- Netflix Is Hiking Prices 13% In Japan
Netflix Is Hiking Prices 13% In Japan
As new, low cost streaming competitors are emerging left and right, Netflix appears ready to move in for the kill.
That’s because, after spreading its platform globally, all Netflix has to do is flip “the pricing switch” in order to make a positive impact to the company’s free cash. And in Japan, that appears to be exactly what the platform is doing.
Starting today, Netflix’s basic and standard tier prices will rise about 13% in Japan, while premium service pricing remains unchanged, according to Bloomberg. The company’s basic plan will rise to 990 yen ($9.39) from 880 yen. Its standard tier rises from 1,320 yen to 1,490 yen.
Asia is the company’s second fastest growing region, the report notes. Netflix has invested heavily in anime for the market, which is popular in Japan.
The company said in a statement: “We’re updating our prices so that we can continue to offer more variety of TV shows and films — in addition to local shows such as ‘Alice in Borderland,’ and our ever-growing anime lineup. As always, we offer a range of plans so that people can pick a price that works best for their budget.”
The market liked the move, with Netflix stock finishing Thursday’s session up 2.3%. Shares had been little changed since January.
Recall, Netflix just posted an earnings report in January that saw its stock soar. The company posted a big subscriber beat and noted that it would be free cash flow positive in all quarters going fowrward.
At the same time, as we noted, the world’s largest paid streaming service is also facing more intense and cutthroat (or rather cut-price) competition than ever. Comcast’s Peacock platform has been rolling out for a few months, along with the short-form video service Quibi. And AT&T’s big bet on streaming, HBO Max is also up and running now while Disney+ has been a massive hit.
Bloomberg notes that in the all-important Netflix subscriber guessing game, the web traffic research site SimilarWeb suggests the service averaged about 1.5 million new subscribers globally per month in Q4. That’s below the 6 million target the company has given and down from Q4 2019. On the plus side, SimilarWeb notes, subscribers have been rising each month in the quarter and are up sharply from the disappointing Q3.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/06/2021 – 00:00 - Clarity In Trump's Wake
Clarity In Trump’s Wake
Authored by Angelo Codevilla via AMGreatness.com,
The United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. The clarity that it has brought to our situation by recognizing this fact is its only virtue…
“Either the Constitution matters and must be followed . . . or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives.”
– Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the American republic’s system of equal justice. That much is clear.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives.
In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions. In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.
Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.” But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and empowered our burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities. These, along with the manner in which the oligarchy seized power between November 2016 and November 2020, ensure that its reign will be ruinous and likely short. The prospect that the republic’s way of life may thrive among those who wish it to depends on the manner in which they manage the civil conflict that is now inevitable.
From Ruling Class to Oligarchy
By the 21st century’s first decade, little but formality was left of the American republic. In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy described the logic by which government and big business tend to coalesce into socialism in theory, oligarchy in practice. But by then, that logic had already imposed itself on the Western world. Italy’s 1926 Law of Corporations—fascism’s charter—inaugurated not so much the regulation of business by government as the coalescence of the twain. Over the ensuing decade, it was more or less copied throughout the West.
In America, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act’s authors had erected barriers against private oligopolies and monopolies. By maintaining competition between big business, they hoped to preserve private freedoms and limit government’s role. But the Great Depression’s pressures and temptations led to the New Deal’s rules that differed little from Italy’s. No matter that, as the Supreme Court pointed out in Schechter Poultry v. U.S., public-private amalgamation does not fit in the Constitution. It grew nevertheless alongside the notion that good government proceeds from the experts’ judgment rather than from the voters’ choices. The miracles of production that America brought forth in World War II seemed to validate the point.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had come to understand large organizations that feed on government power and dispense vast private benefits, was not shy in warning about the danger they pose to the republic. His warning about the “military-industrial complex” that he knew so well is often misunderstood as a mere caution against militarism. But Ike was making a broader point: Amalgams of public and private power tend to prioritize their corporate interests over the country’s.
That is why Eisenhower cautioned against the power of government-funded expertise. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded,” he said, because “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Government money can accredit a self-regarding elite. Because “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” government experts can end up substituting their power for truth.
The expansion of government power throughout the 1960s and ’70s in pursuit of improving education, eradicating poverty, and uplifting blacks created complexes of public-private power throughout America that surpassed the military-industrial complex in size, and above all in influence.
Consider education. Post-secondary education increased fourfold, from 9 percent of Americans holding four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015. College towns became islands of wealth and political power. From them came endless “studies” that purported to be arbiters of truth and wisdom, as well as a growing class of graduates increasingly less educated but ever so much more socio-politically uniform.
In the lower grades, per-pupil expenditure (in constant dollars) went from $3,200 in 1960 to $13,400 in 2015. That money fueled an even more vast and powerful complex—one that includes book publishers, administrators, and labor unions and that has monopolized the minds of at least two generations. As it grew, the education establishment also detached itself from the voters’ control: In the 1950s, there were some 83,000 public school districts in America. By 2015, only around 13,000 remained for a population twice as large. Today’s parents have many times less influence over their children’s education than did their grandparents.
Analogous things happened in every field of life. Medicine came to be dominated by the government’s relationship with drug companies and hospital associations. When Americans went to buy cars, or even light bulbs and shower nozzles, they found their choices limited by deals between government, industry, and insurance companies. These entities regarded each other as “stakeholders” in an oligarchic system. But they had ever less need to take account of mere citizens in what was becoming a republic in name only. As the 20eth century was drawing to a close, wherever citizens looked, they saw a government and government-empowered entities over which they had ever less say, which ruled ever more unaccountably, and whose attitude toward them was ever less friendly.
The formalities were the last to go. Ever since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., the rulers’ dependence on popular assent to expenditures has been the essence of limited government. Article I, section 9 of the U.S. Constitution enshrines that principle. Congressional practice embodied it. Details of bills and expenditures were subject to public hearings and votes in subcommittees, committees, and the floors of both Houses. But beginning in the early 1980s and culminating in 2007, the U.S government abandoned the appropriations process.
Until 1981, Congress had used “continuing resolutions” to continue funding government operations unchanged until regular appropriations could be made. Thereafter, as congressional leaders learned how easy it is to use this vehicle to avoid exposing what they are doing to public scrutiny, they legislated and appropriated ever less in public, and increasingly put Congress’ output into continuing resolutions or omnibus bills, amounting to trillions of dollars and thousands of pages, impossible for representatives and senators to read, and presented to them as the only alternative to “shutting down the government.” This—now the U.S government standard operating procedure—enables the oligarchy’s “stakeholders” to negotiate their internal arrangements free from responsibility to citizens. It is the practical abolition of Article I section 9—and of the Magna Carta itself.
In the 21st century, the American people’s trust in government plummeted as they—on the political Left as well as on the Right—realized that those in power care little for them. As they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public officials and politicians while getting much richer, they felt impoverished and disempowered. Since the ruling class embraced Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant. The presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 underlined that whoever won, the same people would be in charge and that the parceling out of wealth and power among stakeholders would continue.
Americans on the Right were especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally united in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in particular. The cultural warfare it waged on the rest of America inflamed opposition. But it also diluted its own focus on solidifying profitable arrangements.
By 2016, America was already well into the classic cycles of revolution. The atrophy of institutions, the waning of republican habits, and the increasing, reciprocal disrespect between classes that have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another, than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners precluded returning to traditional republican life. The election would determine whether the oligarchy could consolidate itself. More important, it would affect the speed by which the revolutionary vortex would carry the country, and the amount of violence this would involve.
The Trump Catalyst
By 2015, the right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because the other 16 Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a field so crowded depended on when which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never was a head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.
Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.
But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself.
Particular individuals had never been the oligarchy’s worry. In 2008, as Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain—far cries from Trump—he pointed to those Americans who “cling to God and guns” as the problem’s root. Clinton’s 2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,”—racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.—merely voiced what had long been the oligarchy’s consensus judgment of most Americans. For them, pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of power, treating them as less than citizens, had already come to define justice and right.
Donald Trump—his bombastic, hyperbolic style, his tendency to play fast and loose with truth, even to lie as he insulted his targets—fit perfectly the oligarchy’s image of his supporters, and lent a color of legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate collusion between the oligarchy’s members in government and those in the Democratic Party running against Trump.
Thus did the FBI and CIA, in league with the major media and the Democratic Party, spy on candidate Trump, concocting and spreading all manner of synthetic dirt about him. Nevertheless, to universal surprise, he won, or rather the oligarchy lost, the 2016 election.
The oligarchy’s disparate members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to Trump. The realization that the presidency’s awesome powers now rested in his hands fostered a full-court-press #Resistance. Trump’s peculiarities helped make it far more successful than anyone could have imagined.
“Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite”
Applying this observation to candidate Trump’s hyperbole suggested that President Trump might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the most self-destructive of habits, combining “the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.” And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’ plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated with their illegalities.
Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.
He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly. At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a nationally televised speech in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had been wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall Street but left untouched the tax code’s “carried interest” provision that is the source of much unearned wealth. He railed against the legal loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor content without retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January 2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.
Nor did Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of being ordered to attend workplace sessions about their “racism.” But not until his last months in office did he ban the practice within the federal government. Never did he ban contracts with companies that require such sessions.
Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.
#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob—especially when all can be sure they are acting safely, gratuitously. Success supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the ruling class’ members that they are more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger and better about themselves than they ever had.
Logic and Dysfunction
Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.
Ruling-class judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump Administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, non-stop and unquestioned. #TheResistance made it ruling-class policy that Trump’s and his voters’ racism and a host of other wrongdoing made them, personally, illegitimate. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2018, the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set upon in the streets, prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even for defending themselves.
Because each and every part of the ruling coalition’s sense of what may assuage its grievances evolves without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It is also inherently destructive of oligarchy.
Enjoyment of power’s material perquisites is classic oligarchy’s defining purpose. Having conquered power over the people, successful oligarchies foster environments in which they can live in peace, productively. Oligarchy, like all regimes, cannot survive if it works at cross-purposes. But the oligarchy that seized power in America between 2016 and 2020 is engaged in a never-ending seizure of ever more power and the infliction of ever more punishment—in a war against the people without imaginable end. Clearly, that is contrary to what the Wall Street magnates or the corps of bureaucrats or the university administrators or senior professors want. But that is what the people want who wield the “intersectional” passions that put the oligarchy in power.
