- Livid Luongo Lashes Out At Democrat "Depravity" Playing Out In Real-Time
Livid Luongo Lashes Out At Democrat “Depravity” Playing Out In Real-Time
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 23:15Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
It is one thing to know your opponents have no soul. It is quite another to watch in real time their depravity play out with gleeful disdain.
Anyone saying that what is happening right now in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan etc. is not a conscious effort to rig an election is either a victim of propaganda or being willfully obtuse.
Because they told us this is what would happen. Through the Transition Integrity Project and bread crumbs left throughout the campaign, we knew it would come to this.
For weeks I’ve been saying I hope Trump’s performance is strong enough and his coattails long enough to preclude the Democrats and The Davos Crowd from trying to pull off the theft of the election.
That they would see the magnitude of the problem in front of them and be stopped short by little things like math.
And then realize that even if they did try and cheat it would be so transparent that nothing good for them would be gained by it. But they didn’t listen.
Trump almost pulled it off. His numbers across the board were excellent, stunning even given everything that’s happened.
He may yet pull this out and I support any and all efforts to do so, but it is looking quite grim today.
The potential is there for the Republicans to pick up as many as twelve seats in the House while holding the Senate if not picking up a seat, depending on how the courts rule on the already well-documented fraud.
Coattails that long are prima facia evidence that what’s happening with the presidential election is fraud. I won’t go into the list of red flags here, others have done a far better job (and are, frankly, more entertaining), but they are big enough and red enough to get even the laziest, porn-besotted bull in the world angry.
And that’s what should be scaring the crap out of everyone on ‘the Left’ today. Because as we heard yesterday, with coattails that long and the amount of obscene behavior on display, the remaining members of the Democratic caucus in the House are scared… and not just for their political lives.
If we run this race again we will get fucking torn apart again in 2022, Spanberger says
— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) November 5, 2020
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in damage-control mode, saying “but we held the House” — which they were supposed to expand their majority in — and are “on track to win the presidency,” which no one will take even remotely seriously.
I’ve had visions of seeing Pelosi dragged out of the Capitol by her expensive dyed hair choking on her dentures while being arraigned for sedition, but her getting beaten with the ‘awesome power of the Speaker’s gavel’ and lynched by her own caucus for incompetence will be even more delicious.
At around 2am Tuesday evening I realized that they were actually going to do this and I texted a friend the next morning. His response?
“Civil war it is then.”
There can be no other response to this from men and women of character. Exhaust every legal means possible, certainly, but remember that the courts are as corrupt as the county governments. Fear of reprisal makes men weak.
The one thing Trump said in his post-election remarks that rang so true and with me and should ring true with every libertarian-leaning person (left or right) alive, that the process itself is corrupting. It corrupts everything it touches.
Four years of the Democrats and the Media screaming about Russian collusion and undermining the legitimacy of Donald Trump inspired thousands of people to become corrupt poll workers, mailmen, supervisors of elections, party operatives and the like.
And they obviously feel justified in this. They are, after all, the heroes of their own stories whose motives are pure and whose hearts are in the right place.
If we just get rid of Orange Man Bad, everything wrong with America will be gone. Scapegoating is as old as mankind but it doesn’t work anymore now that we’ve internalized the story from the scapegoat’s point of view, Christ.
So, all they have now is the unquenchable envy of Marxism which burns until it consumes everyone in retribution or they are put down like rabid dogs. That’s what is on display in these counting centers.
On the other hand, even Trump’s detractors had to admit the guy did inspired work to try and bring as many people under his tent as possible. To right the wrongs they see in the most non-violent way possible, voting.
But if that’s not good enough, if the message sent wasn’t strong enough through the ballot box, then that lesson will be taught in a far uglier way.
This is why I excoriated the libertarians the other day. I could see this coming. Either cooler heads prevail or the grievances get settled with violence. It’s our job to be the voice in between, not sit on the sidelines like high school band nerds sitting through a football game.
From a market perspective the threat of a marginally-empowered Harris presidency with he slimmest House majority any party has held in decades and a divided Senate means nothing gets done until the mid-terms.
And any attempt by Harris and Obama to legislate through Executive Order will result in even more dramatic events than we’ve seen to date, including secession.
This is why Bitcoin, gold, silver and U.S. Treasuries exploded to the upside. Big money moved into the most liquid assets, UST’s, while the marginal flow piled into safe havens and those worried about cross-border capital controls are running into Bitcoin and cryptos.
Everyone is holding their collective breath while we grind towards the Great Reset with most of the first world either under lockdown over last year’s flu or paralyzed by political shenanigans which makes the U.S. look like Venezuela.
The rising euro is a function of the lockdowns and the local need for liquidity. The spasming bonds markets blew out a lot of carry and interest rate trades this week. While the dollar looks like it’s getting killed, what’s really happening is trades betting on Harris destroying capital have reversed.
And the focus now turns to the wholesale destruction of European economies. Oh well, Europe was a good thing while it lasted. Enjoy the return of feudalism, folks, maybe there will be something left for me to visit before I die.
We still have our guns, FYI.
And this is why Trump isn’t going anywhere. The Deplorables now have to become The Ungovernables. No more negotiations, discussions, turning the other cheek, etc.
Ungovernable. Just say no to Commies.
What’s the point of voting or even democracy at all if a few dozen angry black election officials in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta can decide the entire thing?
— Roosh (@rooshv) November 6, 2020
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Hey man, don’t let the midwit, white women off the hook there… in this Civil War race has nothin’ to do with it.
Because no matter what vote totals you manufacture or political/judicial arms you twist no one can rule for long without the consent of the governed.
This is not a LARP nor a drill. It is a simple statement of fact.
If the men who keep the engine of the world running refuse to show up one day, the God of Power the Marxists all worship will vanish like Hillary’s emails.
Ayn Rand wasn’t wrong about everything, folks.
This is particularly true when nearly all of those men are armed and are the ones that grow the food, treat the water, patrol the streets and keep the lights on.
The legal case is being built now to go to the State Legislatures, who are the ones who actually decide whose electors go to the Electoral College, and invalidate the votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, at a minimum.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct.”
LEGISLATURE, not governor, AG, or SecState.
Will GOP state legislatures of PA WI MI do their duty? If you live in those states, demand they act!
PA & WI pic.twitter.com/vG4wEcKabF
— Jim Jatras (@JimJatras) November 6, 2020
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Getting those Republican-controlled legislatures to throw out the suggested results of a tainted election is exactly why the Electoral College exists. It is the last defense against mob rule and the corrupting nature of politics. The commies in the DNC and The Davos Crowd don’t like to hear that and frankly don’t care but that is the reality of it.
That’s Trump’s path to the presidency at this point, because the votes will be tallied to ensure that he not only loses but lose by a large enough ‘electoral vote’ majority to nullify any rulings by the Supreme Court.
Pelosi is prepared to invoke the 20th Amendment if there is no resolution on Inauguration day, January 20th through an act of Congress. This is why many House seats have not been called even though they are over.
She made her choice. So did the all the people currently engaged in this theft. Now the nature of the State is clear for a majority of people to see.
Civil War it is, then. Molon Labe.
* * *
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- You Can Now Pay $125,000 A Ticket For An Underwater Expedition To The Titanic
You Can Now Pay $125,000 A Ticket For An Underwater Expedition To The Titanic
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 22:45Today in “proof that the wealth gap is widening further and that people have too much money on their hands” news…
The Titanic, more than 100 years after sinking while traveling from England to New York in 1912, is once again being turned into a tourist destination. Hopefully, this time around it works out a little better.
Yes, for $125,000 per ticket, you can now go back and re-live the world’s most famous maritime disaster, according to Sputnik News. In fact, there may be something fitting about re-living a massive disaster in 2020, but we digress.
US civilian undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions is planning the trips for May 2021. The company is reportedly planning on six different dives to the wreck. They aim not only to cash in from tourists, but also to “conduct scientific research on sea life around the Titanic and create a 3-D model of its debris”.
Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate Expeditions, told Bloomberg: “All the bones are gone. There are no bodies down there. There are boots and shoes and clothes that show where people were 100 years ago, and that is very somber.”
Actually it sounds kind of refreshing, relative to 2020 so far.
He continued: “If this was just another money-losing wealthy person’s activity, I don’t see how it scales. We don’t take passengers, we don’t do trips, we don’t do rides. We’re doing an expedition.”
Those who pony up the cash for the trip will have to pass an interview process, the company’s dive chief said: “We don’t want someone who is used to being catered to—a prima donna. We don’t have chocolates on the pillow.”
Rush also said that half of the people who have already booked tickets are also already booked as tourists for Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 per person journey past the borders of space (because of course they have). Two ticket holders have even scaled Everest. “We have others who have not done a lot of adventure travel or have done minimally—a safari, or they have been to Antarctica,” he said.
The trip will begin in Canada and will then sail 8 days to the Titanic’s wreckage. From there, there will be a 6 to 8 hour dive of the wreck.
- Gridlock – Biden May Or May Not Win, But Trump Remains 'President' Of Red America
Gridlock – Biden May Or May Not Win, But Trump Remains ‘President’ Of Red America
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 22:15Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
One clear outcome of the U.S. election was the collapse of the promised ‘Blue Wave’ – an implosion that marks the ‘beginning of the end’ to a powerful spell enthralling the West. It was the delusion which Ron Chernow, the acclaimed U.S. presidential historian, gave credence, as he contemptuously dismissed America’s “topsy-turvy moment” as purely ephemeral, and a “surreal interlude in American life”: No longer can it be said that there is one ‘normal’. Win or lose the White House, Red Trumpism remains as ‘President’ for half America.
Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration – a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics – to a reassuring ‘sanity’ of facts, science and truth. Biden, it was hoped, would be the agency over-lording a crushing electoral landslide that would terminate irrevocably Trump’s rude interruption of the ‘normal’. Biden supporters were rallied, Mike Lind, the American academic and author has observed, around the idea of America moving toward a ‘managed’ society – based on ‘science’ – that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class.
