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Debt Rattle September 3 2020

Sep 032020

September 3, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:39 am Finance Tagged with: Bannon, Biden, bookies, bradykinin, China, Covid19, Cuomo, hidden voters, lawless cities, Lin Wood, Trump, Twitter, Vitamin D 17 Responses »

Jackson Pollock Shooting Star 1947

• Supercomputer Analysis Provides New COVID19 Theory (M.)

• Trump Leads Biden At The Bookies (ZH)

• The Stock Market Thinks Joe Biden Is Going To Beat Donald Trump (CNN)

• Hidden Trump Voters Could Have Big November Impact (Hill)

• Trump Orders Feds To Begin Process Of Defunding “Lawless” Cities (ZH)

• Gov. Cuomo: Trump ‘Better Have An Army’ If He Comes To NYC (NYP)

• China To Overtake US As World’s Top Economy In 2032 – State Think Tank (SCMP)

• Xi Jinping Is Hoping To Let 1,000 IPOs Bloom In Hong Kong & Shanghai (Whalen)

• Lin Wood, Attorney For Kyle Rittenhouse, Locked Out Of Twitter Account (Fox)

• Steve Bannon Needs A Defense Not A Conspiracy Theory (Turley)

Cheap antigen tests

Bill Barr Mail-in Voting

"A bipartisan commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker said back in 2009 that mail-in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion.

The only time the narrative changed is after this administration came in."

– AG Bill Barr pic.twitter.com/qWdX7uUf9V

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 2, 2020

A bradykinin storm. And Vitamin D as a potentially useful drug. Better get some now, before it’s too popular.

• Supercomputer Analysis Provides New COVID19 Theory (M.)

Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week. When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms.

It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson’s group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July. According to the team’s findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease’s cardiac and GI symptoms. But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson’s group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn’t content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors.

Instead, it actively hijacks the body’s own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they’re usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs. In this sense, Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently. The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body’s levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire.

Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can’t do this as effectively.) The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm — a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it’s this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19’s deadly effects. Jacobson’s team says in their paper that “the pathology of Covid-19 is likely the result of Bradykinin Storms rather than cytokine storms,” which had been previously identified in Covid-19 patients, but that “the two may be intricately linked.” Other papers had previously identified bradykinin storms as a possible cause of Covid-19’s pathologies.

[..] Jacobson’s team also suggests vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN. Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming. The researchers note that vitamin D has already been shown to help those with Covid-19. The vitamin is readily available over the counter, and around 20% of the population is deficient.

28% of black voters, vs 8% in 2016. That’s enormous.

• Trump Leads Biden At The Bookies (ZH)

The trend we have been noting for the last week has accelerated overnight and ‘the streams have crossed’, with the average bookie now seeing it more likely that President Trump wins the 2020 election that Joe Biden. This huge swing comes as Summit News’ Paul Joseph Watson notes that the results of a new national poll reveal that a stunning 28 per cent of black Americans plan on voting for President Donald Trump. The Atlas Intel poll finds that Biden leads Trump nationally by just three points. But the real story lies in the percentage of Hispanic and black voters who told the pollsters that they will vote for Trump. According to the survey, 28 per cent of African-Americans say they plan to vote for Trump, a stunning figure. 29 per cent of black Americans also approve of the job Donald Trump is doing.

This compares to 2016 when Trump attracted 8 per cent of the black vote while Hillary Clinton captured 89 per cent. Joe Biden is down to 66 per cent of the black vote, according to the poll. Amongst Hispanics, Trump is up 13 points on the 2016 (41%), while Biden is down 10 per cent (56%). The reason behind the surge in black support for Trump could be the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement seems to be backfiring after 3 straight months of violent riots and unrest. As we highlighted earlier, a separate poll found that Trump’s support amongst African-Americans has doubled since 2016, although the results of the Atlas Intel poll blows even that figure out of the water. Activist Candace Owens, who has led the ‘Blexit’ campaign to convince black Americans to get off the Democratic reservation, appears to have achieved a stunning success.

CNN went to a different casino.

• The Stock Market Thinks Joe Biden Is Going To Beat Donald Trump (CNN)

The presidential election is only two months away and the stock market is soaring. In theory, that should bode well for President Trump since a bull market has historically benefited the incumbent. But Trump is trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden in many head-to-head national polls. Although the market’s sharp rebound since March could be viewed as a sign that investors expect the coronavirus-induced recession to be brief, you need to dig deeper and look at how the recovery is unfolding. It turns out a basket of stocks that could fare well in a Biden presidency have been outperforming the overall market — as well as a portfolio of stocks that might benefit from a second Trump term.

According to data from Strategas that was shared with CNN Business, a group of infrastructure, renewable energy, pro-globalization, health care and cannabis stocks are up more than 10% since early June. This so-called Biden or blue list includes companies like Granite Construction (GVA), Tesla (TSLA), First Solar (FSLR), chip giant Broadcom (AVGO) and the iShares MSCI Germany ETF (EWG), which owns several top German stocks. The bet is that these companies might thrive if Biden wins and pushes for the United States to rebuild highways and bridges, wean America off oil and restore fractured trade relations with China, Japan, Europe and other global economic leaders.

There might be a few more this time around.

• Hidden Trump Voters Could Have Big November Impact (Hill)

Trump supporters are far more likely to hide their preference in polls. This was the finding of recent research that investigated this increasingly prevalent assumption. If true in even small percentages, an imposing Trump surge could be hiding within the electorate. There is growing suspicion that Trump supporters are not divulging their preferences to pollsters. This would hardly be surprising considering the left’s current cancel culture climate. Five years of vituperation has increasingly turned violent. There are daily occurrences for those willing to objectively look at the riots occurring in big cities across America. Even high-profile people are not immune, as Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s narrow escape outside the White House following President Trump’s acceptance speech demonstrated.

It is logical that ordinary Americans could feel vulnerable. To test this theory, CloudResearch recently sampled American voters in search of what they term “shy voters.” Their results show that Trump supporters were “significantly more reluctant to share their opinions on phone surveys compared to Biden supporters.” Almost 12 percent of Republicans and nearly 11 percent of Independents, were also almost twice as likely to be reticent than Democrats (about 5 percent). These seemingly small percentages could have major November implications. For illustration of roughly how big, look at 2016 exit polling. In the last presidential election, 36 percent of voters were Democrats, while 33 percent were Republicans and 31 percent were Independents.

Applying CloudResearch’s “shy voter” percentages to each group yields 9 percent of the electorate as not giving their true candidate preferences. However, those roughly one in 11 reticent voters are not, as CloudResearch discovered, evenly distributed between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Instead, they run about 2-to-1 in Trump’s favor. On the net, they come out to around a 3 percent hidden “Trump bump.” Again, that may appear small, but not in what is an increasingly tight race. According to Real Clear Politics’s average of polling results, Biden’s national lead is now just 6 percent — down from 9 percent on July 1. Currently, Biden’s lead in the all-important top battleground states is far narrower — just about 3 percent, compared to just over 5 percent on Aug. 5.

While we do not know where these reticent supporters were being recorded (for example, listed as supporting a third-party candidate or as unsure of who they support), if they were listed as Biden supporters, their impact as hidden Trump supporters would be twice as large. This is because of the zero-sum nature of each vote going to Trump also would be deducted from Biden. So, the range of Trump’s benefit relative to Biden from hidden supporters could be anywhere from 3 percent to 5 percent. Either way, in a tight race such an impact would be huge. Remember that in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2 percent. However, Trump still won the electoral vote and the presidency. A hidden 3 percent of Trump supporters would erase Clinton’s 2016 margin and Biden’s current lead in Real Clear Politics’s battleground average. A hidden 5 percent of Trump supporters would push Real Clear Politics’s national average into a dead-heat.

The reactions should be good.

• Trump Orders Feds To Begin Process Of Defunding “Lawless” Cities (ZH)

The feud between Trump and liberal cities which encourage protests which seeking to defund the police escalated sharply on Wednesday, when the President ordered the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City, Portland, Seattle and Washington, cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime. In a five-page memo sent to federal agencies on Wednesday whose subject is “Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients of Federal Funds That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities” and signed by Trump, the president orders them to report to the White House Office of Management and Budget on any funding that could be redirected.

