Feb 09

Today’s News 9th February 2020

  • Trump Supporters Attacked After Van Plows Through GOP Voter Registration Tent In Florida
    Trump Supporters Attacked After Van Plows Through GOP Voter Registration Tent In Florida

    Approximately six Trump supporters were attacked in the parking lot of a Jacksonville, Florida Walmart Saturday afternoon at around 3:50 p.m. when a man in his 20s plowed through a voter registration tent, according to the local Sheriff’s Office.

    “It happened so quickly,” said volunteer Nina Williams, one of five women who were working the tent. “I just barely got out of the way.”

    After driving through the tent, the man stopped, took a video, and flipped off the Republicans before driving off.

    “Kind of out of the blue, a man approached us in a van, was waving at us, kind of a friendly demeanor, thought he was coming up to talk to us, instead he accelerated his vehicle and plowed right into our tent, our tables,” said Volunteer Mike Alfiere, the sixth volunteer, adding “After he ran over everything, he backed up, took out a cell phone, kind of recorded the damage, made some obscene gestures at us and then proceeded to leave the complex.”

    Responding to the incident, the Duval Country Democratic Party issued a statement condemning the act, saying “No one’s life should be placed in danger for exercising their first amendment rights.”

    “The hate is toxic and dangerous,” tweeted Jacksonville Mayor, Lenny Curry. “Thankfully no one was injured but certainly they are shaken after being targeted because they were registering voters.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsPresident Trump weighed in Saturday afternoon, tweeting “Law Enforcement has been notified. Be careful tough guys who you play with!“

    JPO detectives will be looking into this as a case of aggravated assault, and have withheld comment on the driver’s motivation. 

    “We are outraged by this senseless act of violence toward our great volunteers,” said Duval GOP Chairman Dean Black, according to CBS 47. “The Republican Party of Duval County will not be intimidated by these cowards and we will not be silenced. I call on every Republican in our great city to stand up, get involved, and show these radicals that we will not be intimidated from exercising our Constitutional rights.”

    Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the target of a violent 2017 shooting at the hands of a Bernie Sanders supporter, tweeted “@realDonaldTrump supporters shouldn’t have to fear for their lives while registering people to vote,” adding “This can’t be the new normal. Democrats need to join me in condemning this behavior.”

    Lastly, former Florida governor Sen. Rick Scott tweeted “@DuvalGOP will not be silenced or intimidated. They will redouble their efforts to support strong Republicans in NE Florida and around the state!”

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    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 02/09/2020 – 00:19

    Tags
    Politics

  • US Deploys "Mini-Nuke" In Deplorable Threat To World Peace
    US Deploys “Mini-Nuke” In Deplorable Threat To World Peace

    Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The Pentagon confirmed this week that it has, for the first time, armed some of its submarines with long-range nuclear missiles which have a lower destructive power compared with existing warheads. These so-called “mini-nukes” represent – despite the diminutive-sounding name – an increased risk of nuclear war.

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    The newly deployed W76-2 warhead fitted to the Trident missile system is reported to have an explosive yield of five kilotons, or about 1 per cent of the existing W76-1 weapon. The supposed lower-yield weapon is nevertheless an instrument of immense mass destruction, equivalent to approximately a third of the power of the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 which killed tens of thousands of people. That puts in perspective the seemingly more usable “mini-nuke” missile.

    However, with Dr Strangelove-type logic, Pentagon official John Rood, claimed

    …the new device “would make Americans safer because it would deter the danger of nuclear war happening.”

    He also reportedly cited the weapon as a deterrent against alleged Russian aggression. (It is lamentable, if not absurd, how American officials incorrigibly portray Russia as a bogeyman. When will they ever evolve?)

    The official US reassurance is not the view of the US-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who said the deployment of such weapons actually increases the risk of an eventual nuclear war. This is because the lower-yield W76-2 launched from US Ohio-class submarines will be indistinguishable from the existing Trident warheads. Therefore the danger of escalation to all-out nuclear war is increased.

    Russia also condemned the US move. Sergei Ryabkov, Deputy Foreign Minister, said:

    “The US is actually lowering the nuclear threshold and conceding the possibility of waging a limited nuclear war and winning this war… this is extremely alarming.”

    What is doubly perplexing is the wider context in which the Trump administration has abnegated arms controls treaties. Last year, the administration walked away from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, governing the use of short-range, or tactical, nuclear missiles. So far, Washington has shown every indication that it has no intention to extend the New START accord with Russia governing long-range strategic weapons, which is due to expire next year.

    The deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons as part of the strategic arsenal is bound to destabilize the global strategic balance. Moscow has repeatedly warned that Washington is trying to incite a new arms race. It points to the undoing of arms controls treaties and the US weaponization of outer-space as evidence of such an agenda of provoking global insecurity.

    It is tempting to speculate that the US is reacting to Russia’s development of hypersonic non-nuclear weapons which are said to be able to evade any anti-missile defense system. Moscow maintains that its arsenal is predicated on a doctrine of self-defense and not a first-strike objective. In any case, it seems that the US having realized that it has lost out to Russia in development of hypersonic non-nuclear weapons has taken the tack of expanding its nuclear options. That move overturns decades of declared non-proliferation commitments.

    It should also be noted that this week the Kremlin disclosed that an urgent call issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to convene a summit in order to address international peace has so far been ignored by Washington. Last month, at a Holocaust memorial in Israel, Putin repeated a proposal for the UN founding powers – the US, Britain, France, Russia and China – to consolidate efforts for strengthening global security, non-proliferation and arms controls. This week, the Kremlin said this call has not received any response from the US (or the UK) to participate in such a forum.

    Furthermore, next month sees one of the biggest-ever NATO war maneuvers in Europe, including a massive trans-Atlantic deployment of US forces. Russia’s Ministry of Defense has deprecated the huge mobilization as being akin to a rehearsal for an invasion of Russia.

    President Donald Trump has previously stated his abhorrence of nuclear war and has called for negotiation of a new comprehensive arms control treaty between the US, Russia and China.

    All empirical evidence shows that American rhetoric is completely and contemptibly detached from the reality of its threatening practices. The world is moving towards more insecurity and risk of catastrophic war. And the fault of that damnable dynamic lies entirely with Washington.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 23:30

    Tags
    War Conflict
    Politics

  • Visualizing The 700-Year Fall Of Interest Rates
    Visualizing The 700-Year Fall Of Interest Rates

    How far can interest rates fall?

    Currently, many sovereign rates sit in negative territory, and, as Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld notes, there is an unprecedented $13 trillion in negative-yielding debt.

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    This new interest rate climate has many observers wondering where the bottom truly lies.

    Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England (BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of -0.0196% (-1.96 basis points) throughout the past eight centuries.

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    The Evidence on Falling Rates

    Collecting data from across 78% of total advanced economy GDP over the time frame, Schmelzing shows that real rates* have witnessed a negative historical slope spanning back to the 1300s.

    Displayed across the graph is a series of personal nominal loans made to sovereign establishments, along with their nominal loan rates. Some from the 14th century, for example, had nominal rates of 35%. By contrast, key nominal loan rates had fallen to 6% by the mid 1800s.

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    Starting in 1311, data from the report shows how average real rates moved from 5.1% in the 1300s down to an average of 2% in the 1900s.

    The average real rate between 2000-2018 stands at 1.3%.

    Current Theories

    Why have interest rates been trending downward for so long?

    Here are the three prevailing theories as to why they’re dropping:

    1. Productivity Growth

    Since 1970, productivity growth has slowed. A nation’s productive capacity is determined by a number of factors, including labor force participation and economic output.

    If total economic output shrinks, real rates will decline too, theory suggests. Lower productivity growth leads to lower wage growth expectations.

    In addition, lower productivity growth means less business investment, therefore a lower demand for capital. This in turn causes the lower interest rates.

    2. Demographics

    Demographics impact interest rates on a number of levels. The aging population—paired with declining fertility levels—result in higher savings rates, longer life expectancies, and lower labor force participation rates.

    In the U.S., baby boomers are retiring at a pace of 10,000 people per day, and other advanced economies are also seeing comparable growth in retirees. Theory suggests that this creates downward pressure on real interest rates, as the number of people in the workforce declines.

    3. Economic Growth

    Dampened economic growth can also have a negative impact on future earnings, pushing down the real interest rate in the process. Since 1961, GDP growth among OECD countries has dropped from 4.3% to 3% in 2018.

    Larry Summers referred to this sloping trend since the 1970s as “secular stagnation” during an International Monetary Fund conference in 2013.

    Secular stagnation occurs when the economy is faced with persistently lagging economic health. One possible way to address a declining interest rate conundrum, Summers has suggested, is through expansionary government spending.

    Bond Yields Declining

    According to the report, another trend has coincided with falling interest rates: declining bond yields.

    Since the 1300s, global nominal bonds yields have dropped from over 14% to around 2%.

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    The graph illustrates how real interest rates and bond yields appear to slope across a similar trend line. While it may seem remarkable that interest rates keep falling, this phenomenon shows that a broader trend may be occurring—across centuries, asset classes, and fiscal regimes.

    In fact, the historical record would imply that we will see ever new record lows in real rates in future business cycles in the 2020s/30s

    -Paul Schmelzing

    Although this may be fortunate for debt-seekers, it can create challenges for fixed income investors—who may seek alternatives strategies with higher yield potential instead.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 23:00

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • Coronavirus 'Super-Spreader' Infects 57 In Hospital As China Continues To Refuse CDC Help
    Coronavirus ‘Super-Spreader’ Infects 57 In Hospital As China Continues To Refuse CDC Help

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    One of the coronavirus fears was the possibility of super-spreaders. That possible fear is now reality…

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    Disturbing Details

    A New Report on 138 Coronavirus Cases Reveals Disturbing Details including the emergence of a super-spreader.

    One patient, admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, infected at least 10 health care workers and four other patients [actual suspect total is 57 see study below].

    The patient who infected so many health workers had been placed in a surgical ward because of abdominal symptoms, and the coronavirus was not initially suspected. Four other patients in that ward also contracted the disease, presumably from the first patient.

    The incident was a chilling reminder of the “super-spreaders” in outbreaks of other coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS — patients who infected huge numbers of other people, sometimes dozens. The phenomenon is poorly understood and unpredictable, an epidemiologist’s nightmare. Super-spreaders led to considerable transmission of MERS and SARS inside hospitals.

    Super-Spreader Infects 40 Health Care Workers

    The JAMA Report, published on Friday, is among the most comprehensive articles to date about people infected with the newly identified virus.

    Of the 138 patients, 57 (41.3%) were presumed to have been infected in hospital, including 17 patients (12.3%) who were already hospitalized for other reasons and 40 health care workers (29%). Of the hospitalized patients, 7 patients were from the surgical department, 5 were from internal medicine, and 5 were from the oncology department. Of the infected health care workers, 31 (77.5%) worked on general wards, 7 (17.5%) in the emergency department, and 2 (5%) in the ICU. One patient in the current study presented with abdominal symptoms and was admitted to the surgical department. More than 10 health care workers in this department were presumed to have been infected by this patient. Patient-to-patient transmission also was presumed to have occurred, and at least 4 hospitalized patients in the same ward were infected, and all presented with atypical abdominal symptoms. One of the 4 patients had fever and was diagnosed as having nCoV infection during hospitalization. Then, the patient was isolated. Subsequently, the other 3 patients in the same ward had fever, presented with abdominal symptoms, and were diagnosed as having nCoV infection.

    The data in this study suggest rapid person-to-person transmission of 2019-nCoV may have occurred. The main reason is derived from the estimation of the basic reproductive number (R0) based on a previous study.

    In this single-center case series of 138 hospitalized patients with confirmed NCIP in Wuhan, China, presumed hospital-related transmission of 2019-nCoV was suspected in 41% of patients, 26% of patients received ICU care, and mortality was 4.3%.