Over time, Lind suggests, American society would begin to depart more, and more easily, from its republican roots, through a process already underway: via attempts to alter the Constitutional order, and other rules, to bring about a change in the way America is governed.
The notion however, of what America – as Idea – now constitutes, has fractured into two tectonic plates, moving apart in very different directions – and likely to move even further apart as each ‘plate’ remains convinced that ‘it won’ – and the sweetness of victory has been stolen.
The fracturing of the ‘One Normal’, by contrast, provides some kind of respite to much of the globe.
The fact remains that the election has produced a result in which it is abundantly clear that one half of the American electorate precisely voted to oust the other half. It is gridlock – with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party, and the House of Representatives and White House (possibly) in the hands of the other. As Glenn Greenwald warns:
No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.
Though the maths and maps suggests Biden will likely reach 270 Electoral votes, the old saying ‘It ain’t over ’till it’s over’, holds true. The electoral vote scenarios in the key ‘swing states’ would only apply if there is no litigation, fraud or theft. However all three are in play – If you are stuffing the ballot box, you first wait to see what the regular vote is, so that you know how many votes you ‘need’ (mathematical anomalies aside) to push your candidate over the top. Trump, somewhat rashly, gave out the GOP vote calculations at 02.30 on Wednesday, and hey-presto, loads of absentee ballots suddenly arrived at certain polling stations at around 04.00. That seems to have happened in Wisconsin, where over 100,000 Biden votes appeared seemingly out of nowhere on a flash drive delivered by hand from a Democratic district. That put Biden ahead in Wisconsin – but litigation is in process. Likewise, it appears that a huge “absentee ballot” dump appeared in Michigan that heavily favored Biden.
This is just the beginning of a new and more uncertain phase that could go on for weeks. It may be that ultimately Congress will have to certify and make the final determination in late January. Meanwhile, there are some things we know with much higher certainty: The Republican majority in the Senate may hold until the 2024 election. So, even if Biden wins, his agenda will not hold through 2024.
A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one: He or she cannot make claim to the ‘will of the majority’. Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent ‘the nation’. Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a ‘united people’.
“There is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart,” David French notes in a new book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. French — an anti-Trump conservative — argues that America’s divisions are so great, and the political system so poorly designed to handle them, that secession may eventually be the result: “If we keep pushing people and pushing people and pushing people, you cannot assume that they won’t break”, he writes. (A 2018 poll found that nearly a quarter of each party – Democrat and Republican – characterized the opposing party as “evil”).
An ideological split, and the concomitantly contested America as Idea has huge geo-political implications, reaching well beyond America itself – and principally for Europe’s élites. European leaders did not see it coming when Trump was elected in 2016. They misjudged Brexit. And this year, they misread U.S. politics once again. They yearned for a Biden win, and they (still) fail to see the connection between the popular rebellion of Red under Mr. Trump, and the angry protests occurring across Europe against lockdown.
Separating tectonic plates – more strategically – usually signal a kind of dualism that betokens civil conflict. In other words, their separation and moving apart turns into an ideological struggle for the nature of society and its institutional fabric.
Historian, and former War College Professor, Mike Vlahos warns (echoing Lind), that, “there is, here: more of a hidden – and thus in a sense, occult struggle – by which over time, societies begin to depart more, and more easily, from their roots. The western dominant élites presently are seeking to cement their hold over society [moving towards a ‘managed’ society]: To have full control over the direction of society, and, of course, a framework of rule that protects their wealth.”
“Quite to the surprise of everyone, and given that the Republicans are being represented by a billionaire who has a great many friends in Manhattan – the Wall Street donors to the two campaigns, outnumber Trump’s donors for Biden by 5-to-1”.
Why, Vlahos asks, would Wall Street invest in a man – Biden – and in a Party, ostensibly seeking to move America toward this ‘managed’ progressive society? Is it because they are convinced of a need radically to restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations? Is this then Vlahos’ occult struggle?
Many of the élite hold that we are at that monumental inflection point at this moment – In a nutshell, their narrative is simply this: the planet is already economically and demographically over-extended; the infinite economic expansion model is bust; and the global debt and government entitlement expenditure bubble too, is set to pop at the same moment.
Mike Vlahos notes that in a curious way this American story mirrors that of ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic – with on the one hand, the élite Roman class, and on the other, the Populares, as Red Americans’ equivalent:
“This is in fact the dual story of Rome in the last century of the Republic, and it tracks very well — with the transformation going on today [in the U.S.] — and it is a transformation … The society which emerged at the end of the Roman Revolution, and civil war … had too, a totally dominant élite class.
“This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.
“… today American inequality is as great as in the period right before the French Revolution, and is mirrored in what was happening to Rome in that long century of transformation. The problem we have right now, and which is going to make this revolution more intense, is I think, the cynical conclusion and agenda of Blue to just leave behind the Americans they do not need [in the New Economy] – which is to say all of Red America, and to put them into a situation of hardship and marginalization, where they cannot coalesce, to form a rival — as it were — Popular Front.
“What I think what we are seeing here [in the U.S.] is profound: American society – emerging from this passage, is going to be completely different. And frankly, it already feels different. It already feels – as it has felt for the past four years – that we are in a rolling civil war norm now, in which deep societal strife is now the normal way in which we handle transfers of power. Issues will be [momentarily] resolved, with the path of society [painfully] staked out through violent conflict. That is likely to be our path for decades ahead.
“The problem with that in the shorter term, is that there is still enough of the nation aroused and ready to fight this process. The problem: Can the last energies of the Old Republic still be harnessed against this seemingly inevitable, transformation?”
A ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is the only way by which to ‘square this circle’, according to this mindset. The Reset is purposefully aimed to disrupt all areas of life, albeit on a planetary scale. Shock therapy, as it were, to change the way we humans think of ourselves, and our relationship with the world. The Great Reset looks to a supply-side ‘miracle’, achieved through full-spectrum automation and robotics. A world where the money is digital; the food is lab-grown; where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies; and everyday existence is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts.
- China Leapfrogs US With World's First 6G Satellite Amid Raging Tech War
China Leapfrogs US With World’s First 6G Satellite Amid Raging Tech War
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 21:45As the US’ tech war with China continues to rage, China has leapfrogged the US in satellite telecommunication technology with the successful launch of the world’s first sixth-generation satellite into space.
The experimental satellite containing advanced telecommunications technology was launched Friday into low Earth orbit from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northern Shanxi Province, reported Asia Times.
A Long March-6 carrier rocket’s payload consisted of the 6G satellite and 13 other satellites. A video of the launch was published on Twiter via the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
The “#UESTC” satellite (Star Era-12), the first #6G test satellite in the world and first one named after the university since its establishment, was successfully lifted off at Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center and entered the scheduled orbit on the morning of Nov. 6. pic.twitter.com/ouM2rpC7pS
— UESTC-电子科技大学 (@UESTC1956) November 6, 2020
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The satellite, developed jointly by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology and Beijing MinoSpace Technology, will be used in a pilot testing program to trial 6G technology in space.
According to Yicai Media Group, 6G is more than 100 times faster than 5G – enables seamless transmission, longer distances, faster speeds, and smaller power output from space to land-based communication devices.
6G technology is still in the beginning stages, but Friday’s launch appears to show China has moved ahead of the US in space-based testing. Many hurdles are still expected with the technology as testing will start near term.
The launch comes as the US and China are locked in a heated tech war. In 2019, President Trump tweeted the obvious: America must step up its efforts to develop and deploy cutting edge tech or face getting “left behind.”
“I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………”
- Trump Campaign To Challenge Mail-In Ballots Counted In Absence Of GOP Observers In Battlefield States
Trump Campaign To Challenge Mail-In Ballots Counted In Absence Of GOP Observers In Battlefield States
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 21:15Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times,
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign will launch a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to challenge the mail-in ballots that have been counted without Republican poll watchers onsite.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney announced Saturday the lawsuit during a press conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with several Republican poll watchers who were prevented from entering the poll sites or the rights of poll-watching were blocked.
A federal lawsuit will be filed on Monday in Pennsylvania and more expected in other states.
“We’re going to file a federal lawsuit that will cover here [Philadelphia] and Pittsburgh, and we will have as many witnesses as the court needs. Right now, it could be as many as 90 witnesses,” Giuliani said.
Several witnesses joined Giuliani during the press conference, all are local Philadelphia residents.
Lisette Tarragano, one of the witnesses, said she was never allowed to enter the polling site along with other five to six Republican poll watchers.
“I was never brought in. Actually, I never got past the first identification stage, they kept saying that mine as well as five or six other Republicans, their names hadn’t been entered into the system,” she said.
Two other poll watchers, Darrell Brooks and Matt Silver said they were kept 15 to 20 feet away from the ballots.
Silver also alleged that some unusual ballot boxes were witnessed inside the polling site.
“There seem to be at least certain boxes seem to be in the same unusual pen, and seem to have very similar handwriting. Some boxes were normal, some boxes were like that,” he said.
The Biden campaign, the Office of Philadelphia City Commissioners, the election division of Allegheny county government, and the Pennsylvania Department of State didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
It was reported that a Republican poll watcher was temporarily blocked on Election Day in Philadelphia.
Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, admitted that the one poll watcher was prevented from entering the polling site on Nov. 3.
“The mistake was corrected, and the guy was admitted,” he said, claiming it was an isolated incident.
A poll watcher in Philly was just wrongfully prevented from entering the polling place#StopTheSteal pic.twitter.com/iJTFtRk0Id
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) November 3, 2020
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During the election night, Trump led when the ballot canvassing started in several swing states including Pennsylvania. But the lead was diluted by the lately-counted mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden took a slight lead after the mail-in ballots were counted.
Because the results are very close and several lawsuits are ongoing over the election outcome in several battlefield states, it’s more and more clear that this election will be settled through the judicial system.
The expected lawsuit by the Trump campaign will start another battle line over the outcome of the election in some swing states: mail-in ballots counted without Republican observers.
