Jan 232020
 
 January 23, 2020  Posted by at 10:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Jack Delano Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops San Bernardino, CA 1943

 

Adam Schiff’s Opening Argument At Senate Impeachment Trial (Pol.)
Gabbard Suing Clinton For Defamation Over ‘Russian Asset’ Comments (Hill)
Black South Carolina Elected Official Now Backing Sanders Over Biden (AP)
Hunter Biden Ordered To Appear In Court Next Week For Contempt Hearing (ZH)
UN Demands US Probe Of Alleged Saudi Hack of Bezos’ Phone (ZH)
The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)
Ghislaine Maxwell’s Personal Emails Were Hacked (DM)
TEPCO Estimates It Will Take 44 Years To Decommission Fukushima No. 2 (JT)
Australia Red Cross: $11 Million ‘Administration Cost’ For Bushfire Help (7N)
Monarch Butterfly Population Critically Low On California Coast – Again (G.)

 

 

China Lunar New Year is from Jan 24-30. Hundreds of millions of Chinese traveling.

China Quarantines 11 Million In Wuhan As Virus Kills 17, With 95 Critical (RT)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has commended China’s swift response to a rapidly moving virus gripping the country, but despite a quick-climbing infection tally, the agency is reluctant to classify it a global health threat. “What they are doing is a very, very strong measure and with full commitment,” WHO director-general Tedros Ahanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday, referring to Beijing’s shutdown of all public transportation in and out of the city of Wuhan, the viral epicenter. As of 10am local time, all trains, buses, railways and ferries traveling to and from Wuhan have halted operations until further notice in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, with the government calling on the city’s 11 million residents to refrain from leaving without “special reasons.”

Medical personnel were also posted at toll gates and checkpoints along major roadways to screen commuters for the illness. The comments followed an emergency WHO meeting in Geneva on Wednesday, where the health agency mulled whether to declare the novel coronavirus – now dubbed “2019-nCoV” – a worldwide emergency. Still unsure after a day of deliberation, however, WHO will meet again Thursday, with Tedros saying he took the decision “extremely seriously.” China’s National Health Commission (NHC), meanwhile, has provided the latest figures tracking the impact of the dangerous pathogen, with 131 newly confirmed infections bringing the total to 571 across some 25 Chinese provinces.

Seventeen people have died from the illness thus far, all in central China’s Hubei province, with another 95 in critical condition with severe pneumonia-like symptoms. There are also now 393 suspected infections in China – 257 of them registered on Wednesday alone – with 5,897 additional cases of “close contact,” the NHC said.

Read more …

Couldn’t find any relevant write-ups of Schiff’s marathon, so here’s the text -not sure it covers all 3.28 minutes of it. But who cares? He had nothing new and what he had, he repeated 20+ times. Including the very dead: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

The Hunter Biden/Burisma story has not been debunked as Schiff repeats ad nauseum, what has been debunked -by Mueller- is Russiagate. But who cares?

Michael Tracey: “Counted at least 57 references to Russia or Putin in today’s impeachment trial which is why it’s a total fallacy to separate this episode from the Russiagate narrative which has dominated US politics for 3+ years. What’s happening now is just its inevitable culmination..”

Adam Schiff’s Opening Argument At Senate Impeachment Trial (Pol.)

Mr. Chief Justice, Senators, counsel for the President, and my fellow House managers: “When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”


Those words were written by Alexander Hamilton in a letter to President George Washington, at the height of the Panic of 1792, a financial credit crisis that shook our young nation. Hamilton was responding to sentiments relayed to Washington as he traveled the country, that America, in the face of that crisis, might descend from “a republican form of Government,” plunging instead into “that of a monarchy.” The Framers of our Constitution worried then—as we worry today—that a leader could come to power not to carry out the will of the people that he was elected to represent, but to pursue his own interests. They feared that a president could subvert our democracy by abusing the awesome power of his office for his own personal or political gain. And so they devised a remedy as powerful as the evil it was meant to combat: Impeachment.

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Go Tulsi. Someone has to break the DNC, or the Democrats are finished as a party..

Gabbard Suing Clinton For Defamation Over ‘Russian Asset’ Comments (Hill)

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is suing Hillary Clinton for defamation over the former secretary of State’s remarks on a podcast characterizing the Democratic presidential candidate as a Russian asset. Gabbard filed the defamation lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Gabbard’s lawyers allege that Clinton’s comments have “smeared” Gabbard’s “political and personal reputation.” “Tulsi Gabbard is a loyal American civil servant who has also dedicated her life to protecting the safety of all Americans,” Gabbard’s lawyer Brian Dunne said in a statement. “Rep. Gabbard’s presidential campaign continues to gain momentum, but she has seen her political and personal reputation smeared and her candidacy intentionally damaged by Clinton’s malicious and demonstrably false remarks.”


