Today’s News 9th March 2021

• Hong Kong's Carrie Lam "Fully Welcomes" Election Overhaul To Ensure City Run By China "Patriots"
  Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam “Fully Welcomes” Election Overhaul To Ensure City Run By China “Patriots”

  Beijing’s proposed major overhaul of Hong Kong’s electoral system has been broadly slammed in the West as but the final cementing of the mainland’s grip over what was set-up since the late 90’s to function as a semi-autonomous city-state according to the “one country, two systems” agreement made with the UK. Following on heels of last year’s draconian and far-reaching national security law which has been used to effectively crush dissent and arrest literally hundreds of pro-democracy activists – many of them also having fled to outside countries – multiple Communist Party officials addressing this weekend’s National People’s Congress (NPC) assembly in Beijing have warned the West not to interfere. 

  Former governor of Hong Kong Lord Chris Patten was cited in BBC as saying that China’s Communist Party had “taken the biggest step so far to obliterate Hong Kong’s freedoms and aspirations for greater democracy under the rule of law”. However, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in an annual speech touted that “Hong Kong’s shift from chaos to stability fully serves the interests of all parties. It will provide stronger guarantees for safeguarding Hong Kong citizens’ rights and foreign investors’ lawful interests.”

  And pro-Beijing Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam is “fully welcoming” the China-proposed major changes to the electoral system which will increase the mainland’s influence. “There are loopholes in the electoral systems, there are also flaws in the systems in Hong Kong,” Lam told reporters on Monday, according to The Associated Press.

  

  “I fully understand that this is not a matter that can be addressed entirely by the government. I’m glad that the central authorities have, again, exercised its constitutional powers to help address this problem for Hong Kong,” she said.

  The statement comes days after State Department spokesman Ned Price lambasted the changes as constituting “a direct attack on Hong Kong’s autonomy, Hong Kong’s freedoms, and the democratic processes, limiting participation, reducing democratic representation, and stifling political debate in order to defy the clear will of the people of Hong Kong and to deny their voice in their own government and governance.”

  The AP provides a summary of the overhaul and how it will impact candidate “vetting” and voting as follows: 

  Chinese authorities have said the draft decision before China’s National People’s Congress would mean the largely pro-Beijing committee that elects Hong Kong’s leader would also choose a large part of the legislature to ensure the city is run by “patriots.” The Election Committee would also have the right to vet candidates for the Legislative Council, weeding out any people suspected of being insufficiently loyal to China and the ruling Communist Party.

  Currently, half of Hong Kong’s legislature is directly elected by voters, although the mass resignation of opposition legislators to protest the expulsion of four of their colleagues for being “unpatriotic” means the body is now entirely controlled by Beijing loyalists.

  At other steps of the process too Beijing will further be able to examine whether lawmakers are sufficiently pro-mainland. 

  Lam it should be recalled is the Hong Kong leader whose 2019 proposal to extradite criminal suspects to China sparked many months of fierce anti-China protests that often involved violent clashes with police and the shutting down of who central sections of the city. 

  This led to the sweeping national security law last June which has since resulted in the arrest and sentencing of over 100 protesters. The law enables authorities to easily deem activism and free speech as possible ‘terrorist activity’ if an individual is deemed conspiring with foreign powers or issuing anti-China propaganda and rhetoric. Lately even school textbooks have been purged to only allow for pro-mainland and pro-Communist ‘education’. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/09/2021 – 01:00

• The New Normal (Phase 2)
  The New Normal (Phase 2)

  Authored (mostly satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

  So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

  

  Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

  And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

  “Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

  

  In other words, as predicted by us “conspiracy theorists,” the “temporary emergency public health measures” implemented by GloboCap in March of 2020 are still very much in effect, and then some.

  That said, as you have probably noticed, the tenor of things is shifting a bit, which is unsurprising, as GloboCap is now making the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal” roll-out.

  Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.”

  An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state. The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on. The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

  But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. This shock and awe (or “rapid dominance”) tactic has been deployed by empires, and aspiring empires, throughout the course of military history. It has just been deployed by GloboCap against … well, against the entire world. And now, that phase is coming to an end.

  The shape of Phase 2 is not entirely clear yet, but one can make a few logical assumptions.

  Typically, this is the phase in which the conquering force (in this case, GloboCap) restores “normality” (i.e., a “new normality”) to the society it has just destabilized and terrorized. It installs a new occupation-friendly government, restarts the economy, and otherwise begins the gradual transition from martial law to something resembling “normal” everyday life. It hands out candy bars to kids, financial aid to businesses, power to generals and police, and “freedom” to the shell-shocked public.

  This appears to be where we are at the moment. As you’ve probably noticed, the corporate media, government leaders, and medical experts have been making noise about “the end of the pandemic,” or at least “the end of the emergency phase” of it. Suddenly, “some level of Covid is tolerable,” “Zero Covid is unlikely,” et cetera. This is happening pretty much right on cue.

  Now that the vaccination push is underway, they are trying to temper the mass paranoia and hatred that they have fomented for over a year with some hope and a vision of a post-crisis future. Governments are carefully relaxing restrictions, making sure we understand that if we don’t obey orders, wear our masks, get our vaccinations, and so, they will crack down on us again without mercy. They want to ease us into the pathologized-totalitarian future gently, so that it feels like we are being liberated, returning to some semblance of normal life, albeit in a new, more terrifying, perpetually-virus-and-extremist-threatened world.

  For example, here in Germany, the government has decided to “return some freedom and trust to the people,” but they are prepared to lock us down “hard” again if they suspect we haven’t “used their trust wisely.” According to the 5-Step Plan, bookshops and florists can reopen this week with a one-person-per-ten-square-meter limit, up to ten people can play non-contact sports, and five people from no more than two households can meet up (and, thus, also play non-contact sports), unless the “incidence rate” of positive PCR tests rises above 100 per thousand, in which case, back to “hard lockdown” we go. Two weeks after that, on March 22, if the “positive-test rate” stays below 50, outdoor restaurant dining can resume, and theaters, cinemas, and opera houses can open. However, if the “positive-test rate” is more than 50 but less than 100, outdoor dining will only be permitted on a strictly pre-booking basis. (One assumes there will be roving goon squads examining restaurants’ booking records and ordering patrons to show their papers.) There are further Kafkaesque conditions in the plan, but I think you get the general idea.

  Meanwhile, in the USA, although DC remains under occupation, the Capitol surrounded by razor-wire fences to protect democracy from an imaginary enemy straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, Texas, Mississippi, and a few other states are joining Florida in open rebellion, and allowing people to go out to eat, get together with their families and friends, walk around in public without medical-looking masks, and otherwise go about living their lives in a totally non-anus-clenched-paranoid fashion.

  Notwithstanding the outrage of the Covidian Cultists, this development is not of great concern to GloboCap, as the coastal power centers are full-blown “New Normal,” and the liberals who predominantly occupy them have been transformed into paranoid, hysterical zealots who now dedicate a considerable amount of time to hunting down alleged “Covid deniers,” “anti-maskers,” “vaccine refusers,” “white-supremacist extremists,” “conspiracy theorists,” “libertarians,” dead “racist cartoonists,” and anyone else who won’t conform to their pathologized-totalitarian ideology, and obsessively trolling them on social media, or reporting their thoughtcrimes to the Reality Police.

  This transformation of the relatively affluent, predominantly liberal, middle/upper classes, and the millions futilely aspiring thereto, into mindlessly-order-following “Good Germans” (or, rather, mindlessly-order-following “New Normals”) has also occurred here in Western Europe, and elsewhere throughout the global capitalist empire, and was one of GloboCap’s main objectives throughout Phase 1 of the “New Normal” roll out. This transformation has been in progress for quite some time, less dramatically and without a virus. It will continue once this virus is gone.

  The “New Normal” isn’t just about a virus. The “New Normal” was never just about a virus. You don’t need a new “normal” because of a virus. You need a new “normal” when your current “normal” has outlived its usefulness to those in power, which, in our case, are the global capitalist ruling classes.