Over the past few days, Trump has been vocal over the need to protect the sanctity of the ballot box while claiming that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election from him due to efforts to count late-arriving ballots, which he alleges are “illegal.” He and his legal teams have been arguing that mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 but received after election day should not be counted and that votes that were counted without Republican observers present in the ballot-counting centers should also be considered “illegal votes.”
The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Friday ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day.
- China Deploys Trash-Collecting Robots Amid Automation Wave
China Deploys Trash-Collecting Robots Amid Automation Wave
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 20:45A “smart garbage sorting robot” was recently launched on the streets in eastern China, able to pick up and sort trash for an entire workday.
China’s national newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a video this week showing the robot cruising down the sidewalk in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province on Oct. 28, identifying trash, then using its robotic arm to pick up the debris. It was reported the robot could operate for eight hours before the next charge, with the ability to pick up a total of 38.5 pounds of trash.
A smart garbage sorting robot was launched in Hangzhou, E China’s Zhejiang. Supported by visual learning and navigational positioning techs, the robot can work for 8hrs straight, pick up and sort 17.5kg of garbage with an identification accuracy rate of 98% on recyclable trash. pic.twitter.com/SwGiI4Imnb
— People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) November 3, 2020
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Trash picking robots in China is just more evidence of how automation and artificial intelligence will displace millions of jobs, not only in China but worldwide by the end of the decade.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report in October warning that robots could displace an estimated 85 million jobs by 2025.
“Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double disruption’ scenario for workers,” WEF wrote.
“In addition to the current disruption from the pandemic-induced lockdowns and economic contraction, technological adoption by companies will transform tasks, jobs, and skills by 2025.”
A future ruled by robots would likely result in policymakers worldwide enacting some form of People’s QE.
- The Kafka Election: Finding A Way Out Of The Maze
The Kafka Election: Finding A Way Out Of The Maze
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 20:15Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,
The 2020 election is a nightmare from which I — along with millions of others — am trying to awake.
Like many dark dreams, it is uncertain exactly what is happening. Phantasmic ballots come and go. Seemingly insurmountable Republican victories disappear into the mouth of a vote-munching machine and come out the other side as excremental — oops, I mean incremental — Democratic leads just beyond the reach of a recount. And as in any nightmare worth its salt, just when you think it’s about to end, a new trap door opens and you fall into yet one more level of confusion and chaos in a maze with no exit in sight.
But this is America. It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.
So how did we get to a place where, days after the election was held, despite many proclamations by news organizations to the contrary, we still don’t know who won, we don’t know who voted, and we don’t know for sure whether the rules were followed in either voting or counting?
Various irregularities have been reported in five big cities, all in strategic states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The allegations range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.
Democrats tell us that there is nothing to see here, and the compliant media dutifully moves along, unwilling to investigate on its own or even express any concern about potential wrongdoing. Even Fox News has turned into a lapdog for the Democrat Party, calling Arizona for Joe Biden long before anyone could know for sure which way the state would turn.
On Thursday night, as Fulton County was just about to swing Georgia into the Biden column, CNN’s John King arrogantly lectured Donald Trump:
“Guess what, Mr. President? We’re gonna count the votes, and if they favor you, we’re gonna show that. And if they don’t, we’re gonna show that. That’s how democracy works. We’re just counting the votes.”
Um, no, that’s not the way it works. News channels don’t count a damn thing. They just report numbers shipped out by election offices in various counties across the country, and if CNN or any other news outfit were actually doing their jobs, they would be alert for patterns suggesting fraud in the numbers they report. If “just counting the votes” were all that it took to have a democracy, then Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be a glorious example of democracy, as would the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But CNN and the New York Times see it differently. Here’s what the Times tweeted on Election Day:
“The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent.”
Well, yeah, I guess that’s better than vowing to be venal, egotistical, elitist, and dangerously biased, but that’s what the news outlets in the U.S. really are. I can’t think of a less qualified set of judges with whom to invest the power of judging winners and losers in the democratic process than Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow.
Yet they — and their Big (Tech) Brothers at Twitter and Facebook — have set themselves up as the moral authorities on election law. They insist that there is nothing improper about the election because, well, because it ended with the result they wanted. Anyone who disagrees with them, including the president of the United States, they label as a conspiracy theorist.
But let’s think about it. Despite the total lack of curiosity exhibited by the mainstream media, there are many questions about both the casting and counting of votes in multiple states, and it all starts with the amorphous monster Trump has warned us about for months — mail-in balloting. Sadly, there is no way to verify the results of the election as accurate because no matter how many times you recount the votes, you will not be able to ascertain which ones are legal and which are illegal.
When you vote in person, you first make an active choice to vote, confirm your identity as a registered voter to a poll worker, then mark your ballot privately but in the presence of other people, and finally hand it off to a poll worker who scans it directly into a vote-counting machine while you watch.
In other words, you establish your legal right to vote and have a secure chain of custody of your ballot until it is scanned, which you yourself participate in.
None of those steps is present in mail balloting. You are a passive recipient of a ballot, your identity is assumed rather than confirmed, you may be marking your ballot under pressure of either family members or strangers, and you send the ballot to an anonymous election worker through any number of insecure methods of transmission. You have no assurance that your vote has been counted, and what’s worse, you may not even be a participant in your own vote being cast in your name.
The most important thing to remember about mail ballots is that once they are separated from their secrecy envelope, they are completely unidentifiable. They may have come from legal voters, or they may not have. They may have come in the mail, or they may have come in the soda delivery truck. They may have come one at a time, or they may have come 100,000 at a time.
And no one will ever know.
But the boobs on cable news say there is no reason to worry about mail ballots. They say we should just trust the folks who count the ballots because, well, why would anyone cheat to elect the most important public official in the world? Just move along, there’s nothing to see here.
And that is what makes it so frustrating for not just the president but for his supporters who think there may have been deception in the vote-counting process. Because if there is fraud, how the hell do you prove it?
There are only two avenues for a candidate who thinks he has been cheated out of a rightful victory, and both of them have the potential to make him look like (as Jim Acosta accused Trump of being) a “sore loser.” One is the judicial process, which is where we are now, and the other is a constitutional process, about which I will say more in a minute.
The judicial process allows a candidate to go to court to present evidence of fraud or violations of law in the casting or counting of ballots, but then what? Trump’s lawyers have already proven that their election observers were illegally blocked from watching vote counting in Philadelphia. They are also making the case that illegal votes have been cast in Nevada, and raising serious concerns about why vote counting halted mysteriously in big Democrat-run cities during the small hours of the morning the day after the election. But if Republicans prove wrongdoing, what exactly is the solution? Remember, you can’t distinguish a legal vote from an illegal vote once they have been counted, so what can a judge do? What could the Supreme Court do?
Well, in one small part, the Supreme Court is actually well-positioned to act. That’s because the court has already heard one case based on the constitutional provision that federal elections are the sole province of state legislatures. The court split 4-4 on a ruling that would have prohibited Pennsylvania from counting ballots received for three days after Election Day because that rule was implemented by a Pennsylvania court, not the Pennsylvania legislature. The federal judges ruled it was too late to change the lower court mandate, but ordered Pennsylvania to keep the late votes segregated in case the matter ripened into a controversy.
Well, controversy it is. So it is expected that the full court — now including Amy Coney Barrett — will revisit the matter of those late ballots and very likely throw them out. There is little doubt that they are unconstitutional.
But that could only reverse one small measure of mischief, and would not necessarily repair all of the errors of the election. For the rest of those — ones involving procedure or illegal ballots that cannot be distinguished from legal ballots — the courts have limited options. In fact, there really is only one certain judicial remedy, and it is so extreme that almost no one would envision it being used — namely, throwing out the results of the election and mandating a new election to be held in a particular state, be that Pennsylvania or elsewhere.
This would obviously have to be done on an expedited basis since the Electoral College vote is scheduled on Dec. 14, but there is no reason why an election could not be held in a timely manner on a date determined by the court and administered by representatives of the court. Or perhaps I should say there is no reason why that could not be accomplished except for the lack of willingness to intervene that we can expect from either district judges or Supreme Court justices. It would be a heavy lift.
So that brings us to the constitutional solution. This one is more elegant, but it still requires a heady dose of chutzpah. As noted, under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the state legislatures are solely responsible for determining how each state’s electors are appointed. If a legislature were convinced that the presidential election in that state was tainted, it could convene and pass an emergency resolution declaring the election null and void and then choose to appoint a slate of electors by fiat. Since the claim of misconduct is being made by Republicans against Democrats, you can assume that it would take Republican-controlled legislatures to make such a bold move.
Fortuitously, Republicans do control both houses of the legislature in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. Nevada alone among the contested states has a Democratic legislature. If legislators are convinced that the presidency has been wrested out of Republican hands through chicanery or corruption, they could set the matter right by exercising their constitutional prerogative. This is a heavy lift also, but if states intend to ever exercise their authority under our federal system of government, there would be no more appropriate time to do so than when one party seeks to arrogate unto itself power that it has not earned through a free and fair election.
The republic is at stake, and that’s not just a nightmare. It’s reality.
- Watch Live: MSM-Annointed President-Elect Biden Makes A Statement
Watch Live: MSM-Annointed President-Elect Biden Makes A Statement
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 19:45Now that the American media have sanctified Joe Biden as President-Elect, despite ongoing lawsuits, recounts, and no state certifications, many of the world’s leaders were quick to virtue-signal their support for the Harris administration.
“Kamala Harris is absolutely prepared to be president.” Christine Pelosi, Chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus, says the vice president-elect Kamala Harris is in a strong position to be the Democrats next presidential nominee in 2024.
While “declaring victory” was abhorrent just 24 hours ago, it is now apparently okay among social media giants as massive super-spreader-events swarm across the nation to celebrate the end of the virus, the end of oppression, the end of racism, the end of hitler, the end of white supremacy, and the beginning of a new blue dawn… or something like that.