Gabbard’s campaign referred all questions on the lawsuit to Dunne. In response to the lawsuit, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said “that’s ridiculous.” [..] The lawsuit claims that Clinton is a “cutthroat politician” and “sought retribution” for Gabbard endorsing Clinton’s 2016 Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Gabbard is now facing Sanders in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary. “Clinton’s false assertions were made in a deliberate attempt to derail Tulsi’s presidential campaign,” it says. Gabbard’s lawyers claim Clinton’s “peddling of this theory” has harmed Gabbard, voters and “American democracy.” “Tulsi brings this lawsuit to ensure that the truth prevails and to ensure this country’s political elites are held accountable for intentionally trying to distort the truth in the midst of a critical Presidential election,” the lawsuit says.

Read more …

No. 1 for DNC: dump Biden. He’s roadkill.

Black South Carolina Elected Official Now Backing Sanders Over Biden (AP)

A South Carolina elected official who endorsed Joe Biden last month is switching her allegiance to Bernie Sanders in the state’s first-in-the-South presidential primary, saying she had viewed the former vice president — whose support in the state is considered deep — as “a compromise choice.” Dalhi Myers told AP on Wednesday that she was making the change in part because she values what she sees as Sanders’ strength in being able to go toe-to-toe with President Donald Trump in the general election. “I looked at that, and I thought, ‘He’s right,’” said Myers, a black woman first elected to the Richland County Council in 2016. “He’s unafraid and he’s unapologetic. … I like the fact that he is willing to fight for a better America — for the least, the fallen, the left behind.”


Sanders, a Vermont senator, frequently calls out what he sees as Trump’s dishonesty, referring on the campaign trail to the president as a “pathological liar.” Biden, whose relationships in South Carolina go back decades, has led polling in the state, particularly among the black voters who make up most of the state’s Democratic primary electorate. Sanders, whose 47-point loss to Hillary Clinton in 2016 in South Carolina blunted the momentum generated in opening primary contests and exposed his weakness with black voters, has focused on strengthening his ties in the state’s black community. In December, Myers, a corporate lawyer in Columbia, was among more than a dozen South Carolina elected officials to endorse Biden, saying at the time in a release from the Biden campaign that he was “the only candidate with the broad and diverse coalition of support we need to win” against Trump in the general election.

Read more …

No, really. Dump Biden.

Hunter Biden Ordered To Appear In Court Next Week For Contempt Hearing (ZH)

Hunter Biden has been ordered to stand in front of an Arkansas judge next Tuedsay to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt of court for failing to produce a laundry list of financial and personal information in his ongoing child support dispute with stripper Lunden Alexis Roberts. Roberts asked the court on Tuesday to hold Biden in contempt for failing to disclose financial information, contact information, and “a list of all companies he currently owns or in which he has an ownership interest,” as well as “all companies in which he has had an ownership interest in the past five years.” Also sought are a copy of Biden’s 2017 and 2018 tax returns, deeds to properties he owns, and an executed copy of a financial records release Biden has been avoiding filing unless the court allows him to do so under seal.


“The defendant continues to act as though he has no respect for this Court, its orders, the legal process in this state, or the needs of his child for support,” reads the filing, which adds “This is but another example of the defendant’s unnecessary actions to frustrate prompt adjudication of this matter and increase the plaintiff’s litigation costs.” Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer agreed, ordering Biden to appear in person to explain his failure to produce the requested information which was due in August, 2019. In November, a DNA test revealed Hunter to be the father of the unnamed child with Roberts. In order to determine what Biden can cough up, Roberts has sought extensive financial records for periods which include his time on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine.

Read more …

Still don’t quite get this. Did MbS pose as a Nigerian prince? Will the UN get involved if your phone is hacked? Are the UN and Bezos trying to seek vengeance for Khashoggi in a roundabout way?

UN Demands US Probe Of Alleged Saudi Hack of Bezos’ Phone (ZH)

Despite the Saudi Embassy’s denial of the “absurd” claims that MbS hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone, United Nations experts have called for an “immediate investigation” by the United States. Independent experts Agnes Callamard, UN Special Rapporteur on summary executions and extrajudicial killings, and David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, said in a statement Wednesday: “The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.” “The circumstances and timing of the hacking and surveillance of Bezos also strengthen support for further investigation by U.S. and other relevant authorities of the allegations that the Crown Prince ordered, incited, or, at a minimum, was aware of planning for but failed to stop the mission that fatally targeted Mr. Khashoggi in Istanbul.”