As the oligarchy’s every part, every organ, raged against everything Trump, it made itself less attractive to the public even as Trump’s various encouragements of economic activity were contributing to palpable increases in prosperity.
Hence, by 2019’s end, Trump was likely to win reelection. Then came COVID-19.
The COVID Fortuna
The COVID-19 virus is no plague. Though quite contagious, its infection/fatality rate (IFR), about 0.01 percent, is that of the average flu, and its effects are generally so mild that most whom it infects never know it.
Like all infections, it is deadly to those weakened severely by other causes. It did not transform American life by killing people, but by the fears about it that our oligarchy packaged and purveyed. Fortuna, as Machiavelli reminds us, is inherently submissive to whoever bends her to his wishes. The fears and the strictures they enabled were not about health—if only because those who purveyed and imposed them did not apply them to themselves. They were about power over others.
COVID’s politicization began in February 2020 with the adoption by the World Health Organization—which is headed by an Ethiopian bureaucrat beholden to China—and upon recommendation of non-scientist Bill Gates, of a non-peer-reviewed test for the infection. The test’s chief characteristic is that its rate of positives to negatives depends on the number of cycles through which the sample is run. More cycles, more positives. Hence, every test result is a “soft” number. Second, the WHO and associated national organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported COVID’s spread by another “soft” number: “confirmed cases.” That is, sick persons who tested positive for the virus.
When this number is related to that of such persons who then die, the ratio—somewhat north of 5 percent—suggests that COVID kills one out of 20 people it touches. But that is an even softer number since these deaths include those who die with COVID rather than of it, as well as those who may have had COVID. Pyramiding such soft numbers, mathematical modelers projected millions of deaths. Scary for the unwary, but pure fantasy.
For example, the U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based, also predicted COVID-19 deaths for Sweden, which did not lock down. On May 3, the IHME predicted that Sweden would suffer 2,800 COVID deaths a day within the next two weeks. The actual number was 38. Reporting on COVID has never ceased to consist of numbers as scary as they are soft.
Literate persons know that, once an infectious disease enters a population, nothing can prevent it from infecting all of it, until a majority has developed antibodies after contracting it—so-called community immunity or herd immunity. But fear leads people to empower those who promise safety, regardless of how empty the promises. The media pressed governments to do something. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan screamed: “don’t panic is terrible advice.” The pharmaceutical industry and its Wall Street backers salivated at the prospect of billions of government money for new drugs and vaccines. Never mind the little sense it makes for millions of people to accept a vaccine’s non-trivial risk to protect against a virus with trivial consequences for themselves. All manner of officials yearned to wield unaccountable power.
Because the power to crush the general population’s resistance to itself is the oligarchy’s single-minded focus, it was able to bend fears of COVID to that purpose. Thus, it gathered more power with more consequences than the oligarchs could have imagined.
But only President Trump’s complaisance made this possible. His message to the American people had been not to panic, be mindful of the scientific facts—you can’t stop it, and it’s not that bad—while mitigating its effects on vulnerable populations. But on March 15, Trump bent, and agreed to counsel people to suspend normal life for two weeks to “slow the spread,” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Two weeks later, the New York Times crowed that Trump, having been told “hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon,” had been stampeded into “abandoning his goal of reopening the country by Easter.” He agreed to support the “experts’” definition of what “soon” might mean. By accrediting the complex of government, industry, and media’s good faith and expertise, Trump validated their plans to use COVID as a vehicle for enhancing their power.
Having seized powers, the oligarchs used them as weapons to disrupt and disaggregate the parts of American society they could not control.
The economic effects of lockdowns and social distancing caused obvious pain. Tens of millions of small businesses were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. More than 40 million Americans filed claims for unemployment assistance. Uncountable millions of farmers and professionals had their products and activities devalued. Millions of careers, dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, were wrecked. Big business and government took over their functions. Within nine months, COVID-19 had produced 28 new billionaires.
Surplus and scarcity of food resulted simultaneously because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels. As demand shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly, millions of gallons of milk were poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs, and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle were destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit were plowed under. Prices in the markets rose. Persons deprived of work with less money with which to pay higher prices struggled to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.
But none of these had ever shut down a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. Hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Emergency rooms were closed to the poor people who get routine care there. Forget about dentistry. Most Americans were left essentially without medical care for most of a year. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will cause yet.
The oligarchy’s division of all activity into “essential”—meaning permitted—and “nonessential”—to be throttled at will—had less obvious but more destructive effects. Private clubs, as well as any and all gatherings of more than five or 10 people, were banned. Churches were forbidden to have worship services or to continue social activities. The “social distancing” and mask mandates enforced in public buildings and stores, and often on the streets, made it well-nigh impossible for people to communicate casually. Thus, was that part of American society that the oligarchy did not control directly disarticulated, and its members left alone to face unaccountable powers on which they had to depend.
Meanwhile, the media became the oligarchy’s public relations department. Very much including ordinary commercial advertising, it hammered home the oligarchy’s line that COVID restrictions are good, even cool. These restrictions reduced the ideas available to the American people to what the mass media purveyed and the social media allowed. Already by April 2020, these used what had become near-monopoly power over interpersonal communications to censor such communications as they disapproved. Political enforcers took it upon themselves even to cancel statements by eminent physicians about COVID that they judged to be “misleading.” Of course, this betrayed the tech giants’ initial promise of universal access. It is also unconstitutional. (In Marsh v. Alabama, decided in 1946, the Supreme Court barred private parties from acting as de facto governments). Since these companies did it in unison, they also violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. But the ruling class that had become an oligarchy applauded their disabling whatever might be conducive to conservatives’ interests and inconvenient to their own candidates.
Private entities wielding public powers in coordination with each other without having to observe any of government’s constitutional constraints is as good a definition of oligarchy as there is. Oligarchy had increasingly taken power in the buildup to the 2020 election. In its aftermath, it would try to suffocate America.
Sovereignty of the Vote Counters
The oligarchy’s proximate objective, preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results, overrode all others. The powers it had seized under COVID’s cover, added to the plethora that it had exercised since the 2016 campaign’s beginning, had surely cowered some opposition. But as November 2020 loomed, no one could be sure how much it also had energized.
Few people were happy to be locked down. It was a safe bet that not a few were unhappy at being called systemically racist. The oligarchy, its powers notwithstanding, could not be sure how people would vote. That is why it acted to take the presidential election’s outcome out of the hands of those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of its members who would count the votes.
Intentionally, traditional procedures for voting leave no discretion to those who count the votes. Individuals obtain and cast ballots into a physical or electronic box only after showing identification that matches their registration. Ballot boxes are opened and their contents counted by persons representing the election’s opposing parties. Persons registered to vote might qualify to vote-by-mail by requesting a ballot, the issuance and receipt of which is checked against their registration. Their ballots are counted in the same bipartisan manner.
The Democratic Party had long pressed to substitute universal voting by mail—meaning that ballots would be sent to all registered voters, in some states to anyone with a driver’s license whether they asked for them or not and regardless of whether these persons still lived at the address on the rolls or were even alive. The ballots eventually would arrive at the counting centers, either through the mail, from drop boxes, or through “harvesters” who would pick them up from the voters who fill them out, and who may even help them to fill them out. Security, if any, would consist of machine-matching signatures on the ballot and on the envelope in which it had come. The machine’s software can be dialed to greater or lesser sensitivity.
But doing away with scrutiny of ballots counted by representatives of the election’s contenders removes the last possibility of ensuring the ballot had come from a real person whose will it is supposed to represent. Once the link between the ballot and the qualified person is broken, nothing prevents those in charge of the electoral process from excluding and including masses of ballots as they choose. The counters become the arbiters.
Attorney General William Barr pointed out the obvious: Anyone, in America or abroad, can print up any number of ballots, mark them, and deliver them for counting to whoever is willing to accept them and run them through their machines. Since the counters usually dispose of the envelopes in which ballots arrive—thus obviating any possibility of tracing the ballot’s connection to a voter—they may even dispense of the fiction that there had ever been any signed envelopes. That is especially true of late-found ballots. Who knows where they came from? Who cares to find out?
Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal vote-by-mail established by law. Elsewhere, especially in the states sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election, mail-in voting was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions. Questions of right and wrong aside, the Constitution’s Article II section 1’s words—“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—makes such actions unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the counting of votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of Democratic Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.
To no one’s surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by super-majorities for the Democratic candidate precisely from these counties in these states. Yes, Trump’s percentage of the vote fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes in 2020 than four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes he received from blacks. The Democrats’ gain of some 15 million votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their victory in the Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in these corrupt counties—the only places where Trump’s share of the black vote was cut by three-quarters. Did people there really think so differently?
This is not the place to recount the list of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury by persons who observed ballot stuffing, nor the statistical anomaly of successive batches of votes that favored Biden over Trump by precisely the same amounts, of un-creased (i.e., never mailed) ballots fed into counting machines, nor the Georgia video of suitcases of ballots being taken from under tables and inserted into counting machines after Republican observers had been ousted. Suffice it to note that references to these events have been scrubbed from the Internet. It is more important to keep in mind that, in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits that crimes have been committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial, prosecutorial, or legislative investigations. But for the first time in America, the ruling class dismissed them with: “You have no proof!” A judge (the sister of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) ruled that even when someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address is still a lawful basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of crime is impossible with such judges and without testimony under oath, or powers of subpoena.
Just as important, Republicans in general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the executive actions and consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were being perpetrated in key states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional violations were undeniable.
Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.
The Oligarchy Rides its Tigers
Winning the 2020 election had been the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced during the previous five years. In 2021, waging socio-political war on the rest of America is what the oligarchy is all about.
The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference. Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed approach to governing.
The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.
Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74 million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy’s corporate components seem to want only to adorn unchallenged power with a reputation for “wokeness.” For them, causing pain to their opponents is a pleasure incidental to enjoying power’s perquisites. The Biden family’s self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this oligarchy’s standard.
But the people who dispense that reputation—not just the professional revolutionaries of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but “mainstream” racial and gender activists and self-appointed virtue-crats, have appetites as variable as they are insatiable. For them, rubbing conservative America’s faces in excrement is what it’s all about. A Twitter video viewed by 2.6 million people urges them to form “an army of citizen detectives” to ferret out conservatives from among teachers, doctors, police officers, and “report them to the authorities.” No doubt, encouraged by President Biden’s characterization of opponents as “domestic terrorists,” any number of “authorities” as well as private persons will find opportunities to lord it over persons not to their taste. This guarantees endless clashes, and spiraling violence.
Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people they appoint to positions of official responsibility are apparatchiks, habituated to currying favor and pulling rank. They have neither the inclination nor the capacity to persuade the oligarchy’s several parts to agree to a common good or at least to a modus vivendi among themselves, never mind with conservative America. This guarantees that they will ride tigers that they won’t even try to dismount.
At this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and unofficial powers to exclude whomever it chooses from society’s mainstream. Necessarily, however, exclusions cut both ways. Invariably, to banish another is to banish one’s self as well. Google, Facebook, and Twitter let it be known that they would exclude anything with which they disagree from what had become the near-universal means of communication. They bolstered that by colluding to destroy their competitor, Parler. Did they imagine that 74 million Americans could find no means of communicating otherwise? Simon and Schuster canceled a book by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) critical of communications monopolies. Did its officials imagine that they would thereby do other than increase the book’s eventual sales, and transfer some of their customers to Hawley’s new publisher? The media effectively suppressed inconvenient news. Did they imagine that this would prevent photos of Black Lives Matter professionals in the forefront of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol from reaching the public?
In sum, intending to relegate conservative America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way.
Clarity, Leadership, and Separation
To think of conservative America’s predicament as an opportunity is as hyperbolic as it was for Machiavelli to begin the conclusion of The Prince by observing that “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness of Cyrus’s spirit that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to know the excellence of Theseus, that the Athenian people be dispersed, so at the present, in order to know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was necessary that Italy reduce herself to the conditions in which she is at present . . .”
Machiavelli’s lesson is that the clarity of situations such as he mentions, and such as is conservative America’s following the 2020 election, is itself valuable. Clarity makes illusions of compromise untenable and points to self-reliant action as the only reasonable path. The people might or might not be, as he wrote, “all ready and disposed to follow the flag if only someone were to pick it up.” But surely, someone picking up the flag is the only alternative to servitude.
What, in conservative America’s current predicament, might it mean to “pick up the flag?” Electoral politics remains open to talented, courageous, ambitious leadership. In Florida and South Dakota, Governors Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem have used their powers to make room for ways of life different from and more attractive than that in places wholly dominated by the oligarchy. Texas and Idaho as well attract refugees from such as California and New York by virtue of such differences with life there as their elected officials have been able to maintain. Governmental and corporate pressures on such states to conform to the oligarchy’s standards, sure to increase, are opportunities for their officials to lead their people’s refusal to conform by explaining why doing this is good, and by personally standing in the way. They may be sure that President Kamala Harris would not order federal troops to shoot at state officials for closing abortion clinics or for excluding men from women’s bathrooms.
For more than a generation, a majority of Americans have expressed growing distrust of, and alienation from, the establishment. The establishment, not Donald Trump, made this happen. That disparate majority, in many ways at cross purposes with itself, demands leadership. Pollster Patrick Caddell’s in-depth study of the American electorate, which he titled “We Need Smith,” showed how the themes that made it possible for the hero of the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” to prevail against the establishment then are even more gripping now and appeal to a bigger majority. Trump was a bad copy of Mr. Smith.
More than ever, an audience beyond the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump hungers for leadership. The oligarchy came together by ever more vigorously denigrating and suppressing these deplorables. Already before the 20th century’s turn, the FBI and some elements in the Army and the Justice Department had concluded that they are somehow criminal, and that preparations should be made to treat them as such. The official position of the administration taking power after the 2020 election is that domestic terrorism from legions of “white supremacists” is the primary threat facing America. No wonder those so designated for outlawry demand protection.
The path to electoral leadership is straightforward. Whoever would lead the deplorables-plus must explain their cause to friend and foe, make it his own, and grow it by leading successful acts of resistance.
Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his grip on power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, in the course of debunking the narrative by which the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead millions to violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be fired or held back.
Such a persuasive prospective president, or president, could finish the process that, beginning circa 2010, initiated the process of reshaping the Republican Party into something like Caddell’s Mr. Smith would have personified.
Electoral politics, however, is the easy part. Major corporations, private and semi-private institutions such as schools, publishing houses, and media, are the oligarchy’s deepest foundations. These having become hostile, conservative Americans have no choice but to populate their own. This is far from impossible.
Sorting ourselves out into congenial groups has been part of America’s DNA since 1630, when Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Providence Plantations. In the 19th century, the Mormons left unfriendly environments to establish their own settlements. Since 1973, Americans who believe in unborn children’s humanity have largely ceased to intermarry with those who do not. Nobody decided this should happen. It is in the logic of diverging cultures.
As American primary and secondary education’s dysfunction became painfully apparent, parents of all races have fled the public schools as fast as they could. Businesses have been fleeing the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt for generations. When Democratic governors and mayors used COVID to make life difficult in their jurisdictions, people moved out of them. When Twitter’s censorship of conservatives became undeniable, Parler added customers by the hundreds of thousands each day. Facebook and Twitter’s stock lost $50 billion in a week. Much more separation follows from the American people’s diverging cultures.
As conservative America sorts itself out from oligarchy’s social bases, it may be able to restore something like what had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have to learn to coexist within our present boundaries. But that may be the best, freest, arrangement possible now for the United States.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 23:40 - 10 Pounds Of High Powered C-4 Explosives Disappear From California Military Base
10 Pounds Of High Powered C-4 Explosives Disappear From California Military Base
Military officials are scrambling to recover 10 pounds of Composition C-4, after the high-powered explosives vanished from Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base in Southern California, according to ABC 10News, citing ‘sources with close military ties.’
The explosives disappeared during a long training exercise two weeks ago, and are believed to have been stolen.
The unit’s commanding officer is considering extending the training exercise until the explosives are found, sources said. They also confirm the commanding officer messaged subordinate commands about a monetary reward for any information leading to the discovery of the C-4.
The base would not confirm any details with ABC 10News. Capt. Zachary Colvin, with the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command, told this station that “the ongoing investigation into this incident is being handled by NCIS and the affected units.” –ABC 10News
A NCIS Public Affairs spokesperson told ABC 10News “Out of respect for the investigative process, NCIS does not comment on or confirm details relating to ongoing investigations.
Retired Captain Kelly Mayer – a former firefighter and bomb-technician with 23-years of eperience, told the outlet that one pound alone could blow up a vehicle when detonated, adding that C-4 is one of the most powerful explosives to be manufactured.
For reference, here’s 10 lbs of C-4 exploding.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 23:20 - During Pandemic, China Sent Millions Of Counterfeit Masks, Test Kits To US: Customs Data
During Pandemic, China Sent Millions Of Counterfeit Masks, Test Kits To US: Customs Data
Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,
China accounted for about 51 percent of counterfeit or substandard COVID-19-related products seized by U.S. customs officials from October 2019 to Sept. 30 last year, according to a newly-released report from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Among the products seized by U.S. customs officials were over 12.7 million counterfeit masks, 177,356 COVID-19 test kits prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and 38,098 FDA-prohibited chloroquine tablets.
The effectiveness of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and its closely-related chloroquine in treating symptoms of COVID-19, which is caused by the CCP virus (commonly known as the novel coronavirus), is of much debate.
The FDA initially issued an emergency use authorization for the two drugs, but later revoked the authorization in June last year, saying that they were “unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19.”
However, there have been studies showing their effectiveness: one study showed hydroxychloroquine lowered the death rate of COVID-19 patients, while another study demonstrated a drug cocktail containing hydroxychloroquine could lower the hospitalization and death rate of patients infected by the virus.
The FDA currently has a database listing fraudulent COVID-19 products, including test kits. The list contains company names and the names of their products.
In December last year, customs officials in Cincinnati seized 10,080 counterfeit surgical masks, which were labeled “3M Mask Model 1860,” in a shipment originating from China, according to a press release. The boxes containing the masks were fraudulently labeled as “Made in the USA.”
If genuine, these fake 3M masks would have an estimated manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $65,520.
CBP officers in Cincinnati made a significant seizure of counterfeit masks that were packaged advertising protection against communicable respiratory diseases. Officers seized the 21 shipping boxes that contained over 10K counterfeit mask.https://t.co/L0x1I1qaXF pic.twitter.com/2irnkDArZ6
— CBP Chicago (@CBPChicago) January 15, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Counterfeit masks were also arriving in the United States from Hong Kong. Customs officials in Cincinnati seized 6,080 fake 3M masks in freight from Hong Kong on Dec. 6, 2020.
Another seizure took place in Chicago in September last year, when local customs officials stopped a shipment containing 500,000 counterfeit N95 masks. These masks were determined to have an estimated retail price of $474,905, if genuine. The shipment originated from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and was destined for a company in Manalapan, New Jersey.
Forced Labor Products
The CBP report also mentioned that customs officials issued a record number of 13 new withhold release orders, banning the imports of products made with forced labor, in the 12-month period that ended on Sept. 30, 2020.
Most of these targeted products—including disposable gloves, seafood, and cotton—originated from China. Together, these products were valued at nearly $50 million, according to the report.
On Jan. 13, the CBP issued a new withhold release order banning all imports of cotton, apparel, textiles, and tomato products from far-western China’s Xinjiang region.
Beijing has detained more than one million ethnic Muslims, including Uyghurs, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz people, in internment camps in Xinjiang. Detainees are subject to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination sessions. Beijing claims these camps are “vocational training centers.”
In August last year, a U.S. company was fined $575,000 for importing stevia powder and derivatives there were made by prison labor in China. Several months later, in October, CBP asked all U.S. ports to seize stevia products made by an Inner Mongolia-based company, after evidence showed the company used convict, forced, or indentured labor to manufacture the products.
“Currently, CBP is enforcing 44 active withhold release orders and seven active findings,” according to the report.
General Products
Finally, the report concluded that CBP officials seized a total of 26,503 shipments with products found to have violated U.S. intellectual property rights, with China being the “top source” of such seizures. These products would have a total estimated manufacturer’s suggested retail price of over $1.3 billion.
ICE, @CBP and LAPD seize counterfeit Viagra pills, footwear, belts, car emblems and headphones worth more than $32 million at the Los Angeles/Long Beach Seaport. Learn more: https://t.co/cK9jWDw1mo pic.twitter.com/67QjuucuO2
— ICE (@ICEgov) December 17, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In December last year, customs officials in Los Angeles seized three cargo shipments from China containing counterfeit products that could be worth over $32 million. Among the seized fake products were one million knockoff Viagra pills, footwear, belts, purses, and headphones.
