- This Is Why The New Mutant COVID Strain That Is Ravaging South Africa Has Scientists Extremely Worried…
This Is Why The New Mutant COVID Strain That Is Ravaging South Africa Has Scientists Extremely Worried…
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
Over the past couple of weeks, the new coronavirus strain known as “Super COVID” has been racing through the UK and making headlines all over the globe, but scientists insist that the new mutant COVID strain in South Africa is potentially much more dangerous.
Just like “Super COVID” in the UK, there is evidence that the South African strain spreads faster, and South Africa’s health minister has warned that there is “anecdotal evidence” of a “larger proportion of younger patients with no co-morbidities presenting with critical illness”. But the biggest reason why health authorities are so concerned about this particular strain is because it has mutated so dramatically that the current vaccines that have been developed may not work against it. The following comes from a Reuters article entitled “UK scientists worry vaccines may not protect against S.African coronavirus variant”…
UK scientists expressed concern on Monday that COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out in Britain may not be able to protect against a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in South Africa and has spread internationally.
Both Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19-causing virus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday he was now very worried about the variant identified in South Africa.
Even though the UK is the epicenter of the “Super COVID” outbreak, the British are so alarmed by the South African strain that they have banned all flights from South Africa. In an interview with the BBC, Hancock admitted that he is “incredibly worried” about what is happening in South Africa right now…
“I’m incredibly worried about the South African variant, and that’s why we took the action that we did to restrict all flights from South Africa,” he told the BBC’s “Today” program.
“This is a very, very significant problem … and it’s even more of a problem than the U.K. new variant.”
As the Daily Mail recently explained, the vaccines that have already been developed are designed to get the body to identify COVID’s “spike protein”, and if this does not happen they will not work properly…
Covid vaccines – including the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford University/AstraZeneca jabs currently being rolled out across Britain – work by training the body to spot the virus’s spike protein.
If the spike mutates so much that it becomes unrecognizable then it could render vaccines useless or make them less potent.
Scientists are telling us that the new mutant strain in South Africa has a total of eight changes to the spike protein, and Dr. John Bell of Oxford University is calling them “pretty substantial changes”…
Dr. John Bell of Oxford University said Sunday the variant identified in South Africa was worrisome in this regard, however.
“They both have multiple, different mutations in them, so they’re not a single mutation,” he told Times Radio. “And the mutations associated with the South African form are really pretty substantial changes in the structure of the (virus’ spike) protein.”
At this moment, we do not know if the current vaccines will be rendered useless by this new mutant strain or not.
But it is being reported that early tests have shown that at least one of the mutations appears to have made the virus more resistant to antibodies…
One, called E484K, is particularly alarming, Dr Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, told the Wall Street Journal.
When he and his team tested antibodies from donated plasma or lab made ones against that mutated bit of the virus variant, the immune cells were less effective.
Of course much more testing needs to be done, and those tests are being conducted right now.
According to a top official in the UK, scientists may be able to come to some sort of a conclusion in a couple of weeks…
Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said in response to a question from POLITICO on December 30 that this work can take 12 to 14 days, and that it may be a couple of weeks before scientists can give “a solid steer” on whether the vaccines will be effective on new variants.
So it may be a while before we know for sure if the current vaccines will be effective against this frightening new mutant strain in South Africa or not.
But what we do know is that this new strain is rapidly becoming dominant in large portions of South Africa…
The variant, 501.V2, is more infectious than the original COVID-19 virus and has rapidly become dominant in South Africa’s coastal areas. It is expected that the variant will quickly become dominant inland in Johannesburg, the country’s largest city, and the surrounding Gauteng province, he said.
If it is becoming dominant there, there is a good chance that it will become dominant as it spreads elsewhere as well.
In recent days, two cases of the South African strain have been confirmed in the UK, and there have also been cases detected in Finland, Switzerland and Australia.
Then on Monday, a case popped up in Austria…
On Monday, Austria announced that it had discovered one case of the South African mutation in a 30-year-old woman who returned from a trip on Dec. 6.
And officials in Japan just announced that a case has been identified in their country…
Japan on Monday detected a coronavirus variant found in South Africa, the government said, the first such discovery in a nation that has already identified more than a dozen cases of another variant that is spreading rapidly in Britain.
So it appears that the cat is already out of the bag.
A whole host of nations have already put travel restrictions in place to try to keep this deadly new strain from spreading more widely.
But so far the U.S. is not among them. In fact, testing is not even required for people traveling to the U.S. from South Africa.
Just like we have seen with “Super COVID”, it is probably just a matter of time before the South African strain spreads all over the planet.
And if the current vaccines will not work against it, that will put scientists back to square one in fighting this pandemic.
Of course there are tens of millions of people in the United States that will never take any COVID vaccine under any circumstances. Many are deeply concerned about the potential long-term effects of these experimental mRNA vaccines, and there is still so much that we do not know about them.
These are such troubled times, and the “perfect storm” that started in 2020 is only going to get worse in 2021.
Scientists thought that the new vaccines would give them the upper hand in dealing with this pandemic, but that may not be the case after all.
And as COVID continues to mutate, it is inevitable that there will be even more surprises for our health authorities in the months ahead…
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/06/2021 – 02:00 - Catastrophe Is All Around Us
Catastrophe Is All Around Us
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,
As a naturally optimistic person, it vexes me that the word catastrophe has echoed in my mind since early March 2020. It’s the word the great smallpox eradicator Donald Henderson used in his 2006 prediction of the consequences of lockdown, a word that wasn’t around then. His masterful article addressed the idea of travel restrictions, forced human separation, business and school closings, mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, quarantines, and the entire litany of brutality to which we’ve been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown.
Dr. Henderson warned against it all. This is not how you deal with disease, he said; at a minimum society needs to function so that medical professionals can do their work. Diseases are managed one person at a time, not with grand central plans. That was the old wisdom in any case. Under the influence of vainglorious modelers, ideological resetters, and politicians hoping to make names for themselves, most of the world tried the lockdown experiment anyway.
Here we are nearly a year since I wrote my first article warning that governments presumed themselves to possess the quarantine power. They could use it if they wanted to. I didn’t expect they would. I wrote this piece as a “for your information” public service just to let people know how terrible governments could be.
I had no idea that quarantines would be only the beginning. At this point we know what we did not know then. They are capable – by they I mean even governments in presumably civilized countries with functioning democracies – of the unthinkable, and they are capable of persisting in the unthinkable for an appalling amount of time.
Now the lockdowns are our life in the US, unless you are lucky enough to live in Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, and perhaps a few other places. Here in these outposts of what we used to call civilization, life seems normal. Our readers in these states don’t even think about the virus much, and they read my articles and find them overwrought, like I’m describing life on another planet.
The US seems to have two economies, one open and one closed. You see the difference on social media: people at the beach, malls, living life more or less normally. Meanwhile, in the lockdown states, businesses are shuttered, people are demoralized, fights over masks are breaking out in stores, the arts are wrecked, and multitudes are still cowering in their homes. The unemployment differences between the two reveal exactly what’s going on.
We are experiencing what is a migratory demographic shift that could compare to 19th century legend. From what is being reported by U-Haul and other moving companies, people are fleeing from closed to open. Reports United Van Lines: “Among the top inbound states were South Carolina (64%), Oregon (63%), South Dakota (62%) and Arizona (62%), while New York (67%), Illinois (67%), Connecticut (63%) and California (59%) were among the states experiencing the largest exoduses.” And this all happened since the summer when it became unbearably obvious that the bastards were not going to stop tormenting their people.
Moving, however, is not a panacea. Normal life seems to be breaking down. The government mails are running 2 to 3 weeks behind. Companies can’t even close their books because the tempo of life has dragged to a crawl. Tech support takes many hours on hold. Accountability for failure to deliver on services seems to be evaporating. Groceries experience sporadic shortages in unpredictable ways. We no longer know the rules and yet fear breaking them.
Health care is not functioning normally, with non-Covid patients hurled out too soon while positive tests land you in ICU whether you need it or not. (My own 81-year-old mother was hospitalized with a serious condition and then thrown out because she didn’t test positive for SARS-CoV-2). Vaccine administration has been mostly chaos because society is not functioning normally. Weddings and funerals are still out. We are being socialized to treat everyone, including ourselves, as nothing but pathogenic disease vectors.
The hatred and threats of violence in online venues are out of control. Society has never been more angry or divided in my lived experience. Tech giants are still censoring dissent, trying to force everyone to believe the pronouncements from the World Health Organization even though they change week to week, as if they are working hard to realize Orwell’s vision of the future. The blue check marks and people with access daily advocate trampling on the rights of those who can’t live their lives online.
The mainstream media that most people once trusted continues to pretend as if this catastrophe is a result of the pandemic rather than the pandemic response. Just look at the number of headlines that begin “Pandemic Has Caused….” and then fill in the blank with any one of the many terrible things happening now: a third of restaurants bankrupt, opioid deaths, alcoholism, suicide ideation, female unemployment, demoralized and abused children missing a whole year of schooling, loved ones separated by borders, murder rates soaring, vaccinations missed, cancer screenings forgone, and so on. It’s all the pandemic, they say.
Why won’t the media name the lockdowns as the culprit? It’s not just denialism. The implication is that we had no choice but to shatter life as we know it. Lockdown is just what one does in a pandemic. It’s utterly not. Nothing like this has ever taken place, never in history. This remains an egregious attack on fundamental rights, liberties, and the rule of law. The results are all around us. That the news media refuses to name the reason feels like gaslighting, except that we know they are lying, they know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying. It’s just an unwritten rule in journalism now: never name the lockdowns (unless you bury it in the 13th paragraph of an otherwise boring article).