“The alleged hacking of Mr. Bezos’s phone, and those of others, demands immediate investigation by U.S. and other relevant authorities, including investigation of the continuous, multi-year, direct and personal involvement of the Crown Prince in efforts to target perceived opponents.” The U.N. experts reviewed a 2019 digital forensic analysis of Bezos’ iPhone, which they said was made available to them as U.N. Special Rapporteurs. The experts said that records showed that within hours of receipt of a video from the crown Pprince’s WhatsApp account, there was “an anomalous and extreme change in phone behavior” with enormous amounts of data from the phone being transmitted over the following months.

Read more …

Oh cut it out.

Boeing CEO Expects To Resume 737 MAX Production Before Mid-Year (R.)

Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told reporters on Wednesday the U.S. planemaker expects to resume 737 MAX production months before its forecasted mid-year return to service and said it did not plan to suspend or cut its dividend. The company announced a production halt in December, when the global grounding of the fast-selling 737 MAX following two deadly crashes in five months looked set to last into mid-2020 — a timeline pushed back after Boeing endorsed new simulator training for pilots. Calhoun said the company is not considering scrapping the MAX and expects it will continue to fly for a generation.


“I am all in on it and the company is all in on it,” Calhoun said, adding Boeing will not launch a marketing campaign to get customers to get back on 737 MAX planes. The company said on Tuesday it now expects regulators to approve the plane’s return to service in the middle of the year. Calhoun said he did not see recent issues raised about wiring or software as “serious problems.” The production delay threatens to cut U.S. GDP by as much as 0.5 percentage points. President Donald Trump on Wednesday told CNBC Boeing is a “very disappointing company.” United Airlines said Wednesday it does not expect to fly the Boeing 737 MAX this summer.

Read more …

Subtitle: US Fracking Gushes Bankruptcies, Defaulted Debt, and Worthless Shares

The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)

Following the sharp re-drop in oil and natural gas prices in late 2018, bankruptcy filings in the US by already weakened exploration and production companies , oilfield services companies, and “midstream” companies (they gather, transport, process, or store oil and natural gas) jumped by 51% in 2019, to 65 filings, according to data compiled by law firm Haynes and Boone. This brought the total of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust since 2015 in these three sectors to 402 bankruptcy filings. The debt involved in these bankruptcies in 2019 doubled from 2018 to $35 billion. This pushed the total debt listed in these bankruptcy filings since 2015 to $207 billion. The chart below shows the cumulative total debt involved in these bankruptcies since 2015.

But this does not include the much larger losses suffered by shareholders that get mostly wiped out in the years before the bankruptcy as the shares descend into worthlessness, and that then may get finished off in bankruptcy court. The banks, which generally had the best collateral, took the smallest losses; bondholders took bigger losses, with unsecured bondholders taking the biggest losses. Some of them lost most of their investment; others got high-and-tight haircuts; others held debt that was converted to equity in the restructured companies, some of which soon became worthless again when the company filed for bankruptcy a second time. The old shareholders took the biggest losses.


The Great American Fracking Bust started in mid-2014, when the price of WTI dropped from over $100 a barrel to below $30 a barrel by early 2016. Then the price began to recover, going over $70 a barrel in September and October 2018. But then it began to re-plunge. By the end of 2018, WTI had dropped to $47 a barrel. [..]

And 2020 is starting out terrible for natural gas producers. The price of natural gas has plunged to $1.90 per million Btu at the moment, a dreadfully low price where no one can make any money. Producers in shale fields that produce mostly gas, such as the Marcellus, are in deeper trouble still, because oil, even at these prices, would be a lot better than just natural gas. Producing areas with constrained takeaway capacity (it takes a lot longer to build pipelines than to ramp up production) are subject to local prices, which can be lower still. In some areas, such as the Permian in Texas and New Mexico, the most prolific oil field in the US, where natural gas is a byproduct of oil production, limited takeaway capacity has caused local prices to collapse, and flaring to surge.

Read more …

Sent to WIkiLeaks yet?

Ghislaine Maxwell’s Personal Emails Were Hacked (DM)

Ghislaine Maxwell’s personal emails have been hacked, and damaging information, including the names of individuals linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking case, are at risk of being publicly released. The revelation was made in a letter filed by the British socialite’s lawyers in the defamation case brought against her by Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Guiffre, DailyMail.com has learned. The letter was sent by Maxwell’s attorney, Ty Gee, on December 5 to New York federal court Judge Loretta A. Preska but made public last week. The letter addresses the materials that should remain sealed or redacted in the case. It notes ‘the difficulty and complexity’ of the process as there are more than 8,600 pages, adding that it is ‘difficult-to-overstate importance to the lives of Ms. Maxwell and the non-parties’.

