occasions. In January, Twitter suspended our account because we dared to challenge the conventional narrative about the source of the Wuhan virus. It was only six months later that Twitter apologized, and set us free, admitting it had made a mistake.

  Yet barely had twitter readmitted us, when something even more unprecedented happened: for the first time ever (to our knowledge) Google – the world’s largest online ad provider and monopoly – demonetized our website not because of any complaints about our writing but because of the contents of our comment section. It then held us hostage until we agreed to implement some prerequisite screening and moderation of the comments section. This was a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. In December for the first time in our 12 year history, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us again. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year.

  That said, whether the story of 2021, and the next decade for that matter, is one of helicopter or digital money, of (hyper)inflation or deflation: what is key, and what we learned in the past decade, is that the status quo will throw anything at the problem to kick the can, it will certainly not let any crisis go to waste… even the deadliest pandemic in over a century. And while many already knew that, the events of 2020 made it clear to a fault that not even a modest market correction can be tolerated going forward. That in turn may explain why the last quarters of 2020 were a mirror image of events from the first quarter when stocks tanked. After all, if central banks aim to punish all selling, then the logical outcome is to buy everything, and investors, traders and speculators did just that armed with the clearest backstop guarantee from the Fed, which in March crossed the Rubicon when it formally nationalized the bond market as it started buying both investment grade bonds and junk bond ETFs in the open market. As such it is no longer even a debatable issue if the Fed will buy stocks after the next crash – the only question is when.

  Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political “narrative” has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past year showed vividly why that is the case.

  As for predictions about the future, as 2020 so vividly showed when it comes to true surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure courtesy of China’s covid pandemic, dramatic changes in 2020 persisted, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways – from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to “populist” upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China’s ongoing fight with preserving stability in its gargantuan financial system which is now more than double the size of the US.

  

  As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from the KGB either, although now that the entire Russian hysteria episode is over, those allegations have finally quieted down), and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

  Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, we find it a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world – is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

  In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to accelerate in the coming year, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2020 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch out of fear of repercussions, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an orchestrated information vacuum and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which the public relations arm of established media outlets refused to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

  We are grateful that our readers – who hit a new record high in 2020 – have realized it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

  *  *  *

  And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 11-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