Where is @JoeBiden calling on the massive Super Spreader events held in his name to end❓ ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/8JaofpgMge
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) November 7, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
We suspect Biden’s address will be full of the usual “unifying” themes, just as his earlier statement was:
My fellow Americans – I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect Harris. In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America. With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do, if we do it together.
The pre-victory-speech warm-up…
If only him and his AOC-following entourage really believed that.
Watch Live (due to start at 2000ET):
- The Mystery Of Taiwan
The Mystery Of Taiwan
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 19:15Authored by Amelia Janaskie via The American Institute for Economic Research,
In 2020, most countries in the world locked down their societies with the goal of controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. There were some outliers. Sweden, Belarus, Tanzania, and some US states deployed little in the way of “nonpharmaceutical interventions.”
Another fascinating outlier – often cited as a case in which a government handled the pandemic the correct way – was Taiwan. Indeed, Taiwan presents an anomaly in the mitigation and overall handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In terms of stringency, Taiwan ranks among the lowest in the world, with fewer controls than Sweden and far lower than the U.S.
The government did test at the border and introduce some minor controls but nowhere near that of most counties. In general, Taiwan rejected lockdown in favor of maintaining social and economic functioning.
Source: Oxford University (stringency index) and Lancet
How did Taiwan fare in terms of cases? Taiwan has seen 573 cases, which is remarkably low for a country with a population of close to 24 million and a population density of 1,739 people per square mile.
Source: Worldometer
In terms of death, the numbers are even more striking. Throughout the entire pandemic, Taiwan experienced only 7 deaths. Of the deaths, the individuals were in their 40s to 80s, the majority with preexisting health conditions.
Source: Worldometer
To put this in perspective, in a stringent terrority with similar demographics, LA County’s population is 10 million and population density is 2,500 per square mile – meaning slightly denser but less populated – but by contrast, it has had 309,000 cases and 7,000 deaths.
How did Taiwan maintain such low numbers?
A paper from the Lancet aims to answer this question by providing a few explanations. The authors’ main claim is that Taiwan’s rapid mobilization is ascribed to pre-Covid medical institutions, which include the Taiwan CDC, established in 1990, and the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC). In addition, Taiwan’s outbreak of SARS in 2003 allowed them to create plans for managing a similar disease later on.
For example, a 2005 study of SARS in Taiwan already discussed preparation measures in the case of a new outbreak, explaining that focus must be directed towards the older and immunocompromised populations and hospitals should be managed vigilantly.
Drawing on previous experience, Taiwan created a culture in which masks are worn widely and implemented advanced contact tracing technologies and early screening of international travelers. However, masks were not worn by all citizens and were rather valued for its protection from air pollution. The Lancet authors attribute these strategies to Taiwan’s low cases and deaths.
But here is a puzzle. Usually when public health intellectuals speak of a good handling of a pandemic, they express the need for widespread testing. That is followed by an exhortation to track and isolate. Again, Taiwan did some of this at the border. Taiwan did have a wide availability of tests – unlike the US – and did have an open testing approach so that anyone could get tested, symptomatic or not.
Even then, Taiwan had one of the lowest scores on tests per thousand of any country in the world. Only one person in 100,000 undertook a Covid-19 test.
The government maintained open communication and transparency with its citizens. For example, the Taiwan CDC produced daily reports on the state of coronavirus in the country. Taiwan’s reports are not politicized attempts to generate hysteria (as in places like the US and other European countries), but are straightforward and concentrated on the actual numbers.
This same strategy was also at work in places that did not impose lockdowns, including South Dakota and Sweden. Although one could argue that top-down approaches to information are flawed, there is something to be said for a country that values transparency because it allows for the public to have greater trust in the information provided to them.
As former Taiwanese Vice President Chen has stated:
“I would like to point out a critical element of the Taiwan Model: transparency. From the very beginning of the pandemic, the Taiwanese government has spared no effort in ensuring that the general public has open access to COVID-19 information.”
Another explanation for Taiwan’s proactive approach is that it possesses first-hand information on coronavirus management from its SARS-CoV-1 experience in 2003, which has informed its response and mitigation plans. The fact that Taiwan has dealt with another coronavirus outbreak previously has allowed it to alleviate devastating effects in later years.
Taiwanese health authorities shared information with other countries. Former VP Chen explained why this was crucial, given the Taiwanese SARS experience in 2003:
“International cooperation is the only way to fight a global outbreak….We are more than happy to share our knowledge, experience, and expertise with the international community. Taiwan can help, and Taiwan is helping.”
Nevertheless, other countries and NGOs fail to recognize Taiwan’s unique knowledge and thus do not consider it in the competing market of information that could ultimately inform policy decisions. Perhaps one of the reasons for this issue is that the WHO refuses to acknowledge Taiwan’s independence from China, thus excluding the country from participating in discussions surrounding the pandemic. This stubbornness prevents the dissemination of useful information that could protect people from illness and economic affliction, thus only serving to create harm.
We are still left with a mystery. Taiwan did not lock down. It did not widely test. And yet it had the lowest death rate per million of any populous country in the world. It experienced 0.3 deaths per million and ranks 189th in the world.
What, then, is the explanation? As much as public health authorities in the West want to consider policy as a decisive factor in the success or failure of pandemic response, the Taiwanese case might have nothing at all to do with the public policy response.
The real explanation deals with innate immunities from other vaccines or virus exposures. For example, a study found SARS-CoV-1 reactive T cells in patients who were infected with SARS 17 years ago. Even though about 680 people in Taiwan were infected with SARS in 2003, the study shows a possibility that enduring T cells could influence the effect SARS-CoV-2 has on people with certain preexisting immunities. A different study found that there were strong differences in mortalities between Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Western countries, suggesting that genetic factors may also play a role in these disparities.
Although the extent of Taiwan’s governmental overstep and tracking could be viewed as constituting an infringement on individual rights and privacy, its lighter hand to Covid-19 management has proven wise. The country has seen extremely low cases and – more importantly – low death rates.
Its economic performance is projected to fare better than other countries. Taiwan is expected to experience a 0% growth rate in 2020 GDP – neither losing nor gaining in wealth – while US GDP is expected to contract by 3.5% in 2020.
The Lancet article draws on a significant conclusion regarding Taiwan, “While some aspects of the Taiwan approach might not be acceptable in other jurisdictions, the potential social and economic benefits of avoiding lockdown might alleviate some objections.”
This statement gets at the heart of Taiwan’s strategy: although the government may have overstepped relative to what was necessary, it was able to minimize costs by not shutting down or preventing all people from carrying on a normal life.
There are undoubtedly other reasons accounting for Taiwan’s success, such as its low poverty levels. Still, Taiwan presents an important case study that warrants further investigation. In 2003, Taiwan faced one of the highest SARS infection rates in the world. Now, the Covid-19 infection rate in Taiwan is one of the lowest despite the country not locking down.
The Taiwanese case reveals something extraordinary about pandemic response. As much as public-health authorities imagine that the trajectory of a new virus can be influenced or even controlled by policies and responses, the current and past experiences of coronavirus illustrate a different point. The severity of a new virus might have far more to do with endogenous factors within a population rather than the political response.
According to the lockdown narrative, Taiwan did almost everything “wrong” but generated what might in fact be the best results in terms of public health of any country in the world.
- Tesla Is Now Selling $250 Bottles Of Tequila
Tesla Is Now Selling $250 Bottles Of Tequila
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 18:45Tesla, which has now somehow been bestowed with a $407 billion market cap, has decided to go into the tequila business.
The
car companydisruptive technology company launched its own brand of tequila on Thursday after CEO Elon Musk had joked about doing so back on April Fool’s Day in 2018. Musk said then that the company was looking to launch “Teslaquila”. Now, they have something with a different, but similar, name.The bottles of “Tesla Tequila” are going for $250 each and appeared to have sold out within hours of the product going live on Tesla’s website, according to Reuters.
The product comes in bottle shaped like a lightning bolt, held up by a small stand.
When Musk first tried to trademark the name “Teslaquila” in Mexico back in October 2018, the Tequila Regulatory Council argued that the name was too similar to “tequila”, which is a protected word.
Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council approved of the new name, however, stating: “Tesla is now a certified brand of tequila under the strict regulations regarding our national drink.” The council said it would be made by Destiladora del Valle de Tequila, a major producer of tequilas.
Tesla says the drink is being made by Nosotros Tequila, one of Destiladora del Valle de Tequila’s brands. The producer also makes bourbon, vodka and Canadian whisky. Tesla’s website says the tequila is only available in New York, California and Washington.
Hey, it beats having to go through the trouble of conjuring up a new product reveal to take in extra cash, doesn’t it? Maybe Musk can send the NHTSA a bottle…
- "I Am Done, I'll Not Vote Again" – One Middle-American Mom Rages At 'Real-Life Idiocracy'
“I Am Done, I’ll Not Vote Again” – One Middle-American Mom Rages At ‘Real-Life Idiocracy’
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 18:15Authored by ‘OHMama’ via The Burning Platform blog,
I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.
My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.
As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.
I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Lexus would be an improvement over Fauci.
I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.
I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but fuck these motherfuckers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all.
* * *
- "The Market Could Flip Again": Goldman Warns A "Blue Wave" May Still Be Coming
“The Market Could Flip Again”: Goldman Warns A “Blue Wave” May Still Be Coming
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 17:45“Election Surprise!”
That’s the start of David Kostin’s latest Weekly research report, in which he writes that while online polling markets ultimately correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election (absent an unprecedented overturning by the Supreme Ciurt of an election that the MSM has already called on behalf of Biden), the polls were way off in their broad pro-Democrat bias, and the result has been a dismal showing for Democrats who not only lost seats in the House, but failed to gain control of the Senate. As he explains, “a Blue Wave did not materialize early on election night as many pollsters had predicted. Almost as shocking to investors as Trump’s improbable victory in 2016 (just 22% on the day before the election) was the fact Democrats failed to capture a Senate majority and actually lost seats in the House.”