Gee’s letter says that the project ‘could not be accomplished by scanning or speed-reading’ as each page had to be carefully analysed to redact, for example, ‘a surname or an email address’. He refers to details that were released in error in the 2,000 pages that were made public in August by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Those filings revealed allegations that Maxwell procured underage girls for Epstein. She has denied those charges. ‘Despite the Second Circuit’s best efforts, it made serious mistakes. For example, it redacted a non-party’s name in one location but not another; so the media immediately gained access to that name,’ Gee wrote.

‘As another example, it redacted Ms. Maxwell’s email address (which linked to her own domain name) in one location but not another; shortly afterward hackers breached the host computer.’ The hack may have implications for Prince Andrew after it was revealed in December that the Duke of York exchanged emails with Maxwell in 2015 about Giuffre. In that email, revealed on Panorama, Maxwell and the British royal discussed Giuffre – despite denials from Prince Andrew that he had never met the then-teenager and that a photo of them together was a fake. ‘Let me know when we can talk. Got some specific questions to ask you about Virginia Roberts,’ Prince Andrew wrote in an email to Maxwell. She replied: ‘Have some info – call me when you have a moment.’

Read more …

Make that 70.

TEPCO Estimates It Will Take 44 Years To Decommission Fukushima No. 2 (JT)

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. has outlined plans for the decommissioning of its Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power station, estimating that the process will take 44 years. Tepco presented the outline of decommissioning plans to the town assembly of Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, one of the two host towns of the nuclear plant, on Wednesday. According to the outline, the decommissioning process will have four stages, taking 10 years for the first stage, 12 years for the second stage and 11 years each for the third and fourth stages.


Tepco will survey radioactive contamination at the nuclear plant in the first stage, clear equipment around nuclear reactors in the second, remove the reactors in the third and demolish the reactor buildings in the fourth. Meanwhile, the plant operator will transfer a total of 9,532 spent nuclear fuel units at the plant to a fuel reprocessing company by the end of the decommissioning process, and 544 unused fuel units to a processing firm by the start of the third stage.

Read more …

Like it behooves a major charity. When interviewing such a CEO, always ask what their salaries are.

Australia Red Cross: $11 Million ‘Administration Cost’ For Bushfire Help (7N)

The Australian Red Cross has admitted it may spend as much as $11 million processing the millions of dollars people from across the globe have donated to its bushfire appeal. However, in the face of public outcry, the charity has been forced to revise an earlier statement that suggested a large proportion of the $95 million raised could be quarantined for future natural disasters. The charity also pledged on Thursday to speed up the rate of its delivery of emergency funds to bushfire ravaged communities. “We’re now paying a million dollars a day and we’re keen to continue to speed that up, we know the assistance is needed now,” Red Cross’s director of emergencies, Noel Clement, told 7 NEWS.


Clement said the charity had already dispensed 700 grants of $10,000 each, totalling $7 million. He conceded however that of the revised total of $115 million donated so far – up from yesterday’s figure of $95 million – as much as $11 million could be spent on administration costs. Such a figure – roughly 10 per cent of total revenue raised – is generally considered to be the uppermost limit of acceptable administrative costs among large charitable organisations.

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1980s: 4.5 million. 2019: 29,000.

Monarch Butterfly Population Critically Low On California Coast – Again (G.)

The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed. The count of the orange-and-black insects by the Xerces Society, a not-for-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey. That’s not much different than last year’s tally, when an all-time low 27,000 monarchs were counted. “We had hoped that the western monarch population would have rebounded at least modestly, but unfortunately it has not,” said Emma Pelton, a monarch conservation expert with the Xerces Society.


By comparison, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in forested groves along the California coast in the 1980s. Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in the Western US due to the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases. Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile migration synced to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.


Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

Read more …

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle January 23 2020

Viewing 22 posts - 1 through 22 (of 22 total)
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  • #52931

    Jack Delano Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops San Bernardino, CA 1943   • Adam Schiff’s Opening Argument At Senate Impeach
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 23 2020]

    #52932
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Methinks that FP (Former not Fresh Prince) Henry’s time in Afghanistan gave him reasons to reconsider his ties to the crown. He looks good in that photo with Bruce. Like he’s finally his own man. Good on ye, Hank.

    As is kinda obvious by now, sometimes I post a song that has barely even nominal relation to a topic siomply because I feel it deserves more audience. This song — and this p[articular performance — are, imo, staggering:

    I Call Shotgun!

    #52933
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Repent Much?

    For Harry’s Uncle A. WHom I seem bent on calling Henry not Harry.