  So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

  • In 20th spot with 690,000 readers, was an article that touched on one of the most sensitive topics of 2020 – the origins of the Covid virus. As readers are all too aware, the great debate here has been whether the virus emerged due to something as innocuous as a Chinese citizen eating a bat soup, a narrative espoused by the China-controlled media, or if it escaped from a Wuhan biolab. And as AP journalists are now discovering, all signs increasingly point to the latter, something which Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 first said back in April, shocking the world with his claim that the virus was man made as we explained in “COVID-19 Is A Man-Made Virus: HIV-Discoverer Says “Could Only Have Been Created In A Lab“.” Eventually he will be proven correct, confirming once again that the biggest “fake news” is whatever the mainsteam media pushes as the narrative du jour.
  • In 19th spot of the year’s most popular articles, we received another reminder that not all is as it seems when it comes to stoking tensions within US society, as 718,000 readers clicked on a story pointing out that “More Bricks Appear In Advance Of Monday Demonstrations In Baltimore, Texas.” While a wave of protests and violent riots swept across the nation, ostensibly as a grassroot movement condemning police violence against blacks, it had dramatic consequences across the country, leading to the defunding of countless police forces across mostly liberal cities and yet many wondered about who the puppetmaster behind this wave of violence was, because as even Jeff Gundlach mused recently, “It’s Interesting How The Violent Riots Of 2020 Ended Right After The Election.” Hopefully, one day someone will get to the bottom of who and how organized the protest deadly movement of the summer of 2020.
  • In 18th spot, addressing what may be the most critical topic of the next four years, nearly 720,000 readers were presented with a “Blockbuster Report” which in impressive detail “Revealed How THE Biden Family Was Compromised By China.” As a reminder, when news reports of Hunter Biden’s relationship with China first emerged, the social networks were quick to censor any mention of the original report. However, just a few weeks later (and certainly after the election) we learned that Hunter was indeed being probed by tax evasion stemming from his shady Chinese deals which sought just one thing: to buy favor with the family of Joe Biden. Of course, it won’t be the first time foreign powers have sought such undue influence on US politicians – after all that’s what the whole point behind the existence of the Clinton foundation, which did nothing for starving African children or Haiti earthquake survivors, but sure made Bill and Hillary filthy rich.
  • Pivoting from China’s attempts to influence the White House, we once again find ourselves in the middle of the social unrest which defined much of the summer of 2020. Only this time there was a twist: 726,000 readers were fascinated how an “Antifa Attempt To Riot In California Suburb Goes Awry” when a group of Antifa ‘protesters’ were met with instant justice at the hands of angry residents in the suburban town of Yucaipa, California. Unfortunately, we expect this violent left-right split across the heart of America to only get worse in 2021 as none of the fundamental reasons for the growing anger and resentment across US society has been addressed yet, and if anything, it has become the media’s duty to stoke even more anger and hatred.
  • Confirming the scientists at best can only make(un)educated guesses about the future (especially if they have paid conflicts of interest) was an analysis from the early spring when the covid pandemic was first sweeping across the country, and which “found” that “All Hospital Beds In The US Will Be Filled With Patients ‘By About May 8th’ Due To Coronavirus.” This article, which was based on official research and was the 16th most read of 2020, with some 764,000 views, merely showcased something that never happened, and in fact the virus rapidly faded away as soon as various containment measures were rolled out. But not before it demonstrated how the media successfully instills a sense of panic amid the population, which continues to this day even as the most apocalyptic predictions postulated by “scientists” never actually came true.
  • By now a clear pattern is emerging: 2020 was without doubt the year of Covid, and it also served as the foundation of the 15th most popular article of 2020, which discussed a “Chilling Documentary Mapping Out Likely Origin Of COVID-19.” Some 767,000 readers got their first glimpse of covid not as a virus that emerged by accident in nature but one that was created in a Chinese lab; more troubling was the hint that China released the virus on purpose in hopes of overturning the socio-economic status quo. While the jury of “scientists” is still out on the real origins of covid (even if the broader public knows all too well where it came from), one thing is certain: the unprecedented transformations sparked by covid left China as one of the biggest geopolitical winners. If nothing else, this should at least prompt some more questions about who stood to benefit from the release of the virus.
  • Covid continued to dominate the most popular list, and the 14th most read article of 2020 with 820,000 views was the report that triggered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression when on March 12, Trump finally bent under pressure and announced a ban on all travel from Europe, in the process triggering both widespread and targeted shutdowns that have lasted to this day, resulting in millions of job losses and countless small and medium business failing in response to the shotgun approach to deal with the pandemic which while crippling most of the population, made a handful of ultra rich investors and mega corporations extremely rich.
  • The 13th most popular article of 2020 touched on the year’s other biggest event, the US presidential election, and whose outcome Trump contests to this day as a result of countless allegedly fraudulent votes being cast on Nov 3. Some 830,000 readers were interested to learn how and why Trump’s then lawyer Sidney Powell intended to “Overturn Election Results In Multiple States.” So far, that has not happened, and in fact it is unlikely that it will after the Supreme Court refused to hear to Trump’s challenge last month. That said, with 3 weeks to go until the inauguration, Trump still refuses to concede although it remains unclear on what grounds he hopes to launch any upcoming legal challenges, even as Joe Biden has already hired his movers in preparation for his transition to the White House.
  • For the 12th most popular article of the past year, we once again shift back to Covid and specifically China’s massive obfuscation campaign, according to which the country which sparked the global covid pandemic has had less than 100,000 cases, even as the rest of world has arounf 500,000 new cases daily. Beijing’s facade of lies almost cracked in February when as asked whether “China’s Tencent Accidentally Leaked The True Terrifying Coronavirus Statistics.” It did, but since the truth in China has a halflife that is shorter than a virus in the wild, everyone quickly moved on and to this day the world continues to drink some bizarre Kool Aid according to which China has just a handful of new cases daily. 
  • The 11th most popular article of the year was something different: it had to do with what may well have been the most underreported story of 2020 (and 2019) – the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful, rich pedophile friends. Of course, most of Epstein’s secrets died with him when he “committed suicide” in the summer of 2019, although some hope for justice remains and it is tied to the ongoing incarceration of Epstein’s madame and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who knew everything and everyone in Jeffrey’s circle. It’s also why 835,000 read the article laying out “The Top Highlights From Ghislaine Maxwell’s Unsealed Court Records.” Unfortunately, so far Ghislain has refused to shine a light into the true scandal surrounding Epstein and his “friends”, and we are confident that if that were to ever change then the daughter of Robert Maxwell – who died in mysterious circumstances back in 1991 – will face a similar fate.