Yet while Wall Street had pivoted to making a Blue Sweep the best possible outcome for risk assets ahead of the election, the eventual outcome showed not only how clueless financial strategists are, but how it is always price that makes the narrative: as Goldman reminds us, the equity market responded to the November 3rd outcome with a powerful rotation.
On the day after Election Day, many of the popular Democratic sweep trades fell while positions likely to benefit from a divided government rallied sharply. For example, a basket of infrastructure spending beneficiaries fell by 5%, renewable energy stocks fell by 2%, and 10-year US Treasury yields fell by 14 bp. The Pharmaceutical industry and the NASDAQ-100 index each rallied by 4%.
This comes from the same Goldman which in November said that a Blue Sweep was great for stocks, writing that a blue wave would “likely prompt us to upgrade our forecasts. The reason is that it would sharply raise the probability of a fiscal stimulus package of at least $2 trillion shortly after the presidential inauguration on January 20, followed by longer-term spending increases on infrastructure, climate, health care and education that would at least match the likely longer-term tax increases on corporations and upper-income earners.”
So, will Goldman now downgrade its forecasts?
Underscoring Wall Street’s revisionism, on Friday JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic wrote that the election outcome “likely eliminates the Blue Wave scenario” which suddenly is “one of the most favorable scenarios for the market. A GOP senate majority should ensure that Trump’s pro-business policies stay intact (tax code, deregulation), and if Biden is confirmed we should be able to expect an easing of the trade war (which should boost global trade and corporate earnings growth).”
He continued:
Which we think would have been a more detrimental outcome for the market given a planned increase of corporate taxes (negative impact on earnings) and capital gains taxes (immediate selling of momentum/growth stocks), and potential for more progressive policies that would have negatively affected the market. Finally, there is also the potential for less market volatility (e.g. no more market disrupting tweets). Lower volatility could result in inflows to risk assets (e.g. inflow in volatility sensitive strategies like vol targeting, etc).
Well, yes: with stocks enjoying a nearly 8% increase in the election week, it would be rather foolish of Wall Streeters to go back to their original thesis that a Blue Wave is bad for risk, and so we observed the greatest pivot in history since… 2016, when everyone predicted that a Trump victory would crash the market. The opposite happened, and we witnessed a similar case of unprecedented “thesis drift.”
However, the greatest irony would emerge if after being written off for dead, a Blue Wave ultimately does emerge: as Kostin writes, “our client discussions since the election indicate that most investors believe a divided government is the most likely situation for the next two years. But what if the “Blue Wave” outcome has only been delayed by two months?”
Here’s why: as we explained last week, the 117th Congress begins on January 3rd, but Senate control will not be known until after Jan. 5, 2021. Based on the latest information, the Senate split appears 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats. Neither the regular nor special Georgia Senate races had a candidate capture more than 50% of the votes, so a run-off will take place between the two leading candidates in each race.
So if the Democrats win the presidency and both Georgia seats, Vice President Kamala Harris would break the tie, giving Democrats control of the Senate. Here, it’s worth noting that the odds of Democrats winning both races are very slim, with Republican David Perdue well ahead of his Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff in the first race…
… while the second one will see two GOP candidates, Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins combine to take on Democrats Raphael Wornock and Deborah Jackson, with the republicans comfortably leading their democratic challengers.
In any case, assuming there is yet another shock outcome, Kostin notes that the policies of a Biden administration would differ dramatically depending on the results in Georgia.
So what would be the equity implications of such an event, however unlikely it may be?
Before we get into the details of Goldman’s explanation, we’d like to point out the obvious: stocks will continue ripping higher, because as we have said repeatedly, to markets it does not matter who the president is, as long as the Fed and central banks keep injecting liquidity, which as we showed yesterday, they’ll keep doing.
Going back to Kostin, he writes that since markets generally do not like uncertainty, the 6% rally in equities since Election Day suggests investors now expect a divided government, reducing the uncertainty associated with the potential for major policy changes.
To be sure, since 1928 the median 12-month equity return during periods of divided federal government (12%) has typically exceeded the typical return when one political party controls Washington, DC (9%). Indicatively, Goldman’s unchanged S&P 500 year-end 2020 target remains 3600 (+3%) which would result in a calendar year return of 11.4%.
So while there still remains some confusion as to what Trump will do now that the election has been called for Biden, according to Goldman, in 2020 the big source of uncertainty is control of the Senate rather than the White House.
One more point here: looking at betting markets, Kostin notes that although the likelihood that both Georgia Senate seats flip from Republican control to Democratic appears very low, markets indicate that those probabilities are rising. As shown in the chart below, while prediction market odds of a Democratic sweep plummeted from 51% to 9% on Election Day, but have since risen to 23%. Policies that just a few days ago were the base case outlook for many investors, including over $2 trillion in virus-related fiscal spending, a potential infrastructure package, and the prospect of higher corporate tax rates, could suddenly again become possible. This, as Goldman previously explained, “could potentially lead to a higher level of corporate profits and equity prices, but they would also increase investor uncertainty.”
Ultimately, if we have yet another dramatic reversal in January and a Democratic Senate majority materializes after all, the Blue Wave/Divided government trades should reverse once again.
Here, Goldman’s advice is that “portfolio managers should at least consider the prospect that Cyclicals could benefit from huge stimulus and more government borrowing could lead to a steeper yield curve that would benefit Financials and be less friendly to long-duration, high-growth Tech stocks.”
He concludes that beneficiaries of Trump’s 2017 tax reform might be exposed to higher corporate rates, parts of the Health Care sector could face regulatory scrutiny, and some Energy firms could be forced to contend with strengthened environmental regulations.
So is a Blue Wave only a figment of Goldman’s imagination? Perhaps, but consider this: stock prices, like prediction markets, appear to be reflecting a rising risk of this outcome: as Kostin concludes, “at the end of this week, infrastructure stocks and rate-sensitive Financials recovered some of their post-election decline, while Tech stocks slipped.”
- Information War? Internet Archive To Rewrite History With Alerts For 'Fact-Checked' Sites
Information War? Internet Archive To Rewrite History With Alerts For ‘Fact-Checked’ Sites
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 17:15Authored by Aaron Kesel via Activist Post,
According to an Archive.org blog post, you will now know if a page was pulled down or received an alert over what “fact-checkers” consider “misinformation.”
This also includes “dead” web pages that were archived. The Internet Archive has started adding fact checks and context to Wayback Machine pages to explain just why the pages were removed. If a page was part of a disinformation campaign or pulled due to a policy violation, a distinct yellow banner will explain why.
The fact checks will come from a variety of mainstream outlets, including FactCheck.org, Politifact, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post. Which absolutely in no way will be manipulated, right?
Of course, that’s obvious sarcasm, as those controlling what is and isn’t disinformation will be the wolves guarding the hen house so to speak. A good question to ask is how does Archive.org treat verifiable information like the Bush administration lying about WMDs, the Al-Nayirah testimony lie that almost sunk us into a war with Afghanistan or the validated conspiratorial facts surrounding 9/11, like the hijackers being given Visas from the Saudi Arabia consulate, as documented by Michael Springmann, who worked as the Head of the Visa Department at the CIA’s consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Springman isn’t the only intelligence official who alleges the attack was allowed to happen. In addition, two veteran FBI investigators, FBI Agents Wright and John Vincent were told to back off investigating the Saudis and Osama Bin Laden, who was a CIA tactician expert used against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
If that’s not enough, what about former CIA PROMIS whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto warning Colin Powell from prison months prior that 9/11 was about to take place through a liaison, his friend and one of my former sources, former FBI senior agent Ted L. Gunderson. All of these are factual holes in a story that if dared to be peeled back will reveal shocking secrets the U.S. government would rather keep hidden. How about the recently exposed lies about Syria’s chemical weapons attack in Douma 2018 whistleblown by several members of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, revealed by WikiLeaks?
The one thing in common all this information has is that it could harm the U.S. and what’s often reflected as “National Security” — in other words, inconvenient truths that could hurt the government’s narrative on a story.
Guess what? It was recently revealed this year amid all the CV-1984 chaos that Saudi Arabia was involved in the attacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accidentally disclosed the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of directing support to two al-Qaeda hijackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks, Yahoo News reported.
Of course, if you follow Activist Post, we told you that court documents had revealed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington may have funded a “dry run” for the hijackings carried out by two Saudi employees years ago.
Archive.org hopes users will “better understand what they are reading” in its archives run by government stooges who would likely flag this information as disinformation on 9/11. The website also says it strives for neutrality — one banner for context explained that including a page in the Wayback Machine “should not be seen” as endorsing the content. However, if you are pushing your opinion on someone else you are effectively endorsing the ideas of one of your fact-checkers.
Fact-checkers have seen a lot of flak lately as they are exposed for doing nothing more than pushing their bias or information spinners for clicks. For example, this author wrote for The Mind Unleashed earlier this year that a scientific phenomenon known as an “air burst” was warned by NASA for near-passing asteroids above the Earth. The fact-checker for Lead Stories then defamed this author by spinning a perfectly normal article going through what an “air burst” is, why an atmospheric explosion could occur if the asteroids came closer enough to Earth and what protections NASA was working on for the future. Which, by doing so, they made a scientific article with more citations than most of these fact-checkers can dig up for their day jobs, into a malicious article. When in reality the malicious article was actually the fact-checkers responding article which when confronted about their erroneous defamatory remarks they refused to correct it; as such, this writer lost a job.
Giving someone the power to fact-check with no accountability to anyone is a lot like giving someone a badge and hoping for them not to abuse their power over others. Oh wait, we have witnessed a lot of that this year. While you may view the metaphor of comparing fact-checking to police brutality as silly, there’s actually no better comparison as the fact-checkers treat information and those putting out unfortunate dark truths exactly the same way that police treat civilians, by beating the shit out of them. Albeit one is physical and the other is less direct, the fact still remains that fact-checkers bully their competition and act exactly as law enforcement does with a power mentality complex that they are above everyone else.
Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s wet dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete. Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird and was showcased again in 2001 after 9/11, with every media outlet and their grandmother saying Iraq had WMDs, a blatant blunt lie.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
– CIA Director William Casey during the first meeting of President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, as cited by CounterPunch.
The other issue that is less conspiratorial, and one that needs to be highly considered is, what if the human doing the fact-checking lacks the proper skills to dig up information online, as not everyone is as skilled as this author when it comes to finding documents and data.
Activist Post has previously shown links between one such fact-checker, NewsGuard ,and the intelligence community. The fact that anyone wants to police information like they are the Ministry Of Truth should scare the living shit out of you. However, the truth is scarier than you can even imagine. Especially when it comes to 9/11, which if you want the truth add up all the available public information to determine what really happened, an attack that was not only allowed to happen but it was helped along and you would still have unanswered questions. But of course, the fact-checkers have all the answers right? Let’s go to war fact-checkers.
- "Meet The New Resistance" – Mark Levin Rages At Democrats' "Cloward-Piven" Chaos Plan
“Meet The New Resistance” – Mark Levin Rages At Democrats’ “Cloward-Piven” Chaos Plan
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:45Richard Andrew Cloward and Francis Fox Piven are two names that are largely unfamiliar to the average American, but, as Mark Levin raged last night during an appearance on Fox’s Hannity show, their historical relevance is being seen all over the country today.
Outspoken conservative Mark Levin fumed at the violation of the Constitution in various states’ ballot collection procedures, blasting that “there’s more evidence of voter fraud than there was ever evidence of Russia collusion… so those that keep saying, let’s see the evidence, where the hell were you for the last four years?”
The Democrats “believed in flooding the system, create chaos, grab power, and accuse your opponent of misbehavior… this is the ideology of two marxist professors – Cloward and Piven.”
And now Democrats are calling for unity? Levin adds…
“I’m part of the new resistance, God forbid if our president doesn’t win.”
“I am not uniting around [Biden] anymore than they united around our man.”
Heated moment now on @seanhannity:@marklevinshow says “I’m part of the new resistance, God forbid if our president doesn’t win.”
“I am not uniting around [Biden] anymore than they united around our man.” pic.twitter.com/YQag3mHEkB
— Anthony Leonardi (@TonyDLeonardi) November 7, 2020
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By way of background, as Brandon Smith detailed previously, in the mid-sixties at the height of the “social revolution” the line between democratic benevolence and outright communism became rather blurry. The Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was used as the springboard by social engineers to introduce a new era of welfare initiatives enacted in the name of “defending the poor”, also known as the “Great Society Programs”. These initiatives, however, were driven by far more subversive and extreme motivations, and have been expanded on by every presidency since, Republican and Democrat alike.
At Columbia University, sociologist professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven introduced a political strategy in 1966 in an article entitled ‘The Weight Of The Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty’.
This article outlined a plan that they believed would eventually lead to the total transmutation of America into a full-fledged centralized welfare state (in other words, a collectivist enclave). The spearpoint of the Cloward-Piven strategy involved nothing less than economic sabotage against the U.S.
Theoretically, according to the doctrine, a condition of overwhelming tension and strain could be engineered through the overloading of American welfare rolls, thereby smothering the entitlement program structure at the state and local level. The implosion of welfare benefits would facilitate a massive spike in poverty and desperation, creating a financial crisis that would lead to an even greater cycle of demand for a fully socialized system. This desperation would then “force” the federal government to concentrate all welfare programs under one roof, nationalize and enforce a socialist ideology, and ultimately, compact an immense level of power into the hands of a select few.
Cloward and Piven claimed that this could be accomplished at a grassroots level through community activism, and, that it would facilitate a more compassionate federal authority, however, there are numerous problems with these assertions.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy has nothing to do with grassroots activism, and accomplishes nothing tangible for the downtrodden poverty class. In fact, I would dare to say that Cloward and Piven as well as most social engineers are well aware that the concept ultimately only serves to give even more dominance to the establishment and pilfer even more freedom from the masses.
Cloward-Piven is not limited to the destabilization of state and local welfare programs. It can easily be used against federal level entitlements, and in reality, is much more effective against an entity with the proven tendency towards exponential debt spending. Though the federal government may be able to borrow fiat dollars through the Federal Reserve to prolong welfare rolls while the states cannot, a more volatile threat arises when debt monetization begins to wear down the purchasing power of the currency. Weakened purchasing power results in reduced consumer activity, less industrial growth, less GDP, and obviously, more poverty. The dollar has lost approximately 98% of its purchasing power since 1972, and after 50 years of the so-called “War on Poverty”, nearly one third of the American population now repeatedly slips under the official poverty line.
In the past decade alone, the number of people dependent on food stamps and EBT for their survival in the U.S. has doubled from 25 million people to nearly 50 million people. Those who receive some kind of payment from the government, including those on social security, disability, and veterans benefits, are approximately 100 million. Americans on social security do not consider themselves welfare recipients because they paid into the system, however, the point remains that if the federal money tap shuts down due to overwhelming participation, the checks will stop whether you paid into the system or not.
In the end, it is the Federal Government itself that is most vulnerable to the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and I believe the goal is to set fire to ALL social structures in the U.S., then assimilate them into a new globalist system.
But, as ominous as that all sounds, we need to back a little further since it was Saul Alinsky, an American community activist and political theorist in Chicago, that was the inspiration for Cloward and Piven.
Alinksy grew impatient with the new leftist activists in the 1960’s. In his book ‘Rules for Radicals,’ (which is dedicated to Lucifer), he states, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules” (Alinsky, 1972).
When forced to do that, human agendas inevitably fall short. This gives the opportunity to replace the capitalist ‘rule book’ with a socialist one.
The strategy was to mobilize people in poverty en/mass to overwhelm the government agencies with a flood of demands beyond these agencies’ capacity.
This creates gridlock, and the aim was to bring the system down.
Alinsky had contact with Hillary Clinton. You can see her letter to him in 1971(freebeacon.com). Clinton wrote her college thesis on ‘Alinsky and His Organizing Plan.’ Also, Barack Obama taught Alinsky 101 at the University of Chicago. How much Allinsky’s concepts actually influenced Clinton and Obama is open to debate. See David Horowitz’s book ‘Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model’ for more information.
Other organizations rose up, such as Acorn, with the issue of “voting rights.” These organizations received support from people like George Soros (but that is another story).
Now, let’s look at the playbook that developed from Cloward and Piven’s ideas.
These steps have been incorrectly attributed by many to Saul Alinsky. While it is true that he didn’t write them, this much is true: the actual plan is real. It was inspired by Alinsky and enumerated by Cloward and Piven.
Some people will react to this list; others will say that some of the steps are desirable goals.
Nonetheless, you can quickly see how they fit into the socialistic goals of far-left politicians and others today.
The 8 Steps to Create a Socialist State.
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Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people. HAPPENING NOW
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Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live. HAPPENING NOW
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Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty. HAPPENING NOW
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Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state. HAPPENING NOW
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Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives. (Food, Housing, and Income) HAPPENING NOW
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Education – Take control of what people read and listen to us“ take control of what children learn in school. ALREADY DONE
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Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools. ALREADY DONE
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Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor. HAPPENING NOW
Right now, as Geoffrey Grider explains, steps 1-5 and 8 are being executed right now in how our government is reacting to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, with steps, 6 and 7 already having been implemented since 2008. The American economy is being split into pieces right now by the combination of a $2 trillion dollar bailout with more coming, Americans under stay-at-home orders, and with more people right now on unemployment in two weeks of the coronavirus crisis than in the second year of the Great Depression of 1929.
In fact, as Geoffrey Grider explains, the Cloward-Piven plan to collapse the American economy first began under President Obama.
We thought we dodged a bullet with the election of Trump in 2016, but the last nine months of chaos in America was the rebirth of the Cloward-Piven strategy… And this does not end well… (as Brandon Smith previously noted):
If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of making the developing crisis about a singularly unimportant thing; then the elites get exactly what they want – an angry and desperate citizenry out for the blood of a middleman and out for the blood of each other, while they sit back, relax, and wait to swoop in as our financial saviors with strings attached.
For those naïve enough to assume that Cloward-Piven is just a well intentioned activist method, it is important to understand that even if that were so, the effect of the Cloward-Piven Strategy will never achieve the goal its creators claimed to support. In my view, it is probable that they never really intended for it to produce wealth equality or an increased quality of life.
The tactic can only decrease wealth security by making all citizens equally destitute. As we have seen in numerous socialist and communist experiments over the past century, economic harmonization never creates wealth or prosperity, it only siphons wealth from one area and redistributes it to others, evaporating much of it as it is squeezed through the grinding gears of the establishment machine. Socialism, in its very essence, elevates government to the role of all-pervasive parent, and casts the citizenry down into the role of dependent sniveling infant. Even in its most righteous form, Cloward-Piven seeks to make infants of us all, whether we like it or not.
The key to achieving this is simple:
“Don’t waste a crisis”?
That is exactly what has happened in 2020, especially as it involved more that one crisis.
The COVID-19 Crisis
This pandemic has affected the lives of everyone. It has been 100 years since we have had anything like it. Tragically, people have died, and hospitals and the health care system have sought to overcome it. It has wrecked the economy, which was doing incredibly well before the pandemic. COVID-19 has been a major crisis.
George Floyd’s Death
The death of George Floyd, while in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis, in May, set off a firestorm of protests that have, in certain places, resulted in violence and destruction of property. In turn, this has resulted in issues related to police reform, law and order, etc. This, too, has been a major crisis.
Now put these two crises together, and people, both in the community and in politics, have sought to promote wholesale changes in society. Not just ‘defunding the police,’ but more radical socialist goals for society.
Remember, Black Lives Matter, which has been so easily endorsed by individuals and organizations, was founded by Marxist communists, who embraced socialist beliefs and positions.
Simply put, that there are some who are taking advantage of the current crisis’ in America to promote far-reaching socialist goals that would change society radically for years to come.