    JAMA Video

    “Fatality rate in a normal Flu is about 0.1%. When you get into the pandemics, of 1957 and 1968, it goes up to 0.8% to 1.2%. The 1918 pandemic, the famous Spanish Flu, you go up to as much as 2.0%…

    I think I can say we don’t know everything about this virus, but it is evolving in a way that it looks like it is adapting itself to infecting much better but we are going to start seeing a diminution in the overall death rate…

    The r0 of this one is supposedly somewhere around 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 depending upon how you model it. Which means that it is a virus that is quite good at transmitting from one person to another.“

    Massaged Numbers?

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    You have to laugh… China’s virus mortality data is as massaged as its GDP and PMIs…

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    Or Not Enough Test Kits?

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    Terminal 3 in Copenhagen Closed

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    Shanghai Empty

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    Downtown of Shanghai, a city with 24 million people and it is totally empty!

    China ignores offers of help from the C.D.C. and W.H.O.

    China probably wants and needs US assistance, but it absolutely does not want US reporting or any investigation into the alleged number of deaths.

    The streets in Shanghai, population 24 million, are empty.

    60 million people are quarantined not even able to leave their houses. That is equivalent to no one in California, Illinois, and Wisconsin being locked in, unable to go to work. The economic hit will be enormous.

    I just cannot believe this would happen over the reported 700 dead.

    In case you missed it, please see 50,000 New Coronavirus Infections Per Day in China.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 22:30

    Tags
    Health Medical Pharma

  • Syria & Russia Publish Evidence Of US Weapons Recovered In Idlib 'Terrorist Enclave'
    Syria & Russia Publish Evidence Of US Weapons Recovered In Idlib ‘Terrorist Enclave’

    The Syrian Army is making major gains inside Idlib in a military offensive condemned by Turkey and the United States, over the weekend capturing the key town of Saraqib from al-Qaeda linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

    Amid the military advance, the Syrian and Russian governments say they’ve recovered proof of US support for the anti-Assad al-Qaeda insurgent terrorists, publishing photographs of crates of weapons and supplies to state-run SANA:

    Syrian Arab Army units have found US-made weapons and ammunition, and medicines made in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at the positions and caches of terrorist organizations in the towns of Mardikh and Kafr Amim in Idleb southeastern countryside after crushing terrorism in them.

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    Syrian reporters say they were recovered in newly liberated areas of southeastern Idlib province, where army units “found weapons, ammunition and US-made shells and Grad missiles left behind by terrorists at their positions in the town of Kafr Amim after they fled from the area after the advancement of the army.”

    The Russian Embassy in Syria also circulated the photos on Saturday, saying there were some “interesting findings” in areas that were controlled by terrorists:

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    For years since nearly the start of the war in 2011 and 2012, Damascus and Moscow have repeatedly offered proof of US weaponry in the hands of jihadist terrorist groups, including ISIS. 

    Pentagon and even some former CIA officials have since admitted the covert US program ‘Timber Sycamore’ resulted in American arms ‘unintentionally’ making their way to terrorists in Syria; however, many informed commentators have said Washington knew exactly what it was doing in its ‘at all costs’ push to overthrow Assad.

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    Meanwhile, in the past days the US State Department has issued repeat warnings to Damascus that it must halt its joint offensive with Russia – going so far as to release a new video framing the operation as an attack on civilians. 

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    The US has charged that Damascus is harming “peace” in Idlib despite the fact that as of 2017 the US Treasury had quietly designated the main anti-Assad group in control of Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as a terrorist organization.  

    At the same time, top Turkish and Russian officials held high level talks in Ankara on Saturday over the worsening humanitarian crisis in Idlib.

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    Turkey fears the fallout and strain of the hundreds of thousands of refugees now fleeing Idlib toward the Turkish border, while Russia has charged that Erdogan has failed in his promises to bring neutralize terrorist groups, who have even begun attacking civilians deep inside of neighboring Aleppo province. 


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 22:00

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • Police Kill Thai Mall Shooter After Hourslong Bloodbath That Left 21 Dead
    Police Kill Thai Mall Shooter After Hourslong Bloodbath That Left 21 Dead

    Update (2145ET): The shooter at the Terminal 21 mall in Korat has been killed by police.

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    A total of 21 were killed, while another 33 were wounded, including several law enforcement officers. The shooter took civilians hostage at the mall, leading to a bloody shootout with police.

    * * *

    A Thai soldier has killed at least 17 people in a mass shooting and has taken hostages inside a shopping mall, all while broadcasting part of the assault on social media, according to the Bangkok Post and RT.

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    Local officials and media reports claimed the man broadcast the violence and ‘took selfies’ during the assault. In the video below, gunshots can be heard outside the mall.

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    The shooting unfolded inside a mall in Korat, also known as Nakhon Ratchasima, in northeastern Thailand. There were “17 deaths and 14 wounded” according to an unnamed official from the Bangkok-based Erawan Center, the nationwide emergency services dispatch center.

    The violence started when the attacker stole weapons and ammunition from his commander, then shot his commander and two others at the Surathampithak army camp before fleeing in a stolen Humvee.

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    He fired at civilians along the route to the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Muang district, and then kept shooting once he got inside the mall.

    “The gunman used a machine gun and shot innocent victims resulting in many injured and dead,” said Col. Krissana Pattanacharoen, a spokesman for the police. Local media played footage of the soldier getting out of a vehicle in front of the mall around 6 pm local time before firing toward a crowd and sending people scrambling for cover.

    The attacker then fired at a cooking gas cylinder, setting off an explosion and fire. Video clips showed people running away and cowering behind cars as thunderous shots rang out.

    What’s believed to be a photo of the attacker is circulating on social media. In the photo, he is identified as a cop.

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    Footage of people fleeing the scene has also been shared to social media.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe army has asked media outlets to stop live coverage of the attack in order to avoid giving the suspect information about official activities.

    At some point, the shooter started a livestream. According to reports, the gunman has taken hostages on the fourth floor of the mall, and Thai special forces are preparing to storm the building, but nothing has been done yet. It’s unclear whether they’re negotiating with the shooter.

    Security forces are gathered outside the mall.

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    The shooter also started a massive fire by reportedly shooting out a gas tank.

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    Local media have reported that the shooter took selfies and livestreamed during the attack. One of the purported photos shows the suspect wearing a combat helmet and a face mask as he holds up an assault rifle.

    The suspect is reportedly an Army sergeant, though other reports have identified him as a police officer. He used an assault rifle to carry out the attack.

    Of course, this isn’t the first mass shooting to be broadcast on social media. Footage of the Christchurch attack’s violent assault on a New Zealand mosque can still be found in some dark corners of the internet, even though New Zealand has made it highly illegal to even look at.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 21:46

  • Chengdu On Lockdown As Coronavirus Deaths Hit 813, Surpassing Total From 2003 SARS Outbreak
    Chengdu On Lockdown As Coronavirus Deaths Hit 813, Surpassing Total From 2003 SARS Outbreak

    Summary:

    • Hubei officials reported an additional 81 deaths in Hubei on Saturday, bringing the death toll to 806: more than the total from the entire 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.

    • Lockdown spreads to Chengdu, China’s sixth largest city (14.4. million)

    • A little later, China’s National Health commission reported that there were a total of 811 deaths across China, an increase of 89 overnight – the biggest one-day increase yet – while 2,649 discharged patients were cured

    • China also reported that on Feb 8, the total number of confirmed new cases rose to 37,198, an increase of 2,652 overnight with 3,916 suspected new cases, bringing the total to 28,942 suspected cases.

    • A total of 188,183 people were receiving medical attention, down 1,477 from 189,660 the day before

    • First American citizen has died

    • First Japanese citizen suspected of succumbing to virus

    • France elevates travel advisory to orange after 5 Britons fall ill in ski resort

    • Roundup of suspected infected in Wuhan continues

    • Beijing appoints Xi protege to help lead virus response

    • Vigil held for the dead coronavirus whistleblower, Dr. Li, in Hong Kong

    • China blocks Foxconn plan to reopen factories

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    Update (2130ET): Rumors on American social media claim the quarantine that is already affected 400m+ people, 60+ cities, and 3 provinces has been expanded to Chengdu, China’s sixth-largest city, with a total population of 14.4 million.

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    Twitter’s @CarlMinzner retweeted a thread from yesterday exploring whether the government is drawing on its experiencing interning more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang to carry out its quarantine.

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    The news comes just hours after health officials in Hubei confirmed the grim reality that China’s (probably doctored) death figures have surpassed the total death toll from the SARS outbreak.

    * * *

    Update (2000ET): According to China’s National Health Commission, the total number of confirmed cases has jumped to 37,198 overnight, an increase of 2,652, with another 28,942 cases suspended. The total number of deaths across the mainland surged by 89, the biggest one day increase yet, and bringing the total to 811.

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    There was good and bad news here. The good news is that ever since China shifted from an exponential to a quadratic equation to goalseek the spread of the pandemic, today was the smallest increase in new cases in a week:

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    However, before stocks rip higher on hopes that this time the pandemic is finally contained, there may be a far less upehoric reason why the number of new cases has topped out at around 3,000. As Dr Scott Gottlieb notes, Hubei’s “actual testing capacity on a per patient basis may be closer to 3,000”, which means the province may have far more new daily cases, it just can confirm them all.

    Meanwhile, the bad news is that even with this unexpected drop in new cases, the cumulative total is still well above JPMorgan’s base case forecast of 35,760 for Feb 8 (and certainly above the optimistic case of 30,957), and just shy of the pessimistic scenario of 39,018.

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    And to further discount any good news, it remains debatable whether one can even trust any Chinese data. As a reminder, 4 days ago the number of people receiving medical attention in China suddenly and unexpectedly plateaued after increase by 15-20K a day, a very suspicious development, and overnight we say the biggest drop in number of people receiving medical attention, which dropped by 1,477. Needless to say this number is suspect…

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    … as is the actual mortality rate, which virtually every single day since the pandemic broke out has been reported to be right around 2.1% of all reported cases, a number that is not as artificially stable as China’s GDP, but is orders of magnitude below what some reputable scientists have said is the true mortality rate, which may be as high as 15-20% for cases in Wuhan.

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    In any case, to repeat what we said earlier, it only took 3 weeks for coronavirus to surpass the death from the 2003 SARS outbreak, which had an R0 of 2-5. Something tells us that the R0 of the novel coronavirus – which according to most scientists is lower than that of SARS – will end up being far, far higher, as will its mortality rate when the true numbers are finally released.

    * * *

    Update (1745ET): The coronavirus outbreak has just reached another grim milestone: The death toll has eclipsed that of the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.

    China’s Hubei province has also reported 2,147 additional cases as of Feb. 8 (early Sunday in Beijing), lifting the total of cases in Hubei alone to 27,100, though the number of new cases being reported out of Hubei continued to slow. Reported cases in China alone exceed 36,693 less than two months after surfacing in late December in Wuhan. SARS sickened just 8,100.

    We noticed over the past few days that the ‘anti-alarmists’ who claimed that the outbreak wasn’t even as deadly as the seasonal flu have gradually gone quiet. Everybody who played down the seriousness of this outbreak is been unequivocally proven wrong.

    To put this all in perspective:

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    If you’re looking for a visual, here’s a useful one (though this chart is slightly out-of-date):

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    A broader look at the outbreak:

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    The confirmed cases have climbed by more than 2,000 daily since Feb. 2, peaking at 3,156 two days later. Confirmed cases also fell in the city of Wuhan, Bloomberg reports. The final evacuation flight taking more than 200 British citizens (and others) out of China has reportedly left Wuhan. Those passengers will be quarantined for two weeks upon arriving back in the UK.

    * * *

    Update (1500ET): The NYT just published its latest critical piece about the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. This one centers on President Xi’s decision to stay out of the limelight over the past two weeks, instead leaving the crisis to his No. 2, Premier Li Keqiang, who has been charged with leading the committee of senior officials tasked with overseeing the government response to the outbreak.

    One academic quoted in the article explains that the government’s botched handling of the outbreak could be the biggest threat to Xi’s rule during his tenure so far, and that the changes he’s imposed on the Chinese constitution could make it difficult for Xi to avoid blame.