  I’ve been writing about this for … well, most of my life, and publishing these columns for the last five years, so I’m not going to summarize all that here, but, basically, we’re living through one of those historic transformations of the structure of political power that we usually don’t recognize until after it has occurred … not just a “changing of the guard,” a transformation of the nature of power, how it is exercised, the beliefs it is based on, and the “reality” conjured into being by those beliefs.

  This transformation began with the end of the Cold War, when global capitalism became the first globally-hegemonic ideological system in history. The roll-out of the “New Normal” is part of that transformation, not the whole of it, but an essential stage. We are transitioning from an ideological “reality” to a post-ideological, pathologized “reality” … a “reality” in which any and all deviation from official ideology (i.e., “normality”) is no longer a political challenge or threat, but an “illness” or “psychiatric disorder.”

  I’m going to be obnoxious and quote myself, so that I don’t have to try to explain this again. Here’s a passage from a recent column:

  “A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory ‘outside’ the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists.’ These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called ‘normality’ (or, in our case, currently, ‘New Normality’) … [t]he new breed of ‘terrorists’ do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate ‘reality.’ They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be ‘treated,’ ‘reeducated,’ and ‘deprogrammed,’ until they accept ‘Reality.’”

  As we shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal,” the pathologization of political dissent will continue, and intensify, both overtly and subtlely.

  GloboCap and the corporate media will continue to warn of imminent “attacks on democracy” by imaginary “domestic terrorists,” as well as the old “non-domestic terrorists.” They will also continue to warn of imminent threats posed by exotic viruses, and “variants” of exotic viruses, and permanent “conditions” caused by viruses, and other threats to our bodily fluids. Above all, they will continue to warn of the danger of ingesting “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” or any other type of unverified, unauthorized, un-fact-checked content. They will thoroughly diagnose the sources of such content, and exhaustively explain the pathological conditions these sources will clearly be suffering from. They will explore a variety of treatments and cures, and recommend prophylactic measures against potential exposure to these sources.

  These multiplicitous “threats to democracy” (i.e., “terrorists,” “viruses,” “misinformation,” “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “electoral-system scepticism,” “white-supremacist pancake syrup,” “premeditated pronoun abuse,” “oppositional-defiant-infant masklessness,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “religion,” et cetera) will fuse into a single Goldstein-like enemy which “New Normal” children will be conditioned to reflexively hate and fear, and want to silence, and quarantine off from “normal” society, or “cure” of their “illness” with government-mandated, “safe and effective” pharmaceutical therapies.

  But whatever … I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m probably just getting all worked up over nothing. After all, as a lot of my ex-friends will tell you (through their multiple masks and prophylactic face shields), I’m just a paranoid “conspiracy theorist” spreading “unverified misinformation.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/09/2021 – 00:05

• Iran Takes Yet More Action To Blow Past Nuclear Restrictions At Natanz: IAEA
  Iran Takes Yet More Action To Blow Past Nuclear Restrictions At Natanz: IAEA

  At a moment that Israel says it has implemented new plans that will enable it to more effectively launch preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities should Israeli leaders believe the Islamic Republic is on the cusp of nuclear weapons capability, Tehran announced Monday that it continues blowing past prior uranium enrichment limits in place as part of the 2015 nuclear deal.

  Reuters is reporting it as a “recent acceleration” of restriction violations at a moment Biden’s prior stated intent to rejoin the JCPOA is faltering while US-led sanctions (put into effect by Trump) are still at their max. It appears part of continued efforts at ratcheting the pressure on Biden to provide immediate sanctions relief, which thus far the new Democratic administration has refused to do until Iran comes back into nuclear compliance. 

  But at the same time Iran’s boldness in piling on the pressure in the face of a hesitant Biden administration may inadvertently trigger Israeli retaliation.

  

  “Iran has started enriching uranium with a third set of advanced IR-2m centrifuges at its underground plant at Natanz, the U.N. nuclear watchdog told its member states on Monday,” Reuters writes. Crucially it was this very facility at Natanz that was subject of a major sabotage attack in July 2020, with most analysts believing Israel was likely behind it – possibly via a major cyberattack.

  The UN nuclear watchdog IAEA group issued a statement saying, “On 7 March 2021, the Agency verified at FEP that: Iran had begun feeding natural UF6 into the third cascade of 174 IR-2m centrifuges.”

  “The fourth cascade of 174 IR-2m centrifuges was installed but had yet to be fed with natural UF6; installation of a fifth cascade of IR-2m centrifuges was ongoing; and installation of a sixth cascade of IR-2m centrifuges had yet to begin,” it said further. 

  This means that Iran is inching closer toward the 90% uranium purity needed to develop a nuclear bomb, but the IAEA statement indicated Iran was still far from that marker, but is daily opening up such a path if it chooses to go to those levels. 

  Essentially Iran’s position over the past months has been that it’s free to ramp up enrichment at it’s choosing because the US broke the deal (in May 2018) and is thus not in a position to demand conformity. Iran has complained all along that the European signatories have done little to nothing to salvage the JCPOA in the face of Washington’s belligerence and threats of sanctions enforcement. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 23:45

• Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic
  Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic

  Authored byby Brandon Smith via Birch Gold Group,

  In recent economic news, headlines are being dominated by concerns over rising bond yields. Increased bond yields are a sign of a possible spike in inflation and, logically, they call for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to prevent that inflation.

  

  Higher bond yields also mean there is a competitive alternative to stocks for investors – both factors that could trigger a plunge in the stock market.

  If one studies the real history behind the stock market crash during the Great Depression, they will find that it was the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes that caused and prolonged the disaster after they had created an environment of cheap and easy money throughout the 1920s. Former Chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted the Fed was responsible back in 2002 in a speech honoring Milton Friedman. He stated:

  “In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

  This then raises the question – inflation or deflation? Will the Fed “do it again?”

  Probably not in exactly the same way, but we will see elements of both inflation and deflation soon in the form of stagflation.

  It’s a Catch-22 that the central bank has created, and many (including myself) believe that the Fed has created the conundrum deliberately. All central banks are tied together by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the BIS is a globalist institution through and through. The globalist agenda seeks to trigger what they call the “Great Reset,” a complete reformation of the global economy and capitalism into a single one world socialist system… managed by the globalists themselves, of course.

  In my view the Fed has always been a kind of institutional suicide bomber; its job is to self-destruct at the right moment and take the U.S. economy down with it, all in the name of spreading its cult-like globalist ideology.

  The only unknown at this point is how they will go about their sabotage. Will the central bank continue to allow inflation to explode the cost of living in the U.S., or will they intervene with higher interest rates and allow stock markets to crash?

  Either way, we face a serious economic crisis in the near future.

  Increasing Inflation Means Economic Recovery?

  Mainstream economists will often argue that rising yields and inflation are a “good thing.” They claim this is a sign of rapid economic recovery. I disagree.

  If “inflation” was the same as “recovery,” then there would not have been total economic collapses in Argentina in 2002, in Yugoslavia in 1994, or in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.

  I do not see recovery. What I see is the rapid devaluation of the dollar’s buying power due to massive fiat printing through stimulus measures. The Fed and the U.S. government are buying a short-term surge in economic activity, but at a hidden cost. This is a condition that the Dollar Index does not even begin to address, but obvious in prices of necessary goods and commodities.

  Keep in mind that all of this is being done in the name of responding to the pandemic. The pandemic is the ultimate excuse for the active destruction of the U.S. economy. Stimulus measures have devolved into helicopter money being thrown about haphazardly as billions are siphoned primarily by major corporations and through fraud. People who are clamoring for a $2,000 relief check from the government have no idea that corporate welfare has been ongoing for the past year along with billions in retroactive tax refunds. All of that money printing is going to cause damage somewhere. It cannot be avoided.

  It’s Not About The Pandemic

  Let’s make something clear first: The pandemic is NOT the reason for the stimulus flood. The pandemic did very little to hurt actual business in the U.S. Rather, it was the lockdowns that did most of the damage.

  Think about that for a moment – federal and state governments crushed the economy through lockdowns, then offered the solution of vast stimulus measures. This in turn is destroying financial stability and generating rapid price inflation.