New York City, Portland, Seattle and even Washington, DC are among the initial targets of the measure. “My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo, which mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name twice. To ensure the federal funding is not wasted or “spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”

In a tweet late on Wednesday, Trump followed up the memo by saying that his administration “will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses. We’re putting them on notice today.”

He tries to imitate Trump. Doesn’t work. He just ends up sounding crazy.

• Gov. Cuomo: Trump ‘Better Have An Army’ If He Comes To NYC (NYP)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday all but threatened President Trump’s safety if he returns to New York City in a rant responding to an exclusive story by The Post that Trump is looking to pull federal funds from “lawless” cities including New York. Cuomo called an emergency press briefing within a half hour on Wednesday night to tear into Trump for the order, which cites New York’s rising murder rate and defunding of the NYPD. “He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander in chief. But Cuomo, who like Trump hails from Queens, wasn’t done. “He can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City, people don’t want to have anything to do with him.” [..]

On substance, Cuomo said he doubted the legality of Trump’s five-page memo ordering a review of federal funds that can be redirected from New York City, Portland, Seattle and Washington, DC. “It is more of the same from him. It’s political, it is gratuitous. And it’s illegal. But it is another attempt to kill New York City,” Cuomo said. “President Ford said drop dead. President Trump has been actively trying to kill New York City since he’s been elected,” he said. In highly personal and insulting language, Cuomo speculated that Trump wasn’t upset about New York’s soaring murder rate and shootings. “I think it’s because he is from New York City and New York City rejected him, always,” Cuomo said. “He was dismissed as a clown in New York City, those who know him best, like him least.”

[..] The governor also claimed Trump’s “negligence” is the reason New York state suffered the highest COVID-19 death toll. The governor’s critics blame his Health Department’s mandate that forbade nursing homes from turning away COVID-19-positive patients, potentially leading to at least 6,500 deaths. At the end of his call, Cuomo, apparently sensing how his remarks about Trump could be seen as threatening, attempted to walk them back. “My comment about the president and bodyguards in New York City, all I’m saying is that he is persona non grata in New York City. And I think he knows that. And he’ll never come back to New York, because New Yorkers will never forget how gratuitously mean he has been to New Yorkers and how many times he’s tried to kill the city that gave him his start and birthed him. That’s what I meant about the bodyguards.”

Earlier Wednesday, Trump called on CNN to fire Cuomo’s younger brother Chris Cuomo over a leaked tape in which he says he was questioned about sexual misconduct. “Fredo must go!” Trump wrote, using an insulting reference from “The Godfather.”

“..there are also views that China may never surpass the US to be No 1, due to the former’s ageing population..”

• China To Overtake US As World’s Top Economy In 2032 – State Think Tank (SCMP)

China is expected to surpass the United States to become the world’s largest economy in a little more than a decade, despite escalating hostilities with Washington, a Beijing-based governmental think tank has forecast. The prediction, made by researchers at the Development Research Centre (DRC) of the State Council, the Chinese government’s cabinet, reflects mainstream assumptions in Beijing about the success of the Chinese government’s new development strategy of focusing more on its domestic market, given the intensifying economic, technological and geopolitical rivalry with the United States. The report also underlines a big assumption in China that the country’s economic rise is unstoppable.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed on Monday that China must “speed up” the new “dual circulation” strategy he introduced in May, given that the external environment has become volatile and hostile. According to the group of researchers led by Chen Changsheng, who oversees macroeconomic research at the government-run think tank, disputes between China and the US will intensify further in the next five years. “It can’t be ruled out that the US will use all possible methods to contain China’s development, including imposing financial sanctions on Chinese companies by misusing its ‘long arm’ jurisdiction [to impose US law outside America’s borders], seizing China’s holdings of US Treasury securities … coercing other countries to impose technology embargoes on China, as well as excluding China from the [US] dollar payment system,” according to the report.

However, even those factors cannot stop China’s economic rise, the report suggested. The country’s share of the global economy will rise to 18.1 per cent in 2025 from 16.2 per cent in 2019, while the US share will drop to 21.9 per cent from 24.1 per cent in the same period, the researchers predicted. Last month, Justin Lin Yifu, a professor at Peking University and the World Bank’s former chief economist, predicted that China would surpass the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030. However, there are also views that China may never surpass the US to be No 1, due to the former’s ageing population. Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that, from a demographic point of view, China would not be able to surpass the US in the foreseeable future.

“..Chinese companies need access to the US markets because they cannot raise significant money on a Hong Kong exchange. Dollar stability is required for their system to work.”

• Xi Jinping Is Hoping To Let 1,000 IPOs Bloom In Hong Kong & Shanghai (Whalen)

China under Xi Jinping is becoming the embodiment of George Orwell’s “1984” nightmare fueled by 21st century technological tools. Facial recognition, for example, enabled with a lot of stolen western technology, enables the Chinese state to track the movements of its citizens and include this public surveillance in its overall profile of each citizen. The level of control enjoyed by the CCP is illustrated by the harvesting of human organs from the living bodies of political prisoners. The role of finance in China’s development and the CCP’s adoption of new authoritarian controls is a vital piece of the puzzle. By driving China towards a cashless society, the CCP and state security services can use access to electronic cash and payments as a mechanism for reward or punishment.

When cash is eliminated, the state that controls the means of exchange – call it currency – controls all. As financial reform becomes the next leg of the CCP’s continuing drive to protect its political monopoly in China, the fight with Washington over allowing Chinese firms to list their shares in the US takes on significance. Many Chinese firms refused to follow US requirements regarding audit results, putting them in violation of exchange and SEC rules. But the threats by the US to shut out Chinese firms remain just threats in an election year. “Trump will get louder and louder on China before the election, but all of these things will take years to phase in after the election,” notes veteran China watcher Leland Miller founder of China Beige Book. “But many Chinese companies need access to the US markets because they cannot raise significant money on a Hong Kong exchange. Dollar stability is required for their system to work.”

While US actions to address are correct, attracting more volumes to Chinese exchanges serves the interests of the CCP. Even as the US restricts access to US exchanges, billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group is poised to simultaneously list in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Bloomberg News reports Ant is gunning for a valuation of $225 billion, making it the world’s fourth-largest financial company. If you appreciate that the benefits available to CCP members for self-enrichment have been greatly reduced in recent years compared with, say, the first decade of the 2000s, then you understand the problem. Xi Jinping needs to increase the cash flow to communist party cadres in order to maintain control in the 2020s. Reforming the financial system is the perfect canvas for eliminating enemies and generating cash — especially from the important offshore Chinese community.

“I’m going to take Jack Dorsey’s ass down”

• Lin Wood, Attorney For Kyle Rittenhouse, Locked Out Of Twitter Account (Fox)

The high-profile attorney for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with fatally shooting two people in Kenosha, said he was locked out of his Twitter account Tuesday after posting about raising money for Rittenhouse’s legal defense. L. Lin Wood argued the action against his account is the latest example of Twitter censorship of conservative voices and he intends to file a lawsuit against the social media giant and its CEO Jack Dorsey. “I’m going to take Jack Dorsey’s ass down,” Wood told Fox News. “He has been abusing the First Amendment of this country for his own agenda.” Wood was blocked from tweeting for several hours on Tuesday for violating Twitter rules. Wood said he’s been careful to abide by Twitter’s terms of service. But he got a notice that his account was locked for “glorifying violence.”

“I knew they were going to censor me because I’m sending a message of hope,” Wood, who posts regularly to his nearly 138,000 followers, told Fox News. “I’m sending a message of truth. And I’m sending a message that Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent.” Hours after the account had been suspended, Twitter said it made a mistake in a statement to Fox News. “This account was incorrectly actioned,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “This has been reversed and the account has been reinstated.” [..] Wood also represents Nicholas Sandmann, Carter Page, St. Louis couple Mark and Patricia McCloskey, Georgia congressional candidate Marjorie Greene and Dr. Simone Gold. To the outside, Wood’s account looked like it was working normally, with no notifications or warnings on his tweets.