  • With 864,000 page views, the 10th most popular story of 2020 was neither Covid, nor Trump, nor Epstein-related, but instead exposed China’s giant gold counterfeiting underworld as we explained in “83 Tons Of Fake Gold Bars: Gold Market Rocked By Massive China Counterfeiting Scandal.” Over the years there has been much speculation about just how much of the $11 trillion notional in above-ground gold is legitimate, and how much gold-plated tungsten, and the shocking news that emerged out of China in June underscored that one should always check the authenticity of one’s gold holdings, especially if there is any link to China, the country that has taken counterfeiting to an art.
  • Having entered the top 10 most popular stories of 2020, we find that covid makes another appearance in 9th spot with 915,000 reads, this time with the claim made by a top pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, who made the shocking allegation that the coronavirus Is “The Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated On An Unsuspecting Public” and claimed that “There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians, it’s outrageous, this is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” One can easily see why any reference to the story or the doctor was promptly scrubbed by the world’s social media censors who have taken it upon themselves to also be “fact-checkers” on any claim related to covid, even if as we reported previously, most of those ‘fact-checkers’ are deeply conflicted individuals who have a vested interest in perpetuating the far more lucrative, fake narrative about covid.
  • In 8th spot, with just a few hundred more page views, was our report about the scientific analysis conducted on voting patterns in the Nov 3 election. In “It Defies Logic”: Scientist Finds Telltale Signs Of Election Fraud After Analyzing Mail-In Ballot Data” we showed a statistical anslysis “which strongly suggested that fraud occurred” on election night, when several swing states inexplicably stopped reporting vote counts while President Trump maintained a healthy lead over Joe Biden. To this date, this remains a deeply polarizing issue, and even though the courts – including SCOTUS – have refused to investigate further, millions of Americans believe that there are telltale signs that Biden’s victory on Nov 3 was not proper and is why so many Americans refuse to accept Joe Biden as their president.
  • With just over 1.1 million page views and in 7th spot, was the article that got us suspended (for 6 months) from Twitter: in “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?” we asked if Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Peng Zhou (whose data was available publicly to anyone), was the person responsible for unleashing the pandemic. While Twitter unceremoniuosly banned our account for merely asking this question, a few months later the joke was on Jack Dorsey after we reported that “Western Spy Agencies Investigating Wuhan Scientist Highlighted By Zero Hedge In January.” Of course, since the question of China’s involvement in the creation and spread of the covid virus has tremendous political consequences, so far there has been no official finding or conclusion either way.
  • The 6th most popular article of 2020 was another notable question probing the validity of the November election, namely: “Why Does Biden Have So Many More Votes Than Democrat Senators In Swing States?” Another way of asking the same question – which 1,113,129 readers also wanted answered – was “what’s going on here? If it were “never-Trumpers” pairing Biden with their GOP Congressional picks, wouldn’t one expect fewer votes for Trump than GOP Senators?” So far we have not received an answer.
  • Questions about the credibility of the presidential election continued into the Top 5 posts as well, and with 1,245,000 was out post covering the rollercoaster event which was the Nov 3 election, which had Biden winning at first, then odds overwhelmingly shifted in Trump’s favor after he won Florida and Ohio, only to see Biden be declared winner after mail in votes in most swing states came overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor. Not surprisingly, “Trump Blasts Vote-Count Delays As “Fraud On The American Public” and yet it was precisely those same vote counts, as well as various documented reports of mystery ballot boxes emerging in the deep of the night, that ultimately handed Biden the election. Trump is still contesting the outcome.
  • The devastating consequences from the covid pandemic may have been more limited than many expected, largely thanks to an unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, which made life especially easy for companies that had access to capital markets, however it was quite the opposite for millions of small and medium businesses for whom the PPP loans handed out at the peak of the covid crisis provided at best a brief respite. As a result, and as we reported in “Bankruptcy Tsunami Begins: Thousands Of Default Notices Are “Flying Out The Door“,”  well over 1.2 million readers were shocked to learn just how bad the economy was for all those “mom and pop” small business operators who had no choice but to fold as the lockdowns resulting from the covid pandemic crippled the service economy and led to a historic bankruptcy filing spree.
  • The 3rd most popular article of 2020, read over 1.3 million times, had to do with another topic which the mainstream media would not come within 10 feet of, namely whether or not the highly popular Black Lives Matter movement was credible, or if it was just another way of sabotaging the popular narrative in hopes of benefiting a certain social class. One person who took the other side of the argument was an Anonymous Berkeley Professor who “Shredded the BLM Injustice Narrative” only to be met with a furious rebuke from Berkeley, which ironically validated one of the letter’s core claims that dissent outside “a tightly policed, narrow discourse” is not welcome. Sadly, to this day any truly open discourse on the topic of whether BLM’s claims are valid remains taboo, and is the surest and quickest way to ending one’s career.
  • The year’s second most popular article with just over 1.5 million reads, was also an example of conventional media cracking down on anything it found disagreeable to the popular narrative. Shortly after the first reports of covid’s spread, we published our take on a research report which found that “Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions”, Stoking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.” This prompted an immediate panic among the “factcheckers” whose job was to perpetuate the mainstream narrative, and they promptly conceded that while HIV insertions are present, such insertions can also be found in other viruses. Unfortunately, their attempts to discredit the theory that covid was a manmade bioweapon have so far failed to be scientifically validated, while covid’s surprising ability to mutate and force the immune system to attack the host body itself, which are now widely accepted even by the so-called “scientists” have failed to ease concerns that covid is, in many ways, an airborne version of HIV.
  • Finally, in the top #1 spot, and cementing 2020’s status as the year of covid, was an article from March that tried to take on the mass hysteria spread by everyone from (conflicted) politicians to (conflicted) mainsteadm media to (conflicted) pharma companies, all of which had a vested interest in creating the biggest ever crisis possible. With 1.7 million page views, in “COVID-19 – Evidence Over Hysteria” we laid out one take why the widespread panic resulting from covid may be ultimately self-defeating especially when juxtaposed side by the side with the far greater (and far wider reaching) economic damage sparked by lockdowns. Alas, to this day, the hysteria dominates confirming the old saying to let no crisis go to waste, especially when the crisis in question is the biggest one in generations and allows the establishment to rollout socially and economically transformational changes that would never be possible without the scapegoat that is covid.