And even after a full year, the public remains mostly deeply ignorant of the age/health gradient of Covid-19 fatalities, even though we’ve known this since February of last year! According to the CDC – even conceding the accuracy of testing and exigencies of fatality classification – it’s 99.997% for 0-19 years, 99.98% for 20-49 years, 99.5% for 50-69 years, and 94.6% for 70+ years. It’s nursing homes that have been a main vector for disease outcomes. The threat to school-age kids approaches zero. The more information we get the more normalized the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen seems, a respiratory and flu-like illness we have seen become pandemic before it became endemic just like another dozen times in the last hundred years. We didn’t shut down society, and, for that reason, we managed them just fine.
Is it that numbers like the above are just too abstract to mean anything to people? More likely, the numbers mean something but that meaning is overwhelmed by the nonstop panic porn one sees on the media each day. People can no longer distinguish these various terms that media pundits throw around to signal how terrible this disease is: outbreaks, cases, outcomes, deaths, spread, infection rates, hospitalizations – it’s just a huge and blurry blizzard of terrible.
Citing a bit of reality-based data cannot make a dent in the pathological Munchausen Syndrome that has been unleashed. Primal fear has swamped rationality for the better part of 10 months. So people douse themselves in sanitizer for fear of the enemy they cannot see, and presume everyone else is trying to infect them. They put up with attacks on their rights under the belief that it is for their own good.
The fiscal and monetary policy response has been equally egregious, all premised on the idea that money printing and spending – it all goes together these days – can possibly be a substitute for private investment and actual people buying and selling things. That combined with continued protectionist measures in the last days of the Trump administration make for the worst combination of policy malpractice in generations, or perhaps ever. The pain of recovery will be monstrous.
Many of us spend a good part of our days poring over the latest research, which reveals their terrible toll of the lockdowns, the inescapable horror that it is the lockdowns not the pandemic that has done this. It shows the absence of any relationship between lockdowns and lives saved. It shows that a significant number of excess deaths are due not to disease but to drug overdoses, depression, and suicide. It shows the tremendous problems with PCR testing, the nondriver of “asymptomatic transmission,” the incredible proliferation of disease misclassification, and the absurdity of the idea that political solutions can intimidate and arrest a virus.
We do all this research every day, and then turn on the TV to find the nation’s top medical spokesman (a certain Dr. Fauci of fame and fortune) knows nothing and cares nothing for any of the research. He is a performance artist who just likes being on TV, being fawned over while he advocates the permanent overthrow of our rights and liberties. And yet even his colleagues and others in the profession, who know his long-running racket very well, dare not call him out for fear of losing grant money, being ostracized within their institutions, and trolled on Twitter. He is a scary man with the power to make or break careers, so rather than take the risk, others just shake their heads and turn the channel.
Sheer cowardice explains most of the dearth of dissent. It’s easy to forget how cravenly careerist people become when they are afraid. Most people would rather lie or be silent than risk facing disapproval of friends and colleagues. Cancel culture makes this worse. Doctors who dare talk about natural immunities or the talisman of masks and distancing find themselves investigated by medical boards. Academics who speak out are accused of encouraging superspreaders, blasted by colleagues including students. It’s way beyond witch hunts at this point. As a result, you can easily get the impression that everyone agrees with the desperate need to dismantle civilization as we know it.
None of this is sustainable. When it was “14 days to flatten the curve,” I feared for the future of investment, public confidence in government, lost revenue for small and medium-sized businesses, and their permanent shock that would come from the realization that government can and will do something this horrible. Another two weeks went by and we were writing furiously to warn the world of the deadly consequences of this course. April 13 came and AIER released the most strongly worded editorial then in print: we need complete liberation now. The Wall Street Journal followed and said the same two days later.
In those days, the prevailing theory of the virus was that you cannot stop it but you can slow it down. Tall or short, the area of the curve is the same. Why prolong the pain? The talking point at the time was to preserve hospital capacity. But over time, this plausible idea mutated into a full suppressionist agenda. Slow the spread became stop the spread. It was a small step until the “experts” defaulted to a medieval view of disease: run away! Actually, that’s too flattering: it was a gradeschool view of cooties that became the new and thoroughly fake science.
Then we arrived at the current moment in which professional virus fighters, having failed miserably to suppress the virus, have turned against the public, blaming those who do not comply with complete enthusiasm. Fauci says some version of this daily on TV: if everyone would just comply, we won’t have to lock down anymore. Unless morale improves, the beatings will continue.
After two weeks, there was still time to undo major parts of the damage of lockdowns. After 10 months, not so much. There will be loss of life for many years to come plus population-wide psychological, social, and economic damage. The catastrophe has not been averted. It is far worse than any of us could ever have imagined at this time last year. The world has shifted and drastically, and the pain and suffering are unspeakable. Our governments are the pathogens that have done this to us. They were aided and abetted by fake news, fake experts, fake intellectuals, fake science, and a fake view of life.
At this late date, we’ve lost confidence in most of what we used to trust and think was normal. Despair is taking over. Many of those who were willing to fight in the spring and summer have given up, tired of writing, tired of protesting, tired of yelling. The attempt to demotivate the opposition is working. This is a huge error.
What, then, is the path to the future? We can stay on the present catastrophic course or we can reverse it. The sooner governments wise up and stop hurting everyone like this the sooner the healing can begin. It will take years, decades, but a version of the rule of medicine from the ancient days pertains: first stop doing harm.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/06/2021 – 00:05 - Assange "Free To Return Home" If Released By UK, Says Australian PM
Assange “Free To Return Home” If Released By UK, Says Australian PM
Australia remains a key nation among the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing alliance comprised also of Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States – which is why the Tuesday statement of Prime Minister Scott Morrison on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is so significant.
Morrison said that Assange is “free to return home” to Australia once legal challenges against him are resolved. This came a day after a UK judged blocked the US extradition request, citing the extreme health risk he would face in America’s federal supermax prison system.
The US is set to appeal the ruling. The next immediate step is Assange’s bail hearing where his legal team will seek his temporarily release from London’s Belmarsh prison, set for Wednesday.
“Assange’s lawyers will request that he be temporarily released from the maximum-security Belmarsh prison, in southeast London, during a hearing at the Westminster Magistrates Court in the capital that will begin at 10:00 GMT,” Al Jazeera writes.
Morrison told a local Australian broadcaster Tuesday, “Well, the justice system is making its way and we’re not a party to that. And like any Australian, they’re offered consular support and should, you know, the appeal fail, obviously he would be able to return to Australia like any other Australian.”
“So, yes, it’s just a straightforward process of the legal system in the UK working its way through,” he added. But in Assange’s case the chances are high that Washington would cook up new charges which could be used to press Australia to extradite him assuming he did ever risk making his way back to Australia, where he’s a citizen. It’s extremely unlikely that he would ever travel to another “Five Eyes” country regardless of such “assurances”, short of all US charges being dropped.
Previously Morrison has been on record as saying he won’t intervene to help Assange in anyway while the US was pursuing him on espionage related charges. “Assange must face the music like any other Australian in hot water overseas,” he once said.
Currently Australian opposition politicians are pushing Canberra to bring pressure on the Trump administration to drop all charges, as The Guardian details:
The Australian government is facing calls from its own Coalition backbench and the opposition Labor party to press the Trump administration to end the pursuit of Julian Assange after a British court ruled out the WikiLeaks co-founder’s extradition to the United States.
With the US government signaling it plans to appeal the court’s ruling, the Coalition backbencher George Christensen and the South Australian independent senator Rex Patrick were among Assange supporters who saw a presidential pardon from Donald Trump as the best way to bring an end to the saga.
There have also been US domestic calls among Trump’s own base for a pardon. But with the London court now ruling not to extradite, the pressure has perhaps been taken off Trump a bit to pursue what in his mind might be a politically costly decision, despite pardon for whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden remaining popular among the US public.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:45 - Los Angeles County Is Riskiest Area In The US: FEMA
Los Angeles County Is Riskiest Area In The US: FEMA
Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,
Los Angeles County has been named as the riskiest county in the United States, according to a new Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) index that examines 18 types of natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, floods, volcanoes and tsunamis.
Of the more than 3,000 U.S. counties surveyed, Los Angeles County ranked highest in FEMA’s National Risk Index, which looks at how often natural disasters strike, how many people and how much property are in harm’s way, how socially vulnerable the population is, and how well the region is able to recover.
The index also lists three counties in the New York City area—Bronx, New York County (Manhattan), and Kings County (Brooklyn)—in the top 10 riskiest U.S. counties, as well as Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, St. Louis, and Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California.
In contrast, FEMA has named Loudoun County, a Washington, D.C. outer suburb, as having the lowest risk of any county. Three other Washington suburban counties rank among the lowest risks for larger counties, along with suburban Boston, Long Island, suburban Detroit and Pittsburgh.
FEMA’s Mike Grimm said that although the ranking may seem “counterintuitive,” the degree of risk isn’t based solely on the frequency of natural disasters but it also considers how devastating the toll would be on a region.
Therefore, two New York City counties, Philadelphia, St Louis, and Hudson county in New Jersey have been named among FEMA’s top five most dangerous counties for tornadoes. Meanwhile, Oklahoma county in Oklahoma, which has been struck by more than 120 tornadoes in the past seven decades, has been placed in 120th place on the list.
A tornado in the top five would be “a low frequency, potentially high-consequence event because there’s a lot of property exposure in that area,” University of South Carolina Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute’s director, Susan Cutter, told The Associated Press.
“Therefore, a small tornado can create a large dollar loss.”