    #52934
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Jack Delano Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops San Bernardino, CA 1943

    If you think about it; that’s really quite an amazing photo, IMO…

    #52936
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “China Quarantines 11 Million in Wuhan As Virus Kills 17, with 95 Critical (RT)”

    From yesterday, it doesn’t matter what happens, what matters is what China THINKS happened. And the Corona was patented by the West just a few years ago (2015) and related to a group fronted by Bill Gates. Again, doesn’t matter if that’s why and true, only that China can/might THINK that’s where and why it came from. ‘Cause you know: genocide? It makes people cranky.

    Gabbard Suing Clinton for Defamation over ‘Russian Asset’ Comments (Hill)”

    Since HRC is queen bee, this make a lot of sense. To wrest the party from two who go directly to the media and order the media what to cover and ignore (just like HRC ordered the media to give DJT coverage as “pied piper”, in the leaked emails), Tulsa has to head-on the queen bee to change and save the party. But don’t worry: they won’t. They will irreparably damage it instead. Why? They believe nothing and without the party as air-cover would all go to jail. For election tampering for starters. With Bernie, proven, among 100 other charges, and would be Federal Charge any other time and place. Been so long anyone was straightforward in the party, just doing what they say and acting on it, they don’t expect it or know what to do.

    The media for their part refused to take 30 minutes and read the simple lawsuit document, just like Covington, then commented on nonsense that didn’t happen they all made up in their minds. …But I said “media” so obviously.

    UN Demands US Probe of Alleged Saudi Hack of Bezos’ Phone (ZH)

    Hey U.N., my phone’s been hacked too, and I have some mail I’d like you to sort.

    Boeing CEO Expects to Resume 737 MAX Production before Mid-Year (R.)”

    Doing it to themselves. All about response and handling. They could have fixed and be over this by now except for the lying.

    The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)”

    They act like this matters. The whole point was to turn borrowed Fed money into oil. The companies went bankrupt? The “company” is a fiction. It’s a bunch of words on paper, nothing happens when you tear the paper. However we got real oil for a bunch of hot air clicking mice on a pixel. Sounds like a win, not a loss.

    Point: THEY DON’T CARE. Nor does the economy about this fiction. We’ll just do it again until the US$ is taken away.

    “Ghislaine Maxwell’s Personal Emails Were Hacked (DM)”

    Call the U.N. IT Support hotline!!!

    “TEPCO Estimates It Will Take 44 Years to Decommission Fukushima No. 2 (JT)”

    They re-occupied Hiroshima almost right away with little ill effects. Doesn’t that make General Electric 44x more dangerous than an atom bomb? American corporations and product kill more people than cancer? We’re No 1!!!

    #52938
    Dr D Rich
    Participant

    Paraphrasing Dr. D, Yale the gift that keeps on giving.
    MacKenzie BeebeeBozos, Yale degree and all, didnt become hip to Jeffrey’s! philandering until MBS Crown Prince BoboBoneSaw tapped “I created AMZN outta my garage, I say its true” guy’s cellphone. Ok, got it. That’s a difficult image to eliminate from my mind, a Bezo Yale guy tinkering around in his garage creating AMZN outta whole cloth in a sudden burst of fabulous genius.
    However, I thought we had Jeff BeBozos’s employer, the CIA/FBI/NSA, monitoring and then parallel con-structuring things to keep bozos like Bezos in his lane.
    So, when is the US Gov’t gonna go all scorched earth, Joseph Nacchio/Qwest retaliatory treatment on Ol’ Jeffrey for embarrassing The Firm/NSA and being a bad steward of such fabulous wealth? Already have our answer. The U.N. is gonna step in…right in the middle of The Impeachment of President Donald Trump.

    #52940

    I’m going with bats for the coronavirus. Ot other species feeding on bats. Those species include humans. And the big thing is Lunar New Year, the only time Chinese get to see their remote family. They find a way.

    China

    #52941
    zerosum
    Participant

    Response testing still in effect
    More millions of people under siege/quaranteen
    Still no sign of spreading by private jets
    Still no reports of infections from Davos
    ——

    Schiff’s marathon ( senators must stay and listen. Only short bathroom breaks)
    …. Biden. He’s roadkill. (Sheeee! Don’t wake him up. There’s a favorite un-named waiting in the wing)
    a DNA test revealed Hunter to be the father

    —–
    ( see corrections)
    Boeing will not launch a marketing campaign to get customers airlines to get back on 737 MAX planes.
    United Airlines said Wednesday it does not expect to fly the Boeing 737 MAX this summer.
    ——-
    Boeing will get its share of printed money liquidity.
    The GDP numbers cannot afford a dip of 0.05%
    —–

    OIL AND LIQUIDITY

    This pushed the total debt LIQUIDITY listed in these bankruptcy filings since 2015 to $207 billion.
    Did liquidity find its way to THE SHARE HOLDERS

    #52942
    zerosum
    Participant

    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-quarantines-second-city-experts-warn-its-already-too-late-stop-virus

    Here’s some more information on the victims, including the types of illnesses they faced:
    At least nine of those who died had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease. Eight were in their eighties, two in their seventies, five in their sixties and one man was in his fifties. The youngest woman was 48 and had a pre-existing condition.