  With all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2021, and the next decade?

  We don’t know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try despite endless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2020, which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional “polling” and “strategist” class forever. We merely observe, try to find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

  We do know, however, that after a record $22 trillion in stimulus was been conjured out of thin air by the world’s central banks and politicians in just the past 9 months, as helicopter money makes a triumphal arrival in both the US and Eurozone, and as interest rates are on the cusp of breaking out, the entire world is floating on an ocean of excess money, which in 2020 once again succeeded in masking just how ugly the truth beneath the calm surface is.

  We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 12, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

  Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2021, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2020 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that the system is reduced to (ab)using each and every day just to keep this grand tragicomedy going for at least one more year.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:44

• 1984? Twitter Mob Cancels English Literature
  1984? Twitter Mob Cancels English Literature

  Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

  Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

  San Francisco Drug Overdoses Outpace COVID Deaths

  San Francisco is a city that implemented some of the more strict COVID lockdowns in 2020, inside a state that may have been the most draconian in the US.

  And while San Francisco has only seen 173 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, the city has watched as 621 people died of drug overdoses.

  In 2019 there were 441 San Francisco deaths from drug overdose in San Francisco; so even just the INCREASE in drug overdose deaths from 2019 to 2020 (an increase of 180) is greater than the number of COVID-19 deaths in San Francisco.

  This echoes other unintended consequences from lockdown isolation, such as Japan’s spiking suicide rate.