    “It’s a big shock to the legitimacy of the ruling party. I think it could be only second to the June 4 incident of 1989. It’s that big,” said Rong Jian, a writer about politics in Beijing, referring to the armed crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters that year.

    “There’s no doubt about his control over power,” he added, “but the manner of control and its consequences have hurt his legitimacy and reputation.”

    Meanwhile, three more cases of nCoV have been confirmed aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’, the Carnival-owned cruise ship currently under quarantine in Yokohama. Three more individuals have tested positive, bringing the number aboard to 64, the government said Saturday. All passengers are facing a two-week quarantine.

    In China, much of the population has ordered to stay home, with only limited runs for essential supplies allowed. Factories will remain closed for at least another week or so, and airlines have cut service. JPM recently warned that the economic impact could drive China’s economy to a standstill. Here’s the latest update on how China’s tourism industry is dealing with the fallout.

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    In other economic news, the government in Beijing just blocked Apple supplier Foxconn’s plan to reopen factories in the southern city of Shenzen on Monday. According to Nikkei, health inspectors visited the factories and determined there was a “high risk” of infection.

    But most unusually about this crisis is the fact that the Communist Party’s immense propaganda machine is struggling to regain control of the narrative. After cracking down too hard on people like Dr. Li and others who warned of the outbreak before it became a national – then international – issue, the government dialed down its censorship machine, only to ramp it back up a few days later. Now, the party and its cadres are struggling to reassert control. Citizen journalists covering the outbreak in Wuhan have been harassed and arrested.

    Though it wasn’t mentioned in the NYT report, Beijing bolstered its response to the crisis by appointing a protégé of President Xi to the committee overseeing the response to the outbreak, the latest effort by the government to rebuild confidence after the death of Dr. Li. Chen Yixin, secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the Communist Party’s top law enforcement body, was appointed to Li’s committee, according to Taoran Notes, a social media account affiliated with state-owned Economic Daily, which was cited by SCMP.

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    Dr. Li. Chen Yixin

    A vigil for the doctor was held in Hong Kong.

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    Here’s video from one vigil:

    One image circulating online shows Dr. Li’s face with his mouth covered by a dragon paw, a symbol of how the government silenced him.

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    Canada’s National Post has documented some more of the outrage growing on social media, which the Communist Party is scrambling to suppress.

    “Good people don’t live long, but evil lives for a thousand years,” read one post mourning Li’s death.

    A hashtag referencing the message that Dr. Li was forced to sign by police in Wuhan after he was punished for speaking out is spreading on Weibo and other Chinese social media sites.

    Now, many users are using the hashtag “Can you manage, do you understand?” — a reference to the letter Dr. Li was forced to sign when authorities accused him of disrupting “social order,” according the BBC.

    Though the comments hold back from outright naming Li, they demonstrate the escalating anger towards the government.

    “Do not forget how you feel now. Do not forget this anger. We must not let this happen again,” one commenter wrote on Weibo.

    “The truth will always be treated as a rumour. How long are you going to lie? What else do you have to hide?” another wrote.

    “If you are angry with what you see, stand up.”

    In one of the most unlikely outbreaks so far, the coronavirus has arrived in the Haute Savois in the French Alps according to Bloomberg and Vanity Fair. As we mentioned earlier, five Britons have been diagnosed with the holidays just a week before the resort is set to be packed with vacationers from the UK.

    Beijing has also sent members of a powerful anti-corruption committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding Dr. Li’s death, a sign that Beijing will likely find some poor local official to scapegoat.

    The virus has been tracked back to a contaminated chalet in Les Contamines-Montjoie. Family members from two apartments within the chalet have been infected, including a 9-year-old girl. The virus is believed to have traveled to the resort after another Briton traveled to Singapore.

    So far, only a handful of new cases have been reported Saturday afternoon in the US, though it’s the middle of the night in Beijing right now. Here’s the latest count courtesy of SCMP.

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    * * *

    Update (1200ET): More surprisingly frank reports from the Chinese press have been circulating on Saturday courtesy of Caixin, a Beijing-based financial and business news organization.

    Among other things, TV reports claimed shortages of essential medical supplies have persisted into Saturday, stoking public anger over the death of Dr. Li, the first bonafide martyr of the 2019-2020 nCoV outbreak.

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

    The station offered more grim updates on the rounding up of all infected patients in Wuhan.

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

    Other reports claim that government forces are also rounding up those who are merely suspected of being exposed.

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

    As one twitter sleuth asks: Would they be going to all this trouble for less than 800 dead across a country of 1.4 billion? So far, reports of these violent roundups have been confined to Wuhan. How long until they start rounding up party members in Shanghai, or Beijing?

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

    Mandatory home and temperature checks were only the beginning. How long until millions are forcibly confined?

    * * *

    With roughly a dozen cases confirmed in the US, all of which are reportedly expected to pull through, news of the first American death from the coronavirus outbreak initially sounded like a mistake. But it’s now been confirmed by both the New York Times and WSJ: One of the Americans who decided to stay behind in Wuhan has died.

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    Few details about the woman were immediately available, other than her age – 60 – and the location where she died. Though the NYT reported, citing two sources, that she had underlying health issues.

    Few details about the American, who died on Thursday, were immediately available. According to the United States Embassy in Beijing, the person was 60 years old and died at Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, the inland metropolis at the center of the epidemic. Two people familiar with the matter said the person was a woman and had underlying health conditions.

    It’s unclear whether the woman who died made any attempt to leave the city on one of the evacuation flights that has ferried Americans to safety.

    News of the American woman’s death come as the world grows increasingly skeptical about the numbers being released by the Chinese government, with some suggesting that the number of new cases reported every day reflects China’s limited screening abilities, not the actual number of new infections. And as we pointed out last night, over the past two weeks, what was initially an exponential curve in the number of new cases has quietly shifted into a quadratic one, where the number of new cases is largely unchanged day after day.

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    We also noted that the number of confirmed deaths (all except for 3 have been recorded inside China) has topped 700 (the most recent total is 724), and is now closing in on the 800 number – aka the total number of cases from the SARS outbreak.

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    SCMP

    Washington is especially frustrated with Beijing right now because, for the last month, the CDC has been offering to send a team of experts to help China combat the outbreak (remember when President Trump promised whatever help would be necessary?). But the Chinese have refused to accept them (though they have accepted shipments of facemasks and other supplies). A similar offer from the WHO has also been refused (though its top officials – who know the deal with Beijing – have met with the Chinese leadership).

    Alex Azar, the United States secretary of health and human services, said at a news briefing on Friday that he had recently reiterated the C.D.C. offer to his Chinese counterpart, Dr. Ma Xiaowei.

    Asked about the holdup, Mr. Azar said: “It’s up to the Chinese. We continue to expect fully that President Xi will accept our offer. We’re ready and willing and able to go.”

    Hmm….we wonder why?

    Interestingly, Japan also claimed that one of its citizens may have succumbed to the virus in Wuhan, though they can’t be sure because Chinese officials never confirmed whether the patient had contracted nCoV.

    Japan also said on Saturday that one of its citizens had died in a Wuhan hospital from a suspected case of the coronavirus. But the Japanese Foreign Ministry said that based on information it received from the Chinese authorities, it could not confirm whether the man, who was in his 60s, had been infected with the new virus. The ministry called the cause of death viral pneumonia.

    Per WSJ, Chinese officials said the man died of “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, meaning it was almost certainly nCoV.

    China’s Foreign Ministry said this past week that as of noon on Thursday, 19 foreign nationals in the country had been confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus, and only two have been discharged from the hospital.

    In other disturbing news, 5 British nationals have reportedly been diagnosed with the virus in a French ski town, according to the Telegraph. The group was reportedly infected when one of its members came into contact with an individual who had been infected in Singapore.

    Think about that: Five Britons have been infected with the virus (which can cause life-threatening pneumonia) after contracting it via aerosol exposure from a traveler who had recently been to Singapore, and was (presumably) infected there. The French government has raised its travel restriction to orange.

    Does that sound like a ‘China’ problem? All the while, China is growing more isolated as the US and dozens of other countries either close their borders to Chinese citizens, or implement strict controls. Meanwhile, across the mainland, millions are mourning the death of Dr. Li, a doctor who succumbed to the virus in Wuhan after being punished for trying to warn the public about it. According to the SCMP, his death could inspire demands for free speech to coalesce into a movement, similar to what just transpired in Hong Kong.

    For the hundreds of Americans who were rescued and are now being quarantined on American military bases, news of the death, though said, likely helped put things in perspective: Yes, they’re stuck in this military camp for two weeks. But at least one of them must be thinking: ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 21:43

  • Breaking Down The Last Decade Of "Terrible" Climate-Change In 7 Narrative-Busting Charts
    Breaking Down The Last Decade Of “Terrible” Climate-Change In 7 Narrative-Busting Charts

    Authored by Anthony Watts via WattsUpWithThat.com,

    This article on Grist (h/t to James Taylor, The Heartland Institute) tries to point out how “terrible” the last decade was due to “climate change”. They write:

    As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?

    The seven charts below begin to hint at an answer to that question. Some of the changes they document, like the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the number of billion dollar disasters that occur each year, illustrate how little we did to reduce emissions and how unprepared the world is to deal with the warming we’ve already locked in.

    https://grist.org/climate/we-broke-down-the-last-decade-of-climate-change-in-7-charts/

    We can also provide 7 charts that illustrate the last decade of climate change, and they tell a different story…

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    What they say: 1. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by about 25 parts per million.

    There’s no disputing that ambient CO2 has gone up in the atmosphere, however, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. NASA, for example has this to say about the effects of that increased CO2 in study about CO2 and greening derived from satellite data.

    From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 2016

    “We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilizing effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data,” says co-author Prof. Ranga Myneni of the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University.

    “The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two-times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2)…”

    https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/bu-cfg042216.php

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    This image shows the change in leaf area across the globe from 1982-2015. CREDIT Credits: Boston University/R. Myneni
    Source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.html

    It seems the Earth’s biosphere is responding to increased CO2 in a positive way, that’s also undeniable.

    What they say: 2. Climate change got expensive.

    They cite this graph (produced by the Grist magazine):

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    And they say:

    One of the best-established consequences of global warming is that it makes natural disasters, like fires and floods, more frequent and severe. In the 2010s, the costs of this consequence came into sharp focus as billion-dollar disasters struck the United States again and again. 

    But, that’s not true when you look at normalized weather disaster costs:

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    Source: Pielke, R. (2018). Tracking progress on the economic costs of disasters under the indicators of the sustainable development goals. Environmental Hazards, 1-6.

    Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. makes note of this in Why Climate Advocates Need To Stop Hyping Extreme Weather

    It appears that 2019, is on track to continue the record of good news. Robert Muir-Wood of RMS, a leading catastrophe modeling firm, wrote a month ago “Almost three months ago we passed a remarkable record in catastrophe loss. And yet no one seems to want to celebrate it. No banner headlines in the newspapers. . . The first half of 2019 generated the lowest catastrophe insurance loss for more than a decade.” Muir-Wood labelled 2019 “the year of the kitten.” With two months left, cross your fingers.

    What they say: 3. More people accept the basic premises that it’s getting hot and that it’s our fault.

    Well, you might think that if you believe the highly adjusted temperature data published by NASA GISS and [University of East Anglia’s Climate Research unit] on climate (ground zero for the embarrassing and revealing Climategate affair in 2009).

    But when you look at unadjusted data, such as is produced by the state-of- the-art United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) operated by NOAA, you get a wholly different idea about temperature over the last decade:

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    Graph annotated by A. Watts
    Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets%5B%5D=uscrn&parameter=anom-tavg&time_scale=12mo&begyear=2005&endyear=2019&month=12

    That’s right, in the contiguous US, the temperature for 2019 was actually lower than for the start of the decade at 2010. The two peaks in 2012 and 2016 were from naturally caused El Nino events in the Pacific ocean. Granted, the USA isn’t the world, but the USA routinely gets blamed for all of the climate woes of the world, so the comparison seems a fair one. But really, where’s the climate crisis?