While Oklahoma is twice as likely to be struck by tornadoes than New York City, New York has higher damage potential due to the higher population and property value.
“It’s that risk perception that it won’t happen to me,“ Grimm said.
“Just because I haven’t seen it in my lifetime doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
A list of tips published on FEMA’s website urges Americans to take steps to prepare for potential natural disasters.
It includes creating an emergency plan, an emergency kit, keeping pantries stocked, learning about disaster planning within the community, signing up for emergency alerts, checking insurance policies, taking personal inventories, protecting valuables, planning for pets, and growing emergency funds to budget for possible natural disasters.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:25 - China Arrests US Lawyer During "Massive Crackdown" In Hong Kong
China Arrests US Lawyer During “Massive Crackdown” In Hong Kong
Update 11:00pm ET: In what would be a shocking development, Bloomberg reports that during its “massive crackdown” purging countless local activists and politicians, the Hong Kong police – i.e. China – has arrested American Lawyer, John Clancey, using as a pretext the National Security Law, which everyone warned China would use as strawman to crack down on Hong Kong citizens and activists. Well, it now appears that the emboldened Beijing – which is delighted by the ascent of pro-China pushover Joe Biden to the White House – is also using that law to arrest American citizens.
- H.K. ARRESTS AMERICAN LAWYER JOHN CLANCEY, COLLEAGUE SAYS
- CLANCEY ARRESTED UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY LAW: COLLEAGUE
In response, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken sent out a harshly worded tweet, warning China that the “Biden-Harris administration will stand with the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy.”
The sweeping arrests of pro-democracy demonstrators are an assault on those bravely advocating for universal rights. The Biden-Harris administration will stand with the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy. https://t.co/nSj8dr3OEg
— Antony Blinken (@ABlinken) January 6, 2021
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We eagerly await to see just what the
BlinkenBiden administration will do, besides tweeting angrily in China’s general direction, to secure release of an American citizen unjustly arrested by Chinese proxies in Hong Kong.* * *
Earlier: “Massive Crackdown”: Hong Kong Police Arrest Dozens Of Politicians & Activists
2021 is less than a week old and already Beijing is ramping up its efforts to suppress what’s left of the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong. Right now, China hawks are preoccupied right now by a number of issues: the disappearance of Jack Ma (note: CNBC claims the Alibaba founder is just “laying low”), Beijing’s refusal to allow international investigators inside the Wuhan Institue of Virology and, finally, the CCP’s abusive treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority.
Now, less than two months after the last 19 members of the HK LegCo’s pro-democracy opposition quit en masse over Beijing’s demands that they swear a loyalty oath to uphold the new national security law and the supremacy of the CCP, Hong Kong police have rounded up dozens of pro-democracy activists. The arrests – described by western journalists as a “massive crackdown” – essentially confirm what many feared: all pro-democracy activists who haven’t escaped Hong Kong will likely face arrest and imprisonment.
According to various media reports, police are rounding up dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists.
Massive crackdown underway in Hong Kong.
— Jillian Kay Melchior (@JillianKayM) January 6, 2021
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With at least two student leaders – including Joshua Wong – already heading to prison, Wednesday’s arrests mark the biggest crackdown under the new national security law, according to the NYT, one former opposition lawmaker was participating in a live video chat when he got the knock at the door.
A twitter account run by Wong’s supporters claimed that his house was raided during the sweep with the arrests.
#BREAKING Police also raided Joshua’s home for allegedly violating the national security law this morning as he took part in the primary election last year. 50+ democratic activists were arrested.
— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) January 6, 2021
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Another six former LegCo members were among those who were arrested.
The alleged offenses also underscored government officials’ efforts to weaken any meaningful opposition in the city’s political institutions. Among those arrested were at least six former Legislative Council members, a number of district councilors — a hyperlocal elected position dominated by pro-democracy figures — and several activists. They included figures who had called for aggressive confrontation with the authorities and those who had supported more moderate tactics.
According to social media pages belonging to some of those arrested, the activists were accused of trying to “subvert state power”. The charges were tied to their participation in the informal LegCo vote held over the summer.
An informal primary election for the LegCo held in July delivered an uncomfortably large margin of victory to the pro-Democracy candidates. It’s widely believed this vote deeply bothered Beijing, possibly prompting it to accelerate its crackdown on HK, which once functioned as a that once functioned as an autonomous city state. With its political independence now in tatters, any pro-democracy activists who haven’t already left the city will probably be on the next train or plane out – unless they’re detained first.
But an even bigger question: With Beijing’s crackdowns growing increasingly brazen, how will American institutions like the NBA continue to justify doing business in China?
*HONG KONG EX-LAWMAKERS ARRESTED UNDER NATIONAL SECURITY LAW
Beijing will have to double its payments to the NBA to keep this under wraps
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 5, 2021
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:18 - Marines Step Up Training For China With Island Exercises Off Japan's Mainland
Marines Step Up Training For China With Island Exercises Off Japan’s Mainland
Given ongoing US tensions with Beijing especially in the South China Sea region, the United States Marines are increasingly returning to the branch’s original mission of amphibious warfare reminiscent of the island campaigns of WWII in the Pacific.
It’s being reported this week that this is precisely the type of training being conducted in islands of the Japanese mainland. “The Marine Corps is stepping up training in Japan for island-based conflict in the Western Pacific, putting it at the leading edge of a pivot by the US to face the military challenge from China,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
Illustrative, US Marine training, Getty Images The report details that a new emphasis on small-scale, rapid deployments will make US troops and positions harder to locate. This is very different from the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ environment which saw massive deployments and large-scale occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The report quoted Lt. Col. Neil Berry, commander of the third battalion-Eighth Marine Regiment, based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. as saying, “We’re trying to get away from tents, from computer screens, because, 1.) it’s very stationary and, 2.), it has a huge electromagnetic signature.”
The WSJ detailed further what the island training looks like in practice:
At one of a series of recent exercises, a few dozen Marines faded into long grass after touching down in two CH-47 Chinook helicopters, followed by Japanese soldiers arriving in two Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Their simulated mission: avoiding detection and recapturing a port on an island inside the range of much of the enemy’s missiles and artillery.
The report added: “The exercise reflected a new emphasis on small, dispersed troop units and command centers, which are intended to be harder to locate and destroy.”
Thus in addition to simulating the type of small militarized island environment as exists among contested island-chains in the South China Sea (also built up through the PLA’s series of man-made islands), the Marine Corps is preparing to evade detection by China’s advanced radar and technological capabilities.
Over the past year especially, the US has stepped up both aerial patrols and US Navy sail throughs of the region, also near and through the disputed Taiwan Strait, in “freedom of navigation” exercised aimed at signaling Beijing.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 23:05 - Epidemiologist Says Influenza Cases Are Being Counted As COVID-19
Epidemiologist Says Influenza Cases Are Being Counted As COVID-19
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Top epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski says that the massive drop in influenza cases can be attributed to the fact that many are being falsely counted as COVID-19 cases.
Wittkowski, former Head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at Rockefeller University, cautioned that, “Influenza has been renamed COVID-19 in large part.”
According to CDC figures, the cumulative positive influenza test rate from late September into the week of December 19th was just 0.2%, compared to 8.7% from a year before.
According to Wittkowski, this is because many flu infections are being incorrectly labeled as coronavirus cases.
“There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the ‘presumed COVID-19’ category of people who have COVID-19 symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA,” Wittkowski told Just the News.
Those patients may “also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be ‘confirmed’ to be COVID-19,” he added.
Wittkowski challenges the notion that masks and social distancing have resulted in a drop in flu cases, asserting that flu and COVID-19 viruses are “more similar than people want to acknowledge.”
“People know everybody is wearing masks and distancing, and so people want to come up with things that are good about it,” he said.
In places like California and Pennsylvania where mask wearing is most common, COVID-19 cases have continued to skyrocket.
As Just the News notes, “Data indicate that more than nine out of every 10 Americans in most states are wearing masks in public regularly; those numbers have been above 80% since the early fall. Yet average positive COVID-19 tests have multiplied by nearly seven times since the spring peak.”
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:45 - Chinese Soldiers Outfitted With Digital Combat Device That Has "Self-Destruction Mode"
Chinese Soldiers Outfitted With Digital Combat Device That Has “Self-Destruction Mode”
New Delhi Television has revealed that Chinese soldiers in the Tibet Military Region will soon be equipped with new digital systems embedded in their combat gear.
Chinese soldiers will be outfitted with satellite antennas on the helmets, new night-vision goggles, and a digital control terminal on the arm. They will also receive advanced body armor, a new navigation device, personal radio, camera module, audio converter, information processing, and power supply module.
While the upgrades sound nothing out of the ordinary, there was mention that the new combat gear would be outfitted with “self-destruction mode.”
More importantly, this system is equipped with a self-destruction device. If a soldier is seriously injured but does not want to be captured, activating the self-destruction device will not only maintain the dignity of the soldier, but the enemy will not be able to obtain any information about this system. The Lu media report bluntly wrote, “Another self-destructive method is in the battalion-level command post. If the commander finds on the screen that the individual soldier is farther away from other troops, but the order cannot be contacted. If you’re a soldier, it will also initiate self-destruction.” -NDTV
There was mention that self-destruction mode could even be triggered remotely by the commander, allowing the soldier to “maintain military dignity” and prevent information leakage.
Many netizens were outraged that soldiers would be outfitted with exploding bombs that could be donated by superiors. Some netizens said: “Isn’t this stuff a human bomb?”