  Conservative states and counties that refused to shut down are recovering at a much faster pace than leftist states which imposed draconian restrictions on citizens. Yet, the lockdowns did nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in blue states. So, the lockdowns accomplished no discernible advantage for the public, but they did give the central bank a perfect rationale to further erode the dollar.

  This resulting price inflation is something that not even the red states can escape.

  For example, home prices are rapidly expanding beyond the market bubble of 2006. This is partially due to millions of people participating in perhaps the largest migration in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Anyone who is able is moving away from major cities into suburban and rural areas. But, home prices also have a historic habit of inflating along with currency devaluation. The cost of maintaining and remodeling an older home, or building a new home, rises as the prices of commodities like lumber inflate.

  And lumber prices are certainly inflating! Softwood lumber prices are up at least 110% from a year ago, and are climbing as much as 10% in a week.

  Home rentals also do not escape inflation, as the rising cost of maintaining properties forces landlords to increase rents. The only places where rents are decreasing are major cities that Americans are seeking to flee, such as New York and San Francisco.

  Inflation In More Than Just Housing

  The majority of commodities continue to see price inflation across the board. Food and energy prices have been creeping higher for the past year. Governments are once again blaming the pandemic and “stresses on the supply chain,” which may have been a believable claim nine months ago, but not today. Anything to hide the fact that all that stimulus has inflationary consequences.

  Dollar devaluation is the most visible in terms of imported goods. In other words, it costs more dollars to buy goods outside the U.S. as the value of the dollar falls. And since the majority of U.S. retail is supplied by foreign producers, this means that average American consumers will suffer the brunt of inflationary consequences. Public stress and anger will be high.

  Pandemic Lockdowns Are Just An Excuse

  This is why the COVID-19 lockdowns must continue and the pandemic fear factory must remain active. The globalists need a cover event for the Reset and they need to keep the citizenry under control, and the pandemic can be blamed for just about anything. I think this is why we are already seeing the media hyping the existence of “COVID mutations.” Do not be surprised if the Biden Administration tries to implement a national lockdown sometime this year in the name of stopping the spread of a “more deadly” COVID-19 variant.

  It won’t matter that the previous lockdowns were useless and all the data shows that keeping the economy open is a superior policy. It might seem like logic is going completely out the window, but there is a very logical reason for what is happening in the minds of globalists.

  Stagflation comes into play through losses in certain sectors of the economy, high unemployment and the inability of wages to keep up with costs.

  There is the continued dismantling of the small business sector, which, again, I believe is being destroyed deliberately. It’s not a mistake that small businesses were predominantly targeted as “non-essential” during the lockdowns. It’s also not a coincidence that the majority of COVID-19 PPP loans went to big box corporations while small businesses received almost nothing. The small business sector is being erased, leaving only the corporate sector to provide for consumers.

  This may be why Democrats are so adamant about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Wages are already rising according to market demand and region. The average non-skilled worker in the U.S. is making around $11 an hour. There is no need for the government to interfere, unless they have ulterior motives.

  A $15 minimum wage would likely crush what’s left of small businesses, and only corporations that are receiving the bulk of stimulus dollars will be able to afford to pay workers the higher rate. On top of that, years from now the government could claim they “took action” to front-run stagflation by increasing people’s pay. But a $15 minimum wage is most useful to the establishment in the short term because it muddies the waters on the inflation issue.

  Prices will continue to rise due to dollar devaluation, but the media and government will say that it has nothing to do with the dollar and everything to do with companies raising shelf prices to offset increased labor costs.

  The Biggest Threat In The History Of American Society

  I suspect that the establishment will do everything in its power to distract the public from the biggest threat in the history of American society – the stagflationary time bomb

  If they admit to its existence then the public could prepare for it, and they don’t want that. If Americans were to decentralize their local economies, support local small businesses instead of big box retailers, start producing necessities for themselves, and if they started developing currency alternatives like local scrip backed by commodities… then they would be able to survive a national financial crisis.

  In fact, I guarantee that any community, county or state that takes these steps will immediately be targeted by the federal government, further revealing the truth: The establishment wants the public to suffer.

  They want economic disaster. They do not want people to have the option of taking care of themselves. They need people scared, desperate and malleable, or they will never achieve their Reset agenda.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 23:25

• San Francisco TV Reporter Robbed At Gunpoint While Covering Auto Thefts 
  San Francisco TV Reporter Robbed At Gunpoint While Covering Auto Thefts 

  The effects of the virus pandemic and socio-economic implosion that followed compounded with failed liberal leadership have transformed some parts of San Francisco into high-crime areas. A KPIX 5 reporter investigating a series of car break-ins around Twin Peaks was robbed at gunpoint for his camera, reported KPIX 5. 

  KPIX reporter Don Ford reported at Twin Peaks in San Francisco last Wednesday when a white luxury sedan with four men inside pulled up and put a Glock to his face, demanding his camera. 

  “The car came up here while we were about to do an interview, three guys jumped out,” said Ford. “One had a gun and put in my face and said, ‘We’re taking the camera.'”

  

  “My whole thought at the moment was be calm. Let’s not get this guy excited. He’s got the gun. I don’t. So you take you the camera. It’s yours Buddy,” he said. 

  “I was worried that this is what’s gonna happen, because as thieves get more and more brazen, they do more and more brazenly things. I’m not making that up. We just had that experience today,” a neighbor who asked not to be identified. 

  Ford was preparing to interview a homeowner when the incident unfolded. 

  “I just looked and I said, ‘I’m not going to get shot today,'” the homeowner said. 

  Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who serves the metro area’s District 8, which includes Twin Peaks, tweeted the incident is “ridiculous & unacceptable but not entirely unexpected in San Francisco in 2021.”

  “We need to adequately resource public safety agencies, adopt better strategies to stop repeat offenders & make clear that San Francisco is not a place that you can commit crimes & put people’s lives at risk with impunity,” Mandelman said.

  Violent crime has increased in the metro area since lawmakers defunded the San Francisco Police Department by $25 million from $692.9 million in 2020 to $667.9 million. 

  Citywide robberies and automobile vehicle thefts are surging; latest crime data shows burglaries jumped 59.4%, and motor vehicle thefts are up 20.8% so far this year.

  San Francisco police could see upwards of 11% or 167 officers laid off due to budget cuts. The possible reduction could significantly impact patrols and result in more crime. 

  Besides surging vehicle thefts and other violent crimes, companies are closing up shops as shoplifting has become a significant problem. 

  On top of this all, there’s an exodus of residents who are leaving San Francisco for rural communities, fed up with the city’s socio-economic implosion. The ability to work-at-home has also accelerated outbound migration. San Fran could one day be a hallowed out town, like Baltimore and or Detroit, if these trends persist. 

  Here’s the full report via KPIX 5 of the reporter who was robbed at gunpoint. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 23:05

• U.S. Flies Two B-52H Bombers Over Middle East To "Reassure Allies"
  U.S. Flies Two B-52H Bombers Over Middle East To “Reassure Allies”

  Via SouthFront.org,

  On March 7th, two US B-52H Stratofortress strategic bombers flew over the Middle East, as a show of strength against Iran.

  

  The US military’s Central Command said the two B-52s flew over the region accompanied by military aircraft from nations including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It marked the fourth-such bomber deployment into the Middle East this year and the second under President Joe Biden.

  A pair of U.S. Air Force B-52H “Stratofortresses” flew a multinational patrol mission across the #MiddleEast from @TeamMinot today to deter aggression and reassure partners and allies @USAFCENT @MOD_Qatar @modgovksa #B52
  https://t.co/dAEOYtRbgt pic.twitter.com/yPQEqywrnH

  — U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 7, 2021

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

  Flight-tracking data showed the two B-52s flew out of Minot Air Base in North Dakota, something Central Command did not mention in its statement on the flights.

  Iran, as usual, wasn’t directly mentioned by CENTCOM’s statement. According to it, the flight was to “deter aggression and reassure partners and allies of the US military’s commitment to security in the region.”

  This goes directly opposite of US President Joe Biden’s claim that he wants to return to the Iran Nuclear Deal and have a sort of normalization in relations.