  Click here to read the full story.

  *  *  *

  Twitter Mob Takes Aim at Classic Novels Taught in Schools

  Under the hashtag #DisruptTexts, English and Literature teachers across the United States are banding together to censor dangerous classic novels.

  For example, a teacher in Lawrence Massachusetts said that the organization #DisruptTexts helped her school district remove Homer’s The Odyssey from the curriculum.

  Others have done away with the “slut-shaming” classic, The Scarlet Letter, as well as Shakespeare for his works written “at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed.”

  The idea is that anything written too long ago will reflect the bias and prejudice of the past, and fail to properly indoctrinate students into the correct way of thinking, according to the woke Twitter mobsters.

  Instead the organization has partnered with Penguin Publishing to suggest teachers use titles such as Antiracist Baby a “picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves… to help readers recognize and reflect on bias in their daily lives.”

  Click here if you want to see the #DisruptTexts website for yourself.

  *  *  *

  High School Student Sues Over Woke Curriculum

  A high school student from Nevada, William Clark, has filed suit against his high school for forcing its woke curriculum on him.

  Clark has a white father and black mother; his father is deceased and he is growing up in a predominantly black household with two black siblings.

  But given that he has a white biological father, Clark is “regarded by his peers as white”. And that’s enough for him to be guilty.

  According to the lawsuit, Clark’s high school is forcing him to “unlearn the basic Judeo-Christian principles” from his upbringing.

  These values include “the proposition that every person is unique and equal before the eyes of God and will be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.”

  But Clark’s public school doesn’t believe in such principles.

  To them, whiteness is oppressive. And despite Clark being half black (i.e. just as black as Barack Obama), he is deemed to be an oppressor by school officials.

  The lawsuit alleges that school officials deliberately misled parents about the curriculum and did not inform anyone that their children would be indoctrinated into Critical Race Theory and other woke principles.

  In one class in particular, a mandatory ‘Sociology of Change’ course required for all students, the teacher greets students in the morning with “Hello my wonderful social justice warriors!”

  Students are expected to label and identify themselves based exclusively on gender, race, sexuality, and religion and then determine if your identity is associated with oppression or privilege.

  (The study material makes it easy by pre-determining for the students which identities are oppressors, and which are victims.)

  Those with oppressor identities would then be forced to submit themselves for ridicule by the rest of the class.

  Clark chose not to participate in the exercises. And for his resistance, he received failing grades, which will prevent him from graduating and threaten his college prospects.

  Click here to read the full lawsuit.

  *  *  *

  Sheriff’s Office Makes List of Innocent Kids Susceptible to “fall into a life of crime”

  Pasco County Florida thinks it can predict which kids will grow up to be criminals. So it keeps a detailed list of these innocent children.

  Factors which land kids on the list include getting bad grades in school, witnessing or being the victim of violence at home, and even “a juvenile’s social network,” which the Sheriff’s office tracks.

  Other factors which have landed 420 children on the list of potential criminals include “hanging around in public”.

  This is all described in the Sheriff’s office’s own manual, in a section on crime prevention.

  Deputies do engage some of the at-risk youth. But the main objective seems to be spying and intelligence gathering to aid in investigations– not to innocently mentor youth.

  Click here to read the manual.

  *  *  *

  UK Bans “Buy One Get One Free”

  In the country’s quest to save people from themselves, the United Kingdom will ban “buy one get one free” offers, and other promotions, on unhealthy food items.

  The rules which go into effect in April 2022 also forbid restaurants from giving free soda refills, and stop unhealthy items from being featured at the checkout.

  The argument is that obesity related illness costs the socialized healthcare system of the UK 6 billion pounds per year.

  Therefore the government has the right to dictate health standards to citizens and businesses alike.

  Click here to read the full story.

  *  *  *

  On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 17:20

• "I'm Choosing The Risk Of Getting COVID": Over Half Of Health Care Workers At California Hospitals Refuse Vaccinations
  “I’m Choosing The Risk Of Getting COVID”: Over Half Of Health Care Workers At California Hospitals Refuse Vaccinations

  California’s health workers are refusing to take the new COVID-19 vaccines – with over half of frontline workers at one hospital unwilling to take it, and between 20% and 50% of workers at other facilities who feel the same, according to the Los Angeles Times.