Netizens also said: “This is too ruthless. Keep away from the team and be detonated by the commander. This is a typical control technique for future operations. They are afraid of soldiers running away, pretending to be dead, and rebelling.”
Another netizen said: “In the past, the Communist Army asked each soldier to keep a grenade for himself. Before he was captured, it sounded and died with the enemy. It was also called ‘Glorious Bomb'”.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:25 - Vietnamese Woman Dubbed Early "Super Spreader" Starts Her Own Line Of Hygiene And Self-Care Products
Vietnamese Woman Dubbed Early “Super Spreader” Starts Her Own Line Of Hygiene And Self-Care Products
“Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise,” the old saying goes. For Vietnamese heiress and jet-setter Nga Nguyen, her recent “challenge” was being dubbed a Covid super-spreader after she caught the virus in March 2020 during fashion week in Europe.
Her subsequent travel habits, as she spread the virus across the world, made international news while she was recovering – with many outlets dubbing her as a “super spreader” and vilifying her.
So she did what anyone would do on the precipice of a global pandemic with the media constantly at your door: she started her own line of hygiene and self-care products.
“I was at the hospital but I wasn’t on a ventilator and I was conscious. I was blessed to get very good treatment and I was very impressed by all the sanitising products that they used, and that made me think that I should use my personal experience to start a line,” she told the South China Morning Post.
She named her line N.G.A., which stands for Never Go Alone, and partnered with a friend based in California to create formulas and scents online. She also has two other team members: one based in Nigeria and another based in Milan. She hired British design studio Layer to design her packaging.
Nguyen prattled on: “Before this happened to me, I never focused on hygiene products – they were always an afterthought. You obviously have wipes in the kitchen and stuff like that but I wanted to turn hygiene products into something beautiful that you celebrate. Most sanitisers are sticky and don’t feel good on your skin and you have to wash your hands afterwards. I wanted to create something like a perfume but that also disinfects.”
She continued: “I was always struggling to find my own entrepreneurial project. I’ve always loved fashion but I didn’t feel I was good at designing and then I had so much time without travelling and even though I felt weak physically, mentally I was very alive and had all these ideas.”
“The pandemic has taught us about self-awareness and well-being. Taking care of yourself is the new normal because in three years there could be another virus, so you have to improve your hygiene and protect yourself and wear a mask,” she said.
She also peppered in the requisite “saving the world” comments – in case there’s any ESG self-care SPACs looking for a company: “You can never please everyone. I’m doing this because I want to help other people and I plan to add philanthropic elements into the project going forward.”
She concluded: “You think of the darkest moments and live with more purpose, also because you know who your real friends are. I wake up every day and I walk 10,000 steps before 10am and I created a routine for me that’s very effective in order to prepare for the new normal.”
We were able to capture never before seen footage of her interview for those that would like to hear more about the details:
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 22:05 - Investing Legend Turns Apocalyptic: Bursting Of This "Great, Epic Bubble" Will Be "Most Important Investing Event Of Your Lives"
Investing Legend Turns Apocalyptic: Bursting Of This “Great, Epic Bubble” Will Be “Most Important Investing Event Of Your Lives”
Authored by Jeremy Grantham via GMO,
Waiting For The Last Dance – The Hazards of Asset Allocation In A Late-stage Major Bubble
Executive Summary
The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.
These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.
But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios. Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.
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“The one reality that you can never change is that a higher-priced asset will produce a lower return than a lower-priced asset. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can enjoy it now, or you can enjoy it steadily in the distant future, but not both – and the price we pay for having this market go higher and higher is a lower 10-year return from the peak.”
Most of the time, perhaps three-quarters of the time, major asset classes are reasonably priced relative to one another. The correct response is to make modest bets on those assets that measure as being cheaper and hope that the measurements are correct. With reasonable skill at evaluating assets the valuation-based allocator can expect to survive these phases intact with some small outperformance. “Small” because the opportunities themselves are small. If you wanted to be unfriendly you could say that asset allocation in this phase is unlikely to be very important. It would certainly help in these periods if the manager could also add value in the implementation, from the effective selection of countries, sectors, industries, and individual securities as well as major asset classes.
The real trouble with asset allocation, though, is in the remaining times when asset prices move far away from fair value. This is not so bad in bear markets because important bear markets tend to be short and brutal. The initial response of clients is usually to be shocked into inaction during which phase the manager has time to reposition both portfolio and arguments to retain the business. The real problem is in major bull markets that last for years. Long, slow-burning bull markets can spend many years above fair value and even two, three, or four years far above. These events can easily outlast the patience of most clients. And when price rises are very rapid, typically toward the end of a bull market, impatience is followed by anxiety and envy. As I like to say, there is nothing more supremely irritating than watching your neighbors get rich.
How are clients to tell the difference between extreme market behavior and a manager who has lost his way? The usual evidence of talent is past success, but the long cycles of the market are few and far between. Winning two out of two events or three out of three is not as convincing as a larger sample size would be. Even worse the earlier major market breaks are already long gone: 2008, 2000, or 1989 in Japan are practically in the history books. Most of the players will have changed. Certainly, the satisfaction felt by others who eventually won long ago is no solace for current pain experienced by you personally. A simpler way of saying this may be that if Keynes really had said, “The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent,” he would have been right.
I am long retired from the job of portfolio management but I am happy to give my opinion here: it is highly probable that we are in a major bubble event in the U.S. market, of the type we typically have every several decades and last had in the late 1990s. It will very probably end badly, although nothing is certain. I will also tell you my definition of success for a bear market call. It is simply that sooner or later there will come a time when an investor is pleased to have been out of the market. That is to say, he will have saved money by being out, and also have reduced risk or volatility on the round trip. This definition of success absolutely does not include precise timing. (Predicting when a bubble breaks is not about valuation. All prior bubble markets have been extremely overvalued, as is this one. Overvaluation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for their bursting.) Calling the week, month, or quarter of the top is all but impossible.
I came fairly close to calling one bull market peak in 2008 and nailed a bear market low in early 2009 when I wrote “Reinvesting When Terrified.” That’s far more luck than I could hope for even over a 50-year career. Far more typically, I was three years too early in the Japan bubble. We at GMO got entirely out of Japan in 1987, when it was over 40% of the EAFE benchmark and selling at over 40x earnings, against a previous all-time high of 25x. It seemed prudent to exit at the time, but for three years we underperformed painfully as the Japanese market went to 65x earnings on its way to becoming over 60% of the benchmark! But we also stayed completely out for three years after the top and ultimately made good money on the round trip.
Similarly, in late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, we rapidly sold down our discretionary U.S. equity positions then watched in horror as the market went to 35x on rising earnings. We lost half our Asset Allocation book of business but in the ensuing decline we much more than made up our losses.
Believe me, I know these are old stories. But they are directly relevant. For this current market event is indeed the same old story.
This summer, I said it was likely that we were in the later stages of a bubble, with some doubt created by the unique features of the COVID crash. The single most dependable feature of the late stages of the great bubbles of history has been really crazy investor behavior, especially on the part of individuals. For the first 10 years of this bull market, which is the longest in history, we lacked such wild speculation. But now we have it. In record amounts. My colleagues Ben Inker and John Pease have written about some of these examples of mania in the most recent GMO Quarterly Letter, including Hertz, Kodak, Nikola, and, especially, Tesla. As a Model 3 owner, my personal favorite Tesla tidbit is that its market cap, now over $600 billion, amounts to over $1.25 million per car sold each year versus $9,000 per car for GM. What has 1929 got to equal that? Any of these tidbits could perhaps be dismissed as isolated cases (trust me: they are not), but big-picture metrics look even worse.
The “Buffett indicator,” total stock market capitalization to GDP, broke through its all-time-high 2000 record. In 2020, there were 480 IPOs (including an incredible 248 SPACs2) – more new listings than the 406 IPOs in 2000. There are 150 non-micro-cap companies (that is, with market capitalization of over $250 million) that have more than tripled in the year, which is over 3 times as many as any year in the previous decade. The volume of small retail purchases, of less than 10 contracts, of call options on U.S. equities has increased 8-fold compared to 2019, and 2019 was already well above long-run average. Perhaps most troubling of all: Nobel laureate and long-time bear Robert Shiller – who correctly and bravely called the 2000 and 2007 bubbles and who is one of the very few economists I respect – is hedging his bets this time, recently making the point that his legendary CAPE asset-pricing indicator (which suggests stocks are nearly as overpriced as at the 2000 bubble peak) shows less impressive overvaluation when compared to bonds. Bonds, however, are even more spectacularly expensive by historical comparison than stocks. Oh my!
So, I am not at all surprised that since the summer the market has advanced at an accelerating rate and with increasing speculative excesses. It is precisely what you should expect from a late-stage bubble: an accelerating, nearly vertical stage of unknowable length – but typically short. Even if it is short, this stage at the end of a bubble is shockingly painful and full of career risk for bears.
I am doubling down, because as prices move further away from trend, at accelerating speed and with growing speculative fervor, of course my confidence as a market historian increases that this is indeed the late stage of a bubble. A bubble that is beginning to look like a real humdinger.
The strangest feature of this bull market is how unlike every previous great bubble it is in one respect. Previous bubbles have combined accommodative monetary conditions with economic conditions that are perceived at the time, rightly or wrongly, as near perfect, which perfection is extrapolated into the indefinite future. The state of economic excellence of any previous bubble of course did not last long, but if it could have lasted, then the market would justifiably have sold at a huge multiple of book. But today’s wounded economy is totally different: only partly recovered, possibly facing a double-dip, probably facing a slowdown, and certainly facing a very high degree of uncertainty. Yet the market is much higher today than it was last fall when the economy looked fine and unemployment was at a historic low. Today the P/E ratio of the market is in the top few percent of the historical range and the economy is in the worst few percent. This is completely without precedent and may even be a better measure of speculative intensity than any SPAC.