    What they say: 4. But there’s a widening partisan divide when it comes to worrying about the environment.

    Well that’s true, Conservatives generally think things through and look at fact based evidence compared to the liberal side, which seems to “feel” issues far more than they critically examine them.

    But when people of all stripes worldwide are polled about it, such as the United Nations does, it comes in dead last as a concern:

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    Source: http://data.myworld2015.org/

    It seems people worldwide would rather have education, food, honest government, better roads, and reliable energy than they would some climate action.

    What they say: 5. Coal continued its death spiral.

    Citing a Grist produced graph of data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that they say depicts a “death spiral” for coal use, they say coal is on the way out.

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    Clayton Aldern / Grist

    While that data is true, what they aren’t showing you is the rest of the story from the EIA:

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    Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook

    What is really going on here is that natural gas is replacing coal because it is more efficient, less expensive to maintain, and has a smaller footprint. It’s really a market driven business decision rather than a nod to environmental concerns.

    What they say: 6. Solar skyrocketed, but fossil fuels still dominate.

    Once again they cite a graph they produced from EIA data, and once again, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

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    Clayton Aldern / Grist

    Gosh, it looks like the entire USA is being powered by solar energy! Hurray for environmentalism! Inconveniently, the reality is far different:

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    Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review

    While renewables, including solar, have made gains, they still lag behind fossil fuels such as natural gas, crude oil, and coal in energy production in the USA. Without baseload (grid) generation by coal and natural gas, solar wouldn’t even work, since almost all solar installations are grid-tied – meaning that if the grid doesn’t have electricity, solar power can’t feed to it.

    What they say: 7. While coal flatlined, the price of renewables dropped precipitously.

    I wonder what the price of renewables would be if they weren’t propped up by your tax dollars? According to EIA data, fossil fuels are still far less expensive:

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    https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/reports/52521…

    And there there’s this analysis.

    The EIA estimates the two largest federal tax credit programs benefiting wind and solar paid out a combined $2.8 billion in 2016. These funds came through a tax credit worth 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour of power produced, as well as a deduction equal to 30 percent of a facility’s installation costs.

    These two tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2021, though a permanent 10 percent investment tax credit for solar and geothermal installations would remain.

    https://www.insidesources.com/us-still-subsidizing-renewable-energy-to-the-tune-of-nearly-7-billion/

    That doesn’t include state tax credits, which are also substantial.

    While some people at Grist believe there is more to worry about from climate change issues this past decade, the undeniable fact is We’ve Just Had The Best Decade In Human History.

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    Source: Matt Ridley, writing in the Spectator UK

    How inconvenient for the eco-worriers at Grist.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 21:30

    Tags
    Environment

  • Global Air Freight Just Suffered Worst Year Since 2009
    Global Air Freight Just Suffered Worst Year Since 2009

    The International Air Transport Association (IATA) published a new report on Wednesday that showed global air freight markets declined in 2019, suggesting the global economy continues to decelerate. 

    Global air freight measured in freight tonne kilometers (FTKs), plunged 3.3% in 2019 over the prior year while available freight tonne-kilometers (AFTK) rose 2.1%. 

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    IATA warned this was the first year of contracting freight volumes since 2012, and the slowest growth in the industry since 2009. 

    Cargo volumes dropped in December by 2.7 Y/Y, while capacity rose 2.8%. 

    The performance of air cargo is a reflection of a global synchronized slowdown that continues to deepen. Slowing GDP growth across major manufacturing-intensive economies has dented consumer confidence, led to falling export orders, and, in return, has hurt the air freight industry.

    IATA said there are some signs that orders could bounce in 2020. It warned that a slowing global economy and coronavirus outbreak in Asia could lead to turbulence in 1H20.

    “Trade tensions are at the root of the worst year for air cargo since the end of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. While these are easing, there is little relief in that good news as we are in unknown territory with respect to the eventual impact of the coronavirus on the global economy. With all the restrictions being put in place, it will certainly be a drag on economic growth. And, for sure, 2020 will be another challenging year for the air cargo business,” said Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO.

    Here’s IATA’s Regional Performance Report: 

    All markets except Africa suffered volume declines in 2019. Asia-Pacific retained the largest share of FTKs, at 34.6 percent. The share of freight traffic increased modestly for both North America and Europe, to 24.2 percent and 23.7 percent, respectively. Middle East carriers’ traffic share held steady at 13 percent. Africa and Latin America saw their shares lift marginally, to 1.8 percent and 2.8 percent.

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    Asia-Pacific carriers in December posted a decrease in demand of 3.5 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Capacity increased by 2.8 percent. The full-year 2019 saw volumes decline 5.7 percent, the largest decrease of any region, while capacity increased by 1.1 percent. As the world’s main manufacturing region, international trade tensions and the global growth slowdown weighed heavily on regional air freight volumes in 2019. Within-Asia FTKs were particularly affected (down 8 percent compared to a year ago).

    North American airlines saw volumes fall by 3.4 percent in December, while capacity grew by 2.1 percent. For 2019 in total, the region’s cargo volumes declined by 1.5 percent, compared to a capacity increase of 1.6 percent. Trade tensions and cooling US economic activity in the latter part of the year have been factors in the decline. The 5.6 percent fall in international year-on-year volumes in December was the weakest monthly growth outcome for the region since early 2016.

    European airlines experienced a 1.1 percent year-on-year decrease in freight demand in December, with a capacity rise of 4.9 percent. The fall in December was typical of the performance for 2019 as a whole, where volumes fell 1.8 percent, but capacity increased by 3.4 percent. Softer activity, including in the manufacturing-intensive German economy, combined with ongoing Brexit uncertainty, contributed to the 2019 result, which in international freight volume terms was the weakest since 2012.

    Middle Eastern carriers’ freight volumes decreased 3.4 percent year-on-year in December and capacity increased by just 1.9 percent, the lowest of any region. This contributed to an annual result of a decline in demand of 4.8 percent in 2019 – the second greatest decline in growth rate of all the regions. Annual capacity increased just 0.7 percent. Disruption to global supply chains and weak global trade, together with airline restructuring in the region, were the chief drivers of the weaker freight outcome.

    Latin American airlines suffered the sharpest fall in demand of any region in December, of 5.3 percent. The region was also the only one to see a reduction in capacity (-3.1 percent). Although the region was the second strongest performer across 2019 as a whole, limiting its decline in volumes to just 0.4 percent, social unrest and economic difficulties in several key countries led to the weakest international FTK outcome since 2015. Annual capacity increased 4.7 percent.

    African carriers’ saw freight demand increase by 10.3 percent in December 2019, compared to the same month in 2018. This was reflected in the strong 2019 full-year performance, which saw Africa freight volumes expand 7.4 percent. Capacity in December grew by 10 percent and for 2019 in total, increased by 13.3 percent. Over the year, air cargo volumes have been supported by strong capacity growth and investment linkages with Asia.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 21:00

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • Fiscal And Monetary Policy Insanity – Realized Depopulation Vs. Potential Pandemic
    Fiscal And Monetary Policy Insanity – Realized Depopulation Vs. Potential Pandemic

    Authored by Chris Hamilton via Econimica blog,

    There is great concern (rightly) about the current Coronavirus and potential for a regional or global pandemic.  The loss of life and associated deceleration of economic activity have a fair number of folks pretty concerned and market riggers working overtime to avoid an asset “panic” (aka, free market price discovery).  However, how bad and widespread this may get is unknowable and speculative.

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    What is known before any pandemic is that the four regions of the world that make-up just 36% of global population but nearly 80% of global GDP (plus 80% of commodity / energy consumption) including East Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, S/N Korea), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America (US, Canada) all have declining under-60-year-old populations as of 2019.

    As the chart below shows, all four regions are now in decline and the under 60 year-old declines are projected to continue and worsen through 2040 in all but North America.  As for the US, the projections of a return to high rates of immigration and significant increases in fertility and births are unlikely to play out.  North America’s under 60 year-old population is much more likely to hug the zero growth line through 2040 than return to growth.

    Below is what this looks like on an annual change basis in millions of persons.  Noteworthy is 2009 was the gateway from centuries of secular growth to what is now decades or perhaps centuries of secular decline.  2020 is really the jumping off point, as a period of minor under 60yr/old population declines ends, and the downside speed accelerates in these four regions (particularly China in East Asia).  In 2020, the global population of consumers will decline by 5 million.  By 2030, the decline will be “at least” 17 million annually.  Why “at least”? 

    This data from the UN assumes birth rates and total births in these four regions far above what was observed in 2018 and 2019 and these UN assumptions of rising fertility and births is projected through 2040.  Since 2007, birth rates and total births are significantly breaking to the downside, particularly in 2019… and the difference in these four regions was over 2 million fewer births in 2019 alone and the delta is only growing over time.

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    The actual declines in the under-60 population will likely be in excess of 20 million a year by 2030.  Simply put, in 2020, we are looking at a 0.2% to 0.3% annual decline in consumers with the jobs, income, savings, and/or access to credit to consume.  By 2030, the annual decline will be up to 0.7% to 0.8%.  It is very hard to grow when you are shrinking…and all the poor and third world nations are dependent on the demand growth among these four consumer regions for their growth.  You can see the problem (unless you are paid quite handsomely not to see it).

    Strangely, the Federal Reserve and like central banks, in conjunction with federal governments, are making money ever cheaper with the aim of a continuation in global productive capacity…in the face of fast declining populations that do all the consuming. 

    We are officially in a period of fiscal lunacy in the face of depopulation among the global consumer base.

    Data via UN World Population Prospects 2019


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 20:30

    Tags
    Business Finance

  • 'Bullets, Not Hugs': Mexico Deploys Elite Marines To Fight Drug Cartels In Response To Pressure From Trump Admin
    ‘Bullets, Not Hugs’: Mexico Deploys Elite Marines To Fight Drug Cartels In Response To Pressure From Trump Admin

    Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has deployed Mexico’s largely sidelined elite marine force to fight drug cartels, following pressure from the Trump administration to beef up its fight against illicit substances, according to the Wall Street Journal – which notes that the move marks a shift from a “counternarcotics strategy that largely ended the pursuit of high-profile arrests and focused almost exclusively on poverty alleviation.”

    “We are operating again,” said one senior Mexican navy officer, adding “The targets we need to go after have been defined.”

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    Marines presented Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the media in Mexico City after his capture in 2014. He later escaped, and was recaptured in 2016. (Photo: ronaldo schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

    The new strategy comes amid growing alarm in Washington that Mexico has failed to control the drug trade – highlighted by the November murder of nine US citizens by suspected cartel hit men. According to preliminary numbers, 2019 murders in Mexico are on track to exceed 2018’s record of 36,685, according to the report.

    Spearheading the Trump administration’s push is US Attorney General William Barr, who has visited Mexico twice to encourage AMLO to bring the marines back to counternarcotics enforcement, as well as beefing up extraditions of suspects who have fled the US while wanted for crimes. In January, Barr urged the Mexican government to target fentanyl labs, as well as crack down on seaports used to deliver precursor chemicals used in the labs.

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    President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, right, met with U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the National Palace in Mexico City in December.

    In exchange for the enhanced crackdown, the US has agreed to step up efforts to prevent guns from being smuggled into Mexico, according to the Journal‘s sources.

    The marines, the Mexican security force that U.S. officials say they trust the most, were behind most high-profile arrests and killings of cartel leaders in the past two decades, including twice capturing drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

    The elite navy force was largely sidelined by Mr. López Obrador soon after he took office in late 2018, part of a strategy by the new government to halt the pursuit of top cartel figures and focus instead on attacking poverty—an approach it dubbed “hugs, not bullets.”

    Last year, the marines took part in few counternarcotics operations. But in recent weeks, marine units have been involved in a flurry of high-profile arrests, including of the head of a Mexico City cartel and close relatives of two major drug lords. –Wall Street Journal

    Mexico-city based security consultant Eduardo Guerrero told the Journal that the “Hugs, not bullets” approach is changing, and that he expects Americans ” to take a very proactive role in pushing Mexico to confront the most powerful groups, especially the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartels.”