  Biden expressed a desire to return to the deal if Iran honors the deal’s limits on its nuclear program. However, tensions remain high after militias in Iraq — likely backed by Iran — continue to target American interests.

  In late February, Biden ordered the launch of an airstrike just over the border into Syria in retaliation, joining every American president from Ronald Reagan onward who has ordered a bombardment of countries in the Middle East.

  On the same day, Beirut-based channel Al-Mayadeen aired footage of the Helios Ray, a Bahamian-flagged roll-on, roll-off vehicle cargo ship hit by the blasts February 26 in the Gulf of Oman.

  The grainy footage included areas blurred out on the video, likely coordinates and other information displayed by the Iranian military drone. The footage at one point showed what appeared to be a hole in the side of the vessel.

  Al-Mayadeen did not say when the footage was shot, nor explain the circumstance by which the Iranian drone was following the ship. The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, which patrols the Mideast and often has tense encounters with Iran, declined to comment on the footage.

  Off Gaza’s coast, three fishermen were killed in a reported Hamas misfire, according to Israeli media.

  At the same time, Arab-language media reported that it was an Israeli strike that killed the fishermen.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 22:45

• How Much Money Do You Need To Join The Top 1%?
  How Much Money Do You Need To Join The Top 1%?

  Knight Frank has released its 15th annual Wealth Report which found that the Covid-19 pandemic has proven good news for the world’s super rich, primarily due to surging asset prices that are being driven by lower interest rates and fiscal stimulus.

  As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the global UHNWI population (an ultra-high-net worth individual has a net worth of $30 million or more) climbed 2.4 percent over the past year with growth strongest in Asia at 12 percent. Growing inequality is increasingly been seen as the greatest threat to future wealth accumulation and support for wealth taxes is rising in many parts of the world with such plans already proposed or in place in Argentina, Canada and South Korea with similar measures likely to be introduced elsewhere.

  Considering the massive and growing gap between the super rich and the rest of the world, how much would someone need to earn to join the exclusive and oft-maligned one percent club? The Wealth Report included an interesting subsection that used the company’s Wealth Sizing Model to compare requirements to gain access to the top 1%.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  They vary considerably between countries and people would need the deepest pockets in Monaco. The tiny principality is well known as a playground for the super rich and it has one of the densest UHNWI populations on the planet. The entry point to the community is the highest on the planet at $7.9 million. Switzerland is known for its affluence and a cool $5.5 million would be needed to be counted among the country’s top one percent. The United States has the world’s largest UHNWI population with around 180,000 people holding a fortune of $30 million or more in 2020. Some $4.4 million would gain entrance to the America’s one percent club.

  

  Elsewhere, the threshold is considerably lower, particularly in developing countries where the super wealthy community remains relatively sparse. While China is expected to see its entry requirements rise significantly in the coming years, $850,000 was enough to be counted among its one percent community in 2020. India has seen its super rich population grow steadily in recent years but its threshold remains extremely low less than one percent of Monaco’s. A mere $60,000 would count someone among India’s highest earners, though the status would not last long. Knight Frank predicts that India’s entry threshold will double within the next five years.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 22:25

• China 'National Team' Is Back – Stocks Surge Back After Hitting Correction Territory
  China ‘National Team’ Is Back – Stocks Surge Back After Hitting Correction Territory

  It would appear global equity markets are testing the will of the world’s central bankers… one by one.

  Friday in the US we saw a sudden and mysterious buying-panic occur as the Nasdaq accelerated into correction territory and beyond…

  

  And tonight, after we tweeted the following…

  In theory a continued collapse in the QQQ will crash the S&P, DJIA, and everything else.

  In practice, the Fed will never allow it. We are within 2-3% of the Fed’s red line for QQQs

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 9, 2021

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

  …Chinese stocks have seen a sudden mysterious buying-panic occur..

  

  …just as the big-cap CSI-300 accelerated beyond a correction…

  

  Bloomberg reports that Chinese state funds intervened to alleviate declines in the stock market as a rout showed no signs of slowing.

  State-related funds are stepping in to ensure market stability during the government’s key policy meeting in Beijing, according to people familiar with the matter. A Hong Kong-based trader said clients linked to mainland funds were actively buying shares through stock links with Hong Kong on Tuesday.

  It has been a few years since the so-called “National Team” has been seen in Chinese markets. In 2016, one analyst noted:

  “The ‘national team’ is very deeply involved, and its main purpose is to prevent the market from moving up or down too extremely. Sometimes when the market looks set to break out and you buy shares to wait for them to rise, the good momentum would suddenly stop.”

  In fact China’s plunge protection team was very active during 2015’s chaos…

  

  

  Will it be The ECB’s turn tomorrow? Or was that what sparked the sheer panic-buying in Europe today also?

  

  Just how much “whatever it takes” are they willing to do?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 22:24

• Burger King's 'Woke' Viral Tweet Backfires Horrendously
  Burger King’s ‘Woke’ Viral Tweet Backfires Horrendously

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  A tweet posted by Burger King which said “women belong in the kitchen” that was meant to be a woke virtue signal to mark International Women’s Day backfired horrendously.

  

  The fast food giant followed up the tweet with a second that read:

  “If they want to, of course. Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We’re on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry by empowering female employees with the opportunity to pursue a culinary career.”

  However, the fact that the explanatory text was not included in the first tweet just made it look to many as though Burger King was regurgitating a sexist trope.

  [ZH: We note that both tweets have since been deleted]

  Looks like they forgot to delete their Facebook post:

  

  Perhaps forgetting that the woke mob displays ruthless intolerance to humor or nuance, the company faced an immediate backlash before ‘Burger Queen’ began trending, with Twitter users demanding a name change as an apology for causing offense.

  your only way out of this is to change the name to Burger Queen

  — Kelly Bachman (@bellykachman) March 8, 2021

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

  Others called for a boycott, including this woman whose tweet received over 22,000 likes.

  I won’t be eating at your store again thanks

  — ChildishTalksHipHop🐻 (@childish_santan) March 8, 2021

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

  “Burger King belongs in a trashcan,” said another verified liberal.

  Burger King belongs in a trashcan.

  — Chelsea Peretti (@chelseaperetti) March 8, 2021

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

  Others pointed out the irony of women in the kitchen only being acceptable in 2021 if those women are wage slaves for giant transnational corporations, with traditional family gender roles frowned upon.

  “If they want to, of course.” No one on earth would be working in a Burger King kitchen if they didn’t have to pay rent & bills, but Burger King is trying to make it sound like female empowerment lmao pic.twitter.com/56q58dVKIR

  — Charlie Nash (@CharlieNash) March 8, 2021

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

  *  *  *

  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 22:05

• "The System Is Compromised" – Baltimore Man Receives 18 Unemployment Debit Cards
  “The System Is Compromised” – Baltimore Man Receives 18 Unemployment Debit Cards

  Maryland’s Department of Labor is investigating a bizarre unemployment insurance scam. A Baltimore-area man claims to have received at least 18 fraudulent unemployment insurance debit cards from “investors,” according to local news station WMAR-2 News. 

  “That’s one, that’s two, three, four. That’s five, that’s six, seven, eight. That’s a total of nine cards,” said Dr. Keenan Cofield, who is a state lobbyist, a taxpayer – he said stuff like this makes him “cringe.” 

  

  He told WMAR-2 News Mallory Sofastaii that a total of 18 unemployment debit cards were mailed to his address. He said the debit cards were individually sent to him but addressed to other people.

  “Each one of them has a Visa card, each one of them has a name,” Cofield said.

  He was communicating with some people inline about the need for investors in a few of his projects. The Baltimore-area man said at least two people through a messenger app offered to invest with him.

  “And things were moving on, and they said that the funding would be coming by cards. So, next thing I know, I see these strange-looking Maryland Department of Labor and Regulation unemployment. [There’s] nobody at this house with these names,” said Cofield.

  Cofield communicated with the investors through Google Hangouts. He shared 30 pages of the conversations with Sofastaii: 

  The sender wrote:

  “Once cards are activated All you have to do is drive to an ATM machine and make withdraw sir”

  The sender instructs Cofield to keep 60 percent of the balance on the various cards and send the other 40 percent back, which will be split between the sender and someone named Bryan.