This time, more than in any previous bubble, investors are relying on accommodative monetary conditions and zero real rates extrapolated indefinitely. This has in theory a similar effect to assuming peak economic performance forever: it can be used to justify much lower yields on all assets and therefore correspondingly higher asset prices. But neither perfect economic conditions nor perfect financial conditions can last forever, and there’s the rub.
All bubbles end with near universal acceptance that the current one will not end yet…because. Because in 1929 the economy had clicked into “a permanently high plateau”; because Greenspan’s Fed in 2000 was predicting an enduring improvement in productivity and was pledging its loyalty (or moral hazard) to the stock market; because Bernanke believed in 2006 that “U.S. house prices merely reflect a strong U.S. economy” as he perpetuated the moral hazard: if you win you’re on your own, but if you lose you can count on our support. Yellen, and now Powell, maintained this approach. All three of Powell’s predecessors claimed that the asset prices they helped inflate in turn aided the economy through the wealth effect. Which effect we all admit is real. But all three avoided claiming credit for the ensuing market breaks that inevitably followed: the equity bust of 2000 and the housing bust of 2008, each replete with the accompanying anti-wealth effect that came when we least needed it, exaggerating the already guaranteed weakness in the economy. This game surely is the ultimate deal with the devil.
Now once again the high prices this time will hold because…interest rates will be kept around nil forever, in the ultimate statement of moral hazard – the asymmetrical market risk we have come to know and depend on. The mantra of late 2020 was that engineered low rates can prevent a decline in asset prices. Forever! But of course, it was a fallacy in 2000 and it is a fallacy now. In the end, moral hazard did not stop the Tech bubble decline, with the NASDAQ falling 82%. Yes, 82%! Nor, in 2008, did it stop U.S. housing prices declining all the way back to trend and below – which in turn guaranteed first, a shocking loss of over eight trillion dollars of perceived value in housing; second, an ensuing weakness in the economy; and third, a broad rise in risk premia and a broad decline in global asset prices (see Exhibit 1). All the promises were in the end worth nothing, except for one; the Fed did what it could to pick up the pieces and help the markets get into stride for the next round of enhanced prices and ensuing decline. And here we are again, waiting for the last dance and, eventually, for the music to stop.
EXHIBIT 1: BUBBLES – GREAT WHILE THEY LAST
Housing bubble as of 11/30/2011, Tech bubble as of 2/28/2003
Source: S&P 500 (Tech bubble); National Association of Realtors, U.S. Census Bureau (Housing bubble)Nothing in investing perfectly repeats. Certainly not investment bubbles. Each form of irrational exuberance is different; we are just looking for what you might call spiritual similarities. Even now, I know that this market can soar upwards for a few more weeks or even months – it feels like we could be anywhere between July 1999 and February 2000. Which is to say it is entitled to break any day, having checked all the boxes, but could keep roaring upwards for a few months longer. My best guess as to the longest this bubble might survive is the late spring or early summer, coinciding with the broad rollout of the COVID vaccine. At that moment, the most pressing issue facing the world economy will have been solved. Market participants will breathe a sigh of relief, look around, and immediately realize that the economy is still in poor shape, stimulus will shortly be cut back with the end of the COVID crisis, and valuations are absurd. “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” But remember that timing the bursting of bubbles has a long history of disappointment.
Even with hindsight, it is seldom easy to point to the pin that burst the bubble. The main reason for this lack of clarity is that the great bull markets did not break when they were presented with a major unexpected negative. Those events, like the portfolio insurance fiasco of 1987, tend to give sharp down legs and quick recoveries. They are in the larger scheme of things unique and technical and are not part of the ebb and flow of the great bubbles. The great bull markets typically turn down when the market conditions are very favorable, just subtly less favorable than they were yesterday. And that is why they are always missed.
Either way, the market is now checking off all the touchy-feely characteristics of a major bubble. The most impressive features are the intensity and enthusiasm of bulls, the breadth of coverage of stocks and the market, and, above all, the rising hostility toward bears. In 1929, to be a bear was to risk physical attack and guarantee character assassination. For us, 1999 was the only experience we have had of clients reacting as if we were deliberately and maliciously depriving them of gains. In comparison, 2008 was nothing. But in the last few months the hostile tone has been rapidly ratcheting up. The irony for bears though is that it’s exactly what we want to hear. It’s a classic precursor of the ultimate break; together with stocks rising, not for their fundamentals, but simply because they are rising.
Another more measurable feature of a late-stage bull, from the South Sea bubble to the Tech bubble of 1999, has been an acceleration of the final leg, which in recent cases has been over 60% in the last 21 months to the peak, a rate well over twice the normal rate of bull market ascents. This time, the U.S. indices have advanced from +69% for the S&P 500 to +100% for the Russell 2000 in just 9 months. Not bad! And there may still be more climbing to come. But it has already met this necessary test of a late-stage bubble.
It is a privilege as a market historian to experience a major stock bubble once again. Japan in 1989, the 2000 Tech bubble, the 2008 housing and mortgage crisis, and now the current bubble – these are the four most significant and gripping investment events of my life. Most of the time in more normal markets you show up for work and do your job. Ho hum. And then, once in a long while, the market spirals away from fair value and reality. Fortunes are made and lost in a hurry and investment advisors have a rare chance to really justify their existence. But, as usual, there is no free lunch. These opportunities to be useful come loaded with career risk.
So, here we are again. I expect once again for my bubble call to meet my modest definition of success: at some future date, whenever that may be, it will have paid for you to have ducked from midsummer of 2020. But few professional or individual investors will have been able to have ducked. The combination of timing uncertainty and rapidly accelerating regret on the part of clients means that the career and business risk of fighting the bubble is too great for large commercial enterprises. They can never put their full weight behind bearish advice even if the P/E goes to 65x as it did in Japan. The nearest any of these giant institutions have ever come to offering fully bearish advice in a bubble was UBS in 1999, whose position was nearly identical to ours at GMO. That is to say, somewhere between brave and foolhardy. Luckily for us though, they changed their tack and converted to a fully invested growth stock recommendation at UBS Brinson and its subsidiary, Phillips & Drew, in February 2000, just before the market peak. This took out the 800-pound gorilla that would otherwise have taken most of the rewards for stubborn contrariness. So, don’t wait for the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys to become bearish: it can never happen. For them it is a horribly non-commercial bet. Perhaps it is for anyone. Profitable and risk-reducing for the clients, yes, but commercially impractical for advisors. Their best policy is clear and simple: always be extremely bullish. It is good for business and intellectually undemanding. It is appealing to most investors who much prefer optimism to realistic appraisal, as witnessed so vividly with COVID. And when it all ends, you will as a persistent bull have overwhelming company. This is why you have always had bullish advice in a bubble and always will.
However, for any manager willing to take on that career risk – or more likely for the individual investor – requiring that you get the timing right is overreach. If the hurdle for calling a bubble is set too high, so that you must call the top precisely, you will never try. And that condemns you to ride over the cliff every cycle, along with the great majority of investors and managers.
What to Do?
As often happens at bubbly peaks like 1929, 2000, and the Nifty Fifty of 1972 (a second-tier bubble in the company of champions), today’s market features extreme disparities in value by asset class, sector, and company. Those at the very cheap end include traditional value stocks all over the world, relative to growth stocks. Value stocks have had their worst-ever relative decade ending December 2019, followed by the worst-ever year in 2020, with spreads between Growth and Value performance averaging between 20 and 30 percentage points for the single year! Similarly, Emerging Market equities are at 1 of their 3, more or less co-equal, relative lows against the U.S. of the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, we believe it is in the overlap of these two ideas, Value and Emerging, that your relative bets should go, along with the greatest avoidance of U.S. Growth stocks that your career and business risk will allow.
Good luck!
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:55 - China's New Defense Law Gives Military More Control Of War Powers
China’s New Defense Law Gives Military More Control Of War Powers
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
A new amendment to China’s defense law gives more control of the military to Beijing’s Central Military Commission (CMC), a defense body that oversees the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and is chaired by President Xi Jinping.
The amendment came into effect on January 1st and weakened the role of China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, in formulating military policy. According to The South China Morning Post, the new legislation adds “disruption” and “development interests” as grounds for the deployment of troops.
President Xi Jinping visits the Central Military Commission in 2017, via AP. Since CMC’s leadership is made up of China’s military brass, the new amendment gives more control of war powers to the PLA. Zeng Zhiping, a military law expert and former PLA colonel, explained to the Post how the new amendment works.
“The CMC is now formally in charge of making national defense policy and principles, while the State Council becomes a mere implementing agency to provide support to the military,” Zeng said.
And further according to South China Morning Post:
The legislation also specifically stresses the need to build a nationwide coordination mechanism for the mobilization of state-owned and private enterprises to take part in research into new defense technologies covering conventional weapons, as well as the non-traditional domains of cybersecurity, space and electromagnetics.
He compared the new policy to other countries that have more civilian control over their militaries. “Even in the US, the civilian-led defense ministry plays a more important role than their military top brass, the joint chiefs of staff,” he said.
The new law could allow China’s PLA to deploy more quickly to confront the US, whose warships are frequently sailing in waters near China’s coast. In 2020, the US stepped up its military presence in the region by increasing US Navy transits of the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. US military surveillance flights have also increased in the region.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:25 - Is China About To Devalue The Yuan: Local Banks Start Dumping Yuan
Is China About To Devalue The Yuan: Local Banks Start Dumping Yuan
In our market wrap note yesterday, we said that the Chinese Yuan surged to its strongest against the dollar since June 2018, rising above 6.50, and was now “at a critical level that has prompted volatility-inducing devaluations in the past.”