  

  At St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Tehama County, fewer than half of the 700 hospital workers eligible for the vaccine were willing to take the shot when it was first offered. At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot. Roughly 20% to 40% of L.A. County’s frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials.

  So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine — an estimated 50% — that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses, Public Health Director Kim Saruwatari said. -LA Times

  Yet, as the Times notes, vaccine doubts among healthcare workers have come as a surprise to researchers, ‘who assumed hospital staff would be among those most in tune with the scientific data backing the vaccines.’

  Perhaps they were spooked by a viral video of a Tennessee nurse passing out on camera roughly 10 minutes after receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine – which she says was due to an ‘over-reactive vagal response’ and not related to the jab.

  

  “I’m choosing the risk — the risk of having COVID, or the risk of the unknown of the vaccine,” said 31-year-old nurse April Lu of the Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, who added that she refused to take the vaccine because she wasn’t convinced of its safety for pregnant woman. Lu is six months pregnant.

  “I think I’m choosing the risk of COVID. I can control that and prevent it a little by wearing masks, although not 100% for sure,” she added. Lu isn’t alone, with several of her co-workers similarly refusing to take the vaccine.

  “I feel people think, ‘I can still make it until this ends without getting the vaccine,’” she said.

  The extent to which healthcare workers are refusing the vaccine is unclear, but reports of lower-than-expected participation rates are emerging around the country, raising concerns for epidemiologists who say the public health implications could be disastrous.

  A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were “vaccine hesitant,” a figure slightly higher than the percentage of the general population, 27%.

  “Even the name, Operation Warp Speed, draws some concern for people about the rush to push it through,” said Dr. Medell Briggs-Malonson, an emergency medicine physician at UCLA Health who has received the vaccine. Still, she urged her colleagues to do the same. -LA Times

  Another healthcare worker, office assistant Nicholas Ruiz at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California says that while he interacts with nurses who deal with COVID-19 patients, he’s not taking the vaccine either.

  “I feel like the perception of the public with healthcare workers is incorrect. They might think we’re all informed of all of this. They might think that because we work in this environment,” said Ruiz, adding “But I know there’s a lot of people that have the same mentality as the public where they’re still afraid of getting it.”

  To try and convince health workers to take the jab, several hospitals are now showing employees instructional videos and interactive webinars showing staff happily getting vaccinated.

  At Laguna Hospital and San Francisco, around 10% of the nursing staff have opted out of the vaccine. Meanwhile, UCLA health reports 7,300 personnel out of 37,000 had received it – with officials noting that “there may be vaccine hesitancy in our workforce.”

  “We are not asking personnel to decide immediately whether to receive the vaccine. We want to give those offered vaccines adequate time to make a decision, and we hope that personnel will continue to understand that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks,” the hospital said in a statement.

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Travis
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 16:55

• Adopting A Gold Standard Would Promote Fiscal Discipline
  Adopting A Gold Standard Would Promote Fiscal Discipline

  Authored by James Caton via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  Many are surprised to learn that famed central banker Alan Greenspan has been a longtime supporter of the gold standard. But the record is clear. Greenspan published an essay in support of a gold standard with unregulated banking titled “Gold and Economic Freedom” in July 1966. He remained an advocate of the gold standard at the time of his appointment as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. And he has continued to wax about the gold standard in the time since leaving the Fed. 

  

  Among other things, Greenspan recognizes that the gold standard constrains government spending – and borrowing.

  Much such infrastructure would have to be funded with government debt. We are already in danger of seeing the ratio of federal debt to GDP edging toward triple digits. We would never have reached this position of extreme indebtedness were we on the gold standard, because the gold standard is a way of ensuring that fiscal policy never gets out of line.

  By now, the level of indebtedness has exceeded the value of U.S. GDP by an additional 35 percent. And the annual budget does not appear to be on course to reverse this trend any time soon. Under a commodity standard, like the gold standard, maintaining this risky position would be difficult, if not impossible, for the federal government.

  Unlike Greenspan, most economists today see the gold standard as an arcane relic. But what if Greenspan is correct? Is it possible to regain the advantages of a gold standard today?