    “As for the impact on younger people, according to current epidemiology and what we know right now, they really aren’t susceptible,”

    Therefore, avoid poor, old, sick people.
    Still no reports of sick people flying on private jets or from Davos.

    #52943
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    ““The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (WS)”

    They act like this matters. The whole point was to turn borrowed Fed money into oil. The companies went bankrupt? The “company” is a fiction. It’s a bunch of words on paper, nothing happens when you tear the paper. However we got real oil for a bunch of hot air clicking mice on a pixel. Sounds like a win, not a loss.”

    It’s a loss. We’ll need that oil later on, even at the low REOI yields it gives. Russia benefitted because it can sell at those prices and still come out ahead on the financial ledger while not trashing aquifers, public trust, the will of the capitlist community to invest in it down the road when it would make financial sense (after the petrodollar has collapsed and we can’t afford tobuy foreign oil).

    #52944
    zerosum
    Participant

    ” The whole point was to turn borrowed Fed money into oil.
    The companies went bankrupt?”

    The owners, not the companies, are laughing all the way to the bank.
    There are over 3,000 orphan abandoned wells in Alberta, Canada

    Those owners will start a new company to cap those orphan oil well and send the bill to the gov./tax payers.
    Again ….. laughing all the way to the bank.

    #52945
    generic
    Participant

    Excelon Generation plans to decommission Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island plant over a period of 6 decades at a cost of over $1 billion dollars.

    https://www.inquirer.com/business/energy/three-mile-island-nuclear-reactor-decommissioning-plan-exelon-years-20190405.html

    #52946
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Having grown up in the post-WWII New Deal era, turning 13 when men walked — nay, pogo-hopped! –on the moon, when the counter-culture zenithed at Woodstock (only to, of course, drown in that success amid the complacent 70s), and perhaps most importantly to me back then, young women began venturing about braless while the smog visibly lessened from new environmental regs we foolishly thought would stay, two years before Nixon axed the gold standard (“I am not a crook! I GAVE it away!”), R. Buckminster Fuller was in full prominence amid stunning images of Terra from Luna, I naturally formed a liberal bias in my politics. Putting aside details, you were kinda dumb not to, for it had been liberals who, since the Depression, had been the recognized voice of fixing the problems created by progress driven by sad old same old human nature.

    Never mind political realities and machinations, in terms of the general zeitgeist you were a sucker at that time to believe the post-WWII/Cold War corporate job for life/atomic power too cheap to meter zeitgeist.

    Hypnosis is Fun!

    Just like you would’ve been a sucker not to support the French Revolution despite how predictably human the results of that was too.

    Agent Smith Speaks

    That beautiful first half 20th Century Modern Era USA is King thing (king both morally, financially, and most of all, financially and entertainingly) was picking up the thrown retreads of its excess success (too much of anything will kill you),blowing out left and right, veering all over the road.

    What had once been liberalism was now the new conservatism. Mainstream. America loves a winner, and it was Dems in charge who’d won WWII (along with first of all working hard to make sure it happened and on their terms), so it took the general who’d won that war, likable Ike, to oust the increasingly war-hungry Dems who’d placated Depression Era anxiety with a ton of good old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus spending, most of it pretty savvy since this was when building dams and similar infrastructure was the smart thing to do, all that sweet cheap stratospheric REOI oil digging up and smelting the best mineral deposits we’ll ever see in this country outside of year 2100’s Best of the Best landfills (“Turning yesterday’s toxins into today’s Necessities”).

    But by 1952 and Truman’s disaster after disaster, beginning with that disturbing image of us performing municipal nuclear genocide on two cities after already fire-bombing Tokyo, a fate that in the short run was perhaps more gruesome than Hiro-Saki, then continuing and concluding through more of the same but sans nukes to North Korea (Shoa offs!), it was time for nominal conservatism to get some of the action. It was just more of the same neo-fascism the Dems sold, but… churchier, with nice sensible shoes, and a healthy dislike of taxation with or without representation.

    No one was really questioning the status quo, just doing some interior re-decoration.