This was only the latest time in the past few weeks we have speculated that the recent surge in the dollar has put Beijing in the very unpleasant position of being forced to decide just how it will let some steam out of the soaring yuan, which is rapidly becoming a lead deflationary anchor dragging down the broader Chinese economy.
We didn’t have long to wait to get a very clear signal that Beijing is now actively contemplating a devaluation. In fact, it took just a few hours for China’s yuan to abruptly erase its overnight advance in a move early on Tuesday, when big state banks were seen suddenly dumping the yuan for the first time in years.
The yuan erased a gain of about 0.5% within an hour in late morning trade, and was at 6.4577 per dollar as of 2:21 p.m. in Shanghai. As Bloomberg first reported, the move came as a few big Chinese state banks actively offloaded the currency against the greenback after the yuan hit 6.43. Bloomberg was also kind enough to provide a translation for the cheap seats: “while the lenders could be taking profits on long-yuan positions, they could also be acting on behalf of the authorities to rein in the appreciation.”
For those who are confused about the significant of what just happened, all Chinese banks are effectively state-owned entities (SOEs), and everything they do is with the explicit preapproval of Beijing, which knows very well that the entire global community is scouring its market for signals such as this. This is important because Chinese banks always start intervening in FX when Beijing is seeking to telegraph to the world that it is now displeased with the strength of its currency, and any further gains will not be tolerated.
In other words, a sighting such as this, is usually a clear and present signal that a far more aggressive devaluation is imminent.
To be sure, while the recent plunge in the dollar has sent most emerging-market currencies higher recently, the yuan has also been bolstered by China’s fundamentals. The country’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic has been solid, and China is attracting strong capital inflows chasing the yuan’s wide yield premium over the rest of the world. The currency is now trading near a two-year high. Which however, is not at all what Beijing wants as it is scrambling to extend its export trade-driven rebound: after all, the stronger the yuan, the less competitive the country’s products on the global trade arena.
Pointing out the obvious, Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior emerging-markets strategist at Credit Agricole CIB said that “the pace of gains has been unsustainable and probably unacceptable to policy makers,” adding that he “wouldn’t be surprised if this correction was driven by agent banks buying the dollar.”
Translation: this is a mini state-mandated FX intervention. And if the yuan continues to rise – read, the dollar continues to tumble – then the mini intervention will mutate into a maxi devaluation.
That said, Beijing doesn’t have to go all August 2015 on the yuan, as China has several other tools at its disposal which increase in order of severity – starting with weaker fixings and ending with relaxation of capital curbs (and allowing bitcoin to trade again) – if it wishes to slow the rally. Just late last year, the authorities made it cheaper for traders to bet against the currency and allowed onshore investors to buy more overseas assets. That move, however, did not have much impact against a US currency that has been sliding at a spectacular fashion.
As such, this is Beijing’s official warning to the Fed: stop what you are doing, or the trade war will rapidly transform into a currency war as well.
Which is paradoxical, because looking ahead, the yuan will likely be supported by a potentially more stable relationship between Beijing and Washington under Joe Biden’s staunchly pro-China administration. Liu Li-gang, chief China economist at Citigroup Inc., said he expects the Chinese currency to appreciate to 6 per dollar by end-2021, a level unseen since 1993. Needless to say, Beijing will not be happy if Liu is right.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 21:05 - Save The Date! January 6th Is America's "Rendezvous With History"
Save The Date! January 6th Is America’s “Rendezvous With History”
Authored by Ben Garrison via GrrrGraphics.com,
Wednesday, January 6 is a red letter day. I’m sure many have the date circled on their new calendars. Probably in red ink. Soon it could be circled in fire.
It’s a protest day for many Trump supporters. They’ll be in Washington D.C. to help the president in his quest for justice. The election was blatantly stolen by the Democrat Socialists. The evidence is overwhelming, but the corporate media, the courts, and many in Congress are content to be led by a corrupt and demented swamp and basement-dwelling pedophile, China Joe Biden.
The big question is, will Vice President Mike Pence come through for Trump and challenge the electoral votes in key states? Will he stop the steal? We will all soon know, but I have my doubts. If Pence sides with Biden, then he’ll go down in history as the second Benedict Arnold. Trump should then initiate the Insurrection Act and arrest them all for attempting a coup. After all, they were aided by China and other foreign operatives. Trump should hand Pence a second envelope that says, “You’re Fired.” I hope I’m wrong about Pence, but I have my doubts about him. If he proves me wrong and sides with the president, I’ll be delighted.
January 6th can be a turning point in US history. It can be the day when patriots take not just a stand, but real action against the globalists who want a ‘great reset,’ which means America will live under a totalitarian system similar to communist China.
We don’t want a ’new normal’ that’s being forced upon us by tyrants. We want the regular constitutional normal. We The People want our Republic back.
Make America Great Again!
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:45 - What Is Behind Saudi's Shocking Decision To Cut 1MM Bpd In Oil Output Today? Goldman Explains
What Is Behind Saudi’s Shocking Decision To Cut 1MM Bpd In Oil Output Today? Goldman Explains
The first monthly OPEC+ meeting to decide on the group’s production ended with an unexpected, in fact shocking two-month agreement:
- Saudi announced an unexpected and unilateral production cut of 1 mb/d in February and March,
- Russia and Kazakhstan will instead increase output modestly to meet seasonal needs while
- other producers will remain at their January levels.
Of the three, the Saudi decision to cut production by 1 million barrels came as a shock to the market, sending oil sharply higher.
What has behind it? As Goldman’s commodity strategist Damien Courvalin explains, despite this bullish supply agreement, Saudi’s decision “likely reflects signs of weakening demand as lockdowns return, with our updated 1Q21 balance actually weaker than previously.”
That said, Saudi’s action and the prospect for a tight market in 2Q21, as the rebound in demand stresses the ability to restart production, will likely support prices in coming weeks, leading Goldman to reiterate its bullish oil view. As a result, the bank continues to recommend a long Dec-21 Brent trade (currently trading at $52/bbl vs. its $65/bbl forecast) and expect sustained backwardation and lower implied volatility. Courvalin also notes that “fundamentals do matter, but we see the recent recovery in refining margins and product cracks as premature and the best way to express the expected weakness in near-term oil demand.”
Here are more details from the Goldman note:
The most significant decision was Saudi’s pre-emptive measure to reduce output in the face of renewed lockdowns with OPEC+ production now expected below our prior forecast by 1.45 mb/d in February and 1.85 mb/d in March. Saudi’s decision surprised as global demand beat expectations in December on shallower and shorter EU lockdowns and resilient jet demand. Further, by allowing Russia to increase production, Saudi undermined its efforts since April to have every producer implement similar cuts, with the Kingdom solely taking a fiscal hit. Finally, by lifting prices to their highest levels since last March, Saudis risk extending the ongoing recovery in shale production, as WTI spot prices now at $50/bbl can allow for higher activity and positive free cash flows (although such a response would likely take time to materialize with producers cautious of further OPEC surprises).
This, according to Courvalin, leaves a large expected slowdown in global oil demand as the most rational explanation for Saudi’s cut, likely signaled through its term contract to Asian consumers where infections are rising quickly (Korea, Japan, South-East Asia).
Meanwhile, Goldman’s high-frequency indicator of oil demand (or lack thereof) suggests that the return of more aggressive lockdowns is already weighing on demand, and the bank is reflecting these headwinds in its balance, taking down January and February oil demand to 92.5 mb/d from an upward revised December demand level of 93.5 mb/d.
Separately, and from a geopolitical perspective, the transition to a likely less supportive US administration may also have led Saudi to adopt a more supportive stance towards other Middle East producers, as illustrated in both today’s unilateral cut and restoration of ties with Qatar.
As a result of today’s announcement, Goldman’s updated Q1 2021 balance is weaker than previously although, with prospects for a tighter market in 2Q21 as the Saudi announcement hints. This new OPEC+ path and the bank’s demand downgrade lead the bank to forecast a 1Q21 0.25 mb/d surplus vs. a commensurate deficit previously (only half offset by a tighter December). Importantly, OPEC+ March production level will still be low just as global demand starts rebounding sharply driven by warmer weather and rising vaccinations. This points to the group potentially struggling to ramp-up output quickly enough, with estimates currently reflecting a 1.3 mb/d deficit in April-July despite OPEC+ increasing production by 4 mb/d, a historically tall order.
On net, Goldman believes today’s outcome will help support prices in the face of demand risks given Saudi’s commitment to balance the market, and the potential for Saudi to cut more – now that they have tipped their hand – than demand actually disappoints, risks of a tighter 2Q21 balance and a growing consensus bullish outlook for crude fundamentals later this year.
Finally, for those asking, Goldman’s own year-end Brent forecast of $65/bbl is well above market forwards and consensus expectations.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:25 - Leaked Documents Reveal Chinese Regime’s Orders to Steal Foreign Technologies
Leaked Documents Reveal Chinese Regime’s Orders to Steal Foreign Technologies
By Alex Wu of the Epoch Times
A series of leaked government documents recently obtained by The Epoch Times reveal that Chinese authorities have funded projects that are aimed at obtaining foreign advanced technologies through partnerships with international research institutions. Public records show that China’s Ministry of Science and Technology is behind the efforts.