But a screengrab of Wood’s account shared with Fox News shows his account “has been locked for violating the Twitter rules.” Specifically, Wood was dinged for “violating our rules against glorifying violence.” “Everybody thinks I’m still on it unless they know I’ve been blocked,” Wood said. “That’s why we’re getting the word out they censored me for nine hours. I have no idea how to get back on. They didn’t give me any instructions.” On Monday, Wood revealed on Twitter that more than 11,000 donors have raised $605,550 for the legal defense of Rittenhouse, who claims the shootings in Kenosha were self-defense. A Twitter user asked if Wood would be selling or disclosing his donor list to other groups. Lin replied “No” and added “#fightback” in reference to the name of the legal fund foundation. That was his last tweet before getting locked out.

Wood said he’s been accumulating “a mountain of evidence” to support a lawsuit against Twitter for discriminating against users based on political speech. Wood previewed a lawsuit he intends to file on behalf Sandmann that could be a class action suit and pointed to Twitter’s actions against his account as the latest example of suppression of free speech. He’s been vocal on Twitter about his intentions to sue. Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School graduate, filed suit against mainstream media outlets for their coverage of his encounter with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial, which portrayed the teen as the aggressor. He already settled his multi-million dollar defamation lawsuits with CNN and the Washington Post and now Wood says the next frontier will be Twitter and other websites. “Nicholas Sandmann is going to take down the mainstream media. And then we’re going to take down social media,” Wood said. “Nicolas Sandmann is going to never be forgotten.”

Sounds serious enough.

• Steve Bannon Needs A Defense Not A Conspiracy Theory (Turley)

“This entire fiasco is to stop people who want to build the wall.” That was the only response noted from former White House strategist Steve Bannon after his indictment for fraud in New York last week. Facing up to 20 years in prison, it was perhaps the most ambitious political spin from a man whose creativity was matched only by his audacity. If Mr. Bannon is hoping to convert his signature deep-state conspiracy into a criminal defense, however, he will face perhaps his most formidable opponent yet: himself. In a recent book, “Deep State: Trump, the FBI and the Rule of Law” by James B. Stewart, Mr. Bannon is quoted as saying “deep state conspiracy theory is for nut cases” and that such claims are out of bounds since “America isn’t Turkey or Egypt.”

He is now suggesting the a similar conspiracy is afoot to derail his work to build the wall. However, Mr. Bannon needs an explanation, not a narrative, to address his alleged conduct in the indictment. The problem with the deep-state conspiracy as a defense is that it only works if prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are pursuing a simple and honest wall builder with bizarre or novel theories of criminality. In fact, the 24-page indictment is as simple as sin itself. It details knowingly false statements to donors coupled with the misuse of contributed funds for personal expenses of the four principle figures behind the “Build The Wall” campaign. Mr. Bannon never does anything small and, when he decided to delve into the funds of this charity, he did it with signature gusto.

The charity raised $25 million and Mr. Bannon is accused of taking $1 million of that money as personal compensation. His co-defendants Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea are accused of taking their own shares despite assurances to donors that all of the money would go to building the wall along the southern border.

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I must have said it 1000 times. No velocity, no inflation.

Lance Roberts Velocity and Inflation

#Inflation comes from stronger #economic growth, #rising #wages and increasing #production which leads to higher #consumption to support higher prices.
Here's why the #Fed won't get #inflation. pic.twitter.com/dinoIrEexZ

— Lance Roberts (@LanceRoberts) September 1, 2020

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They Only Serve Themselves

Sep 022020

September 2, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:09 pm Finance Tagged with: CIA, evidence, intelligence, MH17, Mueller, NATO, novichok, Putin, Russia, Skripal, Trump 16 Responses »

Caspar David Friedrich The Monk by the Sea c1809

“The Kremlin” poisoned their “fierce rival” Navalny with the infamous deadly agent novichok. That is the headline. Only, the German accusation in that direction doesn’t say novichok, its says a “cholinesterase inhibitor”, of which novichok is just one example, was used. The news outlets must be thinking that at least after the Skripal case, enough people will recognize the term, and let’s not confuse them.

The Germans claim they have “unequivocal proof” (eindeutiger Beweis) for this. While the Russian doctors who initially treated Navalny after he fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Omsk (or was that the other way around?!) said he showed zero signs of poisoning. But yeah, they’re Russians, so they can’t be trusted, right? They all squander their Hippocratic oaths at the feet of the great malevolent dictator ~~Trump~~ Putin. You’re familiar with the parable about “all Cretans lie”?

“Merkel spokesman Seibert said the German government will inform its partners in the European Union and NATO about the test results..” NATO? What do they have to do with anything? How does the alleged poisoning of a two-bit (2% in the polls) Russian “politician” link to NATO? Is Navalny himself linked to NATO? Where does NATO come in to the conversation? How much does the CIA pay Navalny anyway?

The thing, the problem, is that it makes no difference anymore even if this particular instance has a kernel of truth in it. Because there have been so many of them, and they’re all “based” on non-evidence, circumstantial “evidence”, stuff that you wouldn’t get a conviction on in any western court. For good reason.

In the Skripal case, a pair of vague Russians were presented in the UK media who supposedly had been in the area where the alleged poisoning took place, where the head of all UK nurses “just happened” to deliver first aid, but the story still never made sense. Now I read in a Dutch news outlet that the two Skripals were moved to New Zealand to start a new life, but the fact remains that no-one has heard from them since that alleged incident. Almost as if someone doesn’t want to provide any proof, just the narrative.

In the MH17 case, another RussiaRussia story, they threw all credibility out from the start by appointing main victim the Netherlands (2/3 of deaths) the main prosecutor, but even more by allowing one of the main potential perpetrators, Ukraine, not just a role in the investigation, but handing them a veto right over whatever info could be shared with the outside world. I think we call that lock stock and barrel.

It is of vital importance for two parties -which might as well be one- in the west to keep accusing Russia of all manner of issues, while knowing full well they will never answer (though, remember Concord Asset Management, Robert Mueller III?), which means you can say whatever you want. It’s a free for all. The two parties are intelligence and NATO.

Western nations, and that means all of them, all the self-congratulating “democracies”, are being blackmailed by their own -secret- intelligence services, which most often pose as “national security services”, and they find they have no way out. In most countries, the best before date of a politician, even the political system itself, is way shorter than that of an intelligence agency’s agenda. The only thing a newly elected politician can do is accept a secret service’s word at face value, and define policy accordingly.

Be it domestic, bi-lateral vs particular countries, or global. The policies have already been defined years ago, and they have been defined by unelected “spooks”, not elected representatives of the people. This is incredibly (and I don’t use that word lightly) damaging to all of our societies, and we need to call a halt to it. But how do you do that? When they are the ones making policy, and not the people we vote into office to do that for us? It’s certainly not an easy task, but we can’t let them continue either. That would only mean assured destruction, economic depression and, ultimately, war.

That’s how and why we get the Navalny and Skripal stories. This goes back to at least WWII. US intelligence and the Wolfowitz/Brzezinski/Leo Strauss/Kissinger neocon cabal have severely compromised US national security for decades, only to funnel trillions towards US arms manufacturers, who today produce second rate weapons to boot. It is high time to stop this. Security is much better served by dialogue. Or should I say ”arguably?”

What the Navalny story, lacking evidence as much as so many other narratives, should tell us is that we are sort of hostages to a Ghost of Christmas past. We are being blackmailed as we speak by secret agents in cohort with the very military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about, because they all need to keep a long lost dream alive in order to still appear relevant and chuck trillions out of our pockets.

It’s a scam, it’s blackmail. Russia is not about to attack you. They may have much better weaponry by now than we do (they do, check hypersonic), but they still won’t attack you, because A) they don’t want to, and B) they don’t have the numbers. They don’t have the manpower, they don’t have the money, they just want to be left alone, and we won’t leave them alone.

Our spooks invent Skripal and MH17 and Navalny and Russia collusion and prostitutes peeing on beds in Moscow. Because that’s how they justify -literally- endless streams of money towards their operations, and those of their Siamese twin NATO. All that money goes towards the 1950’s though, we’re paying through the nose for a long discredited notion and a long passed… past.