  Cofield asked whether this was fraud.

  The sender replied:

  “Sir believe me sir. this is not fraud sir ok. … Trust me It not a fraud sir”

  Here’s more of the convo: 

  

  “They have not said which ones were which, but they said the minimum was $500 and at least two or three of those cards are $10,000,” Cofield said.

  Cofield said nobody in his household is unemployed and became suspicious of how the unemployment debit cards, loaded with a lot of taxpayers’ money, and in envelopes under the seal of “Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation. 

  What this is, as Cofield discovers, is a “money mule operation.” In an operation like this, Cofield is the “go-between” entity that hands the dirty money then sends a certain portion back to the fraudsters. 

  “When I saw the Department of Labor and Licensing and Regulation unemployment, oh no, this is a scam. This is a big scam and this is a huge problem,” he said.

  Cofield has since contacted law enforcement about the money mule operation. 

  “It’s sad. Nobody knows where to go, so this is why I say guess what, Mallory is on this thing about unemployment, and that’s why I picked up, and that’s why we’re at Channel 2 now,” said Cofield.

  During the pandemic, State Police and the FBI have warned about increasing unemployment scams. The FBI ranks Maryland 5th in the country for “money mules” in 2019 despite being a highly prosperous state. 

  “The system is still messed up. There are people who have still not got their legitimate benefits. This lets you know not only somebody in that pile probably is missing their card, but the system is compromised,” said Cofield.

  Maryland’s Department of Labor expects to eliminate debit cards by April and switch to direct deposits. 

  On a national level, federal officials admitted that tens of billions of dollars in unemployment benefits were disbursed and squandered by fraudsters during the pandemic. 

  One fraudster, who made a million dollars in an elaborate unemployment scam in California, released a rap video about it. 

  As the plot thickens in the search for who the fraudsters are in Cofield’s case – he said one of the “investors” had a family member working at the Tennessee Bank of American Maryland Unemployment debit card processing center, according to Fox 5. 

  Fox 5 reports on the fraud:

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 21:45

• Gold Vs Bitcoin Part 2: Careful What You Wish For
  Gold Vs Bitcoin Part 2: Careful What You Wish For

  Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

  This is the second part of my look at the age old “Gold vs Bitcoin” debate, which I outlined in Part 1: “Gold vs Bitcoin is Fscking Stupid” as being faith-based and pointless.

  

  While it is thoroughly enjoyable to watch it play out between the symbolic archetypes of  near-boomer Peter Schiff and his millennial son, Spencer, I sometimes suspect that to  be a staged, WWE style confrontation….

  Future tweet: “Now that Bitcoin has hit $500,000 I must admit that a move up to $1,000,000 can’t be ruled out. However…”

  — Spencer Schiff (@SpencerKSchiff) February 16, 2021

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

  However I bring up the elder Schiff for a reason, because part of his core thesis is that after the coming global monetary reset, the world will move back to a gold backed currency.

  A return to a gold-backed standard would be a disaster

  This I find not only unlikely, but undesirable. Anybody paying attention to the way the world works now absolutely shouldn’t want a return to a gold-backed currency, especially people holding their wealth in gold.

  The reason is very simple: if that were to happen, there would occur with that a corresponding global ban on private gold ownership. Anybody who thinks this through can see that is the most likely way it would play out.

  The religious goldbugs think the USD will implode (probably correct), lose it’s global reserve currency status (correct) and then… government will admit defeat, remonetize the world with a gold backed currency. Doing that would instantly make the goldbugs who were outside the system, who were highly critical of it and who reject the legitimacy of much of it, the most wealthy and powerful participants in the new monetary regime.

  Do you really think it would play out like that? Do you really think that governments who double-down on incompetence, who think nothing of changing the rules and moving the goalposts, who stop at nothing to preserve their own position and serve their own interests are going to throw their hands up in the air, shrug their shoulders and walk offstage to clear a path for a next generation of goldbug power elites?

  I don’t think so.

  This is what happens instead:

  1. A new narrative begins to emerge:  gold bugs are damaging the stability of the banking system

  2. Sudden focus on how gold mining accelerates climate change and exacerbates systemic racism

  3. Gold jewelry = white privilege (even in India,  remember, by this point 2 + 2 = 5)

  4.  Private gold hoards are exacerbating wealth inequality

  After a few months of this and then the time is right, a coordinated set of policy initiatives will emanate from some elitist circle jerk like Davos or Jackson Hole:

  • all gold mines nationalized globally, possibly structured into an International Gold Pool™.

  • mandatory buybacks of private holdings at capped prices

  • criminalization of unlicensed private gold ownership

  …and gold jewelry will be the MAGA hats of the future. It’ll end your career.

  I may be off on the details, but that is in essence what I would expect happens if the global monetary reset heralds a return to the gold standard.

  The powers that be will never admit causing the monetary crisis, will never concede that it was their policies over successive decades caused it, and they will never voluntarily allow a tectonic shift to move power and wealth to anybody other than themselves.

  So if you’re a big believer in preserving your wealth through holding gold (as I am), then this is definitely what you don’t want to be wishing for. This is what the Bitcoiners should be hoping happens to the goldbugs.

  As for the Bitcoiners….

  Bitcoin as world reserve currency will never happen

  Some Bitcoin maximalists think that it is destined to become the global world reserve currency because (wait for it)….

  It would essentially force governments to be honest.

  I should be able to rest my case here. Governments are congenitally incapable of honesty. Perhaps there was a point in time when that wasn’t the case, but it certainly isn’t today, and the governments we have today will not voluntarily move to a system that forces them to be honest.

  The only way Bitcoin gets made the world reserve currency is if it’s done in a way that removes any and all advantages from those who own it today. This is how the system works: the elites are in charge, and anything that comes along to challenge their authority is either co-opted or criminalized.

  The system is hardwired to preserve the power and privilege of the people running it, and as I’ve said in the past, the privilege isn’t race based, it’s based on the structure of the monetary system. 

  Both goldbugs and Bitcoiners think government bans are unlikely or unworkable. Just last week on Coindesk’s The Breakdown, NLW’s Long Reads Sunday was Alex Gladstein’s Can The Government Ban Bitcoin?, who wrote about the mechanics of implementing a ban on bitcoin…

  “a military home-by-home raid couldn’t work very well and would constitute a mass set of human rights violations.”

  …possibly overlooking that we are one year into a New Normal where that which is not expressly permitted is forbidden.

  Anybody under-estimating the level of overreach and oppression that all governments globally can undertake, in concert, has to either have been asleep for the last year or is so comfortably cocooned  in one of those “post-physical” lifestyles that they didn’t care.

  To be clear however, I mostly agree with Gladstein’s reasoning on why Bitcoin can’t be banned effectively. Which is also why I think that precludes it from being part of any kind of government sponsored monetary restructuring (that said, some central banks may start buying Bitcoin as a part of their own reserves, the first national central bank to ponder it that I know of was Barbados, back in 2015)

  If Bitcoin were to become the rails of the global monetary system, it would happen in a way where the governments can completely regulate every single aspect of it, including where and how you HODL, whether it’s legal to mine (or stake for other or future cryptos) and whether or not you’re permitted to self-custody.

  So if you’re a big believer in preserving your wealth through migrating into the crypto-currency economy (as I am), then this is definitely what you shouldn’t be betting on. This is what the goldbugs should be hoping happens to the Bitcoiners.

  The true enemy is EvilCoin

  If I can see horrible outcomes as a result of what either camp thinks would be “victory”, what am I doing about it? This is what I said in Part 1,

  “the entire debate pointless because people who invest in either asset class are doing so for the same reasons…If the job at hand is to protect one’s wealth from systemically rigged and disintegrating monetary regime, arguing for one over the other feels like trying to defend against it with only half the available toolkit….The entire gold vs crypto argument goes away when one realizes that there is more overlap in the objectives of each asset than there are differences”

  I’ve never been a Gold vs Bitcoin guy, I’ve always been a Gold and Bitcoin guy. And by “gold” I mean precious metals, and by Bitcoin I mean crypto currencies in general (I also like Ethereum, as described in part 1).