Counterfeit toys from China that could be worth about $1.3 million were also seized at the Port of New York/Newark, the CBP announced on Dec. 21 last year.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 23:00 - Rapper Lil Uzi Got $24 Million Diamond Pierced In His Forehead
Rapper Lil Uzi Got $24 Million Diamond Pierced In His Forehead
While Friday’s job numbers showed the labor market continues to deteriorate, with millions of people unemployed, experiencing housing and food insecurities, one rapper, in these unprecedented economic times, decided to show off his wealth by piercing a jaw-dropping stone to his forehead.
Rapper Lil Uzi Vert (real name: Symere Bysil Woods) showed off his new $24 million diamond pierced to his forehead on Wednesday.
“Beauty is pain,” the 26-year-old rapper posted to his Instagram account, followed by a video of the jaw-dropping diamond.
It was initially assumed by many that Uzi had the stone embedded into his forehead. But, according to Luis Garcia, the vice president of the Association of Professional Piercers, it’s just a piercing.
“It looks like he has what we would call a vertical bridge piercing, as in the bridge of the nose. That would be an actual piercing with a staple shape barbell that enters at one point, exits at another, and then the big diamond attaches to that bar on the front,” Garcia told Yahoo. “It’s a piercing, while obviously not super common in typical circles, it’s fairly common in piercing circles. …Definitely not with a giant $24 million diamond on it. But it’s something that gets done.”
In today’s economy, facing a double-dip recession, walking around with an 11-carat diamond plastered to the rapper’s forehead makes him a walking target.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 22:40 - Is A Space Mining War Inevitable?
Is A Space Mining War Inevitable?
Authored by Cecilia Jamasmie via Mining.com,
A brewing war to set a mining base in space is likely to see China and Russia joining forces to keep the US increasing attempts to dominate extra-terrestrial commerce at bay, experts warn
The Trump Administration took an active interest in space, announcing that America would return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and creating the Space Force as the newest branch of the US military.
It also proposed global legal framework for mining on the moon, called the Artemis Accords, encouraging citizens to mine the Earth’s natural satellite and other celestial bodies with commercial purposes.
The directive classified outer space as a “legally and physically unique domain of human activity” instead of a “global commons,” paving the way for mining the moon without any sort of international treaty.
Spearheaded by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Artemis Accords were signed in October by Australia, Canada, England, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy and the United Emirates.
“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration exacerbated a national security threat and risked the economic opportunity it hoped to secure in outer space by failing to engage Russia or China as potential partners,” says Elya Taichman, former legislative director for then-Republican Michelle Lujan Grisham.
“Instead, the Artemis Accords have driven China and Russia toward increased cooperation in space out of fear and necessity,” he writes.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos was the first to speak up, likening the policy to colonialism.
“There have already been examples in history when one country decided to start seizing territories in its interest — everyone remembers what came of it,” Roscosmos’ deputy general director for international cooperation, Sergey Saveliev, said at the time.
China, which made history in 2019 by becoming the first country to land a probe on the far side of the Moon, chose a different approach. Since the Artemis Accords were first announced, Beijing has approached Russia to jointly build a lunar research base.
President Xi Jinping has also he made sure China planted its flag on the Moon, which happened in December 2020, more than 50 years after the US reached the lunar surface.
The Next Wild West?
China has historically been excluded from the US-led international order in space. It is not a partner in the International Space Station (ISS) program, and a US legislative provision has limited NASA’s ability to cooperate with it in space since 2011.
“America and China should cooperate in space,” say policy experts Anne-Marie Slaughter and Emily Lawrence.
“If the US managed to coordinate with the Soviet Union on space policy during the Cold War, it can find a way to cooperate with China now,” they note.
Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department from 2009 to 2011, believes that President Joe Biden’s team should distance from Trump’s accords and instead pursue a new course within the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
“Biden can restore some of America’s global legitimacy by working to establish a multilateral framework, negotiated with all relevant parties that protects areas of common interest while granting internationally accepted commercial opportunities,” Slaughter and Lawrence wrote.
It will not be an easy task, they say, but a necessary one. “Without an international framework that includes all major spacefaring countries, the moon could become the next Wild West.”
The race is on. It has been for a while. So much so that NASA has laid out a $28 billion plan to launch an unmanned mission around the moon in 2021, followed by a crewed moon flyby in 2023, then a lunar landing in 2024.
NASA plans to build a permanent moon-orbiting base called the Gateway, similar to the ISS. From there, the agency hopes to build a base on the lunar surface, where it can mine the resources required to fly the first astronauts to Mars.
Russia has been pursuing plans in recent years to return to the moon, potentially travelling further into outer space.
Roscosmos revealed in 2018 plans to establish a long-term base on the moon over the next two decades, while President Vladimir Putin has vowed to launch a mission to Mars “very soon.”
NASA outlined in 2019 its long-term approach to lunar exploration, which includes setting up a “base camp” on the moon’s south pole. (Artist’s rendition courtesy of NASA.)
The US, Russia and China are not the first nor the only nations to jump on board the lunar mining train.
Luxembourg, one of the first countries to set its eyes on the possibility of mining celestial bodies, created in 2018 a Space Agency (LSA) to boost exploration and commercial utilization of resources from Near Earth Objects.
Unlike NASA, LSA does not carry out research or launches. Its purpose is to accelerate collaborations between economic project leaders of the space sector, investors and other partners.
The tiny European nation announced in November plans to create a European Space Resources Innovation Centre (ESRIC), in charge of laying the foundations for exploiting extra-terrestrial resources.
Luxembourg is also supporting a program to begin extracting resources from the Moon by 2025.
The mission, in charge of the European Space Agency in partnership with ArianeGroup, plans to extract waste-free nuclear energy thought to be worth trillions of dollars.
Trillion-dollar market
Both China and India have also floated ideas about extracting Helium-3 from the Earth’s natural satellite. Beijing has already landed on the moon twice in the 21st century, with more missions to follow.
In Canada, most initiatives have come from the private sector. One of the most touted was Northern Ontario-based Deltion Innovations partnership with Moon Express, the first American private space exploration firm to have been granted government permission to travel beyond Earth’s orbit.
Space ventures in the works include plans to mine asteroids, track space debris, build the first human settlement on Mars, and billionaire Elon Musk’s own plan for an unmanned mission to the red planet.
Geologists, as well as emerging companies, such as US-based Planetary Resources, a firm pioneering the space mining industry, believe asteroids are packed with iron ore, nickel and precious metals at much higher concentrations than those found on Earth, making up a market valued in the trillions.
On December 5, 2020, a metallic asteroid 140 miles wide and worth an estimated $10,000 quadrillion made its closest approach to our planet.
In this concept image, a resource prospector carrying a payload roves on the lunar surface. (Image courtesy of NASA.)
“With NASA and other companies investing in and developing nuclear power for use in space travel and colonization, the reality of mining asteroids is closer than ever before,” says Bob Goldstein, CEO of US Nuclear Corp.
With proven successful fusion energy experiments under their belt, US Nuclear and Magneto-Inertial Fusion Technologies (MIFTI) believe they are only a few years away from building the world’s first fusion power generator.
Fusion power releases up to four times as much energy as fission, and uses fuel that is lightweight, low-cost, safe, and sustainable.
A spacecraft with fusion-powered propulsion systems could reach the asteroid belt in as little as seven months. According to Goldstein, it could be powerful enough to transport the asteroid to an earth orbit where it would be much more efficient to mine and transport these valuable resources to earth.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 22:20 - Nevada Gov Pushes Plan To Let Companies Raise Taxes, Create Local Governments
Nevada Gov Pushes Plan To Let Companies Raise Taxes, Create Local Governments
Imagine a place where private companies get to effectively separate from the surrounding area and create their own towns, raise their own taxes, and create their own laws – all while still using American dollars.
Such a place would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase “company town”.
Just imagine an Apple-ville, Google-town, or PornHubtopia, but instead of rising out of Silicon Valley, the companies may need to trek out to the Nevada desert.
Because Nevada is trying to make all this – and more – a reality with its latest economic development plan, which involves a decidedly innovative approach that differs starkly with the traditional tax abatements and incentives offered by states like New York (to megacorps like Amazon), and by other states, to other (also often already very large) companies. But Nevada isn’t just trying to lure in the big fish. It’s trying to convince people to come there and build.
According to a draft of the plan obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal (but not yet shared with the legislature), the law would effectively make Nevada an ideal place of business for the next generation of crypto-libertarian innovators. These corporation-run governments “would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties,” the Review-Journal added.
While the details of the plan were just leaked this week, when Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak first introduced the plan during his State of the State address on Jan. 19. At that time, he named Blockchain LLC as one company that had committed to traveling to Nevada and building there.
The leak to the Review-Journal is starting to pick up traction, as the story about Nevada’s plan for “Innovation Zones” attracts the interest of the national press. It has all the makings of a good political story – after all, it features a Democrat trying to create an independent, decidedly capitalist, libertarian society.
The whole point of the plan is to bring in more businesses, people and competition by bringing “groundbreaking technologies” to the state, which is already benefiting from the exodus from nearby California, as stretched residents of the Bay Area (and other parts of the Golden State) have been making homes in Las Vegas, Reno, Carson City and other parts of the Silver State, and more will likely continue to do so as California moves to chase away the wealthy, especially in the tech space.
The governor’s office of economic development will manage applications for the plan. And even though it’s hardly a sure thing to pass the legislature, it has already got some developers and local officials, excited.
Storey County Commissioner Lance Gilman, one of the industrial center’s developers, said that the Blockchains Innovation Zone is “going to have an impact on Storey County, and the jury is still out on whether that will be positive or negative.” Gilman said that the county is staying open-minded about the idea, but there needs to be some sort of incentive to compensate for ceding the land to the zone itself.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the plan is that it represents a rare example of state-led economic development that doesn’t feature the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages. Kowtowing to corporate interests helped bring Tesla’s Gigafactory to Nevada, apparently.
But we suspect the notoriously open-minded Tesla CEO Elon Musk might be willing to trade Texas and California for Nevada if this plan were to pass.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 22:00 - House Impeachment Brief Against Trump Threatens Freedom Of Speech Of All Americans: Dershowitz
House Impeachment Brief Against Trump Threatens Freedom Of Speech Of All Americans: Dershowitz
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Thursday that the House impeachment brief against former President Donald Trump, which seeks to undermine Trump’s First Amendment-based argument in his defense, amounts to a dangerous broadside against the freedom of speech of all Americans.