But as soon as anyone mentions Russia, you know there’s never going to be any checks and balances, as long as there are still enough people who buy into the Putin=”Bogeyman who eats little children” thing, in the same way that they believe Putin controls Donald Trump’s mind and policies. It’s a numbers thing: as long as enough people buy it, the narrative will continue to be sold.

You’re essentially stuck in your grandparents’ mindframe. No kidding. As we go through our 2020 crisis, which seems real enough, we spend extraordinary amounts of money on long outdates ideas maintained only to maintain the CIA and the army. Say what you will, but there’s nothing smart about that. It’s only very stupid.

Because, for one thing, suppose there are real threats lurking today, how can we face those while we’re still focusing on things that ceased being threats decades ago? Shouldn’t we perhaps replace our “intelligence” with something more intelligent? And fit not for the 1950’s but for the 2020’s?

Our “security services”, and NATO very much as well, make us less secure, safe, not more, because that’s the only way they know to justify their continued existence. Yes, there’s a paradox hidden in there somewhere. They don’t serve us, they only serve themselves.

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Debt Rattle September 2 2020

Sep 022020

September 2, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, CIA, Comey, Covid19, eviction ban, Fauci, FBI, Fed, Jubilee, landslide, Trump, Turkey, vaccine 13 Responses »

Leonardo da Vinci Head of a Woman 1475-80

• Trump Administration Issues Sweeping Eviction Ban (Hill)

• Trump Knocks Fauci: ‘I Inherited Him’ (Hill)

• Fauci: COVID Vaccine Trials Could End Early If Results Are Overwhelming (KHN)

• Dem Group Warns Of Apparent Trump Election Day Landslide (Axios)

• CIA Conduct During Russia Assessment May Be Next Boomerang (Solomon)

• FBI Investigated Trump As Comey Said He Wasn’t Under Investigation (JTN)

• Judge Sullivan Files Order Dragging Out Flynn Case Past Election (CT)

• How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West (Michael Hudson)

• Fed Now Owns Nearly One Third of All US Mortgages (Mish)

• California Democrats Kill Gas and Oil Regulations (Horn)

• Erdogan Asked His Generals To Sink Greek Ship Or Shoot Down Fighter Jet (KTG)

• Journalists Paved Assange’s Path To A US Gulag (Cook)

We need rapid tests and HCQ, zinc, lots of them all. The numbers are not decreasing nearly fast enough.

Taleb Fragility + Pandemic

https://t.co/NDHeRluHVM

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) September 1, 2020

Election time.

• Trump Administration Issues Sweeping Eviction Ban (Hill)

The Trump administration issued an order Tuesday banning landlords from evicting tenants from properties they can no longer afford to rent due to income lost to the coronavirus pandemic. The order, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), would make it illegal to evict any individual who expects to make less than $99,000 or a joint-filing couple that expects to make less than $198,000 in 2020. The tenants would still be required to pay rent owed per the terms of the lease, but will be allowed to stay in their unit through the end of the year. “President Trump is committed to helping hardworking Americans stay in their homes and combating the spread of the coronavirus. Today’s announcement from his administration means that people are struggling to pay rent and risk further spreading of exposure to the disease, due to economic hardship,” said White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern.

The national eviction ban was issued under a federal law that gives the CDC director authority to impose measures to prevent the spread of communicable disease “as he [or] she deems necessary.” The provision specifically refers to filling the gaps left by “inadequate” state-imposed public health measures and does not directly mention financial aid or overriding contracts between citizens, raising questions about its legality. In order to qualify for the eviction protection, a tenant must declare that their 2020 income will fall below the threshold set out in the order; they’ve sought all potential sources of federal housing aid; and that they cannot afford to pay the rent due to a pandemic-related job loss or expense despite their best efforts to do so.

Trump gets the blame for the pandemic, but Fauci is the go-to guy.

• Trump Knocks Fauci: ‘I Inherited Him’ (Hill)

President Trump on Monday questioned the value of Anthony Fauci to the White House coronavirus task force, saying in an interview with Fox News that he “inherited” the government’s top infectious disease expert. “I disagree with a lot of what he said,” Trump told Laura Ingraham when asked if he would put Fauci “front and center” in the pandemic response if he could do it again. “I get along with him, but every once in a while, he’ll come up with one that I say, ‘Where did that come from?'” Trump continued. “I inherited him. He was here. He was part of this huge piece of machine.” The president reiterated his claim that Fauci opposed his decision to restrict travel from China in January. Fauci indicated at the time he did not think it was a good idea, though he later said it had bought the U.S. time to fight the virus.

Trump has repeatedly undermined and criticized Fauci. Last month, he retweeted a message that said Fauci “has misled the American public on many issues, but in particular, on dismissing #hydroxychloroquine and calling Remdesivir the new gold standard.” He also has said Fauci is a nice man but has “made a lot of mistakes.” Other White House officials, such as trade adviser Peter Navarro, have openly attacked Fauci in public. Fauci has been among the most visible members of the White House coronavirus task force, giving frequent media interviews. However, he has largely been cut out of recent public White House events around the pandemic, as has Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the administration’s coronavirus response.

Empty blah.

• Fauci: COVID Vaccine Trials Could End Early If Results Are Overwhelming (KHN)

A COVID-19 vaccine could be available earlier than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce overwhelmingly positive results, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, in an interview Tuesday with KHN. Although two ongoing clinical trials of 30,000 volunteers are expected to conclude by the end of the year, Fauci said an independent board has the authority to end the trials weeks early if interim results are overwhelmingly positive or negative. The Data and Safety Monitoring Board could say, “‘The data is so good right now that you can say it’s safe and effective,’” Fauci said. In that case, researchers would have “a moral obligation” to end the trial early and make the active vaccine available to everyone in the study, including those who had been given placebos — and accelerate the process to give the vaccine to millions.

Fauci’s comments come at a time of growing concern about whether political pressure from the Trump administration could influence federal regulators and scientists overseeing the nation’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, and erode shaky public confidence in vaccines. Prominent vaccine experts have said they fear Trump is pushing for an early vaccine approval to help win reelection. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he trusts the independent members of the DSMB — who are not government employees — to hold vaccines to high standards without being politically influenced. Members of the board are typically experts in vaccine science and biostatistics who teach at major medical schools. “If you are making a decision about the vaccine, you’d better be sure you have very good evidence that it is both safe and effective,” Fauci said. “I’m not concerned about political pressure.”

It’ll be mayhem. Good for the lawyers, bad for everyone else. The US will be lucky not to have a civil war.

• Dem Group Warns Of Apparent Trump Election Day Landslide (Axios)

A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted. Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night. Imagine America, with its polarization and misinformation, if the vote tally swings wildly toward Joe Biden and Trump loses days later as the mail ballots are counted.

That is what this group, Hawkfish, which is funded by Michael Bloomberg and also does work for the Democratic National Committee and pro-Biden Super PACs, is warning is a very real, if not foreordained, outcome.Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn calls the scenario a “red mirage.” “We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” he said. “When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”

Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted. Once 75% of mail ballots were counted, perhaps four days later, the lead could flip to Biden’s favor. This particular modeling scenario portrays Biden as ultimately winning a massive victory, 334-204.

These things need much more scrutiny.

• CIA Conduct During Russia Assessment May Be Next Boomerang (Solomon)

By his own admission, ex-CIA Director John Brennan chafed at being questioned earlier this month by federal prosecutor John Durham about the Obama administration’s intelligence assessment that Russia’s meddling in 2016 election was designed to help Donald Trump. Brennan “questioned why the analytic tradecraft and the findings of the ICA are being scrutinized by the Department of Justice, especially since they have been validated by the Mueller Report and the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Review,” a statement issued by his spokesman Nick Shapiro said. The answer, according to multiple officials familiar with the evidence, is that the House intelligence committee in 2018 sent a secret report to the CIA inspector general that called into question the tradecraft used in the Brennan-led assessment.