  

  The post-reset toolbox, from Part 1

  Personally I don’t see any danger that either camp will ever see that their preferred monetary asset becomes the global reserve asset. Gold doesn’t allow governments to embezzle wealth from its subject and Bitcoin is off the table. They would never go with an open source project pioneered by an anonymous cypherpunk. They just won’t.

  What is more likely and what I personally am betting on is this:

  There will be some form of global monetary reset involving Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). China is already a fair way down the runway with their Digital Currency Electronic Payments (DCEP) system and the use of digital cash is far more pervasive there already.

  China is dictatorship. There is zero personal freedom and there are no sovereign individuals. Their social credit system will increasingly regulate every aspect of every citizen’s most minute activities and it will be the envy of technocrats the world over.

  I am betting on The Great Bifurcation playing out in the classical liberal world as follows:

  

  Erstwhile democratic nations will implement CBDCs which will be the rails of MMT, UBI and eventually full social credit systems “with Western characteristics”.  As the middle class gets hollowed out, most people will fall below an impermeable membrane into the new serfdom. The defining characteristic of the underclass:

  • no assets (“The year is 2030, you will own nothing and be happy…”)

  • no income as we understand it today, it’ll be UBI which is more of a digital “scrip” than actual money

  • no job, no career no profession other than side-hustles, gigs and the odd outlier shot at being in influencer

  The people who owe more than they own will basically be screwed and if there is another financial crisis before all this happens, say one in which equities, property values get smashed down while the cost of living skyrockets, then what’s left of the middle class will be quickly sorted into either category.

  I am always surprised at how few people I talk to have ever watched Mr. Robot.  However its explanatory allegory around the two-tiers of digital money after a global financial crash is a compelling one.

  So called “Evilcoin” is the CBDC, run by the establishment and is more like company scrip of yore, redeemable across the company platform. Alongside EvilCoin is Bitcoin, which people prefer and what actually holds value and confers a greater amount of economic freedom.

  

  In short: we’re headed into two-tier society, one where the tier you’re in relies on which form of digital currency economy you’re participating in the most. That’s what we look at specifically in my premium letter The Crypto Capitalist (including which publicly traded companies will be the best ones to own here in the New Normal).

  If there is any single take-away from all this, it is this, as long as “the system” as we know it, stays on the rails, then:

  “Gold vs Bitcoin” is the wrong question.

  “What are the alternatives to EvilCoin?” is the only question.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 21:25

• Royal Caribbean's Newest Ship Stuck At Port After Workers Catch COVID 
  Royal Caribbean’s Newest Ship Stuck At Port After Workers Catch COVID 

  Europe recorded more than one million COVID-19 cases last week, an increase of 9% from the previous week and a reversal in a six-week decline. There are fears of new variants spreading around the continent. So it comes as no surprise that members of Royal Caribbean International’s newest cruise ship, Odyssey of the Seas, recently tested positive for the virus, forcing the vessel to remain docked at Bremerhaven, Germany, reported NDR German news site. 

  Several German newspapers reported that “two employees on the Odyssey of the Seas” tested positive for the virus on Mar. 3 and were confirmed on Mar. 4 via PCR tests. The estimated 500 crew and workers have been quarantined on the ship. 

  

  According to NDR, the port medical service in Bremerhaven has ordered the vessel to remain in Bremerhaven until further notice. 

  The Meyer Werft shipyard already completed initial tests of the vessel in the North Sea. Further sea trials were supposed to be completed later this month, but NDR said it is “unclear when it can take off for the planned test drives.” The shipyard is scheduled to deliver the Odyssey to Royal Caribbean next month ahead of his first sailing from Haifa, a northern Israeli port city, in May. 

  This comes as the so-called U.K. variant has spread across Europe. According to WHO experts, the new variant is 50% more transmissible than the virus that surged early last year. 

  While the global travel and tourism industry is preparing for a banner year as vaccine rollouts and unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus has led some economists to believe there is massive “pent up demand,” it appears the virus pandemic continues to cause bottlenecks in the return to normalcy for specific industries.  

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 21:05

• Taibbi: The Prophet Of The Trump Era
  Taibbi: The Prophet Of The Trump Era

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  I entered Martin Gurri’s world on August 1, 2015. Though I hadn’t read The Revolt of the Public, at the time a little-known book by the former CIA analyst of open news sources, I hit a disorienting moment of a type he’d described in his opening chapter. There are times, he wrote, “when tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday… the compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea.”

  

  Gurri’s book is about how popular uprisings are triggered by collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power. I felt such a collapse that day in Waterloo, Iowa, covering the Republican presidential primary. The first debate was five days away and the man expected to occupy center stage, Donald Trump, held a seemingly inexplicable six-point lead.

  Two weeks before, on July 18th, Trump lashed out against former Republican nominee John McCain. Even McCain’s critics considered his physical and mental scars from years as a Vietnam war prisoner to be unassailable proofs of his patriotic gravitas, but the service-evading Trump was having none of it. “I don’t like losers,” he said, adding, “He’s only a war hero because he was captured.” It was the universal belief among colleagues in campaign journalism that this was an unsurvivable gaffe, a “Dean scream” moment. We expected him to apologize and wash out. Instead, he called McCain a “dummy” and kept a firm grasp on the lead.

  A different candidate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, was in Waterloo. Two years before, Time all but dubbed Christie the favorite for 2016 with a silhouette cover portrait, over the nastily shallow (but publicity-generating) double-entendre headline, THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Christie was every Washington consultant’s idea of a “crossover” superstar. I’d describe the concept in Rolling Stone as someone “mean enough for the right-wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel.”

  Christie parked himself in the middle of Waterloo’s annual “Irish fest” street fair, waiting for an Iowan to ask for a souvenir campaign handshake. He had his hand out and thumb stuck upwards, like an Iguanodon. Nobody came. Kids ran around him like he was a shrubbery. Two young women, giggling about something that clearly had nothing to do with him, walked his way, separated just long enough to avoid hitting him, then linked up again a few yards down. He eventually posed with a few passersby, but the rubbernecking that usually attends the arrival of any “famous politician” was conspicuously absent.

  

  Later, I sat in the park discussing Trump’s stubborn grasp on the lead with another reporter, an Iowan. “It’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re beating the shit out of the guy, and he just won’t die.” He compared it to a nightmare, where you stab an attacking monster over and over, and nothing happens.

  Elections in the pre-Trump era had been stale rituals. As recently as 2013, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post called them “remarkably scripted and controlled.” Donors, party chiefs, and pundits could concoct contenders through sheer alchemy, mesmerizing the public with incantations like “electability.” But in Iowa that summer, one “electable” Republican candidate after another — from Jeb Bush to Scott Walker to Marco Rubio — flopped in public appearances, savaged as phonies on social media. Walker, the betting favorite among reporters, saw his campaign deflated when his online strategist, Liz Muir, started tweeting her real feelings about Iowa (including the classic, “#agsubsidies #ethanol #brainless”).

  I’d spent weeks crisscrossing the state in search of even one piece of evidence that conventional wisdom still had predictive power in Republican politics, finding none. Now, here was Christie, reduced from being lionized in a Time cover story as a favorite and a “guy who loves his mother and gets it done,” to being nobody at all, a clown standing alone in a park. The realization that no one was in control of the campaign show anymore was jarring even to me, a critic of the old gatekeeping ritual.

  In the introduction to The Revolt of the Public, Arnold Kling speaks of a different “Gurri moment”: when Dan Rather’s 2004 expose about George W. Bush’s military service was blown up by an amateur blogging under the name “Bucklehead.” In the past, a media titan like CBS could only be second-guessed by another major institutional power. In “Rathergate,” both the network and one of its most iconic celebrities were humiliated by a single individual, a preview of the coming disorientation.