Writing in an op-ed for The Hill, Dershowitz made a case against a key argument contained in the brief (pdf), namely that “the First Amendment does not apply at all to impeachment proceedings,” signals Congressional willingness to take aim at freedom of speech more broadly.
“The brief filed by the House managers advocating the conviction and disqualification of citizen Donald Trump contains a frontal attack on freedom of speech for all Americans,” Dershowitz wrote.
“It states categorically that ‘the First Amendment does not apply at all to impeachment proceedings,’ despite the express language of that amendment prohibiting Congress from making any law, or presumably taking any other action, that abridges ‘the freedom of speech.’”
Attorney Alan Dershowitz, then member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, speaks to the press in the Senate Reception Room during the Senate impeachment trial at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 29, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The legal scholar then challenged another statement in the brief, namely that “the First Amendment exists to promote our democratic system.”
“This categorical statement surely would have surprised the Framers of the First Amendment, who believed in freedom of speech but not so much in democracy,” Dershowitz wrote. “The Framers of our constitutional system thought they were building a ‘republic,’ with limited suffrage and many checks on ‘democracy,’” he added, arguing that freedom of speech is “essential to keeping it a republic, but not necessarily a democracy.”
“So, no, the First Amendment does not exist only to ‘protect our democratic system.’ It exists to protect our liberty, regardless of what system we choose,” he wrote.
Dershowitz said that the argument made by the authors of the House brief that the First Amendment “doesn’t apply to presidents or others who ‘attack our democracy,’ is the same as that made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes decades ago “when they sought to deny First Amendment protection to communists and others who were seen as enemies of democracy and who, if they had come to power, would have denied the rest of us our freedoms, including that of free speech.”
“Freedom of speech must include those who would replace democracy with other systems of governance. It must even include those who advocate severe restrictions on freedom of speech, as many young left wing radicals do today. They, too, must be allowed to express their dangerous views,” he argued.
The House brief argues that the First Amendment protects private citizens from the government but “it does not protect government officials from accountability for their own abuses in office.”
Holding Trump “accountable through conviction on the article of impeachment would vindicate First Amendment freedoms—which certainly offer no excuse or defense for President Trump’s destructive conduct,” the brief’s authors argue.
“Even if the First Amendment were applicable here, private citizens and government officials stand on very different footing when it comes to being held responsible for their statements,” they wrote.
Citing U.S. Supreme Court rulings in cases Branti v. Finkel and Elrod v. Burns, they argued that, “as the leader of the Nation, the President occupies a position of unique power. And the Supreme Court has made clear that the First Amendment does not shield public officials who occupy sensitive policymaking positions from adverse actions when their speech undermines important government interests.”
The House brief alleges that Trump incited a mob that breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by sowing doubt about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
Protesters clash with police at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Julio Cortez/AP Photo)
Trump’s legal team denies the allegation and argues in a memo (pdf) that the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president. The team also argues that Trump exercised his First Amendment rights in calling into question the results of the election.
“After the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of COVID-19 pandemic ‘safeguards’ states election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures,” the legal team wrote.
“Like all Americans, the 45th President is protected by the First Amendment,” they wrote. “Indeed, he believes, and therefore avers, that the United States is unique on Earth in that its governing documents, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, specifically and intentionally protect unpopular speech from government retaliation.”
“If the First Amendment protected only speech the government deemed popular in current American culture, it would be no protection at all,” they added.
Dershowitz’ sentiment that the reasoning featured in the impeachment brief is a threat to freedom of speech more broadly was echoed in a statement by Trump adviser Jason Miller, who said: “not only will President Trump be on trial next week. The First Amendment will be on trial next week because the Democrats aren’t going to stop with attacking President Trump, they want to go after the free speech and the rights of all Americans.”
Democrats face an uphill battle in the Senate in their pursuit of an impeachment conviction against Trump. Forty-five Republican senators voted in favor of a resolution calling the trial unconstitutional, since Trump is now a private citizen. With the Senate split 50–50, the impeachment managers would have to convince 17 Republicans that the trial is constitutional and that Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 21:40 - "No Room For Debate": Beijing Imposes Sweeping Pro-China Curriculum On Hong Kong Schools
“No Room For Debate”: Beijing Imposes Sweeping Pro-China Curriculum On Hong Kong Schools
In yet more significant fallout and far-reaching impact from the so-called Hong Kong national security law imposed by Beijing in June of last year, HK authorities in concert with China have unveiled sweeping new ‘national security rules’ for schools.
Schools have been ordered to adopt the curriculum which instills “an affection for the Chinese people” and while at the same time weeding out potentially disloyal teachers. “As far as national security is concerned, there is no room for debate or compromise,” the new security directive for schools reads ominously.
The measures were announced late Thursday and as Bloomberg details, “will require primary and secondary school students to memorize the law’s offenses, which include subversion, secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers.”
Image via China Daily And further, “Authorities are also looking to incorporate national security education into all subjects, from geography to biology, the government said in a statement.”
While it remains unclear (and highly dystopian) just how it is that “national security education” will be incorporated into something like science and biology, Beijing has long suspected Hong Kong’s youth of being the main problem behind recent unrest. The mainland further blamed a “foreign hand” to the rolling protests and unrest of recent years.
China’s Education Bureau was cited as saying the following:
The fundamentals of national security education are to develop in students a sense of belonging to the country, an affection for the Chinese people, a sense of national identity, as well as an awareness of and a sense of responsibility for safeguarding national security.
As far as prevention and education are concerned, schools have a significant role to play.
The rolling and increasingly aggressive protests which saw entire districts of Hong Kong grind to a halt in 2019 into the early part of 2020 were largely driven by young people, in particular college and no doubt high school students as well. There were a number of instances of students ditching school en masse in order to join the anti-mainland protest movement.
2/ Schools must inform the police and parents of incidents involving “political propaganda” – including students chanting slogans, posting material with political messages and asking or coercing other children to follow their political stance.
— Tom Grundy (@tomgrundy) February 5, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Also alarming is that it appears to set up a ‘loyalty litmus test’ of sorts for teachers and staff, which will also no doubt induce ‘informants’ to turn-in fellow faculty. Thursday’s Education Bureau statement further urged school staff to “step up the prevention and suppression” of teaching that’s considered in breach of the security law while helping students to “gain a correct understanding” of the legislation.
Thus HK schools have now effectively and seemingly overnight been transformed into ‘reeducation’ programs of pro-mainland propaganda. This is precisely what many students feared as in recent years China sought to emphasize “patriotic education” in Hong Kong schools, which met with fierce resistance.
The question remains whether this will serve to trigger new waves of unrest, or if China has already effectively gained enough control to stifle even the beginnings of a fresh street uprising.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 21:20 - Biggest Gun Control Bill In History Targets The Poor, Will Make Millions Of Felons Overnight
Biggest Gun Control Bill In History Targets The Poor, Will Make Millions Of Felons Overnight
Authored by Matt Agorist via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,
HR127, known as the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act introduced by Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18], is, without a doubt, the most tyrannical gun control bill ever proposed.
Like all gun control measures, this bill would hit the poor and minority communities the hardest. Its massive scope would also turn tens of millions of legal, law abiding gun owners into felons overnight.
As TFTP reported in December, before Joe Biden took office, his administration has major plans for eviscerating the Second Amendment. Biden has been an outspoken gun grabber and on his campaign website, he’s stated that he will use executive action to enforce gun control.
On the site, Biden states that he will use executive action to “get weapons of war off our streets.” Calling an AR-style weapon a “weapon of war” is laughable given the fact that Biden, under president Obama, aided in the wholesale slaughter of countless innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia — using actual “weapons of war” like drone strikes, hellfire missiles, and sanctions.
Nevertheless, the new boss — who is the same as the old boss, contrary to what many believe — is presiding over a Congress that will consider the most tyrannical gun control measures in the history of America, HR127.
Former vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, Spike Cohen points out that “HR127 would be most heavily enforced against those with the least ability to defend themselves in court: the poor, and minorities. It will also make things much worse in marginalized communities, where only police and criminals will have guns.”
In a post to Facebook, Cohen narrowed down some of the bill’s most ominous points that would target every single gun owner in the country.
1. Firearms License required for any new gun purchases or ownership transfers.
-
Licensee Must be 21, complete a 24 hour gun safety training course, and must undergo a psych evaluation.
-
Multi-tier license. Individual license for ownership and display of “antique” firearm, standard firearm license, and “military style” license.
-
Military license requires additional 24 hour safety course.
-
Licensing is revoked immediately for anyone indicted of a crime in which the sentence lasts longer than 1 year.
This heavily discriminates against anyone who has ever seen a therapist or had to get mental health treatment, such as victims of abuse and people with depression, and veterans seeking care for PTSD. Depression and addiction are mentioned specifically as reasons for licensing denial.
Also, gun licensing is expensive, which makes ownership less accessible for those who need their own protection most.
2. Requires an $800 annual government insurance fee for all current and future gun owners, to be paid to the Attorney General EVERY YEAR.
There is no grandfather clause, meaning this applies to anyone that owns a gun at all, not just those who purchase a new firearm after this passes.
This fee will certainly go up each year. It’s yet another barrier for those in poverty to be able to defend themselves.
3. Mandatory Nationwide Firearms Registration & Database
-
ALL firearms owned shall be registered under penalty of up to $150,000 and 15 years in prison.
-
Serial, make, model, date, identity of owner, and the location of where the firearm will be stored to be collected and maintained in a database by the US Attorney General.
-
Names and information of all those who may have access to the firearms shall be collected as well.
-
This information to be accessible by state, local, and federal police, military, as well as state and local governments.
4. Ammunition and Magazine Bans
-
Bans .50cal and larger ammunition outright.
-
Bans all mags that hold more than 10 rounds
This ammo is mostly used for hunting and is rarely used against people. The most common handguns and rifles use magazines that exceed this arbitrary limit, which makes TENS OF MILLIONS of law-abiding gun owners felons overnight.
Illegal ownership of even a single round of banned ammo will result in up to $100,000 in fines AND 20 years in prison.
This bill was originally presented last year and reinvented this year with a whole new level of tyranny added to it both in the government and out of it. For example, the registration data will be made public. Given the cancel culture mass hysteria-inciting media frenzy as of late, this list could be used by big tech and woke cults to target their political rivals. They could seek out this data and use it to implement blacklists, social media bans, and any other number of ways the cancel culture attacks those with whom they disagree.
As we reported in December, many of these gun control measures are already on the president’s agenda, which go even further.