Specifically, the officials said, it highlighted dissent and doubts by some intelligence community analysts about Vladimir Putin’s intentions in intervening in the 2016 election. Some believed it was to help Trump; others believed it was simply to sow chaos without picking a winner, and still others saw evidence Putin might have preferred Hillary Clinton, the officials said. In other words, an assessment that was portrayed as unanimous when it was made public in early January 2017 was anything but at the analyst level, according to Fred Fleitz, a longtime intelligence officer who was briefed on the House intelligence committee’s concerns when he served as chief of staff in the National Security Council.

“When I was briefed on the House Intelligence Committee report on the January 2017 ICA, I was told that John Brennan politicized this assessment by excluding credible intelligence that the Russians wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election and ordered weak intelligence included that Russia wanted Trump to win, Fleitz told Just the News. “I also was told that Brennan took both actions over the objections of CIA analysts. I am concerned about what happened to these analysts and worry that they may have been subjected to retaliation by CIA management,” he added.

“These analysts are true whistleblowers, and they should come to the congressional intelligence committees to tell their stories and set the record straight on the ICA.” Officials said the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was a member of the House Intelligence Committee before joining the Trump administration, is considering declassifying parts or all of the House Intelligence Committee report to the inspector general. Ratcliffe hinted Sunday new releases of information are imminent. “I’m optimistic that I’ll be declassifying additional documents soon,” Ratcliffe told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

And Trump knew.

• FBI Investigated Trump Tweets As Comey Said He Wasn’t Under Investigation (JTN)

The conservative watchdog Judicial Watch says it has received more than 300 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that includes records of the FBI discussing an investigation into tweets sent by President Trump in early 2017 about the agency spying on him at the behest of former President Obama. In a March 2017 exchange, Strzok emails several of his colleagues, including Page, about several tweets the President Trump had sent earlier in the month commenting on suspected wire tapping at Trump Tower during the 2016 election. “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” wrote POTUS on March 4.

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!” Trump continued. “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” He concluded the March 4 tweet storm with: “How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate Bad (or sick) guy!” On March 29, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey’s chief of staff emailed Strzok, Page and several of their colleagues saying that the director would like a briefing on a “sensitive matter.”

A followup email says that Comey requested the briefing so that he would be able to brief then-acting U.S. Attorney General Dana Boente. One week after the email exchange and director’s briefing, the second renewal and order of the FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was filed. The new emails also detail exchanges between FBI officials and reporters at CNN and the New York Times pertaining to the Russia investigation. [..] “These astonishing emails, which have been hidden for years, show the Comey FBI was investigating President Trump over his critical tweets of the agency and Obama’s spying abuse and misconduct,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These emails also show that Comey was intimately involved with illegal and dishonest FISA spy op against President Trump.”

No coincidence.

• Judge Sullivan Files Order Dragging Out Flynn Case Past Election (CT)

The minute order filed by Judge Emmet Sullivan outlines a protracted time-frame for the next sequence of events in the case against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. As noted in the order, Sullivan is now telling the DOJ and Flynn defense to file a joint status report outlining their “recommendation for further proceedings” by September 21, 2020. From there a briefing schedule which will require both parties to respond to Sullivan’s personal amicus (Gleeson), and additionally respond jointly to any other amicus not ordered by the court. Lastly, Sullivan is requesting three dates for oral arguments. In essence, despite his ability to quickly convene the parties to settle all matters before the court; which includes the unopposed motion by the DOJ and defense to drop the case; Sullivan intends to drag this case out as long as possible and use the amicus as a tool forcing responses from both parties (DOJ and Flynn). So much for the “quick dispatch” outlined within the DC Circuit opinion, this case is going on for several more months.

Jubilee time.

• How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West (Michael Hudson)

Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the coronavirus’s economic effects, I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers. At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom?

This age-old confrontation over how to deal with the unpaid rents, mortgages and other debt service is at the heart of today’s virus pandemic as large and small businesses, farms, restaurants and neighborhood stores have fallen into arrears, leaving businesses and households – along with their employees who have no wage income to pay these carrying charges that accrue each month. This is an age-old problem. It was solved in the ancient Near East simply by annulling these debt and rent charges. But the West, shaped as it still is by the legacy of the Roman Empire, has left itself prone to the massive unemployment, business closedowns and resulting arrears for these basic costs of living and doing business.

Western civilization distinguishes itself from its Near Eastern predecessors in the way it has responded to “acts of God” that disrupt the means of support and leave debts in their wake. The United States has taken the lead in rejecting the path by which China, and even social democratic European nations have prevented the coronavirus from causing widespread insolvency and polarizing their economies. The U.S. coronavirus lockdown is turning rent and debt arrears into an opportunity to impoverish the indebted economy and transfer mortgaged property and its income to creditors. There is no inherent material need for this fate to occur. But it seems so natural and even inevitable that, as Margaret Thatcher would say, There Is No Alternative. But of course there is, and always has been. However, resilience in the face of economic disruption always has required a central authority to override “market forces” to restore economic balance from “above.”

How not to do a Jubilee.

• Fed Now Owns Nearly One Third of All US Mortgages (Mish)

Nearly $7 Trillion in Securities, $2 Trillion Mortgages. As of August 26, 2020 the Fed’s Balance Sheet is nearly $7 trillion total of which $3.7 trillion are notes or bonds, and nearly $2 trillion in mortgages (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Ginnie Mae).

Bloomberg reports No End in Sight to Fed’s Mortgage Buying Spree. • The Fed has snapped up $1 trillion of mortgage bonds since March. It bought around $300 billion of the bonds in each of March and April, and since then has been buying about $100 billion a month. • The Fed now owns almost a third of bonds backed by home loans in the U.S. • Buying the securities has pushed mortgage rates lower, with the average 30-year rate falling to 2.91% as of last week from 3.3% in early February. • Morgan Stanley analysts pointed out in late March that the buying was running at eight times the pace seen in prior episodes of Fed purchasing under programs known as quantitative easing. • Just before this latest round, principal payments from its mortgage bond holdings had whittled that down to 21%, but it has now increased back to 30%. • If the Fed maintains its current buying pace, it will again own 34% of the mortgage universe by year’s end.

It was always just lip service.

• California Democrats Kill Gas and Oil Regulations (Horn)

Big money from Big Oil and industry-tied unions has helped to kill a legislative effort to create environmental protections for communities living near oil and gas operations in California. On August 5, a 5-4 Senate committee vote struck down consideration of legislation calling for a 2,500-foot setback between future oil wells and homes, schools, and playgrounds. Only one of those votes came from a Republican. It was the second time in as many years that the bill, Assembly Bill 345, failed to pass, and it failed to do so even after several rounds of significant amendments had watered down the legislation. With that, a years-long activist-led legislative movement went up in smoke for 2020.

And then came the historically large wildfires. Within a matter of days, the state’s northern half caught fire at an epic scale, wildfires made worse from climate change and fueled by unfettered fossil fuel drilling. California oil is some of the dirtiest, from a climate change perspective, in the United States. Drilling for oil in the state also has major public health repercussions, an impetus driving AB 345. Recent studies have linked oil drilling in California to health impacts, including low birth weight and small gestational age, as well as preterm births. Research has also linked higher levels of industrial pollution to higher contraction rates of COVID-19. Despite these impacts, the bill attracted a core group of Democratic legislators who ultimately oversaw the bill’s demise.

Three of those who spoke out the most strongly against AB 345 at the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water hearing on August 5 before voting against it — senator Ben Hueso, senator Andreas Borgeas, and Senate majority leader Bob Hertzberg — have received high dollar contributions and other support from oil interests that lobbied against AB 345. The lobbying and influence campaign efforts waged by the oil industry and labor against AB 345 illustrates the difficulty in crafting climate policy and environmental protections — even in a state with a supermajority Democratic Party legislature that bills itself as a global leader on fighting climate change.

Merkel needs to wake up.

• Erdogan Asked His Generals To Sink Greek Ship Or Shoot Down Fighter Jet (KTG)

German conservative newspaper Die Welt reported that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to provoke a military incident with Greece in the Eastern Mediterranean in order to survive politically.In a report entitled “Erdogan’s calculated war,” the news paper said that “if it depended on the Turkish President, his navy would have sunk a Greek ship in the Mediterranean a long time ago.” Citing Turkish military sources, Die Welt wrote that Erdogan had asked Turkey generals a few days ago to sink a Greek ship and that they should do so securing that no one is killed in the process.