    But a few sock hops and shotgun weddings later, raw rebellion got above my generation’s pelvis, JFK was inspiring — then murdered and therefore martyred into a kind of sainthood, the Viet Nam war couldn’t control the media or its veterans enough to keep our de facto imperial fascism rolling anymore, we’d read Silent Spring, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, seen the movies King of Hearts and Lawrence of Arabia, heard civil right’s roar and watched LBJ’s dick-wrangling of Congress to pass some great social justice/welfare* legislation (whereupon he turned over and screwed IT in the ass too, cuz sticking his dick in often unwilling things is about all he knew how to do), rivers were on fire, and everyone in my childhood Chicago knew the air stank worse and worse all the time… popular political reality, the one that the moods of the masses follow, was in a period of acknowledging more sanely than not the nature of the messes it had made.

    [ *let’s reclaim that word from its vernacularization into ‘pandering freebies’ back to the proper :common good”, eh? ]

    Making good remedy, of course, was an entirely different story, but hey, we’re human beings. Fucking up is our middle name despite our brilliant mutations now and then.

    We’d wasted too much of the Enlightenment’s/New World’s new tools and resources already to fix things via our usual erratic cultural migrations. We needed to get everything right 90% plus to survive the dilemmas of Post-Modernism (I hate the term too but it semiotically captures its essence of too lame to earn a name, too abstruse to decipher and too boring/horrifying when one does bother). 51-49% (our typical winning streak) wouldn’t do, and 51-49% would compound like interest into a seriously negative asymptote like the one “Tyler Durden” of Zero Hedge uses as his title quote.

    Fast forward through ye olde Hegelian epicycles in democratic miniature from liberal backlash to conservative backlash to liberal BL to conservative BL to LBL to CBL to… each backlash bearing less resemblance to its label than before, each lash being weakening limp plebiscite wrist flickers for/against the Lesser Lib/Con Evil, and here we are.

    How Time Flies!

    Like Captain Kangaroo’s obvious grandfather said:

    “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

    ― G.K. Chesterton

    ck:

    gk: Exhibit B

    When I started educating myself after rather wild and crazy young adult years, the conservative voice who had as profound an effect on my thinking as, say, Noam Chomsky or Hunter Thompson, was this guy here:

    The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

    Being a Xtian, I am inherently liberal but, being a Xtian, I am also inherently conservative. Not because the Bible tells me so, but because human reality has shown itself to be incapable of fulfilling Enlightenmental secular humanism just as the mythical Middle Easter forebears, Adam and Eve, couldn’t begin to handle the challenge of higher reflective consciousness. Too much too soon, which is an apt description of humanity since Enlightenment re-opened Pandora’s Box. Man discovers fire, man burns planet.

    Like that E.O. Wilson quote Raul shared awhile back.

    I have no faith in any strategy or camp of either political label to do any good. Liberalism’s ideals are generally superior but its faith that science can bell the cat has proven to be what Dr. D calls Anti-Logos. We can’t help it. We’re way too stupid to be so smart, and language allows morons to possess technology created by geniuses. Not good.

    I am a Xtian a) because I’m desperate, which is how it should be, no shame, and b) read loosely, shall I say liberally, as I believe it should be read, the Bible (and other religious codices from ancient past) make for me the best sense of why we’re the way we are. But that’s a very long story. I’ve camped most of my life with atheists and agnostics, worship Nabokov and Borges and Stanislaw Lem and such, enjoyed and endorsed Dawkins’ work outside his shrill autistic denunciation of magical thinking, don’t for a second believe that believing in God makes it so (although I will entertain the quantum woo notion that God is perhaps a self-recycling feedback loop of belief in such an entity and the accompanying idea that the universe has sound good benevolent reason, that we must keep clapping if we want Tinker Belle not to die), and don’t think that Jesus or Abrahamic religionism in general is the only true strain… but will indulge the notion that when Jesus said He was the Only Way and all that, it was something unique among whatever relations and effects upon us in this little cosmos may supernally exist. A path He’d personally carved out because He felt sorry for us recycling samara or karma through dharma or whatever that stuff is called. Not necessary, per se, but taking responsibility for the mess His Daddy, one demiurge rung up the ladder, has made of evolving life on Terra into something mostly good with just enough bad to pay back entropy.

    The idea being that when we do that life review thing so many NDEs report, we have supernaturally powerful compassion by which to forgive ourselves when the Big Screen shows us how much our petty selfish blind actions hurt so many many many sentient creatures, some of them human. That we don’t voluntarily cast ourselves into some lake of fire, i.e., back to the old recycling of consciousness through samsara. Only logical use of crucifying a Son of God that I can think of.