One of Biden’s most ominous moves in regard to controlling guns is his push for “smart gun technology” that will require biometrics to fire in an ostensible move to “prevent unauthorized use.” In reality, however, this paves the way for bad actors, including the state and hackers, to be able to control, hack, or essentially turn off your gun, making it a paperweight.
Biden also plans to pick up where Trump left off in regard to extreme risk laws, also called “red flag” laws. Under Biden’s plan, which is similar to the many plans implemented under Trump, family members or law enforcement officials will be able to make claims — many which involve no evidence — allowing a person’s guns to be temporarily taken until that person is declared fit enough to get them back.
This attacks on the Second Amendment must be resisted. Please consider calling your representative and peacefully telling them to oppose this bill.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 21:00 -
- Tokyo Olympics Gripped By New Scandal After Head Organizer Makes "Sexist Remarks"
Tokyo Olympics Gripped By New Scandal After Head Organizer Makes “Sexist Remarks”
Multiple “controversies” – not the least of which are looming pandemic risk and health concerns – are threatening to once again derail the Tokyo Olympics. The summer Olympics were already postponed from last year, a first in history, moved to July of this upcoming summer. But now a fresh scandal has again put the pressure and spotlight on the games and its organizers as one of the eldest members of the Olympic Committee is accused of making sexist comments. Reuters reports:
Japan’s Olympic Games faced a “major issue” after the head of the local organizing committee made sexist remarks, Tokyo’s governor said on Friday, sending a clear signal the deepening controversy risked tarnishing the global event.
The president of the Tokyo Olympic Games organizing committee, Yoshiro Mori. AFP/Getty Images 83-year old Yoshiro Mori unleashed a “social media storm” this week which has since been picked up in a torrent of international reports by simply saying that women talk too much.
Somewhat absurdly (given the multiple major other pressing issues and immense hurdles the Olympic Games are now facing amid a global pandemic), these are the reports now headlining across the world, as The Washington Post recaps:
Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, on Wednesday said women have an “annoying” tendency to make meetings run unnecessarily long in comments that he sought to retract Thursday.
Speaking to members of the Japanese Olympic Committee with reporters present, Mori said “board of directors meetings with many women take a lot of time.”
“When you increase the number of female executive members, if their speaking time isn’t restricted to a certain extent, they have difficulty finishing, which is annoying,” he said, as told by an Agence France-Presse translation of an Asahi Shimbun story.
“Women are competitive,” Mori added. “When one person raises a hand, others think they need to speak up as well. That’s why everyone speaks.”
“Some members of the committee reportedly laughed at Mori’s remarks…” WaPo noted further.
Mori is currently under pressure to resign his post. Making matters worse the whole commentary which apparently may have been an attempt at humor was in response to a question centered on the Japan Olympic Committee’s (JOC) gender make up. Critics have said there’s not enough female representation.
“I don’t speak to women much.”
Tokyo Olympics chief Yoshiro Mori apologises but refuses to resign after making sexist remarks https://t.co/bw3PrVSune pic.twitter.com/zNww3U3d7H
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) February 4, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The controversy has now escalated to be categorized as a matter of “safety” and “security”. The comments from the out of touch octogenarian caused Reuters to write this over-the-top line: “The incident has cast another dark shadow over the Games, postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, with just months left before the opening ceremony.”
Tokyo’s female governor, Yuriko Koike, added fuel to the controversy by saying, “The mission of the metropolis and the organizing committee is to prepare for a safe and secure Games, and we are facing a major issue.”
Meanwhile, in real news not subject to as much hyperventilating and over-dramatization, the International Olympic Committee is now mulling canceling the upcoming games altogether as it could be “too dangerous to proceed” amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic.
“The IOC has the power to cancel,” IOC Canadian member Dick Pound said in a new interview this week, according to Bloomberg. “I’m sure that would be a decision to be made together with the Japanese government and the Japanese organizers on the basis of advice from the World Health Organization and other scientific data,” he added, explaining further it’s no longer a matter of merely postponing further: “We don’t have three choices anymore, we have only two – we go or we cancel.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 20:40 - SPAC Craze Goes To Wine Country
SPAC Craze Goes To Wine Country
Submitted by Market Crumbs,
It’s almost every day that we write about a new SPAC deal. January saw the amount of money raised by SPACs jump 20-fold from last January to $24.26 billion, already accounting for 30% of last year’s $79 billion raised by SPACs.
While SPAC deals have commonly targeted companies in the electric vehicle space, the list of companies that have gone public through this route is quickly growing.
This week saw an interesting SPAC deal as Vintage Wine Estates has entered into a merger with Bespoke Capital Acquisition Corp. to become a publicly traded company.
Vintage Wine Estates, which was founded 20 years ago, is one of the fastest growing U.S. wine producers with sales of nearly 2 million nine-liter equivalent cases annually. Vintage Wine Estates carries more than 50 brands that range in price from $10 to $150 per bottle.
The winemaker touts profitability every year since inception, with 20% average annual revenue and EBITDA growth since 2010. The combination will see Vintage Wine Estates continue to be run by founder and CEO Pat Roney while the management team will remain in place.
“Our advantaged scale within a highly fragmented wine industry, industry-leading DTC platform that positions us well in a post-COVID consumer world and premium brand portfolio provide a strong foundation to build upon and sustain robust long-term growth,” Roney said. “This transaction will not only enable us to invest behind our brands to drive market share where necessary, but it will also fuel the next phase of our rapid growth in the U.S. wine industry.”
Vintage Wine Estates will use the combination to expand in the U.S. wine industry, which has seen sustained growth over the past 25 years and has room for more growth, according to the company.
The combination will also bring the experience of former Diageo CEO Paul Walsh, who is the Executive Chairman of Bespoke Capital Acquisition Corp. and will serve as the non-executive Chairman of the combined company.
“After evaluating over 100 companies, we are delighted to have identified VWE as the ideal merger partner,” Walsh said. “The Company represents a unique and compelling investment opportunity in the consumer staples space. VWE’s well-diversified portfolio of high-quality brands spanning all price points and differentiated omni-channel marketing approach bring great balance.”
As SPACs continue to dominate, this is just one of the interesting examples of a company that has been given a fresh boost as it heads to the public markets.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 20:20 - "The Open Kimono": NRA Bankruptcy Will Lead To Unprecedented Disclosure Of Org's Financial Habits
“The Open Kimono”: NRA Bankruptcy Will Lead To Unprecedented Disclosure Of Org’s Financial Habits
A forthcoming NRA bankruptcy may mark the first time critics of the association get a deep look into the inner-workings of the organization.
As part of its coming bankruptcy, the NRA “will be forced to release a detailed list of cash payments it has made to insiders in the last year and any unusual property transfers it has made to anyone within two years,” Bloomberg notes. It will also have to disclose whether or not it had a 5% stake in any other businesses.
The disclosure are relatively common for a bankruptcy proceeding, but the fact that the NRA has often played their cards close to their chest with how they run their business means that the volunteering of the information will be a break from the norm.
The U.S. Trustee will set up an official committee of unsecured creditors that will have the power to look into the NRA’s spending, the report notes. Howard Seife, head of the bankruptcy practice at the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, said: “We have a technical term for it in the trade. It’s called the open kimono.”
Dallas bankruptcy attorney John Penn said: “Each bit of information in that filing can open the door for more inquiries and discovery.”
“Any time you are considering filing for Chapter 11 and taking advantage of the protections of the bankruptcy code, you need to be prepared for tremendous scrutiny of your operations and financial conditions,” Seife added. In addition, top members of the NRA may have to testify under oath.
The NRA has filed for bankruptcy as part of a strategy to resolve lawsuits it is facing, claiming it is “the subject of a political attack” from regulators in New York. The organization is hoping to reincorporate in Texas for a fresh start. New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing to dissolve the organization and is specifically targeting its executive Vice President, Wayne Lapierre.
James alleges that Lapierre spent over $1 million of NRA money on unauthorized flights and received inappropriate gifts.
The NRA’s lawyer, William Brewer, said: “The NRA will provide the information required by the bankruptcy schedules without hesitation. The truth is, most of its senior staff members, including CEO Wayne LaPierre, have no guarantees of future employment and have voluntarily taken pay reductions to help the NRA address the pandemic.”
“The NRA will utilize all tools at its disposal to highlight the motivations of the NYAG. Clearly, the NRA believes this was a politically motivated attack – fueled by the NYAG’s opposition to the NRA’s political point of view,” he concluded.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 20:00 - Calling For An American Ministry Of Truth – The US Media's Dystopian 2021
Calling For An American Ministry Of Truth – The US Media’s Dystopian 2021
Authored by Stephen Lendman via Global Research,
The New York Times never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity for truth-telling as it should be.
It’s a notion long ago abandoned in deference to providing press agent services for powerful interests.
At the same time, the Times finds new ways to disgrace itself.
Calling for a US Ministry of Truth headed by a “reality czar” sounds ominously like what Orwell described in his dystopian 1984 novel that’s no longer fiction, saying:
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy.
They are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
Along with Big Brother mass surveillance and newspeak, Orwell’s Ministry of Truth was all about controlling the message, eliminating whatever conflicts with it, memory holes used for this purpose.
The Times and other US major media operate this way now — a collective ministry of truth as described above.
Featuring the official narrative exclusively, alternative views are filtered out and suppressed, free and open expression banned in their reports.
In 1984, unnwanted material went down memory holes to “be whirled away (in) enormous furnaces…devoured by the flames,” said Orwell, adding:
“(T)here were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.”
In the US and West, no Orwell-style memory hole is needed, no furnaces, no ceremonial book-burnings.
Big Media in cahoots with diabolical government officials censor and eliminate truth-telling on what’s vital for everyone to know.
What Times fake news called a US “reality crisis” amounts to urging greater state-sponsored censorship than already.
What it called “the scourge of hoaxes, lies and delusions” are hard truths about US imperial wars, hazardous covid vaccines to be shunned, stolen Election 2020, unelected/cognitively impaired Biden unable to serve in any public capacity, the anti-Trump Jan. 6 Capitol Hill false flag, and other cutting-edge issues.
What the self-styled newspaper of record calls “misguided beliefs” are indisputable facts important for everyone to know.
A real “national reality crisis” exists because of Big Government in cahoots with Big Media – like the Times — serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others.
It’s because of US police state totalitarian rule on a fast track toward full-blown tyranny.
It’s because the US no longer is open, free, and fair.