    The Trump administration began increasing pressure on Mexico in November following the murders of three mothers and six of their children in a fundamentalist Mormon compound in the northern state of Sonora. Cartel gunmen reportedly ambushed the families while fighting for control of the area where the victims lived.

    After the massacre, Mr. Trump said the U.S. would designate Mexico’s drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that Mexico strongly opposed. Mr. Trump suspended the decision after Mr. Barr met with senior officials during a trip to Mexico in December. –Wall Street Journal

    Barr’s visits have shown measurable results thus far, with Mexico stepping up the pace of extraditions (37 since December out of 58 in all of 2019) according to the Mexican Attorney General’s office.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 20:00

  • Climate Activist Leaves Environmentalist Movement Because It's "Too White"
    Climate Activist Leaves Environmentalist Movement Because It’s “Too White”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    A Filipino climate activist wrote an article for VICE saying that she left the environmental movement because it was too “white.”

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    Those awful white people and their…trying to save the planet!

    “The climate movement is overwhelmingly white. So I walked away,” explains Karin Louise Hermes, accusing her fellow tree huggers of exploiting her for ‘woke’ token diversity points.

    “After a while I realized I would only be called upon when climate organizations needed an inspiring story or a “diverse” voice, contacts for a campaign, or to participate in a workshop for “fun” when everyone else on the (all-white) project was getting paid,” she complains.

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

    Hermes’ main bone of contention appears to be that her white comrades didn’t adequately embrace the notion of intersectionality, which basically means using climate change alarmism as a vehicle to push all your other demented far-left political demands.

    “Anti-racism and anti-capitalism need to be made part of organizing,” claims Hermes.

    “If “Green” policies fail to consider anti-racism and migrant rights, how is any person of colour supposed to feel voting for them or organizing in the same spaces?”

    Hermes apparently made activist leaders uncomfortable by drawing attention to their lack of diversity.

    “Whenever I would question the whiteness of these spaces and how strategies didn’t take race into account, I would be met with uncomfortable silences,” she writes, asserting that the mostly white activist leaders were not paying enough attention to what “whiteness, capitalism, and inequality have to do with climate change.”

    In what was actually a fairly good point, Hermes also highlights how eco-warriors push veganism as a solution yet refuse to acknowledge “how people have been killed after protesting against the sourcing of plant-based foods like palm oil on Indigenous lands.”

    In summary, Hermes accurately nails how climate activists use non-white people as human shields for their arguments, but her own inherent racism towards white people also shines through given the fact that most of this took place in Berlin, which is still 71 per cent ethnic German.

    Respondents on Twitter also had some fun on the thread.

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

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    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 19:30

    Tags
    Social Issues
    Environment

  • It's Time To Ask Again What Really Happened To Ukraine's Missing Gold
    It’s Time To Ask Again What Really Happened To Ukraine’s Missing Gold

    Now that the Trump impeachment farce is finally over, vindicating the president and in the process for the first time boosting the president’s approval rating higher than where Obama was at this time in his first term much to the embarrassment of Nancy Pelosi, whose impeachment gambit has backfired spectacularly (just as Nancy knew it would, and is why she delayed triggering it until a critical mass of ultra left-wing demands in Congress made it impossible for her to ignore any longer)…

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    … the Democrats’ great diversion from Trump’s core question – did the Bidens willfully engage in, and benefit from corruption in the Ukraine, corruption which may have been enabled and facilitated by billions in taxpayer funds originating from the Obama administration no less – is over.

    However, while Trump has finally moved on beyond what in retrospect was a remarkable, if failed presidential coup attempt, orchestrated by the Ukraine lobby in the US, backed by the Atlantic Council and various other “deep-state” institutions and apparatchiks, and implemented by Congressional democrats who are now watching the chances of the Democratic party winning the 2020 presidential election melt before their eyes, some long overdue questions surrounding the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine – one of the world’s most corrupt nations according to the World Economic Forum – especially around the time of the 2014 presidential coup and the months immediately following, are about to be asked, and haunt Joe Biden and his son like a very angry and vengeful ghost, only this time there will be no Trump impeachment to distract from revealing the shocking answers.

    Needless to say, we are delighted by this outcome because as regular readers will recall, there are many unanswered questions that emerged back in 2014, some from following the money both in and out of Ukraine, and some from following the country’s gold, much of which was put on board a plane headed to the US in one cold, wintry night in March 2014, never to come back again.

    But before we get there, first we need to a rather lengthy detour into the history of Ukraine corruption since the February 2014 Euromadian revolution, for the background on why Trump had to be stopped at all costs from asking either Ukraine, or anyone else, questions that may expose corruption involving Joe Biden in particular, and the Obama administration in general. To do that, we need to follow some $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funds that quietly went missing back in 2014, and most likely ended up in the offshore bank account of some Ukrainian oligarch; conveniently PJ Media’s senior editor Tyler O’Neill did just that almost two years ago, in March 2018. Here’s what he said back then, together with some additions from ZH:

    In the last days of the Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden took a “swan song” trip to Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country where he had been the administration’s “point person.” On the eve of this trip, the country announced it would end a criminal investigation into an infamous company connected to the loss of $1.8 billion in aid funding — a company whose board of directors included Biden’s son Hunter.

    The Biden family’s dealings with this Ukrainian company involved getting one of the country’s most notorious mob bankers, Ihor Kolomoiski, off the U.S. government visa ban list. Under Biden’s leadership, $3 billion in aid went to Ukraine, and his son’s company was implicated in the disappearance of $1.8 billion of that money. Peter Schweizer revealed the former vice president’s role in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

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    Ihor Kolomoiski

    Secretary of State John Kerry announced the U.S. support for Ukraine’s nationalist government in March 2014, a month after a mass uprising pushed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych out of office and inspired a corresponding pro-Russian uprising in the east. It was also at this time that a leaked recording between US assistant secretary of state Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, emerged, a clip which as the FT said then  “could also bolster [claims] that the protests that erupted against Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich last November are being funded and orchestrated by the US.” In other words, the clip confirmed that the US was masterminding the entire “Euromaidan” process all along and deciding who should be in Ukraine’s next government. In short: what happened in Ukraine in February 2014 was another CIA-staged presidential coup. Finally, it was also the time that Biden became the Obama administration’s “point person” for the country.

    On April 16, 2014, shortly after the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution which culminated with the overthrow of democratically-elected president Yanukovich, Biden met with Devon Archer, a former star fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run and business partner in Rosemont Capital with Biden’s son Hunter. (Federal agents would later arrest Archer in May 2016 for defrauding a Native American tribe.)

    Less than a week later (April 22) came an announcement that Archer had joined the board of Burisma, a secretive Ukrainian natural gas company. On May 13, Hunter Biden would also join the company’s board.

    On the day before Archer’s hiring, April 21, the vice president landed in Kiev for high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials. He spearheaded the effort to invest $1 billion from the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into Ukraine.

    The vice president’s presence helps explain a conundrum. Burisma hired his son and Archer despite the fact that neither of them had any experience in the energy sector. Schweizer notes, “The choice of Hunter Biden to handle transparency and corporate governance of Burisma is curious, because Biden had little if any experience in Ukrainian law, or professional legal counsel, period.”

    Furthermore, Hunter Biden “seemed undeterred by the fact that as he was joining the Burisma board the British government’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was seizing $23 million from [founder Mykola] Zlochevsky’s bank accounts.” Furthermore, a year after Biden joined the firm, “experienced industry observers warned investors that Burisma was still a company to be avoided.”

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    Mykola Zlochevsky

    On the other hand, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Out of 148 nations studied by the World Economic Forum, Ukraine ranks 143 for property rights, 130 for “irregular payments and bribes,” 133 for “favoritism in decisions of government officials,” and 146 for “protection of minority shareholders’ interests.”

    Two major figures in this corruption feature prominently in Biden’s Ukraine investment.

    Zlochevsky founded Burisma in Cyprus in 2006. He served as natural resources minister under Yanukovych, and gave himself the licenses to develop the country’s abundant gas fields. He also had a flare for lavishness, running a super-exclusive fashion boutique named after himself.

    Burisma’s major subsidiaries ended up sharing the same business address as the natural gas firm controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He controlled the country’s largest financial institution, PrivatBank, through which the Ukrainian military and government workers got paid. He also owned media companies and airlines. In violation of Ukraine law, he maintained Ukrainian, Israeli, and Cypriot passports.

    Kolomoisky gained a reputation for violence and brutality, along with lawlessness. Rival oligarchs have sued him for alleged involvement in “murders and beheadings” related to a business deal. He also allegedly used “hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws” to take over a steel plant in 2006. He built his multibillion-dollar empire by “raiding” other companies, forcing them to merge with his own using brute force.

    For these and other reasons, the U.S. government placed Kolomoisky on its visa ban list, prohibiting him from entering the country legally. In 2015, however, after Hunter Biden and Devon Archer had joined Burisma’s board, Kolomoisky was given admittance back into the U.S. According to a follow-up report in 2016, “today, the oligarch mainly resides in Switzerland. He spends much time in the United States and is getting less and less involved in the Ukrainian affairs.”

    Archer and the younger Biden brought other benefits to Burisma, however. Archer represented the company at the Louisiana Gulf Coast Oil Exposition in 2015. Biden addressed the Energy Security for the Future conference in Monaco. The vice president’s son brought much-needed legitimacy to the shoddy gas company. Less than a month after Archer joined Burisma’s board, the company hired another Kerry lackey, David Leiter, as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He successfully lobbied for more aid to the country.

    And Both Biden and Kerry championed $1.8 billion in taxpayer-backed loans given to Ukraine in September 2014 courtesy of the IMF. That money would go directly through Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, and then it would disappear.  According to the Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdog Nashi Groshi, “This transaction of $1.8 billion … with the help of fake contracts was simply an asset siphoning operation.”

    What is even more fascinating, is that in the chaos following the February 2014 revolution, Ukraine appears to have embezzled money from none other than the IMF (whose biggest source of funds is the US). As German newspaper Deutsche Wirtshafts Nachrichten reported in August 2015, a huge chunk of the $17 billion in bailout money the IMF granted to Ukraine in April 2014 was discovered in a bank account in Cyprus controlled by, who else, Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky. As the German publication went on to add, in April 2014, $3.2 billion was immediately disbursed to Ukraine, and over the following five months, another $4.5 billion was disbursed to the Ukrainian Central Bank in order to stabilize the country’s financial system. “The money should have been used to stabilize the country’s ailing banks, but $1.8 billion disappeared down murky channels,” DWN wrote.

    DWN also reported that according to the IMF, in January 2015 the equity ratio of Ukraine’s banking system had dropped to 13.8 percent, from 15.9 percent in late June 2014. By February 2015 even PrivatBank had to be saved from bankruptcy, and was given a 62 million Euro two-year loan from the Central Bank. “So where have the IMF’s billions gone?”

    The racket executed by Kolomoiski’s PrivatBank was first uncovered by the Ukrainian anti-corruption initiative ‘Nashi Groshi,’ meaning ‘our money’ in Ukrainian.

    According to Nashi Groshi’s investigations, PrivatBank has connections to 42 Ukrainian companies, which are owned by another 54 offshore companies based in the Caribbean, USA and Cyprus. These companies took out loans from PrivatBank totaling $1.8 billion.

    These Ukrainian companies ordered investment products from six foreign suppliers based in the UK, the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, and then transferred money to a branch of PrivatBank in Cyprus, ostensibly to pay for the products.The products were then used as collateral for the loans taken out from PrivatBank – however, the overseas suppliers never delivered the goods, and the 42 companies took legal action in court in Dnipropetrovsk, demanding reimbursement for payments made for the goods, and the termination of the loans from Privatbank. The court’s ruling was the same for all 42 companies; the foreign suppliers should return the money, but the credit agreement with Privatbank remains in place.