    Whatever gets you through the night, as John Lennon sang with nice enough lyrics but really atrocious music (he folded fast, musically, without Paul always humming pretty tunes into the air, although he was conceptually pretty brilliant).

    Speaking of John, who else has notices the downright inane paradox of the opening line of Imagine?

    Imagine there’s no heaven (aka imaginary place).

    Indeed. Imagine you’re not imagining. That roomful of infinitely receding mirrors can be yours too if you meditate a few thousand lifetimes. The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.” I find that much easier than trying to envision emptiness, that is, to comprehend raw consciousness directly in some way.

    Throw in the prospects of a benevolent afterlife where souls are revealed in loving essence (quite commonly reported in NDEs, which have happened to two people close to me), and I am seduced thereby to hang my hopes and faith on those silly old post-tribal myths.

    I go now to gaze into my crystal and channel the spirits of ancient Atlantis, for lo, I am stoned.\

    Hail Atlantis

    P.S. from this perspective, I can see why some people are so enamored of Donald, even knowing he’s a despicable heel. Sometimes it takes a blind wannabe Samson (vain arrogant SOB) to bring down the temple.

    Me, I think of my fave Al Sharpton election slogan (my own personal apocryphy): Vote for Al! He can’t fuck up things any worse than they already are, and who knows, he might stumble into something good for us! What the hell, eh?

    Lousy slogan but he was a lousy candidate.

    Alas, as a Xtian I can neither enjoy the thrills of hating him as so many do, nor worshipping him as many others seem to. I have to see him as a sick old homo sapiens like me, and forgive him for being fucked up. Hating on him is like yelling at my own shit. And since the segue exists, I’ll take it: impeaching him is like flushing a bucket of crap down a toilet you know is clogged. Gonna backfire.

    #52947
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    The How Time Flies link opens at the wrong place. Stupid robots. You want to start at 4:45.

    Rebot redux:

    How Time Fry?

    No way it wasn’t robotic error. It’s not like I’m not high. *snigger*

    #52948
    zerosum
    Participant

    Impeachment Gonna backfire.
    Nobody guilty of wrong doing.
    Nobody is lying.
    Everybody is holier than the pope.
    Rules, laws and regulations have been made by the lawyers, accountants and bankers so that even the worst of the worst incompetent and immoral can sleep peacefully every night.
    Capitalism permits everyone to find ways of become billionaires by any means outlined in the Rules, laws and regulations which have been made for that purpose.
    Look the part, act the part, of the innocent and you will remain at your elite status.
    Don’t forget to go to church and bow your head at the appropriate moments to demonstrate your humbleness.

    Impeachment – guilty
    Say bye-bye to Yesterday.
    Say hello to a diferent tomorrow.

    #52949
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Check 9Bill comments?

    #52950
    thomasjkenney
    Participant

    RE: San Berdoo facility, the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana was still standing when I was a teen, and there wasn’t yet much else in that area except vineyards and raw alluvium pushed down from the mountains yearly by the snowmelt. Now it’s all single-family houses – mini McMansions to full-size McMansions.

    RE: Shale oil bankruptcies…it’s OK, it was all fake money anyway, right?

    #52951
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    This is probably old news to y’all, but I’ve been mostly living in a cave these days. I’d read bits and snips here and there about how Bill Gates and his fellow Bezos seemed to be up to more good than bad, but this person gave me what feels like a proper skinny:

    With A Last Name Like That, Who Am I To Argue?

    “proper skinny” sounds like “full monty”

    #52952
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    For Raul. This entirely lacks the philosophical and spiritual depth of wonder that the dog reflection photo has, but it is just as startlingly weird and wonderful if poshlost cubed.

    Ah Wuinnaful Ah Wunnaful

    #52953
    WES
    Participant

    Who knew that you could create so much oil out of thin air?

    Merely moving the decimal point to the right is all the effort that was required!

    The Fed knew!

    #52954
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Sawadi Toot Gene tuk khon; Happy Chinese New Year everybody (in Thai).
    While not a holiday here, it is widely celebrated because so many Thai’s have Chinese ancestors. Most schools and businesses have a very high absentee rate today.
    Bazillions of fire crackes being set off all morning.
    My wife’s grandfather was Chinese and thus she’s fully into today’s celebrations…

    On another note: the Corona virus has the media in a frenzy; as a result a lot of B.S. out there.
    Hopefully, in a day/week or so, things will become more reliable, with facts replacing hyperbole…

    #52955
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Coronavirus Death Toll Hits 25 As Beijing Confirms 830 Patients Infected – ZH

    Climbing quickly in China, as expected; elsewhere, not so much…
    Thailand is holding at 4 cases…

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