  The Modern Monetary System and Fiscal Discipline

  As Greenspan explains in his ’66 essay, government borrowing is backed “only by the government’s promise to pay out future tax revenues.” The gold standard limited the extent to which a government can borrow because gold, unlike fiat money, cannot be printed. Governments are chastened for largess. Under a gold standard, money printing intended to support government borrowing quickly motivates investors to move gold to countries where it can earn a higher inflation-adjusted return. And the lost gold only returns after investors are compensated for the increased rate of inflation or the rate of inflation falls.

  The modern monetary system, on the other hand, has developed in a manner that facilitates state borrowing. I do not mean to accuse any particular person of intentional mischief. I simply note that financial regulation and monetary policy have developed in a manner that increasingly supports fiscal expansion.

  Consider the Basel Accords, which have charted the path of international financial regulation in recent decades. The guidelines provided by the Accords allow banks to hold supposedly safe debt – sovereign bonds – in lieu of reserves. Since these bonds typically earn a positive return and, even in the case of negative rates, tend to increase in value during a liquidity crisis, bank demand for sovereign debt has been practically insatiable. And this is only more true in an era where central banks dictate the value of short-term interest rates while also squeezing the yield curve by buying long-term bonds.

  

  Figure 1

  

  Figure 2

  As Basel II/III was being implemented, Ben Bernanke radically transformed the Fed’s operating system. To avoid short-run inflation and expectation of it by investors, Bernanke preferred to increase the quantity of reserves in the system while simultaneously paying banks risk-free interest not to lend those reserves. The alternative for a central bank would be to choose the level of reserves circulating within the financial system while allowing the competitive market to determine the rate of interest. 

  In this era of unprecedented control, the central bank has supported a massive expansion of federal borrowing. Since the Federal Reserve now sets the short-term rate, it can maintain historically low interest rates that support large fiscal deficits. Jerome Powell, the current chair, has even advocated for increases in federal spending in a wish to coordinate monetary and fiscal policies. 

  This system of monetary control suffers from massive tail risk. The value of the dollar depends upon the expectation that the government can repay its debts in the future. As Greenspan pointed out, the ability of a government to borrow depends on its convincing investors that the government will receive future taxes sufficient to repay the debt. With historically low rates set by the Federal Reserve, there is essentially no constraint on government spending except for the threat of default.

  Gold and Fiscal Discipline

  In light of the current fiscal position of the United States, there is a smattering of irony around the widespread disapproval of a gold standard among economists and policymakers. Perhaps more ironic, the gold standard failed not due to its natural functioning but due to an attempt by policymakers to circumvent the natural functioning of the gold standard so as to avoid the consequence of money printing in Great Britain during World War I. Such was the premise of the gold exchange standard where European central banks agreed – half-heartedly – to treat British pounds on par with their legal defined gold equivalent.

  The system collapsed because it was politically unpopular. Those directing policy were unwilling to cooperate in a system that they felt did not benefit them. France withdrew its gold from England starting in 1927 and the system became inoperable. Growing demand for gold reserves by central banks led to plummeting asset prices and chaos in financial markets. The gold standard didn’t fail because of the nature of a commodity standard, but rather, due to a failed intervention that sought to insulate governments and investors from the effects of Europe’s departure from the gold standard during World War I.

  As economist F.A. Hayek recognized in a 1935 interview with The Economist, it is unlikely that the world could return to a gold standard as it had functioned before World War I. To do so would require that major holders of gold reserves would be willing to reduce their holdings, essentially donating to central banks that arrived late to the gold standard. When the international gold standard was established during the 1870s, gold and silver circulated as money. Bank lending depended on holdings of these metals as reserves. To attempt to return to the classical gold standard today would likely face difficulties that would outweigh the benefits.

  But actors in the financial system would be happy to treat commodities as money if the cost of doing so was sufficiently low. There is nothing stopping any of us from opening a money market mutual fund account and writing checks or using a debit card linked to the account. Technologically, there is little reason individuals could not hold accounts denominated in a commodity like gold or silver except that they would suffer short-term capital gains taxes, in addition to the cost of accounting, for their regular transactions. Even in a world where the dollar is legal tender, savings accounts could be denominated in gold and gold would, therefore, serve as money. 