When the generals refused, someone else suggested shooting down a Greek fighter, and the pilot could use the launch pad to save himself. But Turkish generals again refused. Turkish and Greek Navy ships have been at standoff in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea since Ankara sent seismic vessel Oruc Reis for hydrocarbon research in the Greek continental shelf beginning of August. Fighter jests of the two countries are often engaged in “dog fights” over the Aegean Sea because Turkey sends its F-16s to violate Greek air space.

“He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.”

• Journalists Paved Assange’s Path To A US Gulag (Cook)

Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms. A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during his time in political asylum, in Ecuador’s London embassy, in ways that violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge overseeing his hearings has a serious conflict of interest – with her family embedded in the UK security services – that she did not declare and which should have required her to recuse herself from the case.

All indicators are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years. None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot dictatorship. It happened right under our noses, in a major western capital, and in a state that claims to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not in the blink of an eye but in slow motion – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign of character assassination against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole justification for this relentless attack on press freedom is that a 49-year-old man published documents exposing US war crimes.

That is the reason – and the only reason – that the US is seeking his extradition and why he has been languishing in what amounts to solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers’ appeals for bail have been refused. While the press corps abandoned Assange a decade ago, echoing official talking points that pilloried him over toilet hygiene and his treatment of his cat, Assange is today exactly where he originally predicted he would be if western governments got their way. What awaits him is rendition to the US so he can be locked out of sight for the rest of his life.

There were two goals the US and UK set out to achieve through the visible persecution, confinement and torture of Assange. First, he and Wikileaks, the transparency organisation he co-founded, needed to be disabled. Engaging with Wikileaks had to be made too risky to contemplate for potential whistleblowers. That is why Chelsea Manning – the US soldier who passed on documents relating to US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan for which Assange now faces extradition – was similarly subjected to harsh imprisonment. She later faced punitive daily fines while in jail to pressure her into testifying against Assange.

The aim has been to discredit Wikileaks and similar organisations and stop them from being able to publish more revelatory documents – of the kind that show western governments are not the “good guys” managing world affairs for the benefit of mankind, but are in fact highly militarised, global bullies advancing the same ruthless colonial policies of war, destruction and pillage they always pursued. And second, Assange had to be made to suffer horribly and in public – to be made an example of – to deter other journalists from ever considering following in his footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed at the city gates.

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Taleb Being Lebanese

What do we learn from being Lebanese? @nntaleb pic.twitter.com/0WuUoCoS4y

— Smiljana Skiba (@MasaSkiba) September 1, 2020

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Debt Rattle September 1 2020

Sep 012020

September 1, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, campaign rally, Covid19, Flynn, nitric oxide, plastic, riots, Tesla, Trump 18 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn Head of a Bearded Man c1630

• Trump’s America (Newsweek)

• Chris Cillizza Blasts President Trump For Using The Word “Riots” (Turley)

• The Puppet Candidate in Two Pictures (CT)

• Appeals Court Denies Flynn Request To Dismiss Case (ZH)

• Russiagate Won’t End: US Appeals Court Reverses Decision To End Flynn Case (RT)

• Lucifer’s Hammer (Ben Hunt)

• No One Wants to Solve Real Problems (Geraghty)

• Coronavirus May Survive On Outdoor Surfaces For Longer In Autumn (SCMP)

• Inhaled Nitric Oxide Therapy Benefits Pregnant COVID19 Patients (Harvard)

• Bill of Particulars (Jim Kunstler)

• Just Put Your Brain on Tesla Autopilot and Believe in It (WS)

• Norwegian Researchers Call Against Cleansing Seas Of Plastic Waste (RT)

• Waiting for the Old Bailey: Julian Assange (OffG)

Biden 100 years

Inspiring. Must watch. pic.twitter.com/koA1VKHpuo

— Brandon Darby (@brandondarby) August 31, 2020

Trump Rittenhouse

Here is #DictatorTrump accusing the press of having their own armed militias while defending Kyle Rittenhouse.#ModernFascism #BidenCalm pic.twitter.com/bxoCmWvq5F

— Trev Ken but higher↙️ (@trevken) August 31, 2020

The polls indicated Biden had to be dragged out of his basement to start blaming Trump for the riots and violence. Looks like a hard sell. Certainly when you won’t even allow for Trump to say “riot”.

• Trump’s America (Newsweek)

For months, the national media has largely ignored the sustained violent activism plaguing Democrat-run cities. When they do cover these events, it’s portrayed the same way Democratic lawmakers—and the Biden campaign—have chosen to describe them: as “peaceful protests.” But after four effective days of coverage from the Republican National Convention (RNC), shining a spotlight on what’s actually happening, suddenly Democrats are striking a different tone. Now, the Biden-Harris ticket, along with their surrogates, claim the violence in Portland, Kenosha, Seattle, Chicago and the nation’s capital are President Donald Trump’s fault. This is happening, they argue, in “Trump’s America.” The leftists in national media, of course, happily forward the very same dishonest talking point. It will gloriously backfire.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd finally tackled the rioting after a deadly night in Portland that left dead someone who appears to be a Trump supporter. He asked Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, if Trump should bear responsibility: “This in Donald Trump’s America. How much responsibility should voters be giving the president for his inability to…keep the streets safe?” Over at CNN, they do much the same. Struggling to make his point, perhaps because he knows how dishonest it is, host Anderson Cooper stumbled his way through the same “this is Trump’s America” talking point. He then used the same talking point the following morning to set up a softball question to Biden, who responded that the “video [of violence] being played is video being played in Donald Trump’s America.”

This talking point is transparently dishonest and offensively dumb. Literally all of the sustained rioting and other violence has occured in Democrat-run cities. The federal government does not have jurisdiction to always send in the feds to wander rioting streets and quell the civil unrest. If Trump did always have such authority and if he acted upon it, he’d be called a fascist. Indeed, Democrats already call him just that. Trump has offered help many times to cities and states that are dealing with these issues. In Portland, feckless Mayor Ted Wheeler bragged about smugly rejecting Trump’s assistance in an August 28 letter that he posted to Twitter. He told the president, “We don’t need your politics of division and demagoguery.”

That night, activists gained entry into Wheeler’s condo, where they occupied the lobby. The next night, after trying to forcibly stop Trump supporters from protesting, a man in a conservative Patriot Front hat was shot to death. This is Trump’s fault? After the president’s RNC speech, mobs of far-left activists harassed and assaulted cops and conservatives leaving the White House. Other mobs spent Saturday night harassing D.C. diners who are supporting restaurants struggling to stay open amidst a pandemic. This is Trump’s doing? Trump has not just been rebuffed by progressive mayors. His offers of help have been met with insidious claims that Trump is really just practicing a dry-run for martial law, in the event he were to lose the election. And the media has been there to dutifully forward that dangerous claim.

“.. the majority of citizens believe that the media actively misrepresents facts. Roughly half view the media as biased. This is why. Of course, this is looting and rioting.”

• Chris Cillizza Blasts President Trump For Using The Word “Riots” (Turley)

We have previously discussed how some media organizations told their journalists not to call violence after the death of George Floyd “riots,” including the recently much mocked headline of CNN calling the looting and violence in Kenosha “fiery but mostly peaceful.” Now, Chris Cillizza, an editor-at-large for CNN, is under fire for criticized President Donald Trump for labeling the violence in places like Kenoska “riots.” Critics have noted that the picture posted by Cillizza with this tweet shows a building engulfed in flames. Lawyers notoriously parse terms in ways that often deny their obvious meaning but this effort by some in the media would make a Philadelphia lawyer blush. Cillizza tweeted “Trump’s efforts to label what is happening in major cities as ‘riots’ speaks at least somewhat to his desperation, politically speaking, at the moment.”