Don’t believe us, here’s an interview with Frances Fox Piven from earlier this month as she discusses why disruption must be central to protests, the thorny questions of violence and property destruction…
…this wave of protest is remarkable, and such a relief, to tell you the truth, because it really did look as though we were marching down the road to fascism.
…
It was the coming together of this [the killing of George Floyd] kind of inciting, outrageous act with the underlying conditions — and underlying conditions not only of hardship but also of gross incompetence on the part of the government in charge — which contributed to the sense that people could win something, that they could make an impact on their society.
…
Everybody seems to agree that we have to be nonviolent. I think that’s a judgment that has to be made for each movement action. I do agree that the public that we play to doesn’t like violence. But at the same time, the violent capacity of the crowd is an important way of defending its ability to exercise disruptive power.
…
This movement, Black Lives Matter, in particular, is very open to electoral activism. After the 1960s, activists drew a sharp line between protest activity and electoral activity, as if doing one meant you couldn’t do the other. What they did not keep in full view was the way in which protest activism affected electoral activism and the way in which electoral victories encouraged protest. We can see that pretty clearly now. I don’t think we’ll get a classical realignment, but I think we have to look forward to the destruction of the Republican Party…
…Certainly a revolutionary transformation, yes. Something like a revolution. It’s hard to imagine a revolution in the old style, the French style, in the United States. But a revolutionary transformation in the United States, and in European countries as well.
To be clear, this is not the majority of the protestors. The extreme left-wing is not the majority of people on the left within the Democratic Party.
As Jason Brown notes, reflecting on the current crisis in America, we must acknowledge that there is an organized effort, by bad actors, foreign and domestic, that want to see the destruction of our republic.
We cannot be intimidated by those that want to call us conspiracy theorists, or make fun of us and our “tin foil hats.” We have to speak truth to our elected officials and remind them that they work for us, and that we are not their subjects.
Putting an end to these revolutionary insurgents, is only possible if we recognize them for what they are. The first step to solving a problem, is acknowledging that you have one. We need to be united as a people because together we are strong. When we are divided along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and political ideology we are weak as we fight each other, rather than push back against those that are doing the damage to this country. We need to realize this and stop sabotaging our fellow Americans.
That is America today. We are in the valley of decision, and we have to make a decision which way we want to go as a nation to become a full-blown socialist nation or hold fast to our present system as a free enterprise nation.
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- Forget GOAT, Look At GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble Of All Time
Forget GOAT, Look At GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble Of All Time
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:17Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
So enjoy the GBOAT (greatest bubble of all time) but watch the clock.
Sports fans debate who qualifies as GOAT–the greatest of all time: in hoops, Kobe, Jordan, Kareem, Magic; in boxing, Ali, and so forth.
What we have today is GBOAT–the greatest bubble of all time That it’s GOAT is beyond doubt, as the charts below reveal.
Bubbles have a few unique characteristics which cannot be captured by financial metrics. The most important such characteristic is that mainstream financial managers don’t see it as a bubble. For those who do admit valuations may be a bit stretched (heh), these professionals shrug and say that since the music’s still playing, they have to keep dancing, i.e. yes there may be a bubble but it won’t pop anytime soon.
The other characteristic of a bubble is that it continues expanding far beyond historic valuation redlines, as if nothing in the real world (earnings, multiples, etc.) actually matters. Anyone proclaiming such extremes are unsustainable is laughed off the stage as extremes become more extreme, and those who bet against the tsunami of euphoric confidence that this isn’t a bubble can be found huddled in a cardboard box beneath the freeway overpass, begging for a handful of Cheetos.
Another characteristic worth noting is the acceleration of duration, amplitude and volatility as bubbles reach their zenith. So while bulls are cheering the greatest post-election rally in 73 years (or was it 743 years? 2,743 years? Whatever…), they should be quaking in their designer boots for what increasingly manic rallies are signaling: it’s about to pop, baby.
Jesse Felder of TheFelderReport.com succinctly summarized the case for GBOAT in This Is The Textbook Definition Of “Late Cycle” In The Stock Market (Zero Hedge).
The charts below bolster the (painfully obvious) case for this being the greatest bubble of all time.
Wilshire total stock market capitalization to nominal GDP: record disconnect from GDP.
Regression to trend: all-time high. (via advisorperspectives.com)
Private sector financial assets as a percentage of GDP: all-time high.
Every leg higher takes less time and reaches greater extremes:
So enjoy the greatest bubble of all time but watch the clock. Those Cinderella gains vanish at midnight.
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My recent books:
A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).
Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).
The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF).
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).
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- Largest State-Run Chinese Newspaper Laughs At Trump In First Reaction To Biden 'Win'
Largest State-Run Chinese Newspaper Laughs At Trump In First Reaction To Biden ‘Win’
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:16Within mere minutes of major US networks in what appeared a coordinated effort declared Joe Biden President-Elect the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued it’s first reaction which took the form of gleeful mockery.
“HaHa,” tweeted the People’s Daily, the largest state-owned newspaper in China. Two laughing emoji were also included in the message.
Clearly gloating as well as trolling President Trump who has waged a trade war and pressure campaign against Beijing that has plunged Sino-US relations to the lowest state since the Cold War, state-run People’s Daily retweeted Trump’s Saturday morning declaration asserting he had won “by a lot” – but with the following:
HaHa🤣 https://t.co/hQcTFrxaRn
— People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) November 7, 2020
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The tweet was issued just as the wires, including AP, projected Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Clearly Beijing is eager to not only have the “last laugh” but to rub it in as much as possible.
The Associated Press along with others had previously reported the unsurprising view of leaders in China – that they were outright rooting for a Biden victory, pinning hopes on a change of administrations greatly easing tensions centered on trade, security, and technology.
The AP wrote last month that “a Biden presidency might restore a more predictable relationship after the shocks of Trump’s tariff war and his outreach to India, seen as a strategic rival, and Southeast Asian countries, with which Beijing has a series of territorial disputes, Chinese analysts say.”
Citing one of these analysts who hopes for a ‘more stable’ situation to emerge under a Biden White House, the report said:
At the least, Biden’s policy “won’t be as emotional and ridiculous as Trump’s,” said Yu Wanli, a professor of international relations at Beijing Language and Culture University.
“Democrats appear less militant, so they may take more care to prevent even limited military conflicts and pay more attention to crisis management communication with China,” said Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing, one of the country’s most prominent scholars of international relations.
Recall too that Trump while speaking from the White House and from the campaign trail in the past months had greatly increased his public references to the “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” in very direct swipes at Beijing’s handling of the outbreak which originated in Wuhan late last year before spreading across the world.
Given that public opinion polls in China revealed that more of the population expected a Trump victory, it appears they are breathing a sigh of relief today in Beijing.
- China Export Growth Jumps To 19 Month High, Defying Surging Yuan
China Export Growth Jumps To 19 Month High, Defying Surging Yuan
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:01While the global economy continues to suffer the consequences of the covid pandemic, with much of Europe entering lockdown 2.0, China’s economy is plowing ahead as if nothing ever happened. While a big part of China’s economic strength can be attributed to the record surge of total credit injected in the system in 2020…
… strong trade has also played a major part in the economic rebound: Overnight China reported that exports accelerated to 11.4% Y/Y in October from 9.9% Y/Y in September, the highest print since March 2019, with sequential growth up to +3.3% month-on-month (sa non-annualized) in October vs. 1.1% expansion in September. At the same time, imports moderated in October and grew 4.7% yoy compared with the 13.2% yoy increase in September, as temporary factors behind the strong imports in September – such as Huawei’s front-loading of chip imports – unwound.
The surge in exports to a one-and-a-half-year high took place even as the yuan has strengthened for 6 consecutive months.
So who was so aggressively buying Chinese goods even as they became increasingly more expensive?
- Exports to the US accelerated to +22.5% yoy in October (vs. +20.5% yoy in September).
- Growth of exports to ASEAN decelerated to +7.3% yoy from +14.4% yoy in September.
- Exports to Japan improved and expanded by 5.7% yoy, vs -2.7% yoy in September.
- Exports to EU stayed weak: exports to EU contracted by 7.0% yoy, vs -7.8% yoy growth in September.
Broken down by category, exports of Covid-19 related products mostly slowed in October: exports of textile & fabric goods grew 14.8% yoy, vs 34.7% yoy in September; “working from home” related exports weakened as well – growth of exports in automatic data processing machines moderated to 26.7% yoy in October vs 45.3% yoy in September. Growth of exports in electronic integrated circuits decelerated to 13.9% yoy in October from 17.6% yoy in September. Exports of plastic articles remained strong however and grew 97.9% yoy in October vs 95.9% yoy in September. Housing related exports accelerated further – exports of furniture grew 32.3% yoy, vs 30.6% yoy in September. Exports of motor vehicles and parts strengthened in October. Exports of motor vehicles grew 15.1% yoy, vs 2.9% yoy in September, and exports of vehicle parts grew 31.3% yoy in October, vs 22.7% in September.
Looking at imports, a bigger decline of crude oil imports and slower growth of integrated circuit imports are the main drivers behind the lower headline year-over-year import growth in October. In value terms, crude oil imports contracted further on a year-over-year basis by 36.0%, in comparison with the 14.1% yoy decline in September. Imports of integrated circuits slowed from +28.2% yoy to +15.8% yoy in October, largely as Huawei stopped its front-loading of chip imports. In volume terms, crude oil imports fell by 6.5% yoy, vs an increase of 17.6% yoy in September.
In summary, while China’s export growth strengthened further in October on the back of stronger global growth and market share gains helped by stronger home related products, Import growth slowed in October on the unwinding of front-loaded chip imports by Huawei in September.
The question is what happens in the next few months, as China aggressively halts imports from Australia, and with Europe’s economy set to contract sharply as a result of a new round of covid shutdowns.