Budget for ‘Transferring’ Foreign Technologies
Hebei International Talent Exchange Association (also known as International Technology Transfer Center) was established in 1988 in Hebei Province. It has more than 200 international technical projects and more than 300 foreign experts, covering more than ten fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), information communication, biology, medical, and health.
The organization issued a report, “Hebei Provincial Budget Project Performance Evaluation Form” on Nov. 17, in which it explicitly states that the group aims to “introduce foreign advanced technology … and realize technology transfer [to China].”
To achieve that goal, the document specified that the organization would expand cooperation channels with at least 50 international organizations; set up a minimum of four international scientific and technological cooperation activities; maintain at least 50 foreign technology projects; obtain at least five cooperation intention agreements; and target 60 to 80 foreign technical experts for recruitment.
The report, “Hebei Provincial Budget Project Performance Evaluation Form,” listed the budget and goals for “transferring” foreign technology, with the official seal of approval of Hebei International Talent Exchange Association. (Provided by The Epoch Times) The report laid out a 1 million yuan (about $153,000) budget for the association to recruit talent from overseas and fund the projects they would set up in Hebei. It also projected a profit of 10 million yuan (about $1.53 million) that could be achieved by “transferring” foreign advanced technology to Chinese companies in Hebei.
The purpose of transferring foreign technology was mentioned in another report that was issued at the same time, titled, “Plan for the Use of Special Subsidy Funds for the Construction of Hebei International Science and Technology Cooperation Base.” The foreign technology would upgrade Hebei’s technology, improve products, and boost international competitiveness, the report said.
U.S.-based China affairs commentator Li Linyi told The Epoch Times that the initiative is a lucrative scheme and a blatant plan to steal advanced technology and intellectual property from other countries to benefit the Chinese regime.
According to public records, Hebei International Talent Exchange Association operates under the state-run China Association for International Exchange of Personnel (CAIEP). CAIEP is directly managed by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, an agency under the Chinese regime’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
Higher Education Institutions Are Required to ‘Transfer’ Foreign Technology
Hebei education authorities have also set requirements and goals for obtaining foreign technologies through its “2020 Work Plan of the International Technology Transfer Center of Hebei University of Technology,” issued in 2019. The Epoch Times obtained a copy of this document.
Some of the instructions include establishing an international technology transfer center website; “vigorously introducing” international high-tech talents, high-level management teams and advanced technology resources; “all-round” strengthening of international cooperation and technology transfer; and “improving various working systems in the international technology transfer work.”
The Hebei University of Engineering, for example, has set up partnerships with international schools to develop high-end scientific and technological projects, as outlined in its report, “Hebei International Joint Center Base Defense,” issued on Nov. 21 this year.
The website of Hebei International Joint Center Base at Hebei University of Engineering, listing its goals of obtaining technology from other countries and the technological advantages gained from partnering with foreign universities. (Screenshot of Hebei International Joint Center Base website) Under the section “Cooperative Units and Research Teams” of the document, the university partnered with Le Mans Université and Université Paris-Saclay in France, University College London in England, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The document noted that University College London is the world’s top science and technology university, ranking among the top 10 universities in the world; and Professor P. Picart at Le Mans Université is an authoritative expert on digital holographic display.
Sounding the Alarm
In October this year, at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Fifth Plenary Session, Party leader Xi Jinping emphasized “independent science and technology” and “strengthening basic research and focusing on original innovation” in his speech.
Analysts observed that Xi’s remarks are a response to the growing criticism from the international community regarding the CCP’s theft of intellectual property and technology from Western countries, especially the United States.
On Dec. 9, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a speech at Georgia Institute of Technology, in which he called out the CCP’s stealing of intellectual property and technologies from other countries. He stated, “Much of the high-end industrial base inside of China is based on stolen technology, or technology purchased from other nations. It’s not home-grown.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 20:05 - Amazon Buys 11 Boeing 767s From Delta, WestJet To Expand Amazon Air
Amazon Buys 11 Boeing 767s From Delta, WestJet To Expand Amazon Air
The world’s biggest online retailing monopoly, Amazon, announced on Tuesday that it is expanding its presence in the air freight logistics sector with the purchase of eleven Boeing 767-300 aircraft, which includes seven aircraft from Delta and four aircraft from WestJet. The new aircrafts will join the Prime Air network by 2022.
The four aircraft purchased from WestJet in March are currently undergoing passenger to cargo conversion and will join Amazon Air’s network in 2021. The seven aircraft from Delta will enter Amazon’s air cargo network in 2022.
The purchase price for the 11 Boeing’s remains undisclosed; Amazon said it will rely on third-party carriers to operate the new aircraft.
The full press release is below:
Today, Amazon announced its first-ever purchase of eleven Boeing 767-300 aircraft, expanding its fleet to continue to serve customers. The purchases include seven aircraft from Delta and four aircraft from WestJet, which will join the network by 2022. Amazon Air’s fleet expansion comes at a time when customers are relying on fast, free shipping more than ever.
“Our goal is to continue delivering for customers across the U.S. in the way that they expect from Amazon, and purchasing our own aircraft is a natural next step toward that goal,” said Sarah Rhoads, Vice President of Amazon Global Air. “Having a mix of both leased and owned aircraft in our growing fleet allows us to better manage our operations, which in turn helps us to keep pace in meeting our customer promises.”
Amazon Air plays a central role in delivering for customers by transporting items across longer distances in shorter timeframes. The four aircraft purchased from WestJet in March are currently undergoing passenger to cargo conversion and will join Amazon Air’s network in 2021, and the seven aircraft from Delta will enter Amazon’s air cargo network in 2022. These fleet additions will ensure added capacity in Amazon Air’s network for years to come. The company will continue to rely on third-party carriers to operate these new aircraft.
Amazon Air continues to expand globally to meet the needs of its growing customer base, while investing in jobs and sustainable solutions to power its network. Last year, Amazon launched its first-ever air hub at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany and new regional air operations at Lakeland Linder International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Richmond International Airport, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, Kahului Airport, Kona International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport and Louis Armstrong International Airport. This summer, Amazon Air announced its purchase of six million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel and has already invested in leading-edge electric ground service equipment and solar rooftop panels planned at some facilities. Since Amazon Air’s launch in 2016, Amazon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and created thousands of new jobs at Amazon Air locations across the U.S.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:45 - The Frogs Will Boil Themselves
The Frogs Will Boil Themselves
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
There’s a well-known old fable that describes a frog being boiled alive. It states that if a frog is dropped in boiling water, it will hop out. But if it’s placed in lukewarm water, it will be comfortable. Then, if the heat is turned up slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be boiled to death.
In political terms, this translates into a slow increase, say, the slow rise of taxation or the gradual removal of freedoms.
But there’s another way to boil the electorate of a country: have them become willing participants in their own demise.
This method is a common practice in many countries, particularly the US. Americans have repeatedly been conned into begging for their second amendment rights to be diminished.
The method is to make use of the media to shine a light on the horrific murder of innocents through the use of firearms.
In recent years, this effort has been ramped up through regular senseless massacres of people, particularly children, in public places, such as schools and movie theatres.
Whether or not these incidents are actually created by the ruling elite is a moot point. What matters is that their proliferation has been extremely effective in providing the media will the fodder to repeatedly ask, “When is the Government going to make the possession of guns illegal so that the killing will stop?”
Many citizens are wary of such suggestions, but countless others quickly take the bait and demand that the Government “do something.”
Eventually, this becomes a point of pride for many citizens — a badge of righteousness — for standing up for those who have been victims.
Through such efforts, the US constitution has slowly lost its ability to serve as a limitation to Government power. A proliferation of laws that redefine what the Constitution means has, over time, eviscerated the Constitution.
Not surprisingly, those who support this effort are largely liberal, which creates a backlash from those who are conservative and vehemently oppose any erosion of the Constitution.
Those who are liberal may reinforce their beliefs by watching propaganda networks on television and regularly pump up the dangers of the Constitution. Likewise, conservatives have their propaganda network, which can be counted on to reinforce their views.
Whichever side Americans take on such issues, they would be wise to keep an eye out for what may be the next development in this wrangle.
Those who dutifully watch the liberal “news” networks may soon see pundits despairing that the failings of the aging Constitution must be dealt with. It must be updated if it is to serve changing needs. After all, the Founding Fathers cannot be blamed that they didn’t foresee the existence of AK-47s. Surely, it falls to the present administration to “correct” the failings of the well-intentioned old document.
Conservatives, of course, are likely to be more cautious, but what we may see is for the pundits on their favoured network to express frustration that the Left is seeking to erode traditional values and must, at some point be stopped, or the country will be destroyed. There can be no question that the Founding Fathers were correct — that unless the Constitution and its amendments are not clarified once and for all as to what they were meant to express, American liberty is at stake.
Americans, like citizens of most countries, love a good battle between good and evil. Every four years, a massive three-ring circus is staged in which the political leader is decided and both sports teams – Democrats and Republicans – go all out in seeking a victory on the playing field.
However, in most cases, neither candidate is trustworthy or qualified for the job, but this is of no importance. The essence of the battle is not to select a wise and capable leader but to win.
Similarly, once the populace has been wound up on both sides to believe that only a pitched battle can “re-establish the Constitution” or “modernise the Constitution,” the battle shall be met.
At present, this eventuality may seem mere speculation. But then, the media campaign has not yet begun.
At present, all that exists is pundits in the media bemoaning the injustice of the present situation.
What is needed is the prediction of pundits that, whatever side an individual takes on the issue, his side is sure to win.
On the liberal side, social warriors must come out daily in the media with demands for change and the certainty of success once the battle has begun. On the conservative side, pundits need to guarantee that the battle will be won once and for all, but that the situation is in dire need of immediate attention, or all may be lost.