    “Basically, this was a transaction of $1.8 billion abroad, with the help of fake contracts, the siphoning off of assets and violation of existing laws,” explained journalist Lesya Ivanovna of Nashi Groshi.

    Then in March 2015, Kolomoiski, whom some have described as the Tony Soprano of Ukraine, and increasingly a pariah in the country that made him a billionaire was dismissed from his position as governor of Dnipropetrovsk after a power struggle with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; the fraud was carried out while he was governor of the region in East-Central Ukraine.

    “The whole story with the court case was only necessary to make it look like the bank itself was not involved in the fraud scheme. Officially it now looks like as if the bank has the products, but in reality they were never delivered,” said Ivanovna.

    Such business practices, which earned Kolomoskyi a fortune estimated by Forbes in March 2012 to be $3 billion, were known to investigators beyond Ukraine’s borders; Kolomoiski was once banned from entering the US due to suspicions of connections with international organized crime but then Biden’s involvement quietly lifted the visa ban.

    Despite these suspicions, Kolomoiski is unlikely to face justice, as he is currently living in exile in Switzerland , Israel and the US, after he fled Ukraine in early 2015. Not long after Kolomoiski fled Ukraine, in December 2016, Ukraine’s government nationalize his Privatbank in order to shore up Ukrainians’ savings. A Ukrainian lawmaker called it the “greatest robbery of Ukraine’s state budget of the millennium.” A few months earlier, in February 2016, the government seized Burisma founder Zlochevsky’s assets and placed him on Ukraine’s wanted list. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office seized Burisma’s gas wells.

    Which brings us to January 2017, and when Joe Biden infamous arrived for his “swan song” visit and demanded, before the entire world, that the criminal investigation into Burisma was dropped.

    Devon Archer left the scandal-plagued company at the end of 2016, although a clueless Hunter Biden remained on the board through October 2019 – well after his presence there sparked the biggest political scandal since the Bill Clinton impeachment – providing “legal assistance” in exchange for millions of dollars received from the gas giant. Archer and Biden have not been required to disclose their compensation from Burisma, but Bowling Green State University professor Oliver Boyd-Barrett wrote, “Potentially, the Biden family could become billionaires.”

    So did Joe Biden get Burisma off the hook for $1.8 billion in lost aid funding? Did he or his son get Kolomoisky off the visa ban list? To be sure, many questions still remain and were all conveniently swept under the rug over the “faux outrage” over the Trump impeachment farce. But now that the great impeachment diversion is over, these all too pressing questions can and finally should be asked.

    Incidentally, anyone who is confused by the narrative above, and how $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars “disappeared” in Ukraine starting in September 2014 when the money was deposited in PrivatBank, is encouraged to watch the following video by Glenn Beck who does a surprisingly good job at connecting the confusing dots behind what may be one of the greatest sovereign corruption and money heist stories in history.

    The good news is that there are so many loose threads in this narrative, that any real probe will have little difficulty in getting to the bottom of where and how the $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funding to Ukraine “disappeared” and whether Biden, both father and son, are indeed involved.

    And just to help them out, one place where any serious probe can start is with a story we wrote in March 2014, when citing a local media report, we shone light on a mysterious operation in which a substantial portion of Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, and flown to the US, just weeks after the February 2014 revolution. From the source, March 7, 2014:

    Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport.

    According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.

    After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.

    Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.”

    Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.

    Needless to say there was no official confirmation of any of this taking place, and in fact our report, in which we mused if the “price of Ukraine’s liberation” was the handover of Ukraine’s gold to the Fed at a time when Germany was actively seeking to repatriate its own physical gold located at the bedrock of the NY Fed, led to the usual mainstream media mockery.

    But then everything changed in November 2014, when in an interview on Ukraine TV, none other than the then-head of the Ukraine Central Bank, Valeriya Gontareva (who, became head of the Ukraine central bank in June 2014 when she replaced Stepan Kubiv and also presided over the nationalization of Kolomoiski’s PrivateBank in December 2016), made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”

    As Ukrainareported at the time, this stunning revelation means that not only has Ukraine been quietly depleting its gold throughout the year, but that the latest official number, according to which Ukraine gold was 8 times greater than the reported 1%, was fabricated, and that the real number is about 90% lower.

    According to official statistics the NBU, the amount of gold in the vaults should be eight times more than is actually in stock. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $ 1 billion, or 8% of the total gold reserves. Now this is just one percent.

    Assuming Gonaterva’s admission was true, it would imply that the official reserve data at the Central Bank was clearly fabricated, prompting questions about just how long ago the actual gold “displacement” took place. Could it have been during a cold night in March when “more than 40 heavy boxes” full of gold were loaded up on the plane and flown off to an unknown destination in the US?

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    To help out in this puzzle, we got some additional information from Rusila, which in Nov 2014 reported that “Ukraine’s gold reserves disappeared.”

    According to recent data, the value of Ukraine gold should be $988.7 million. That is the value of gold proportion of gold in gold reserves is 8%. If you believe Gontareva, it turns out there is a mere $123.6 million in gold remaining. The figure is fantastic, considering that the amount of gold at the end of February (when the new authorities have already taken key positions) was $1.8 billion or 12% of the reserves.

    In other words, since the beginning of the year gold reserves dropped almost 16 times. Gold stock in February were approximately 21 tons of gold, the presence of which was once proudly reported by Sergei Arbuzov, who led the NBU in 2010-2012. So what happened to 20.8 tons of gold?

    Explaining the dramatic reduction in the context of the hryvnia devaluation through gold sales is impossible. After all, 92% of the reserves of the National Bank is in the form of a foreign currency that is much easier to use to maintain hryvnia levels and cover current liabilities. Besides since March the international price of gold has plummeted. Selling gold under such circumstances is a crime. In fact it would be more expedient to increase gold reserves through currency conversion in precious metals.

    But apparently the result is not due to someone’s negligence or carelessness. The gold reserve has been actively carted out of the country, as a result of the very vague economic and political prospects of Ukraine. Something similar happened to the gold reserves of the USSR – when the Gorbachev elite realized that perestroika is leading the country to the abyss, gold simply disappeared in an unknown direction.

    Oddly enough there was no official gold reduction just prior to the time when Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland was planning Yanukovich’s ouster, and as shown above, quite the contrary: Ukraine’s gold pile was increasing with every passing year… until it collapsed in early 2014. It is a little more odd that it was during the period when Ukraine was “supported” by its western allies that several billion dollars worth of physical gold – the people’s gold – just “vaporized.”

    Which brings us to the $1.8 billion question: what happened to Ukraine’s gold, because if the now former central banker’s story is accurate, that’s roughly the amount of gold that quietly left the country just days after the US-backed presidential coup. And, it is also roughly how much taxpayer-funded Ukraine aid, procured by Joe Biden while his son was working at Burisma, is now missing.

    At this point, there are certainly many pressing questions but one stands out: was the real “quid pro quo” not one of Trump holding up payments to Kiev in exchange for a probe of Biden – which after reading all of the above is more than warranted – but if the quo, namely US support for regime change in Ukraine and almost two billion in now missing taxpayer funds which ended up in an oligarch’s bank and mysteriously “vaporized” but not before said oligarch hired the son of the US vice president, wasn’t the quid to some 40 tons of Ukraine leaving forever to an unknown destination in the US.

    We hope that Trump’s second term will provide ample time and opportunity to answer this critical question, and just to set off investigators on the right track, we believe that any investigation should begin with the former central bank head, Gontareva, who he also fled to London where she now lives in self-appointed exile and where she now “fears for her life” after one of her homes near Kiev was badly damaged in an arson attack, and was also injured in August when she was knocked down by a car in London. Failing that, one can always check the flight manifests and the cargo contents of all planes that left the Ukraine and arrived in the US on March 7, 2014 with a cargo consisting of billions of dollars in gold…


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 19:00

  • Iowans Rage "They're Dirty, Man", Matt Taibbi Warns Des Moines Debacle Was "Waterloo For Democrats"
    Iowans Rage “They’re Dirty, Man”, Matt Taibbi Warns Des Moines Debacle Was “Waterloo For Democrats”

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,

    In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa…

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    Monday, February 3rd, just before 9 p.m., the airport Holiday Inn, Des Moines. A crowd of supporters and volunteers for Senator Bernie Sanders is buzzing. After four years of being shat upon by party officials and media allies alike (CNN and MSNBC are seen in Sanders crowds as Goebbelsian arms of the Democratic National Committee), Vermont’s anti-corporate crusader has defied odds and soared in polls. All that remains is the Schadenfreude orgasm of a victory speech.

    A young animal rights lawyer named Colin Grace is explaining how he got turned on to Bernie. “Honestly, it started by looking into some of the causes of 2008,” he laughs. “Well, then I found weed and became a libertarian.”

    A nearby supporter with long hair under a standard issue Spin Doctors wool weed-smoking hat perks up.

    “Dude, should we all smoke right now?” smiles at a fortysomething named David, patting his chest pockets.

    “I’ve got the most enormous J.”

    Everyone laughs. David and his wool-and-fleece costume looks nothing like the younger Grace in a blue blazer and collar — Grace was a caucus precinct captain tonight — but their stories sound the same. Two elements are near-constants in Sanders crowds: life experience with a broken system (Grace told a story of corporate-captured regulators killing an animal rights bill he worked on), and feelings of sympathy for a Senator also seen as getting the short stick from establishment cheats.

    “I was third party in 2016. I supported Gary Johnson,” says Grace.

    “But then, even from the sideline, I thought, ‘Man, the DNC is rigging this against Sanders.”

    “They’re dirty, man,” David agrees.

    “They don’t even try to hide it.”

    Nods all around. The group breaks up to hunt for a TV. The results are about to come in. A young woman in a blue Bernie shirt mutters as she walks toward the conference room: “I can’t wait to see Wolf’s face.”

    There was so much scummery to avenge: from Chris Matthews on MSNBC suggesting Sanders wouldn’t stop his car to help someone injured on the side of the road, to CNN running a late-breaking story that the DNC was employing “troll fighters” to combat a Russian “disinformation” campaign (presumably to help Sanders), to the DNC changing debate rules to allow billionaire ex-Republican Michael Bloomberg to buy his way in, to an $800,000 attack ad campaign from former Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, to reports that at least some DNC members were contemplating a return of superdelegates to stop Bernie.

    It was all out war, between what one Andrew Yang supporter described as being between “the screwers and screwees.” It felt like the same kind of below-the-belt mudslinging progressives used to associate with Republican hitman Lee Atwater.

    Sanders supporters felt sure they’d overcome. With a win, all that invective was just another indication of righteousness.

    “It just tells me he pisses off the right people,” Grace quipped. Then he walked off to catch the victory speech, and all hell broke loose.

    *  *  *

    Yesterday’s really gone.

    In 1993, liberal America sang along at the Bill Clinton inaugural ball with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (and Michael Jackson, whoops). “Don’t Stop” was “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” for the smart set. The New Democrats ushered in a new reign for youth and modernity against Reagan-Bush reaction.  

    That’s done. After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

    Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.

    Waukee, Iowa, Thursday, January 30th. Activist Tracye Redd, a Waterloo native who’d repped Black Lives Matter and Greenpeace in the past and was currently “bird-dogging” candidates for the Center for Biological Diversity, approached former Vice President Joe Biden after a speech. He asked if Biden would agree to work toward phasing out fossil fuels.

    Before he knew it, Biden was sticking a finger in his chest and angrily reading off credentials. “Go back. 1986. I was the first one ever to introduce a climate change bill,” he snapped.

    “I thought to myself, ‘Great, you did that in 1986, but if we’ve got a million species facing extinction, so it’s clearly still a problem,’” Redd remembers.

    Biden pushed again. “Politifact said it’s a game changer,” Biden jabbed, adding: “I’ve been working my whole life.” He poked Redd in the sternum on fact, work, whole, and life, then walked away like he’d dropped a mic.