I do not deny that both sides are using these riots for political purposes. Trump is using the violence to reinforce a law-and-order theme while Democratic politicians are blaming him for the violence and calling for the 2020 election to be a referendum on racial justice. It is the parsing of the term that intrigues me. In Portland, the Portland police have reportedly declared 13 riots in 80 days. Newspapers in these cities have referred to rioting from Portland to Minneapolis to Kenosa. David Brown, the Chicago Police superintendent, said, “This was not an organized protest, rather, this was an incident of pure criminality.” The coverage of recent looting and rioting has been uneven with networks like CNN spending comparatively limited time reporting on the violence while Fox is covering it exhaustively.

Other outlets like NPR have run segments on how the word “rioting” has racist roots. Whether there are riots depends on what news outlet you use. It is the new reality of echo-journalism. Of course, this dispute turns on a noun that is clearly defined as “public violence, tumult, or disorder.” [..] We have been discussing the concern by many that networks like CNN shape the news to fit a narrative. Fox and MSNBC have been accused of the same practice. Many in the public do not know where to turn for unbiased reporting on the left or the right, according to various polls. Even in acknowledging the importance of the media to our system, the majority of citizens believe that the media actively misrepresents facts. Roughly half view the media as biased. This is why. Of course, this is looting and rioting.

This was advertized as a “campaign rally”. He was flown out to Pennsylvania for the event, first time he left Delaware in a long time.

• The Puppet Candidate in Two Pictures (CT)

This is the image the mainstream media portray:

This is the image that actually reflects the event:

Any questions?…

In the US today, an Appeals Court can reverse a decision by the DOJ, which all the judges in the court in the end work for. DOJ, prosecution, and defense all agreed the case should be dropped. Months ago.

• Appeals Court Denies Flynn Request To Dismiss Case (ZH)

Michael Flynn’s request to force a judge to immediately dismiss his case was shot down by a federal appeals court on Monday. In an 8-2 ruling, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Flynn’s petition to force Judge Emmett Sullivan to accept the Justice Department’s motion to drop charges without holding a hearing, according to The Hill. Flynn’s request that Sullivan be forced to recuse himself was also struck down, after his legal team argued that the judge acted improperly when he appointed a partisan outside attorney to argue against the DOJ’s decision to drop the case, and that it was inappropriate to ask the full circuit court to revisit an earlier decision by a three-member panel of the DC Circuit to drop the case.

Unless Flynn’s lawyers appeal to the Supreme Court, Sullivan will be able to move forward with a hearing about the DOJ’s unusual reversal in the case, before deciding whether to allow the Trump administration to withdraw its charges against the president’s former close aide. Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in 2016 election.” -The Hill. The DOJ filed a motion to drop the case against Flynn in May, after it was revealed that the FBI engaged in a ‘perjury trap’ against the former Trump National Security Adviser.

“After producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges.”

• Russiagate Won’t End: US Appeals Court Reverses Decision To End Flynn Case (RT)

A full-bench US federal appeals court has reversed an earlier decision to dismiss the ‘Russiagate’ case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, returning it to the judge who refused to let the charges be dropped. In a 8-2 ruling on Monday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Judge Emmet Sullivan, and sent the case back to him for review. Sullivan had been ordered by a three-judge panel in June to drop the case against Flynn immediately, but hired an attorney and asked for an en banc hearing instead. [..] The former top lawyer for the Barack Obama administration, Neal Katyal, hailed the decision as “an important step in defending the rule of law” and argued the case should not be dismissed because Flynn had pleaded guilty.

Sidney Powell

The En Banc D.C. Circuit has denied the writ of mandamus requested by @GenFlynn — split as expected along lines evident from the tone and tenor of the judges at oral argument.
The opinion and dissents are here. https://t.co/af4IbkGSSK
It is a disturbing blow to the #RuleOfLaw

— Sidney Powell 🇺🇸⭐⭐⭐ (@SidneyPowell1) August 31, 2020

Flynn had indeed pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to the FBI, but Powell moved to dismiss the charges due to the failure of his previous attorneys – a law firm with ties to the Democrats – and the government to disclose evidence that could set him free. After producing documents revealing that the FBI set out to entrap Flynn, had no valid cause to interview him in the first place, and the prosecutors improperly extorted him into a plea by threatening to charge his son, the Justice Department moved to drop all charges. Sullivan had other ideas, however. In a highly unusual move, he appointed a retired judge – who had just written a diatribe about the case in the Washington Post – to be amicus curiae and argue the case should not be dropped. It was at this point that Powell took the case to the appeals court, citing Fokker, a recent Supreme Court precedent that Sullivan was violating.

Ignoring the fact that Sullivan had appointed the amicus and sought to prolong the case after the DOJ and the appeals court both told him to drop it, the en banc panel argued the proper procedure means he needs to make the decision before it can be appealed. One of the judges, Thomas Griffith, actually argued in a concurring opinion that it would be “highly unusual” for Sullivan not to dismiss the charges, given the executive branch’s constitutional prerogatives and his “limited discretion” when it came to the relevant federal procedure, but said that an order to drop the case is not “appropriate in this case at this time” because it’s up to Sullivan to make the call first.

[..] With Mueller failing to find any evidence of “collusion” between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, Democrats have latched onto Flynn’s case as proof of their ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory. The latest argument is that the effort to drop the charges against Flynn is politically motivated and proof of Attorney General Bill Barr’s “corruption.” Barr is currently overseeing a probe by US attorney John Durham into the FBI’s handling of the investigation against Trump during and after the 2016 election, with the evidence disclosed during the Flynn proceedings strongly implicating not just the senior FBI leadership but senior Obama administration figures as well.

“Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a defeat this November in anything close to their current form. I think several people are starting to think about that. But here’s what’s also true: Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a victory this November. And no one is thinking about that.”

• Lucifer’s Hammer (Ben Hunt)

Four years ago, when I wrote that I thought Trump would defeat Clinton, I said that Trump breaks us by turning every one of our domestic political games from a coordination game – where cooperation in the national interest is at least possible – into a pure competition game where that potential cooperation is impossible. He did. That’s exactly what happened. So today, neither the Trump campaign nor the Biden campaign can see the United States through anything other than the lens of a pure competition game.

Neither campaign or party will take the necessary steps to defuse the growing violence in American cities, like Biden calling for Democratic mayors to request National Guard support or like Trump doing anything to accommodate the voices of nonviolent protesters, because they both think that to do so would place them at a competitive disadvantage in the November election. Neither campaign or party is appropriately afraid of this comet hitting the United States, because they both think that they’ll do just fine in a post-comet world.

They both think that they can handle the aftermath of this comet strike after November 4th. They both are listening to their institutional Ego rather than to the Narrator. They are both sowing the wind. And they will both reap the whirlwind. Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a defeat this November in anything close to their current form. I think several people are starting to think about that. But here’s what’s also true: Neither the Democratic party nor the Republican party survives a victory this November. And no one is thinking about that.

That 6% figure from the CDC that so many are touting is not what it seems.

• No One Wants to Solve Real Problems (Geraghty)

The president of the United States retweeted a link to a post on Gateway Pundit, asserting that the real death toll from COVID-19 is merely 9,000, and that the other roughly 178,000 deaths were because of other factors. That was a pretty egregious misinterpretation of the CDC’s data; the CDC stated, “For 6 percent of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned [on the death certificate]. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.” The list of conditions is long and varied: diabetes, various heart-related conditions including hypertension, cardiac arrest, ischemic heart disease (hardening of the arteries), cardiac arrhythmia and heart disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, obesity, an immunocompromised state from an organ transplant, coronary art disease, or sickle cell disease.

None of the conditions listed above are death sentences by themselves. With treatment and medication, most people diagnosed with those conditions can live long and happy lives. No one with the slightest understanding of human health can look at someone with one of those conditions listed above dying from COVID-19 and conclude, “that person was going to die soon anyway.” And if your takeaway from this data is that SARS-CoV-2 is only a risk to those with one of those conditions . . . great, now we just have to worry about the 100 million or so Americans with diabetes or prediabetes, the roughly 100 million Americans with high blood pressure, the one in three American adults at risk for chronic kidney disease, the 16 million to 24 million Americans believed to be at risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the 1 in 500 adults who have cardiomyopathy, the millions of Americans either being treated for cancer or who have recovered from cancer, the roughly 100,000 Americans with sickle cell disease, the nearly 49,000 Americans who had an organ transplant last year, and the slightly smaller number of transplant recipients this year.