  The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

  

  Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 20:45

• Mutant COVID Strains In Florida, New York Threaten To Derail US Recovery, BofA Warns
  Mutant COVID Strains In Florida, New York Threaten To Derail US Recovery, BofA Warns

  Dr. Fauci and other health experts are warning about the prospect of a “4th wave” of COVID infections as mutated strains of the virus comprise a growing share of new COVID infections in the US, even as the JNJ one-shot vaccine promises to accelerate the pace of vaccinations. Worries about spreading mutant strains are being amplified by research showing that B.1.1.7 (first identified in the UK, also known as the “Kent” strain, after where it was first isolated and identified) might be on the cusp of becoming the most prevalent strain in the US.

  

  According to research cited in a note published Monday by a team of researchers at BofA, Florida is on the cusp of seeing the UK variant become the “dominant” strain in the state. And although hospitalizations, new cases and deaths have slowed in the Sunshine State, researchers are concerned that the variants are slowing the ebb of the pandemic in the state – and could possibly supercharge it. Cases and hospitalizations are still slowing in the state, just not as quickly as they were in January.

  

  The team of analysts at  BofA said these trends have raised concerns about Florida becoming a bellwether state for the spread of the new variants, which many fear could surge as states from Texas to Connecticut move to loosen at least some (or in Texas’s case, practically all) virus-related restrictions. The fact that the state’s positivity ratio has declined since the start of the year suggests that the virus truly is receding (in other words, the lower case numbers aren’t due to solely to a pullback in testing).

  Perhaps counterintuitively, the analysts at BofA are worried that the UK variant might not be as dominant in Florida as they believe. They also gamed out two additional scenarios that they said would lead to a greater outlook.

  We see three possible explanations for Florida’s continued improvement. First, the spread of the new variant might not be as far along as estimated. So the old variant might still be contracting off a much larger base, while the new variant is growing off a small base. This would not be good news as it would suggest an imminent increase in cases as the new variant continues to spread.

  Second, vaccines might be more effective at containing the virus than we thought, by making both vaccinated people and their close contacts less vulnerable. This would be good news because the cumulative effect of vaccines should increase quickly as the roll-out gains momentum. The third explanation, which is least likely in our view, is that the B.1.1.7 variant is significantly less contagious than widely estimated. This would probably be the best news of all.

  But Florida isn’t the only state struggling with COVID mutations: The B.1.526 variant that is believed to have originated in New York State is also raising concerns, according to BofA. New York cases have dropped more slowly than in the rest of the country, and have flat-lined in the last ten days. Hospitalizations are still falling, but, as the analysts remind us, they are a lagging indicator.

  

  Thanks to these trends, the Empire State now has the second-highest number of confirmed cases per capita in the country, after New Jersey (both are higher than California, which leads in total cases, though it’s massive population makes for a lower ratio).

  However, because the testing rate in New York is about 3x the national average, the positivity ratio – measuring number of positive cases vs. total tests – in the state has been steady at around 3.2% for about a week, compared with the national average of nearly 5%. So, while New York might be feeling the impact of the new variant, the team at BofA doesn’t see reason for alarm until the positivity rate moves significantly higher.

  Looking at the US in total, the analysts at BofA believe new COVID cases could climb in the coming weeks due to the growing presence of the new mutant “variant” strains. Fortunately, they only expect a modest rise through the end of April, after which, they believe, case numbers will move lower again.

  Of course, all of this depends on how effective the first generation of vaccines is in offering protection to patients from the growing number of mutant strains.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 20:25

• Repo Chaos Continues: "Market Just Doesn't Know Where To Price The 10-Year"
  Repo Chaos Continues: “Market Just Doesn’t Know Where To Price The 10-Year”

  The Federal Reserve and Jay Powell want to pretend that all is well with the repo market, but nothing could be further from the truth.

  Last Thursday, we presented to our readers the latest repo market data showing just how broken and inverted the traditional fund flows surrounding the world’s “most liquid” and important security had become in “Historic Repo Market Insanity: 10Y Treasury Trades At -4% In Repo Ahead Of Monster Short Squeeze.” One day later, the chaos got even worse as discussed in “10Y Treasury Hits A Stunning -4.25% In Repo As Yields Blow Out.” Very simply, this meant that an investor in the repo market lending money so others could short the 10Y would end up paying rather than getting paid. As we explained said “this is a clear breach of one of the most fundamental relationships in the repo market, where lenders of cash always get paid – however little – in order to make a more liquid and efficient market.”

  The repo rate sliding far below the “fails charge” of 3.00% which is viewed as the lowest theoretical level where dealers are punished for not delivering a 10Y Treasury i.e., there is a delivery “fail”, was striking but what was even more striking is that the recent repo crunch has been surpassed just once in history: when the 10Y hit a record low repo print of -5.75% during the fear and loathing of the covid crash chaos on 3/13/20, when the Treasury bond market essentially broke down for several hours.

  

  And even though the self-proclaimed “repo experts” and various assorted Fed cheerleaders were certain that this historic repo inversion – which as we explained was the result of unprecedented, record shorting of the 10Y Note – would normalize as soon as today following last week’s announcement of Wednesday’s $38BN 10Y auction, this has not happened. In fact, the situation has only gotten worse, with the 10Y opening at -2.65% and trading as low as -3.75% – below the fails charge for the 4th straight day…

  

  … before closing at -2.90% according to Curvature Securities.

  Commenting on today’s action, Curvature’s Scott Skyrm repeats what we already knew, that there is such a massive short out there that there are simply not enough securities for all shorts to be covered, meanwhile continued shorting piles on leading to even more negative repo rates:

  “the market took $8.5 billion (out of  $8.5 billion available) today from the Fed and took $9.9 billion out of $9.9 billion on Friday. The Street needs the SOMA securities lending supply to cover the shorts, and not all shorts are getting covered!”

  So desperate are shorts that they are covering with Off-the-Runs: “There’s no doubt that some shorts rolled back into the Old 10 Year, because there’s more interest in the Old 10 Year over the past two days”, Skyrm writes with Bloomberg echoing what we said last week, namely that “when the interest rate on overnight cash loans backed by the newest 10-year note goes below -3%, it’s cheaper to pay the regulatory fine for failing to return the collateral on time than it is to renew the loan — a sign that short selling is intense” and that there simply isn’t enough underlying paper available to cover all shorts.

  But the most interesting observations is the repo guru’s comparison between the O/N average repo an the March 15 term (when the 10Y settles): as Skyrm notes, “one thing that’s really interesting is how the 3/15 term market follows the overnight average. Basically, that means the market doesn’t know where to price the 10 Year.”

  
  The convergence of the two series means that “there’s no expectation of [the price] loosening or tightening this week” and while Skyrm admits he has no idea what happens next, he adds that “the market just doesn’t know” either. However, “whichever direction it goes, it will be volatile!”

  Finally, Bloomberg once again ends on an optimistic note, inferring from past examples of superspecial repo tightness that the repo market “may remain tight until this week’s $38BN reopening auction settles on March 15.” Of course, if that doesn’t happen, and if the repo chaos persists all the way into the March 17 FOMC, then all bets are off. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 20:05

• Assad & Syrian First Lady Test Positive For Coronavirus
  Assad & Syrian First Lady Test Positive For Coronavirus

  Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma have confirmed they have coronavirus according to a Monday statement from the president’s office and are said to be experiencing minor symptoms. 

  The statement said they were in “good health and in stable condition” and are continuing to work in isolation at home. The 55-year old leader of Syria and his wife – the latter who recently survived breast cancer, took PCR tests after feeling minor symptoms that were consistent with the virus. 

  

  The news comes on the heels of the war-torn country announcing last week that it’s initiated a vaccination campaign; however, few details have been made public. It’s unclear whether or not the president or first lady have received an initial dose of vaccine. 

  According to ABC News, “The health minister said the government procured the vaccines from a friendly country, which he declined to name.” Likely Russia is providing its Sputnik V vaccine.

  The official recorded case numbers in Syria are nearly 16,000 infections so far, including 1,063 deaths, but the true numbers are believed to be far higher for lack of testing throughout the beginning months of the pandemic. 

  Recently a storm of controversy erupted after international reports claimed that Damascus secretly did a deal with Israel to procure vaccines – something which has been batted down by both sides.

  “The New York Times reported last month that Israel secretly agreed to send Syria some vaccine doses as part of a prisoner swap,” Axios observed. “Both countries deny the report.”