    The scene was so bizarre that Redd says he could only respond by instinct, drawing on post-Trayvon Martin strategies for black men to keep safe in charged situations. “You know, ‘Yessir, no sir,’ don’t talk back, keep your hands visible…”

    Biden in this race has, on multiple occasions, looked close to grabbing prospective voters by the ears and speed-eating their faces off to thwart questions. A few days before the exchange with Redd, he grabbed a former state representative named Ed Fallon by the jacket lapel and asked, “You believe Bernie can do something, and by 2030? Only relaxing when Rollins gasped he was for Tom Steyer. Often he looks around like he expects a thumbs-up for giving in to his rage-response.

    In Cedar Rapids on February 1st, Jaimee Warbasse, a mother, hairstylist, and onetime caucaser for Hillary Clinton, was feeling anxious. Just days were left before the vote, and unusually, she was undecided. Her husband Matt called her with good news: Joe Biden was going to appear at the Roosevelt Middle School, just down the street.

    “I was glad,” Warbasse recalls. “When he was Vice President, I thought he’d make a good president… I was hoping to meet him, so I could feel more comfortable voting for him.”

    Iowans take presidential politics seriously. Perhaps only New Hampshire residents could comprehend. When deciding whom to stand for, Iowans expect to physically meet their candidate. This is seen as a two-way obligation: Voters should make an effort to meet the hopefuls, but candidates also have to make themselves available.

    Warbasse was slightly put out that she had not met Biden. “There were more opportunities to see the other candidates,” she said. She went to his speech, then got in a greeting line, shouting, “Undecided voter over here, Joe!”

    She invited him to make his case. “I haven’t seen much of you,” she said. Why should she vote for him?

    Biden moved inches from her face, gripped her hand (throughout: “we’re talking minutes,” she said) and gave a political clip-art answer, about how he’s a guy who says what he means and means what he says, etc.

    When Warbasse didn’t respond with enthusiasm, his mood turned. “If I haven’t swayed you today, then I can’t sway you,” he snapped.

    Warbasse was shocked.

    “It was like he was waiting for people to tell him what a wonderful person he was,” she says. “It was super bizarre.”

    These scenes have been laughed off as irrelevant dementia, but Biden’s outbursts are in keeping with a long pattern of establishment Democrats being outraged at having to explain their shit records.

    The Biden jab came from the same place as the counter-accusatory finger Bill Clinton thrust at Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia in 2016, for questioning the Crime Bill and talking about “super predators” (“Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t!” Clinton shouted). It was the same impatience that got Nancy Pelosi huffing over progressives and “the Green Dream or whatever.”

    Democratic campaign events have long been more pep rally than discussion, more about the terribleness of Republicans than substance. “They’re so used to events where everyone is rooting for them,” says Redd. “It’s like, ‘No, we’re actually here to challenge you on issues that matter.’”

    Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.

    “Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.

    Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.

    With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”

    But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.

    Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as:

    “Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.”

    (The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).

    Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.

    Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.

    However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.

    Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?

    A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.

    “It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016,” she said. “There has to be somebody.”

    *  *  *

    Just after sundown, February 2nd, Jethro’s BBQ n’ Pork Chop Grill, Johnston, Iowa. The Niners are up on the Chiefs 3-0 and this gymnasium-sized sports bar is packed. Most everyone in seats is a supporter of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.

    Everyone else in the massive crowd seems to be a reporter or cameraperson. You can’t step two feet in the Des Moines area on caucus weekend without hitting press. It’s like an angry God shook a box of us through the clouds.

    When the candidate herself shows up, media engulf her with a three-level swarm. Klobuchar ends up inside a row of cameras inside a row of hacks carrying notebooks, inside a row of taller hacks on tippy-toes.

    “I’m asking you to run for me,” she cries, to the scattered real people somewhere beyond the press.

    “Just like those guys are running on the field. I’m asking you to take this over the goalposts for me. I’m asking you to score a touchdown for — okay, enough!”

    Guffaws! Reporters love “Amy,” who goes by one name behind press ropelines, like Shakira, or Sinbad. She’s their take on a star. “Amy” in the last week surged in polls, having overtaken Warren in some surveys, hitting as much as 10, 12, and 13 percent.

    Klobuchar is a pure distillation of “electability,” i.e. a Washington reporter’s idea of what a Midwesterner finds charming. She isn’t funny, but her tireless marketing of her funniness matches the reportorial concept of what a “sense of humor” is in politics.

    Her ability to speak at length without revealing deep ideological belief is also prized by our kind. This is what Washington for decades told people they wanted, instead of health care, peace, job security, etc.

    Scott Thompson, the former mayor of a downstate Illinois town called Rushville, sees it differently. The congenial labor economist dressed in a big green “Amy” t-shirt has a long-standing ritual, asking every reporter who approaches him to sign a clipboard.

    “Five today,” he says, chuckling. He holds it up: He’s running out of space.

    Thompson’s experience in government disinclines him to politicians who offer facile solutions. He wrestles with the Bernie phenomenon, saying he understands it more now than he used to, as he sympathizes with those who are so mad, they’ve lost faith in the system.

    “But at some point,” he says, “you have to stop being pissed off and start working.” He pauses. “If you want to fight just to fight, go into boxing, you know?”

    That Sunday night, a 36-year-old Minnesotan named Chris Storey called a number he’d been given, for a woman who was chair of the Waukee 4 district. Thanks to a new rule allowing out-of-state volunteers to be precinct captains, he was set to represent the Sanders campaign there.

    “We got along, it was great,” he recalls.

    “She told me she was looking forward to seeing me the next day.”

    The next day, caucus day, Storey showed up at Shuler Elementary School in Clive, Iowa. The same official he’d spoken with the night before met him at the door.

    “It was like two different people,” he recalls.

    “I was told there was a written directive from the county chair that nonresidents could not be precinct captains.”

    Sanders had to get a last-minute replacement captain in Waukee 4, someone not formally aligned with the campaign. He fell short of viability there by five votes. County chair Bryce Smith, who made the decision, said he was responding to a late directive from the Iowa Democratic Party that said they would allow one nonresident captain per campaign, per precinct, but “the discretion of the chair is what goes,” i.e. this ultimately was a judgment call for county chairs. Smith said he didn’t like the change to the longstanding rule — “What’s stopping a campaign from hiring professional persuaders and high profile people?” he asked — and decided to bar nonresident captains. The IDP has not yet commented.

    As a result, some would-be captains in Dallas County from multiple different campaigns were pulled off the job (Smith said he got “five, six, eight” calls to complain). Meanwhile, in other districts, nonresident captains were common.

    Caucus participants later in the week would offer an eyebrow-raising number of other issues: bad head counts, misreported results, misreads of rules, wrong numbers, telecommunications errors, and other problems.

    The basics of the caucus aren’t hard. You enter a building that is poorly ventilated, too small, and surrounded by mud puddles — usually a school gym. You join other people who plan on voting your way, gathering around the “precinct captain” for your candidate. If your pile of people comprises 15% of the room or more on the first count, your candidate is deemed “viable” and you must stay in that group. If your group doesn’t reach 15%, you must move to a new group or declare yourself undecided. There is a second count, and it should be done.

    When historians pore over the Great Iowa Catastrophe of 2020, much of the blame will be focused on Acronym and Shadow, the two firms associated with the balky app that was supposed to count caucus results. For the conspiratorial-minded, the various political connections will be key: Acronym co-founder Tara McGowan is married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle, while former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sits on Acronym’s board. Shadow had also been a client of both the Buttigieg and Biden campaigns in 2019.

    But garden variety disorganization and stupidity were the major storylines underneath the terrible optics. From the first moment the caucus proceedings were delayed Monday night due to what the Iowa Democratic Party called “inconsistencies in the reporting,” Sanders supporters in particular felt in déjà vu territory. Orlando native Patty Duffy, an out-of-stater who captained for Sanders in the small town of Milo, had flashbacks to the run-up to the Hillary-Bernie convention.

    “It was like we were back in 2016,” Duffy said. “Except this was worse.”

    *  *  *

    What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg “in the lead.”

    The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg, objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a “Clusterfuck.”

    Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete’s lead for most of the week with “state delegate equivalents” — the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention — made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.

    This wasn’t necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there’s a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.

    But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a “minor error.” In multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the “delegate equivalents” appeared to be calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with “inconsistencies and errors.”

    Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of the week, she was fatalistic.

    “If you’re a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,” she said.

    “The system is riddled with loopholes.”

    Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.

    “They’re kind of brainwashed,” said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines.

    “They think they’re on the side of the right… they’ll do anything to save their careers.

    An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the process, the so-called “Presidential Preference Cards.”

    In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked with a big “1,” caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a “2,” was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was not viable.

    The “PPCs” were supposedly there to “ensure a recount is possible,” as the Polk County Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn’t understand the cards.

    Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled. Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them.

    Therefore, Baethke says, if they do a recount, “the first preference should be accurate.” However, “the second preference will be impossible to recreate with any certainty.”

    This is a problem, because by the end of the week, DNC chair Tom Perez — a triple-talking neurotic who is fast becoming the poster child for everything progressives hate about modern Dems — called for an “immediate recanvass.” He changed his mind after ten hours and said he only wanted “surgical” reanalysis of problematic districts.

    No matter what result emerges, it’s likely many individual voters will not trust it. Between comical videos of apparently gamed coin-flips and the pooh-poohing reaction of party officials and pundits (a common theme was that “toxic conspiracy theories” about Iowa were the work of the Trumpian right and/or Russian bots), the overall impression was a clown show performance by a political establishment too bored to worry about the appearance of impartiality.  

    “Is it incompetence or corruption? That’s the big question,” asked Storey.

    “I’m not sure it matters. It could be both.”

    *  *  *

    Iowa was the real “beginning of the end,” to a story that began in the Eighties.

    Following the wipeout 49-state, 512 electoral vote loss of Walter Mondale in 1984, demoralized Democratic Party leaders felt marooned, between the awesome fundraising power of Ronald Reagan Republicans and the irritant liberalism of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

    To get out, they sold out. A vanguard of wonks like Al From and Senator Sam Nunn at the Democratic Leadership Council devised a marketing plan: two middle fingers, one in each direction.

    They would steal financial support for Republicans by out-whoring them on economic policy. The left would be kneecapped via “triangulation,” i.e. the public reveling in the lack of choices for poor, minority, and liberal voters.

    Young pols like Bill Clinton learned they could screw constituents and still collect from them. What would they do, vote Republican? Better, the parental scolding of disobedient minorities like Sister Souljah combined with the occasional act of mindless sadism (like the execution of mentally ill Ricky Ray Rector) impressed white “swing” voters, making “triangulation” a huge win-win — more traction in red states, less whining from lefty malcontents.

    Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners – everyone but donors.

    They didn’t just fail to defend groups, but built monuments to their betrayal. They broke labor’s back with NAFTA, embraced mass incarceration with the 1994 Crime Bill, and ushered in the Clear Channel era with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Welfare Reform in 1996 was a sellout of the Great Society (but hey, at least Clinton kept the White House that year!). The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act gave us Too Big to Fail. Shock Therapy was the Peace Corps in reverse. They sold out on Iraq, expanded Dick Cheney’s secret regime of surveillance and assassination, gave Wall Street a walk after 2008, then lost an unlosable election, which they blamed on a conspiracy of leftist intellectuals and Russians.

    Still, if you were black, female, gay, an immigrant, a union member, college-educated, had been to Europe, owned a Paul Klee print or knew Miller’s Crossing was a good movie, you owed Democrats your vote. Why? Because they “got things done.”

    Now they’re not getting much done, except a lost reputation. That feat at least, they earned.

    To paraphrase the Joker:

    What do you get when you cross a political party that’s sold out for decades, with an electorate that’s been abandoned and treated like trash?

    Answer:

    What you fucking deserve!


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 18:30

  • "End That Son Of A Bitch": Duterte Moves To Terminate Philippines' Military Pact With US
    “End That Son Of A Bitch”: Duterte Moves To Terminate Philippines’ Military Pact With US

    President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte is moving to terminate the shaky US-allied country’s military pact with the United States after Washington revoked former police chief and now Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa’s US visa last month. The close Duterte ally stands accused of widespread of widespread war crimes, including ordering extrajudicial killings of thousands during the Southeast Asian Pacific nation’s brutal ongoing ‘war on drugs’ — raging since 2016.