  We could allow for a de facto gold standard at little cost. And this standard would ensure that investors could discipline government for borrowing excessively. If citizens were allowed to save their income in gold-denominated accounts without extra costs of taxation and financial regulation, disciplining their government would be as easy as changing the form of one’s savings account. 

  The lowest cost means of gaining the advantages from gold would be to remove all taxes and regulatory costs that inhibit citizens from treating commodities as money. In the case that citizens could keep their savings in a commodity ETF against which they could write checks or use a debit card, protecting one’s financial position from inflation would be as easy as opening a new account. The financial system would naturally encourage fiscal responsibility and could, perhaps, prevent a fiscal crisis that is growing more likely with every federal budget.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 16:30

• UK Judge To Give Decision On Assange Extradition On Monday
  UK Judge To Give Decision On Assange Extradition On Monday

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  On Monday, January 4th, the British judge presiding over the extradition trial of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will decide whether or not Assange will be extradited to the US and tried under the Espionage Act for exposing US war crimes.

  If extradited, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison. President Trump’s Justice Department indicted the WikiLeaks founder on 17 counts of espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime. The charges revolve around documents provided to WikiLeaks by former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning.

  

  There have been rumors that President Trump is considering pardoning Assange, and many are urging him to do so. Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris made her case for the pardon recently on Fox News.

  “The consequences of a trial against Julian don’t just affect him or us as a family because everyone agrees this is a terrible, terrible case. It’s a terrible case because it is the end of the first amendment,” she said.

  Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019. A UN special rapporteur, Nils Melzer, has likened Assange’s treatment in Belmarsh to torture.

  A U.K. judge will rule whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the U.S. after weeks of talk about a possible pardon from Donald Trump https://t.co/q6CmtoyxkQ

  — Bloomberg (@business) December 31, 2020

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

  Melzer recently spoke out against the extradition, accusing the US of criminalizing journalism.

  “In essence, the United States is trying to criminalize investigative journalism. That’s the purpose of the extradition request, nothing else,” Melzer said.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 15:40

• Senate Overrides Trump Veto Of Defense Bill
  Senate Overrides Trump Veto Of Defense Bill

  Meeting for a rare New Year’s Day session, the Senate voted 81-13 on Friday to override President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Trump said “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions.”

  

  A two-thirds majority was needed to override the veto – which would mark the first in Trump’s presidency. The NDAA authorizes over $740 billion in military programs and construction, as well as 3% pay raises for US troops. It also contains a provision to rename military bases named after Confederate generals.

  Trump also wanted to force a repeal of Section 203 protections for social-media companies enjoy due to their constant editorializing of user content, however lawmakers refused to include the provision.

  The rare January 1st session comes as the new Congress is set to be sworn in on Sunday.

  On Wednesday, the Senate voted 80-12 to begin an official debate on overriding the veto, proving that Congress can act with lightning speed when properly motivated.

  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Tuesday that the NDAA is crucial to national defense, and to “deter great power rivals like China and Russia.” The bill “will cement our advantage on the seas, on land, in the air, in cyberspace and in space,” he added.

  During Trump’s time in office, he has vetoed eight other bills – several of them focused on foreign policy and national security issues, according to the Wall Street Journal.

  The fight over the NDAA also underscored broader tensions over national-security issues between congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump. On foreign policy and national-security issues, many Republicans have readily bucked Mr. Trump during his presidency even as they have stood by him on many other issues.

  For instance, the Trump administration’s recent effort to cut troop levels in Afghanistan in half, to roughly 2,500, by Jan. 15, has alarmed some Republicans. The NDAA requires the administration to submit to Congress a comprehensive assessment of the withdrawal before it can use funds to pull out troops. -WSJ

  In addition to creating a commission to assess changes to bases, displays, monuments, symbols and other paraphernalia related to Confederate commanders, the bill limits the president’s ability to use emergency military construction funds for other purposes. It also restricts employees or former employees from the military-industrial complex to work directly for the Chinese government or government-controlled companies.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/01/2021 – 15:15

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