It’s because hardline government is the mortal enemy of ordinary people — their health, well-being, safety, and fundamental freedoms being eliminated in real time.
It’s because of US war OF terrorism, not on it, rages against ordinary people, wanting them exploited to serve privileged interests.
It’s because America is no longer safe and fit to live in for most of its people.
It’s because of the largely ignored greatest ever US Main Street Great Depression while wealth, power, and privileged interests never had things better.
It’s because media like the Times suppress what’s crucial for everyone to know.
What the Times called “violent extremism” is state-sponsored.
What it calls a “truth commission” reflects shades of 1984.
What it calls “domestic terrorists” are FBI, CIA, DHS, local police, and other elements of oppression to cow ordinary people into submission to a diabolical higher power in Washington.
Truth-telling as it should be is polar opposite how the Times and other establishment media operate.
As a collective lying machine, truth-telling is their moral enemy, what they’re hellbent for eliminating in whatever form it shows up.
In today’s America, Big Brother mass surveillance, police state control, and ministry of truth Big Lies are part of the national fabric.
That’s the ugly reality suppressed by the Times and other Big Media.
The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists.
Growing tyranny heading toward becoming full-blown replaced it.
That’s the ugly reality establishment media like the Times suppress – to their disgrace.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 19:40 - The Curious Case Of The Hedge Fund That Made $700 Million On GameStop
The Curious Case Of The Hedge Fund That Made $700 Million On GameStop
While retail was “sticking it to the suits” – the actual suits at hedge fund Senvest Management were about to net a cool $700 million on GameStop’s run higher. Why? Because GME was the largest Senvest holding as of Oct 7, an oddity considering many within the hedge fund world at the time viewed it as a potential bankruptcy candidate – hardly a prudent move from a fiduciary standpoint, unless Senvest had a plan… and boy did it have a plan.
But let’s back up.
Senvest principles, Richard Mashaal and Brian Gonick, started buying GSE stock equity in September, the Wall Street Journal report reveals, just weeks before they had accumulated a massive 3.6 million shares making Gamestop the fund’s largest holding. Mashaal told the Journal: “When it started its march, we thought, something’s percolating here. But we had no idea how crazy this thing was going to get.”
In retrospect, he just might have had an idea.
GameStop turned into the firm’s most profitable ever investment by dollars earned and IRR. Senvest’s fund has ballooned from $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion as a result of GameStop’s move and, for the month of January, the fund was up 38.4%. Gamestop is also the reason why Senvest is currently the top performing fund tracked by HSBC’s popular Hedge Weekly report.
Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers, noted what many had suspected: “It is not just little people on the long side here. There are huge players playing both sides of GameStop.”
Richard Mashaal, left, and Brian Gonick made $700 million in GameStop in just three months. He was right. Senvest says their interest in the name was “piqued by a presentation from the new GameStop chief executive at a consumer investment conference in January 2020.” The Journal writes:
But as they spoke with management, sussed out competitors and noted the involvement of activists in the stock, including Chewy Inc. co-founder Ryan Cohen, they eventually started buying. By the end of October, Senvest owned more than 5% of the company, paying under $10 a share for the bulk of the stock.
They thought that if GameStop could hold on until the next generation of videogame consoles came out and stoked demand for games and accessories, the company would get a boost. And they reasoned that if Mr. Cohen could help transform GameStop from a largely bricks-and-mortar operation into an online gaming destination, the company could be worth far more.
Sure there are fundamentals, but we doubt that was the reason for the accelerated accumulation of GME stock by Senvest. Something tells us there were other factors that prompted the urgent buying spree, especially since the original “short burn of the century” article on Reddit which sparked the retail interest in the name, appeared in early September right around the time Senvest started acquiring shares, according to the Journal. One almost wonder if the two aren’t linked.
The post reads: “Sup gamblers. Feel bad about missing the gain train on TSLA? Fear not – something much greater and stupider is here. You know Citadel? The MM that took all our money today? Well now we finally won’t be at the mercy of the MMs. Instead, we’re going to temporarily join forces with the Galactic Empire and hijack the death star.”
The post then launches into a relatively sophisticated explanation of the hows and whys of orchestrating a short squeeze:
The this turn around is going to make TSLA’s short burn look like warm afternoon tea.
Why? Well, most short squeezes are mostly math. This one is special because we have math AND great underlying news.
To be clear, this will happen whether or not we participate. I prefer us idiots to be a part of history. Here’s what’s up:
Short interest:
GME currently has between 85% – 99.8% short interest, depending on what site you use. For context, 20% is already considered high as the moon. TSLA and NFLX were around 30-40% at their peak. But GME’S ACTUAL SHORT INTEREST IS OVER 110%.
Here is a simple way of framing the timeline:
– Senvest made $700MM on GME.
– “Richard Mashaal and Brian Gonick started buying GameStop Corp. shares in September” – WSJ
– the r/WSB post “Greatest Short Burn of the Century” hit on Sept 8 https://t.co/fKOc2NDeb8https://t.co/HQuZMcoAEG pic.twitter.com/a3yJOiXkUg
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Just a few months later, in December the GameStop long thesis got a major boost among both the retail (outside of WSB) as well as C-grade institutional community, when Hedgeye, which sells research to clients, pitched the name.
On Dec. 17, when GME stock closed at $14.83, Hedgeye told its clients that GameStop was one of their “Best Ideas” and held a presentation as to why the equity, then trading at $14.83 could eventually be worth $100. What Hedgeye’s clients did not know – according to the WSJ – is that Senvest had pitched the idea to them.
Of course, for Hedgeye it would be a knockout blow if it emerged that the firm wasn’t an “independent provider of research” but middle-man and facilitator for hedge funds who had put on trades and then used Hedgeye’s client network as an amplification system… similar to what many accuse hedge funds of doing to r/wallstreetbets right now. Which is why the advisory denied that the upgrade was promptly solely by Senvest’s whispers (we can only assume that Senvest is also a client): “I respect Senvest a lot. We vetted it independently and we came up with a similar conclusion,” said Hedgeye analyst Brian McGough said.
In any case, by late December – between wallstreetbets and Hedgeye clients, the thesis was already widely spreading among the retail community, a process that would eventually culminate with the explosion of the stock price in late January. Why? Because the prevailing narrative was one where one or more hedge funds would never be able to cover their shorts because there was not enough short available in the float to cover, a process the world first encountered with Volkswagen, leading to a huge squeeze.
A squeeze, incidentally, which Senvest was all too familiar with. The WSJ writes:
Messrs. Mashaal and Gonick had been on the wrong end of short squeezes before at Senvest. One case was with opioid maker Insys Therapeutics Inc., though they ultimately made money on their short position. GameStop’s stock could soar if it got caught up in a situation in which its rising price forced bearish investors to start buying back shares to curb their losses, they thought.
They thought… and they were right. All they needed was the critical mass of buyers to ramp an initial buying cascade which would then trigger the squeeze and the rest is history. That’s precisely what happened in mid to late January, when the stock price exploded from $20 to over $500.
Unable to believe their eyes (or perhaps knowing precisely how such a massive short squeeze would play out) Senvest was just waiting for the catalyst to dump it all. They got it on on January 26, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined the stock-pumping fray and Tweeted out: “GameStonk!!”.
“Given what was going on, it was hard to imagine it getting crazier,” Senvest’s Mashaal concluded.
And here’s who made sure that a hedge fund would make $700MM on GME https://t.co/7ylfMYWF4P pic.twitter.com/CqdSQX8xJZ
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
So just a series of very lucky coincidences leading up to a record, $700 million payday, or a masterfully executed plan that was laid out and executed far better than most Hollywood scripts?
We hope to have the answer once Congress holds its Gamestop hearings, although considering that Maxine Waters is in charge we won’t be holding our breath.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 19:22 - Trump Says Lou Dobbs "Is & Was Great" After Fox News Cancels '#1 Business News' Show
Trump Says Lou Dobbs “Is & Was Great” After Fox News Cancels ‘#1 Business News’ Show
Update (2215ET): Former President Trump has issued a statement on Lou Dobbs show being cancelled:
Thanks for your kind words Mr.President. God bless you and all the American patriots who make this country great. https://t.co/7aPPQMl898
— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) February 6, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
* * *
It’s probably just a coincidence, but…
A day after voting software company SmartMatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts – Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro – over voting-machine-fraud claims, The LA Times reports that, according to a Fox News representative who confirmed the cancellation, Fox News has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight”.
The show, which is described by the network as “the #1 news program on business television”, came under fire during the 2020 election after pushing claims of election fraud.
Additionally, Dobbs was forced to issue a fact-checking clip on his show in December 2020 after Smartmatic, a voting machine company, issued a legal letter regarding what it says was “false and defamatory statements and reports,” The Daily Beast previously reported.
“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business,” a Fox News spokesperson said according to the LA Times.
“This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
Finally, The LA Times cited “people familiar with discussions” who suggested that Dobbs’ cancellation had been in the works prior to legal issues regarding the voting machine companies.
“Lou Dobbs Tonight” is being renamed as “Fox Business Tonight” beginning next week. The show will see rotating guest hosts, according to the LA Times.
Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News but he will in all likelihood not appear on the company’s networks again.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 19:20 - TSA To Slap Mask-Mandate-Violators With $1,500 Fines
TSA To Slap Mask-Mandate-Violators With $1,500 Fines
Mask up on planes, or the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will slap travelers with hundreds of dollars in fines. Repeated offenders could see penalties north of $1,500, according to a TSA press release.
“Based on substantial aggravating or mitigating factors, TSA may seek a sanction amount that falls outside these ranges. TSA has provided transportation system operators specific guidance on how to report violations so that TSA may issue penalties to those who refuse to wear a face mask,” the agency also said.
Darby LaJoye, Senior Official Performing the TSA Administrator’s Duties, said TSA would “fully comply with the President’s Executive Orders, CDC guidance and the DHS National Emergency determination to ensure healthy and secure travel across all transportation sectors. This will help prevent further spread of COVID-19 and encourage a unified government response.”
Two weeks ago, President Biden signed an executive order requiring passengers to wear face coverings on planes. That means people who don’t wear masks could be slapped with fines, or worse, banned from traveling.
“As we continue to experience impacts from this pandemic, we are committed to this measure as the right thing to do for the TSA workforce, for our industry stakeholders and for passengers,” LaJoye said.
The crackdown on mask-wearing has resulted in more than 2,500 passengers banned from planes for violating onboard mask policies.