- US COVID-19 Deaths Top 1,000 For 4th Time This Week As World Awaits Biden Plan: Live Updates
US COVID-19 Deaths Top 1,000 For 4th Time This Week As World Awaits Biden Plan: Live Updates
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 15:35Summary:
- US deaths top 1k for 4th day
- Biden plans 12-member task force
- US tops 100k new cases for 3rd straight day
- Globally, world nears 49 million cases
- Deaths slow after global record
- JNJ launches new clinical trial
- England rate of increase starts to slow
- Norway’s capital imposes new restrictions
- Singapore allows some bars to reopen
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Update (1600ET): With more than 230,000 total deaths, the US death toll is rising again as deaths from COVID-19 topped 1,000 per day for the fourth day this week.
As we noted earlier, the US saw more than 120,000 new infections for a second day on Friday and hospitalizations seemed headed for all-time highs.
Following news earlier that President Donald Trump’s chief of staff had been infected, the world is waiting to see whether Biden’s victory will signal a turning point in the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, as he promises a newly aggressive federal effort to contain a virus that is spiking nationwide.
On Monday, Biden is planning to name a 12-member task force, Axios reported. Italy approved a new pandemic relief package for businesses hit by the country’s second lockdown as infections hit yet another record, and Poland, Hungary and Iran also reported new daily records.
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Update (1600ET):The US surged to a new record in cases since Thursday. Hospitalizations may be headed for all-time highs, too, and deaths are mounting as the presidency hangs in the balance. So far, COVID-19 hospitalizations have topped 100k on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (remember, these numbers are reported with a 24-hour delay).
Current hospitalizations rose Thursday to the highest since Aug. 5, Covid Tracking Project data show. That’s about 11% below previous peaks in April and July, although the data didn’t capture all states until shortly before the July peak. Now, the hit to the health-care system is getting worse fast: The number of coronavirus patients is up 16% in the past week.
The Midwest remains two to three times worse than every other U.S. region, with 548 daily cases per million people, based on the seven-day average.
States posting record cases Thursday included: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.Ml
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With the world still fixated on the US election, the US saw another 100k+ new COVID-19 cases yesterday, as testing continues to expand, the US has just become the first country in the world to post more than 100k new infections back-to-back.
Globally, the world reported nearly 600k new cases back-to-back in another record as European cases also continued to surge. Charts for the hardest-hit countries can all be seen below (courtesy of Bloomberg, which also relies on Johns Hopkins data). The number of confirmed cases globally has reached 48,590,825, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The worldwide death toll has hit 1,231,616.
Moving back to the US, Pennsylvania coincidentally saw a record number of new cases yesterday as officials scrambled to count votes and reporters descended on the state in droves. Globally speaking, we also saw a record number of new deaths yesterday, though the number of fatalities has declined since, with 8,111 new deaths around the world.
Here’s some more COVID-19 news from Friday morning (text courtesy of Bloomberg):
- Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Romania reported surging cases. Meanwhile, U.S., infections increased 1.3% on Friday, with Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado seeing the biggest single-day rises, Malaysia recorded its largest single-day increase of 1,755 infections on Friday, even as authorities impose tighter movement restrictions.
- Singapore will allow some bars and nightclubs to re-open from next month in a pilot program as it takes another step toward normalization encouraged by dwindling coronavirus cases.
- While the WHO is studying a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 found in an outbreak in Denmark’s mink population, it doesn’t share the European country’s view that the new strain may lessen the effectiveness of current Covid-19 vaccine candidates, WHO’s Executive Director Michael Ryan said at a briefing.
- Norway’s capital has ordered that cinemas, training centers and swimming halls be closed and has banned the service of alcohol to slow a rise in infections. The curbs come after Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Thursday introduced tighter rules nationwide and implored people to stay home.
- Johnson & Johnson will imminently start clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine in South Africa after getting regulatory approval, according to the co-chair of the study in the country. Meanwhile, scientists monitoring wastewater in the Western Cape province detected spikes of the coronavirus in the last three weeks as concerns grow among the government that a lack of compliance with health guidelines may trigger a second wave.
- The rate of increase of Covid-19 infections in England is starting to slow, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. The total rate of infections rose to one in 90 in the week through Oct. 31 in England, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. While this up from the previous published rate of 1 in 100, the increase is less steep compared with previous weeks, according to ONS.
- Romania topped 10,000 new coronavirus cases over 24 hours on Friday for the first time since the pandemic started, ahead of nationwide night-time curfew, shopping hour curbs, school closures and mandatory masks coming into force next week. “People will be unhappy with these measures, but they had to be taken before it’s too late,” the government’s virus task force official Raed Arafat said on Friday. “We still expect an increase in cases for now, so we insist to keep these measures in place for at least 30 days so they have an impact.”
- Let's Take Stock Of Where We Are
Let’s Take Stock Of Where We Are
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/07/2020 – 15:15Authored by Michael Anton via American Greatness,
If the Democrats just ram these election results through without explaining, then the legitimacy not just of our electoral system but of our entire government may suffer a fatal blow…
The 2020 election in particular, and our electoral process in general, have been badly compromised.
First there have been the successful efforts by Democrats to loosen electoral administration standards and practices by legalizing ballot harvesting (where partisan “volunteers” go out and collect ballots as well as “assist” voters in filling out their ballots), allowing same-day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and the like. On the flipside we have Democrats tenaciously fighting any efforts to shore up the integrity of the system, such as requiring ID and proof of citizenship to vote.
Couple all of this with unprecedented last minute rule changes on the eve of what was sure to be the most contested election in generations, if not in American history: all changes designed to favor one side over the other.
Theoretically, none of these measures guaranteed a compromised vote. Theoretically, it’s possible that a system designed to be gamed and abused won’t be. But a party concerned about the integrity of the system wouldn’t expend so much effort making it easier to rig elections; it would do the opposite. The other party, the one trying to do exactly that (if all too often in a desultory, half-hearted way) nevertheless gets attacked as the enemy of “democracy.”
Second were all the ways the media, legacy and social, engaged in saturation broadcast of only one side of the story and deliberately suppressed any mention of the other. These enormous in-kind contributions massively outweighed the paltry $10 million Russians allegedly spent on pro-Trump Facebook ads in 2016. Yet we are insistently told that Trump’s 2016 victory was illegitimate owing to “the Russians” while everything Google, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the Associated Press (to name a few) did for Biden either had no effect at all or was totally aboveboard.
Third are the hundreds of lawsuits filed throughout the land by the president’s enemies, all geared toward benefitting Democrats and harming Republicans.
Fourth are the irregularities in the voting and counting that began in the wee hours on November 4 and continue to this minute, including but not limited to: inexplicably halting the counts in five states late on election night; the continuing, and mysterious “finding” of huge tranches of ballots overwhelmingly—and in some cases exclusively—for Biden; computer “glitches” that flipped Republican votes into the Democrats’ column; people showing up to vote in person only to be told that they had already voted absentee when they had never request an absentee ballot; Democratic-controlled states limiting access to Republican observers even in defiance of court orders; etc.
Now, it’s possible that each of these, and many other, shady-looking events has an innocent and plausible explanation. If so, we should be told what they are.
But mostly we’re not being told. Instead anyone who asks is either ignored or, more likely, told to shut up and called a conspiracy theorist and an enemy of democracy.
You’d think that if state and local election officials had innocent explanations for all these instances of alleged irregularity, they’d offer them. You’d think further that it would be in their interest to explain. Does Joe Biden really want to take office with half the country thinking he stole it? They can shout in our faces all they want—and they will—but shouting will not convince. They need to persuade. They need to explain. And their explanations need to be true.
Far from seeing any effort to explain, all I see is an enlivened and merciless push to ram through the results while censoring and slandering anyone who asks questions or points out irregularities. Either they don’t have explanations, or they don’t care what we think. Or both.
There is something to be said—from the point of view of the powerful—for just ramming things through and explaining nothing. It’s a clear demonstration of who’s boss. It demoralizes the other side. And it’s nearly certain to change the system permanently in ways that benefit the ruling class for as long as they can keep it going.
I have no special insight into what the president may or may not do. Based on his remarks Thursday night and the actions so far by his campaign, he clearly doesn’t believe the election was clean. He may nevertheless at some point conclude that he has no viable way to get to the bottom of what happened—especially with unfriendly state officials, agencies, and courts in charge of most of the processes.
Were the president eventually to concede, that will be trumpeted as “proof” that all doubts about the integrity of the election have been laid to rest, and all questions are illegitimate. It will, of course, prove no such thing.
Richard Nixon believed he won the 1960 election but had it stolen from him in Illinois and Texas. (There is evidence, but no conclusive proof, that he was right.) Seeing no clear way to establish the truth, and wishing to avert a crisis, he declined to challenge the results. This episode, ever since, has been “explained” to the American people in two ways: there was no cheating, and Nixon was statesmanlike to concede. But if there was no cheating, conceding was simply a matter of acknowledging reality. Nixon’s action was “statesmanlike” only if he sacrificed something for the (supposed) good of the country—i.e., if cheating denied him the presidency he legitimately won.
No matter what he does, President Trump will get no credit from his enemies, who are already demanding that he concede before the counting is even over—to say nothing of the lawsuits and potential recounts. If he does, a new standard will have been set, or an old one reaffirmed: in any close election, if the Democrat appears to be ahead, and irregularities appear to be present, they are to be dismissed as nonexistent and the Republican must go gentle into that good night.
That may well work in securing the White House this time. But if they just ram this through without explaining what really happened, then the legitimacy not just of our electoral system but of our entire government will have suffered an extreme, and possibly fatal, blow.
No one will really know who won. Partisans on both sides will insist they do, but they won’t—not really. Unless all the anomalies are explained, every count and recount conducted in a fair and transparent manner, the occupant of the White House on January 20, 2021—whoever he is—will sit under a cloud. If he’s Joe Biden, that cloud will be entirely of his party’s own making.
But far more ominously, one half the country—or to be more precise, the class that rules in the interests of (at most) half the country—will surmise that it can rule by fiat. The other half will conclude that they are subjects.
Whether that conclusion resigns the latter to apathy or stirs them to rebellion is the question that will determine the course of our politics going forward.
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