  Next week will mark ten years since the start of the war in Syria, which almost immediately became internationalized into a proxy war pushing for regime change, and later a struggle between the US and Russia for dominance in the Middle East. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 19:45

• Ron Paul: The Fed Is Enabling Biden And Congress' Destructive Agenda
  Ron Paul: The Fed Is Enabling Biden And Congress’ Destructive Agenda

  Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

  According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.

  

  The CBO’s report was largely ignored by Congress and the media. One reason the report did not get the attention it deserves is Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s continued commitment to making sure Fed policies enable Congress to spend as much as Congress deems necessary to address the economic fallout from the coronavirus panic.

  As financial analyst Peter Schiff points out, the Fed’s commitment to ensuring the government can run up massive debt means the Fed will not allow interest rates to increase to anywhere near what they would be in a free market. This is because increasing interest rates would cause the federal government’s debt payments to rise to unsustainable levels. Yet, the Fed cannot admit it is going to keep rates near, or even below, zero indefinitely without unsettling the markets. So, the Fed continues to promise interest rate hikes in the future and the markets pretend to believe the Fed. When (or if) the lockdowns end, the Fed will find a new crisis justifying “temporarily” keeping interest rates low.

  The Federal Reserve has not just endorsed massive federal spending, Fed Chairman Powell has also endorsed masks, vaccines, and social distancing to defeat the coronavirus and restore the economy. It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see the Fed go full Fauci.

  The overreaction to coronavirus is a cause of the explosion in federal spending and debt we have witnessed over the last year. However, federal spending already greatly increased from January 2017 until the lockdowns. This spending growth occurred under a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and, from 2017 to 2019, a Republican House. One bright spot in Democratic control of the presidency and both houses of Congress is more Republicans will fight excessive spending and claim to be “deficit hawks.”

  Republican hypocrisy in claiming to care about spending and debt only when a Democrat sits in the Oval Office is one reason why Democrats can so easily disregard debt. Another reason is the left’s embrace of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory is the latest version of the fairy tale that politicians need not worry about debt and deficits as long as the central bank can monetize the federal debt.

  Unless the government changes course, America will experience a crisis greater than the Great Depression. The crisis will include a final rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status. There will also be much increased price inflation. At that point Congress will have no choice but to limit spending, although it will try to hide cuts in popular entitlement programs by “adjusting” government measures of inflation. Congress could then blame the Fed for the reduction in value of government benefits.

  Those who know the truth have two responsibilities. First, ensure they and their families are protected when the crash comes. Second, redouble efforts to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement so politicians are pressured to cut spending and debt and to end the Fed.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 19:25

• China FM Demands Biden Reverse "Dangerous" Taiwan Stance, Otherwise "World Will Be Far From Tranquil"
  China FM Demands Biden Reverse “Dangerous” Taiwan Stance, Otherwise “World Will Be Far From Tranquil”

  Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi gave his annual news briefing on Sunday and as expected he hammered away at America’s presence and increasing attempts to insert itself politically in the South China Sea region.  

  In particular he demanded that the US stop “crossing lines and playing with fire” on Taiwan in a stark message to Biden, underscoring that Beijing sees “no room for compromise or concessions” when it comes to Chinese sovereignty over the democratically ruled island. Biden’s doubling down on many Trump policies when it comes to ‘confronting’ China was described by Wang as a “dangerous practice” that must be immediately reversed. 

  And what sounds like both a warning to other global powers and a threat to the US in particular, Wang continued: “It is important that the United States recognizes this as soon as possible,” adding that, “Otherwise, the world will remain far from tranquil.”

  

  He emphasized a litany of instances of US “bullying” and “interference” in China’s own affairs, describing Washington’s “willfully interfering in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of democracy and human rights.” One example given was the US calling out human rights abuses against the minority Uighur Muslim population. “The claim that there is genocide in Xinjiang couldn’t be more preposterous. It is just a rumor fabricated with ulterior motives and a lie through and through,” he said.

  Wang’s remarks were issued on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. The major parliamentary session to kick off the year occurs every Spring. This year the NPC is set to initiate a far-reaching overhaul of Hong Kong’s electoral system, intent on further cementing its power following last year’s draconian national security law which has effectively crushed anti-mainland dissent.

  Former governor of Hong Kong Lord Chris Patten was cited in BBC as saying that China’s Communist Party had “taken the biggest step so far to obliterate Hong Kong’s freedoms and aspirations for greater democracy under the rule of law”.

  Wang, however, touted in his remarks that, “Hong Kong’s shift from chaos to stability fully serves the interests of all parties. It will provide stronger guarantees for safeguarding Hong Kong citizens’ rights and foreign investors’ lawful interests.”

  The one-China principle is a “red line” that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Sunday, adding that the Chinese government will never compromise on the Taiwan question. pic.twitter.com/btorhWohY3

  — Chinese Embassy in CZ (@ChineseEmbinCZ) March 7, 2021

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

  The US and European countries have condemned these moves to ensure only “patriots” can run in Hong Kong elections. Wang had this and other examples in mind when in his address he touted Beijing’s recent ‘successes’ in battling “hegemony, high-handedness and bullying” and “outright interference in China’s domestic affairs” out of Washington.

  Another example offered was concerning recent US and Western allied naval maneuvers: “The US and other Western countries frequently stir up troubles in the region, trying to drive a wedge using the South China Sea issue. They have only one purpose: to sabotage peace and disturb regional stability,” Wang said.

  Interestingly enough Wang offered one starting point for US cooperation as potentially happening on the climate front. “I hope China and the U.S. restarting cooperation on climate change can also bring a positive change of climate to bilateral ties,” Wang said.

  * * *

  Additionally Wang’s briefing reviewed China’s relations with other major world powers and how Beijing is handling pressing crises like the pandemic as follows, according to a Bloomberg review:

  • Europe relations: “China and Europe are two important players in this multipolar world. The relationship is equal. It is open. It is not targeting any third party or controlled by anyone else.”
  • Vaccine diplomacy: “We’re also ready to work with the International Olympic Committee to provide vaccines to Olympians.”
  • Trade: “The answer is not to retreating to protectionism, isolation or decoupling, but to work together to make globalization open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial for all.”
  • Japan tensions: “I hope that Japanese society will embrace a more objective and rational conception of China, and solidify public support for long-term steady progress in China-Japan relations.”
  • Indian border: “The rights and wrongs of what happened in the border area last year are clear, so are the gains and losses. The facts once again prove that unilaterally creating confrontation will not solve the problem.”
  • Russia cooperation: “We will set the example of strategic mutual trust by firmly supporting each other in upholding core and major interests, jointly opposing color revolutions, countering disinformation, and safeguarding national sovereignty and political security.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 19:05

• By One Gauge, Inflation Fears Are The Highest This Century
  By One Gauge, Inflation Fears Are The Highest This Century

  By Ven Ram, Bloomberg macro commentator

  What do you get when you combine potent fiscal and monetary stimulus with a U.S. economy on the cusp of a rebound amid surging oil prices? The answer: fears that medium-term inflation relative to the longer term running at the fastest clip since nearly the turn of the century.

  The spread between U.S. five- and 10-year inflation breakevens is now the most positive it’s ever been in Bloomberg data going back to the start of 2002. The differential, which may be thought of as the market’s evolution of inflation over the medium term versus the longer term, went briefly above zero following the financial crisis as well, but wasn’t so pronounced.

  

  The differential is a sign of the market’s collective thinking that the $1.9-trillion fiscal relief ready for endorsement by the House will stoke price pressures over the medium term without necessarily impinging on the evolution of inflation over the longer term. In other words, secular inflation may still be elusive, which is another reason why the Fed may decide to look past price pressures in the here and now (and witness how prescient last year’s virtual Jackson Hole conference seems in hindsight in the context of average inflation targeting, though I would call it serendipity).

  The surge in non-farm payrolls for February and the progress on vaccination show a strong economic rebound may be on the cards. As if on cue, Brent crude prices are hovering around $70 a barrel. All these mean that the breakeven spread is likely to stay elevated for now.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 03/08/2021 – 18:45

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