The result will not be immediate, but, with repetition, eventually, the American people on both sides of the fence may well not only suggest, but demand that the matter be sorted.
At that point, the Government may announce that a Constitutional Review will be undertaken. It would not matter that most of those making the demand are the pundits on the media networks. What would be presented would be that “a majority of Americans demand that the review take place as soon as possible.”
Although at the time, the propaganda may imply that the review will be focused on one part of the Constitution, such as the Second Amendment, Americans will soon discover that the entire document is up for grabs. Under the terms of the review, all facets of the Constitution may be questioned.
Then what would the outcome be?
Each side will hope that their elected representatives will emerge as the heroes, but that is not how politics works.
In truth, elected leaders do not seek to serve the public but to dominate them. Invariably, their recommendations for change will be whatever transfers greater power to themselves.
Both Democratic and Republican members will argue forcefully for the rights of the American citizen. However, in the end, a “compromise” shall be made — one in which the rights of the populace are diminished and the Government has new powers to allow it to bypass the electorate in the future.
If this does occur, the public will, in effect, “boil themselves.” They will have demanded that the Government act, and, when the dust has settled, each side will claim some sort of victory but will fail to understand that they have brought about their own loss of rights.
It is hoped that, when the day comes that a Constitutional Review is proposed, Americans refuse to take the bait.
* * *
Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay. In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s. Click here to download the free PDF now.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:25 - Here's How The FBI Tracked Down Ghislaine Maxwell
Here’s How The FBI Tracked Down Ghislaine Maxwell
Former Jeffrey Epstein ‘madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, following a raid on her secluded mansion in New Hampshire – despite going to great lengths to conceal her whereabouts.
According to a new court document revealed by the Daily Beast, however, the FBI was able to track down the accused child sex-trafficker using a “stingray” device to track down her mobile phone.
Before the feds busted Ghislaine Maxwell, they tracked her to a New Hampshire hideaway using her cellphone data, according to a newly unsealed court filing.
The British socialite and accused accomplice of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had opened a mobile account under the name “G Max” and used it to communicate with phones belonging to her rumored husband Scott Borgerson, her sister Isabel, and one of her lawyers, Laura Menninger, the document states. -Daily Beast
The filing – an affidavit in support of a search warrant application, was filed by the FBI on July 1, 2020, the day before Maxwell was arrested at her Bradford mansion. She stands accused of grooming three girls as young as 14-years-old for Epstein in the mid-1990s as part of an international sex-trafficking operation that lasted for years. Maxwell faces trial this summer.
The affidavit also reveals an earlier attempt to locate Maxwell based on a New York search warrant to retrieve historical cell site data for the disgraced socialite’s cellphone account within one mile of her location, however in their application for the new warrant, the DOJ says they couldn’t locate her in New Hampshire.
“The FBI does not know Maxwell’s current location and accordingly requires the information sought in this application in order to locate and arrest Maxwell,” reads the filing.
The New Hampshire warrant allowed the FBI to “use an investigative device or devices capable of broadcasting signals that will be received by” Maxwell’s phone “or receiving signals from nearby cellular devices,” including Maxwell’s device.”
“Such a device may function in some respects like a cellular tower, except that it will not be connected to the cellular network and cannot be used by a cell phone to communicate with others,” the affidavit states, adding that the device would not intercept her phone’s calls, texts, and other electronic communications and data.
These details seem to indicate that the FBI used a “stingray” device, also known as an “IMSI catcher,” to nab Maxwell. The portable equipment, which can fit inside a briefcase, simulates a cell tower and forces mobile phones in the immediate vicinity to connect to it instead of the actual tower. Once it connects, the stingray captures the phone’s exact location and the registered user’s identifying information. –Daily Beast
According to the affidavit, Maxwell shares a joint bank account with her husband, tech CEO Scott Borgerson, and that her Amazon account sent him “multiple packages within approximately the last year.”
Given that it’s common knowledge that anyone’s cell phone can be tracked if a government is motivated enough, we suspect Maxwell simply thought she was untouchable.
In seeking release on bail – which has since been denied – Maxwell indicated that she had a net worth of approximately $22.5 million, all of which she was willing to pledge for her release.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:15 - Human Rights Group Exposes China's Network Of Secret Political Prisons Where 2 Canadians Are Being Held
Human Rights Group Exposes China’s Network Of Secret Political Prisons Where 2 Canadians Are Being Held
Following some rumblings late last week in the FT, which noted that Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire and Alibaba co-founder (and former Chairman) who recently had a disastrous falling out with the CCP, had apparently been fired from his own show, the western media apparently only just noticed on Sunday night that Ma hasn’t been seen publicly in 2 months.
The story immediately sparked speculation about Ma’s whereabouts – speculation that was exacerbated by the defeating silence from Beijing (the CCP essentially ignored the story while China’s subservient media and its army of censors went to work).
On Twitter, reporters likened the apparent kidnapping of Ma (presumably by CCP thugs, as many assumed he might already be living in a reeducation camp, or one of China’s many ‘secret prisons’) to the US federal government ordering the sudden arrest of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg (on dubious charges).
But in the pages of the FT, the paper’s reporters pointed out that Ma’s disappearance isn’t really that revolutionary, and that Beijing has been using the CCP’s rule over the law to detain not just domestic dissidents, but foreigners as well. Beijing has ramped up these tactics over the last 2 years, since two Canadians – diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor – were arrested in late 2018 on national security related charges. Accused of spying, the men were confined to secret prisons, where they were subjected to torture, denied contact with family and Canadian diplomatic officials.
It’s widely believed the two men were detained in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, himself a prominent businessman. However, while Meng has spent most of this time on house arrest, Spavor and Kovrig have been treated abominably.
As the world waits to learn the fate of the two Canadians, for the first time, the FT has published details about the program under which Spavor, Kovrig and tens of thousands of others have been detained across mainland China. The information was reportedly provided by Swedish human-rights group Safeguard Defenders.
Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and entrepreneur Michael Spavor are among almost 30,000 people who have been held in the facilities from 2013-19, according to Safeguard Defenders, a human rights group co-founded by Swedish citizen Peter Dahlin, who was himself held in a secret prison.
Activists and former diplomats are urging the international community to maintain an assertive approach to Beijing, arguing that quiet diplomacy has proven ineffective. The Canadians were detained in December 2018 following the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of the telecom group’s founder. Ms Meng was held after the US issued an extradition request over alleged violations of sanctions against Iran and has been living under house arrest since 2018.
Huawei has asserted that she is innocent of the charges. Mr Kovrig and Mr Spavor have spent six months in secret prisons under a programme started in 2013 known as “residential surveillance at a designated location” and were only allowed to meet consular officials once during that time.
While the program described by Safeguard Defenders reportedly began in 2013, China has a long history of detaining foreign nationals, sometimes for its own ends, and sometimes in retaliation. The nationalities of those detained include Brits and Aussies, among others.
“It’s been nearly 50 years since I was held, and 50 years later we’re having the same thing again,” said Anthony Grey, a British journalist who was held under house arrest for two years from 1967. Mr Grey was one of a dozen UK nationals detained following the arrest of a group of Chinese journalists in Hong Kong, who were alleged to have violated emergency regulations during violent protests and riots in the city, then under British rule.
Mr Grey was released after several of the Chinese journalists had served their jail sentences. China has also arrested citizens of Australia, with which it has had fraught relations in recent years. Most recently, Beijing detained Cheng Lei, a journalist who worked for Chinese state television, in August, after Australian intelligence staff raided the homes of Chinese journalists in the country. Individuals detained on national security suspicions are typically held under RSDL for up to six months.
Safeguard Defenders says about 400 people were taken into detention in 2013, the first year the programme was launched, increasing to more than 6,000 in 2019. It says detainees are abused psychologically and tortured, with tactics including keeping lights on in cells continuously and sleep deprivation.
Data provided by the group shows how China’s secret prison population has soared in recent years.
One issue with China’s secret prison system is that laws in China are essentially whatever the CCP says they are at any given time.
People can be held for months while authorities investigate them.
Chinese police can detain people for long periods without evidence outside of the RSDL system. In 2013, corporate investigators Peter Humphrey, a UK citizen, and his Chinese-born American wife Yu Yingzeng were held for almost two years, while police tried to force them to confess to a variety of crimes. They denied all allegations.
“We have a new rising power which is acting as a bully, and is building up an inventory of prisoners who become bargaining chips in its negotiations with countries on almost anything,” said Mr Humphrey. China’s supporters see its actions as commensurate with other countries’.
Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei, believes the charges against his daughter are politically motivated and has recommended the book The American Trap by Frédéric Pierucci, a French former executive at power group Alstom, about his jailing on extraterritorial corruption charges in the US when General Electric was trying to take over part of the French company. Mr Pierucci has alleged that Washington uses extraterritorial laws to attack countries competing with US strategic industries.
Another group interviewed by the FT highlighted the risks associated with Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance toward detentions and leveraging them for political purposes.
Charlie Parton, a former British diplomat and now at RUSI, a security think-tank, spearheaded the #FreeChinaHostages campaign, urging people to send Christmas cards to the detainees to Chinese embassies worldwide. “One aim is to show the world the nature of the beast. Despite propounding ideas of win-win and shared humanity, the Chinese Communist party is an unpleasant organisation,” he said.
But with COVID-19 ravaging its economy, the EU is brushing all this aside, and embracing a new trade deal with China that many have warned will make the bloc subservient to Beijing.
Or a
Tyler Durden
Tue, 01/05/2021 – 19:05
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