The airline industry has been turning to mask enforcement as a way to regain confidence in air travel. Another confidence booster has been the introduction of “immunity passports” in Europe, which could be coming to the US later this year.
While there’s been an abundance of research to show masks don’t work against COVID-19, rules are rules, and if you want to fly and avoid being slapped with a fine, wear a mask.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 19:20 - Did You Make Janet Yellen Rich?
Did You Make Janet Yellen Rich?
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
Up until the WallStreetBets crowd short squeezed Melvin Capital for a $7 billion loss, Robinhood had it made. But losing billions is stressful. And when your product blows up your customer the clucking that follows comes hot and heavy.
One of the sweetest displays in the world, we’ve been told, is the bursts of digital confetti that shower down Robinhood’s investment app to celebrate the purchase of stocks, options, and cryptocurrencies. These digital confetti bursts – in addition to spinning prices and scratch off rewards – are great entertainment. So, too, is watching the price of bitcoin quoted in neon pink. It just screams buy!
Trading on Robinhood is designed to be both fun and exciting. There are even freebie alerts. It’s like playing Candy Crush. Only the score is kept in dollars and cents. And with a little practice you can strike it rich.
The clucking for Robinhood CEO, Vlad Tenev, began on Thursday, January 28, at 3:30 am Pacific Time. That’s when the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) informed his company that it had to put up $3 billion. According to Tenev, that’s “an order of magnitude more than what it typically is.”
But Tenev and the fellows at the NSCC handled the situation like professionals. After several early morning phone calls they came to a nifty agreement…
Robinhood would provide $700 million. In lieu of the remaining funds, the company would restrict buying – and digital confetti bursts – of the WallStreetBets-fueled rocket launch of GameStop, AMC, and several other heavily shorted stocks. That’s when the clucking really began.
The Ultimate Catch
The promise of something for free will always be an enticing marketing ploy. Years ago, for example, when opening a new bank account at your local thrift, they’d kick in a free toaster. Robinhood took this marketing strategy and adapted it to the digital age.
When opening a Robinhood trading account, for instance, you have a 100 percent chance of getting a free stock. When you link your bank account, and fulfill certain conditions, you get free stock. When you invite friends…you get free stock.
The free stocks are selected at random. If you’re lucky, you’ll score a share of Apple or Visa.
These free promotions are fun…and generally harmless. Moreover, there are worse ways to acquire new customers. If Robinhood wants to sprinkle free stock around, like digital confetti bursts, good for them.
Yet everyone knows Robinhood’s ultimate freebie is its commission free trades. Certainly, this goes counter to how brokerages have traditionally conducted business. Hence, this ultimate freebie comes with the ultimate catch.
On January 28, after Tenev’s early morning fireside chat with the NSCC, and after WallStreetBets had delivered a three day beat down to Melvin Capital, this ultimate catch was revealed with exacting clarity. By restricting buying at this critical moment, Robinhood appeared to be making an explicit choice: Hedge funds over customers.
And therein lies the kicker: The hedge funds are Robinhood’s customers; its users are the product.
Before noon, Congressional members from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ted Cruz were cluck, cluck, clucking…
Rigged Markets
During the late stages of an epic bubble, fraud, folderol, grift, and graft, drip like honey from a mistresses lips.
Behind Melvin Capital stands Citadel and Point72 Asset Management. As Melvin Capital was getting short squeezed, Citadel and Point72 came to its rescue with $2.75 billion.
Was this an act of fraternal benevolence? Maybe.
But a day or two later Robinhood restricted its users from buying the very stock – GameStop – that wrecked Melvin Capital. Is it merely a coincidence that Citadel is also Robinhood’s biggest customer?
You see, Robinhood, which offers commission free trades, makes its money by selling users’ trades to other large firms – like Citadel Securities – before they’re actually executed. Those firms make money by effectively seeing what the retail investors on Robinhood are going to do before they actually do it, and acting accordingly. The Financial Times explains:
“Citadel Securities pays tens of millions of dollars for this order flow but makes money by automatically taking the other side of the order, then returning to the market to flip the trade. It pockets the difference between the price to buy and sell, known as the spread.”
If this skimming activity sounds like a rigged market it’s because it is. What’s more, it’s making certain insiders ridiculously rich.
Did You Make Janet Yellen Rich?
Incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who was Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, is an insider’s insider. During her brief hiatus from public life Yellen went on a spectacular speaking tour of the big Wall Street banks and corporations.
In total, she raked in $7.2 million in speaking fees from places like Citi, Goldman Sachs, Google, City National Bank, UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Salesforce, and more. Not bad work, if you can get it.
But what could she have possibly said that was so valuable? Did she prove the existence of perpetual motion? Did she, in fact, square the circle?
For an insider’s insider, speeches are delivered with unspoken symbiosis. The words uttered have little relevance. The fees, however, lubricate the mechanism of future access. It wasn’t much of a gamble to bet that Yellen would be Treasury Secretary under a Biden presidency.
Another one of the firms Yellen spoke at happened to be Citadel – Robinhood’s biggest customer. She got $810,000 for two speeches and a series of webinars.
Now where did Citadel get the money to pay Yellen?
Obviously, the company funded it via business profits. But, remember, some of those profits came from skimming retail investor order flow purchased from Robinhood. From what we gather, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and other online brokers also sell order flow to Citadel.
Thus, if you’ve made a trade over the last three years using an online brokerage, guess what?
You’ve unknowingly contributed to making Janet Yellen rich.
The cluckers in Congress have vowed to get to the bottom of the hullaballoo. Somehow this will all be WallStreetBets’ fault…and the insiders – once again – will get off scot free.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 19:00 - Head Of The Fed's Plunge Protection Team Resigns To Join Biden Administration
Head Of The Fed’s Plunge Protection Team Resigns To Join Biden Administration
Back in the summer of 2019, a series of unprecedented personnel shake ups rocked the New York Fed, also known as the most critical Fed due to its direct involvement with capital markets, which a year earlier had appointed former San Fran Fed president and career academic John Williams, a Ph.D economist and Fed lifer, as its new figurehead president to replace Bill Dudley. In a move that shocked Fed watchers, the two most important people at the NY Fed, Simon Potter and Richard Dzina, announced with just a few days’ notice that they would be quitting in what we subsequently learned was their termination by the inferiority complexed Williams.
In late May, Mr. Williams announced the departure of Simon Potter, head of the markets desk since 2012, and Richard Dzina, head of financial services. They had joined the New York Fed in 1998 and 1991, respectively. People familiar with the matter said the exits had less to do with particular policy disputes than with tension over day-to-day management issues.
The way Mr. Williams executed the abrupt departures rattled upper management and sank staff morale, current and former staffers said. Mr. Potter learned of the decision from Mr. Williams shortly before he was to deliver a keynote address in Hong Kong that had already been announced.
At a going-away party at the New York Fed’s headquarters, Messrs. Potter and Dzina received an extended ovation that kept Mr. Williams waiting offstage to address attendees. “It was maybe three minutes,” said one attendee. “It is hard to describe how awkward the air felt.”
Not surprisingly, just a few months later, the hapless Williams – now without Potter by his side – faced the biggest financial crisis in recent years (until the Covid pandemic of course), when the repo crisis struck and for a few critical hours NY Fed president Williams had no clue what to do or how to restore market confidence:
Mr. Williams’s team was making its moves without key leadership after he ousted two veterans.
* * *
“Market confidence in the New York Fed markets desk is critical, and a series of events here have, let’s say, dinged confidence in the operations,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at financial-services company Jefferies LLC. “It’s important that the confidence issue be addressed before it becomes a more significant problem.”
Mr. Williams in the interview defended the bank’s response, saying, “We diagnosed it right, and Lorie and her team worked with others to get that done and get it done quickly.”
Some analysts said that the Fed ultimately made the right calls but that the incident showed officials had miscalculated the quantity of reserves needed in the system and how tight funding markets would get as a result.
“The lack of response on Monday was unnerving,” said Mark Cabana, head of short-term interest-rate strategy research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “They came in on Tuesday, but they came in too late.”
In any event, why was the unexpected departure significant?
Because Simon Potter was the brains behind the actual execution of QE and the Fed’s various indirect trades (using a hedge fund and market maker that has made quite a few headlines in recent days) as the head of the NY Fed’s Markets Group, he was the head trader for the infamous plunge protection team (PPT). Potter’s intimate knowledge of how the Fed “interfaces” with the market also made him an extremely valuable commodity and is why one year later, Potter ended up joining one of the world’s best hedge funds, Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management.
Eventually, more than half a year later, in February 2020 just as the covid pandemic was set to crush the stock market, Williams finally found a replacement for Potter when he hired Daleep Singh, an economist who previously served at the Treasury Department, who was tasked with the massive challenge of running the NY Fed’ markets group; effectively a bureaucrat was in charge of micromanaging the most important capital markets in the world.
But not for long, because fast forwarding to today, just a little over a year after he was hired, Singh announced his resignation from the NY Fed to join the Biden Administration as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy National Economic Council Director.
Here is the full press release:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York today announced that Daleep Singh has stepped down from his role as Head of the Markets Group and will be leaving the Bank in mid-February to join the Biden Administration as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy National Economic Council Director. Anne Baum, Head of Central Bank and International Account Services, will serve as interim Head of the Markets Group and the New York Fed will launch a search for his successor in the coming weeks.
“Daleep brought his dedication to public service and leadership skills to the New York Fed and had a meaningful impact during his tenure,” said John C. Williams, president and chief executive officer of the New York Fed. “Over the past year, Daleep has played a critical leadership role in the emergency facilities the Fed launched in response to COVID-19. I’m thrilled that he will continue to leverage his knowledge and expertise in support of economic policy at this important time.”
Mr. Singh joined the New York Fed in February 2020. As Head of the Markets Group, he focused on bringing together policy, strategy, analysis and operational effectiveness. He also served as a member of the Executive Committee.
Previously, Mr. Singh was Senior Partner and Chief U.S. Economist at SPX Capital, a global investment firm. He also worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2011 to 2017, serving as Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets and Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Affairs.
The problem is that while Singh had no prior capital markets experience and was merely a figurehead, his temporary replacement, Anne Baum is even more clueless.
Which means that for the next several months, the world’s most important trading desk will be without a head trader. And while that shouldn’t be a problem if the markets keep going up, for the sake of the Biden administration – and crony capitalism in general – let’s hope that the NY Fed does not encounter another market crisis that needs more than a token academic figurehead at the helm to know what to do to restore market calm.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/05/2021 – 18:40
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