    An enraged Duterte had threatened last month: “I’m warning you… if you won’t do the correction on this, I will terminate the… Visiting Forces Agreement,” and declared provocatively “I’ll end that son of a bitch” — in reference to the pact which provides legal immunity to US military drills.

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    Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, via Getty/NYT

    Filipino Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin testified before the country’s senate this past week that termination of the agreement will “negatively impact” defense and economic ties between Washington and Manila.

    “The president said he is terminating the VFA,” Defense Secretary of the Philippines, Maj. Gen. Delfin Lorenzana told ABS-CBN News on Friday. “I asked for clarification and he said he is not changing his decision.”

    President Duterte previously gave Washington a month to fix its “mistake” related to punitive action against Dela Rosa and said he wasn’t bluffing. The AP described the history of the key military pact as follows: 

    The security accord, which took effect in 1999, provides the legal cover for American troops to enter the Philippines for joint training with Filipino troops.

    A separate defense pact subsequently signed by the treaty allies in 2014, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, allowed the extended stay of U.S. forces and authorized them to build and maintain barracks and other facilities in designated Philippine military camps.

    Perhaps more significantly Duterte went so far as to declare in late January that he will ban some US senators from visiting the Philippines unless Washington backs down. He’d also told members of his cabinet not to visit the US.

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    Former Philippines national police chief Roland Dela Rosa (now senator) in 2017, via the AFP.

    Since Manila initiated its aggressive militarized crackdown on illegal drugs starting in 2016, thousands of civilian drug suspects have been left dead across the country, mostly in deeply impoverished areas, resulting in condemnations from the United Nations and human rights groups. Most of these killings also took place outside of any courtroom or judicial setting. 

    Dela Rosa was tasked as President Duterte’s top enforcer, gaining him popularity among right-wingers and the military in the country, but infamy among others. 


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 18:00

    Tags
    Politics
    War Conflict

  • OPCW Report (Predictably) Smears Whistleblowers
    OPCW Report (Predictably) Smears Whistleblowers

    Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

    The OPCW has released a briefing note summarising the recent “independent investigation” into their recent Titanic-sized leaks. (You can read the summary at the link above, or the full “independent” report here).

    It’s a fairly narrow statement, focusing entirely on the two unnamed inspectors (Inspector A and Inspector B) who worked with the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media to leak the censored reports. (There is not a word about the e-mails later released by WikiLeaks).

    You won’t be surprised to know that the report finds the two leakers, Ian Henderson and “Alex”, were wrong to leak the confidential information.

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    In that sense, it’s entirely self-contradictory. Attempting to tell us the information is at once “sensitive”, and also incomplete, incorrect and easily refuted.

    Of course, none of that refutation is present here, because that wasn’t the remit of this report. This is just an investigation into the “Possible Breaches of Confidentiality” and not the veracity of the leaks, or the pertinence of the information therein.

    Sometimes an incredibly narrow purview is a sound defence against an undesirable reality.

    There’s really no new information here, just six pages of waffle telling us very little we didn’t already know. It’s not a report that really means anything at all. It’s just something that the OPCW literally had to say. Institutions have immune responses, they simply must attack their critics. It’s automatic.

    If a CIA whistleblower were to announce the sky was blue, the CIA would release a memo claiming to have no official records concerning the visual appearance of our atmosphere and detailing the leaker’s history of alcohol abuse.

    Attacking whistleblowers is just a reflex of self-defence, the most base instinct of every lifeform.

    In its content and tone, this report is a clear example of that behaviour. Far more a smear and hit piece than a refutation or investigation (at one point it even straight-up lies about Ian Henderson’s career at the OPCW).

    Essentially, it’s just a series of attacks on the competence and motivations of the whistleblowers, even to the point of attempting to deny them that status:

    Inspectors A and B are not whistle-blowers.”

    The head of OPCW bafflingly declares, before going on to explain:

    They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence. When their views could not gain traction, they took matters into their own hands and breached their obligations to the Organisation. Their behaviour is even more egregious as they had manifestly incomplete information about the Douma investigation.”

    See – they’re not “whistleblowers”, they’re just individuals who believed that some documents being kept secret should be made public, and “took matters into their own hands”.

    Apparently, that’s different from being a whistleblower. Somehow.

    As with so much else in the current political sphere, it’s not so much an argument as an exercise in semantics.

    Just as Julian Assange’s arrest became a debate over whether or not he was “really a journalist”, and “antisemitism” is redefined to increasingly ludicrous vagueness, here we are confronted by a memo essentially saying “ignore these leaks, these people are not real whistleblowers”.

    It’s really not a report designed to make a case or prove a point. It won’t convert anybody or change a single mind. It’s just there to be at the other end of a link. To supply gate-keeping “journalists” with soundbites to bounce back and forth across twitter and blockquote in their articles.

    A final redoubt to provide mainstream attack-dogs like Chris York or Scott Lucas some cover as they make a hasty retreat.

    In that sense, it’s already doing its job:

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

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

    A more obvious example of papering over the cracks, you will not see.


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 17:30

  • Hawkish Senators Demand Twitter 'Obey Sanctions' By Banning Iran's Leaders
    Hawkish Senators Demand Twitter ‘Obey Sanctions’ By Banning Iran’s Leaders

    At this rate all Iranian media sources and official accounts could soon be banned in the West, leaving journalists without a clue of what Tehran’s leaders actually think, and without official statements. The semi-official Fars news English website was knocked offline two weeks ago by US Treasury order (the international server host conformed, making Fars transfer its site hosting to within Iran), but the latest in a growing list of “purges” whether on YouTube or other platforms.

    And now US senators are leading the charge to get Iran’s leaders banned from Twitter, as The Hill reports: 

    A group of Republican senators lead by Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) sent a letter to Twitter on Thursday asking the platform to suspend the accounts of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to comply with U.S. sanction law.

    The letter to CEO Jack Dorsey argues that an executive order from last summer imposing sanctions on Khamenei and those acting on his behalf prohibits Twitter from providing services to the two Iranian officials.

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    Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Image source: AP.

    Ironically, Twitter itself is blocked inside Iran on order of Tehran authorities, notwithstanding Iranian residents often easily getting around these restraints. 

    Foreign Minister Zarif is actually verified on Twitter despite being personally sanctioned by the US Treasury, and regularly uses it to issue statements to the world in reaction to White House policies or in response to President Trump’s words on Iran. 

    The hawkish group of Republican senators including Cruz, Tom Cotton (Ark.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) wrote in the letter to Twitter: “While the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of Americans — and Twitter should not be censoring the political speech of Americans — the Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights.”

    “And, as the leader of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of U.S. citizens — the Ayatollah and any American companies providing him assistance are entirely subject to U.S. sanctions laws,” they added.

    Iran’s top diplomat often directly engages President Trump on Twitter:

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

    It was also sent to the White House, as well as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – who previously enforced bans on Iranian media entities – and top administration officials. 

    The letter was first reported Friday, and Twitter did not immediately issue a response. But the US company is not expected to take action, given it announced in 2018 it would not suspend accounts of world leaders, given it “would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” according to a prior official company statement.

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    “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions,” Twitter said at the time. 


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 17:00

    Tags
    Politics

  • Pakistan Swiftly Passes Resolution Calling For Public Hanging Of Pedophiles
    Pakistan Swiftly Passes Resolution Calling For Public Hanging Of Pedophiles

    Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    Pakistan’s parliament passed a resolution Friday that calls for the public hanging of convicted child killers and rapists.

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    AFP reports that the resolution, which is non-binding, comes after a number of high-profile child sex-abuse cases have scandalized the South Asian nation in recent years, leading to major outbreaks of unrest and riots.

    Parliamentary affairs minister Ali Muhammad Khan, who presented the resolution in the lower house of the legislature, said that child killers and rapists “should not only be given the death penalty by hanging, but they should be hanged publicly.”

    “The Quran commands us that a murderer should be hanged,” the minister added.

    While the resolution was swiftly passed by a majority of lawmakers, human rights minister Shireen Mazari has emphatically stated that it does not enjoy the backing of the government.

    In a tweet, Mazari wrote:

    “The resolution passed in [the National Assembly] today on public hangings was across party lines and not a govt-sponsored resolution but an individual act. Many of us oppose it – our [Ministry of Human Rights] strongly opposes this. Unfortunately I was in a mtg and wasn’t able to go to NA.”

    Federal Minister for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry also condemned the passage of the resolution.

    Chaudhry tweeted:

    “Strongly condemn this resolution. This is just another grave act in line with brutal civilisation practices [sic]. Societies [should] act in a balanced way, [barbarity] is not an answer to crimes. This is another expression of extremism.”

    However, Pakistan has struggled to come to grips with rampant crimes of child sexual abuse.

    A child rapist was hanged in October 2018 after his crime in Kasur, near Lahore, sparked days of nationwide protests and unrest.

    Six-year-old victim Zainab Fatima Ameen was attacked by a 24-year-old man who later confessed to raping and murdering the young girl.

    In 2015, authorities busted a huge paedophilia ring in Kasur. In the massive scandal, it was found that at least 280 children were being sexually abused by a gang who blackmailed parents with threats to publicly release the videos.

    In March 2016, Pakistan criminalized sexual assault against minors, child pornography and trafficking. Only acts of rape and sodomy had previously been punishable by law.

    Human rights NGO Amnesty International also condemned the recent passage of the bill by the lower house of parliament, with AI Deputy South Asia Director Omar Waraich noting that “public hangings are acts of unconscionable cruelty” with no place in a society that respects people’s rights.

    Continuing, the advocate said:

    “Executions, whether public or private, do not deliver justice. They are acts of vengeance and there is no evidence that they serve as a uniquely effective deterrent.”

    A number of human rights groups have demanded that the country reinstate a moratorium on the death penalty. Capital punishment was reintroduced following the 2015 Army Public School massacre that claimed the lives of 151 people.

    Sarah Belal, the executive director of anti-death penalty group Justice Project Pakistan, told AFP:

    “There is no empirical evidence to show that public hangings are a deterrent to crime or in protecting the psycho-social well-being of children.”

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    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 16:30

    Tags
    Social Issues
    Law Crime

  • "Moments Of Triggering": Rashida Tlaib Explains Why She And Ilhan Omar Held Hands During The State Of The Union
    “Moments Of Triggering”: Rashida Tlaib Explains Why She And Ilhan Omar Held Hands During The State Of The Union

    Tuesday night’s State of the Union was a triumphant moment for President Trump, a time where he celebrated his cresting popularity at the beginning of a critical election year. Despite seizing control of the House a little more than a year ago, the Dems appear despondent and scattered – an impression not helped by the embarrassment in Iowa (how can you convince the country you’re ready to rule when you can’t even rig a goddamn caucus without the whole world finding out?).

    Yet, just as we suspected, some of the most memorable moments from Tuesday’s speech happened off the podium (and we’re not talking about Nancy Pelosi dramatically ripping up Trump’s speech because the president didn’t shake her hand).

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    One of those moments was just shared with the public by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who said during a discussion on Friday that she and fellow Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar huddled together in the audience during President Trump’s speech, as the president praised American strength, industry and ingenuity – qualities that the two radical Democratic lawmakers loath.

    According to Tlaib, she and Omar sat together during the speech because they fully expected to be ‘triggered’ by Trump’s words. And just as they expected, there were “moments of triggering”.

    “There were moments of triggering…I kept holding your hand…we intentionally sat next to each other to support each other.”

    Here’s the clip:

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

    We have a question for ‘the triggered’. What about people who are really in danger of being triggered? What about drug addicts whose lives could literally be placed in jeopardy if they’re triggered by something that makes them want to use? What do the intersectional feminists have to say about that?

    Or do they only care about dumb shit like this?


    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 02/08/2020 – 16:00

    Tags
    Human Interest
    Politics

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