There are some overlaps among those groups, but we have plenty of Americans who have one or more comorbidities and who would be at risk if they caught SARS-CoV-2.

6% of people died from covid19 while having no KNOWN comorbidities. 94% died from covid19 IN CONJUNCTION WITH extant comborbidities.

That means, if they hadn't caught covid19, they wouldn't have died.

Meaning THEY DIED FROM COVID.

This shit is why we need data ethics standards

— Damien P. Williams, MA, MSc, Tired. (@Wolven) August 30, 2020

Well, we’re all going to be cleaner anyway.

• Coronavirus May Survive On Outdoor Surfaces For Longer In Autumn (SCMP)

As the northern hemisphere heads into autumn, the coronavirus may be able to survive on outdoor surfaces for much longer, according to a new US study. Researchers found that in lower temperatures and humidity, the virus could, for example, remain on a hiker’s jacket if it was outside for a week – and remain infectious for that time – whereas in summer its lifespan was estimated to be one to three days. The prolonged survival of the virus on surfaces in autumn could “potentially contribute to new outbreaks”, the team led by Juergen Richt, professor of veterinary microbiology at Kansas State University, wrote in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on preprint website bioRxiv.org on Monday. They believed the virus would also survive for longer indoors in colder and less humid conditions.

The study found it had an average half-life – or rate of decay – of nearly eight hours on a stainless steel doorknob, or nearly 10 hours on a window, which was about to twice the duration in summer. The coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid-19, has adapted well to humans. But to survive outside its human hosts – it spreads through respiratory droplets and contaminated surfaces – the pathogen is believed to prefer lower temperatures and humidity. For the study, Richt’s team used climate data from America’s Midwest to recreate artificial seasons in biosafety chambers. Temperature was controlled at 13 degrees Celsius and 66 per cent relative humidity for spring and autumn, while for summer it was kept at 25 degrees and 70 per cent. The virus was then applied to the surface of 12 materials people come into contact with every day, such as cardboard, concrete, rubber, gloves and N95 masks.

The aim was to find out if the viability of the virus changed with the season. Earlier in the pandemic, the research community had hoped the spread of the virus would slow in summer, believing it would be less likely to stay in the air in warmer weather. But the resurgence of infections in many areas – especially the United States, the worst-hit country where more than 80,000 cases per day were recorded at the peak of summer – raised the question of whether there was any seasonal impact at all. The result of the Midwest study “clearly demonstrates that the virus survives longer under spring/fall not summer conditions”, the researchers said in the paper. That trend was observed on all materials tested, to varying degrees. Out of all of them, the virus survived longest on Tyvek, a synthetic material used in everything from home insulation to personal protective equipment and outdoor wear, with a half-life of up to 45 hours.

So try it on all patients?

• Inhaled Nitric Oxide Therapy Benefits Pregnant COVID19 Patients (Harvard)

Inhaled nitric oxide (NO) can be a valuable adjunct respiratory therapy for pregnant women with severe and critical COVID-19, a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found. The delivery of the therapeutic gas to six COVID-19 pregnant patients admitted to MGH, as described in a paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology, resulted in a rapid and sustained improvement in cardiopulmonary function and decreased inflammation. The resolution of viral infection within 22 days was observed in five of the six patients, findings that could have important implications for treating viruses like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The study is the first to investigate the role of inhaled NO in pregnant people with COVID-19.

The patients experienced rapid relief from breathlessness, a lower respiratory rate, and better oxygenation after mask administration of high concentration NO, according to Lorenzo Berra in the Department of Anaesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH. Berra also reported no negative side effects. “In addition, inflammatory markers showed a rapid decrease after breathing NO and five of the six patients in our study showed viral clearance from nasopharyngeal swabs by 22 days after COVID-19 diagnosis,” Berra, corresponding author of the study, added. “All patients were discharged in stable condition from the hospital. We found these results to be very encouraging.”

Inhaled NO increases oxygenation by dilating or opening constricted blood vessels, especially in more well-ventilated areas of the lung, thereby improving intrapulmonary shunt fraction, or the percentage of blood put out by the heart that is not completely oxygenated. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests that pregnant women with COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized, are at increased risk of being admitted to the intensive care unit, and more often require mechanical ventilation compared to nonpregnant women.

“I’m against them heart and soul, and I no longer care what my old friends think about it.”

• Bill of Particulars (Jim Kunstler)

RussiaGate was, in the strict sense of the word, a conspiracy to overthrow a president carried out by a coordinated effort of high-ranking government employees across many agencies, who knew exactly what they were doing. It was an exercise in perfidy, bad faith, and lawlessness run by the very Department of Justice entrusted with enforcing federal law, including attorney Andrew Weissmann’s clean-up crew fronted by the dishonorable figurehead Robert Mueller. It remains unresolved due to the tensions in that department and the obdurate resistance of the federal courts — for example in the three-year persecution of General Flynn. The eventual day that the hammer comes down on the perps of RussiaGate, if ever it does come, will be a moment of historic moral and ethical clarification in this sore-beset country.

The 2019 impeachment fiasco was a parallel ruse run by Representative Adam Schiff, former Department of Justice lawyer Mary McCord, and Lawfare warrior Daniel S. Goldman, with help from Resistance intriguers in the National Security Council, Eric Ciaramella and Alexander Vindman, and Hillary Clinton’s holdover confederates in the State Department. Mr. Ciaramella’s pretense to be acting as a “whistleblower” was a nakedly false act, illegally abetted by Intel Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, himself a former DOJ RussiaGate player. It is amazing that neither of these two has been indicted for sedition.

Add to these matters the associated misdeeds in the FISA courts, the ridiculous, scurrilous charges against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh by the mendacious Christine Blasey Ford, the ongoing schemes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer to rig the vote with unverifiable mail-in ballots, and the wholesale acts against the public interest by Democratic mayors and governors such as Ted Wheeler, Kate Brown, Bill de Blasio, Andrew Cuomo, Lori Lightfoot, J.B. Pritzker, Ralph Northam, Jacob Frey, Tim Walz, Muriel Bowser, Eric Garcetti, Gavin Newsom, Tony Evers and a wider rogues’ gallery of other Democratic Party subalterns such as Minnesota AG Keith Ellison and NYC education Chancellor Richard Carranza and you have a nearly complete picture of this odious faction.

Finally, add the cherry-on-top: Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden. Does anybody still believe he is a plausible chief executive — even in his own degenerate party? I doubt it. Why they engineered his nomination may remain one of the great mysteries of human existence. Except perhaps to speculate that their sadism has turned inward and become a suicidal death-wish. They are finally so miserably contemptible that they just want to end it all. Personally, I don’t want to see any of these people anywhere near the levers of power in this country. Quite a few of them deserve to be in jail, and I believe before Mr. Trump’s second term is up, they will be — if they don’t try to wreck the United States altogether with new treasons in the November election. I’m against them heart and soul, and I no longer care what my old friends think about it.

As someone tweeted earlier: all we have to do now is wait for Tesla to buy Berkshire Hathaway.

• Just Put Your Brain on Tesla Autopilot and Believe in It (WS)

Let’s get this straight: Tesla is led by a CEO who is regularly seen walking on water, and its shares are a supernatural phenomenon. Today, those shares, trading for the first time after the 5-for-1 split, surged from $442.61 at the open to $498.32 at the close and then on to $514.74 after-hours at the moment. That’s a 16.3% ride in one day, following weeks of supernatural moves into the heavens. Below is my Triple-WTF Chart of the Year because it just blew away and annihilated my WTF-Chart of the Year of February 4 and my Double-WTF Chart of the Year of July 1 (stock prices via YCharts):

The stock split did the job, based on the logic that a five-dollar bill broken into five ones makes each of those ones suddenly worth $1.16 — or $1.87 if you start counting since the announcement of the split on August 11. I mean, it’s just pure supernatural, and if you don’t get it, too bad, it’s a sign that you just don’t have the right stuff. Back on July 1, Tesla surpassed Toyota as the most valuable automaker in the world. At the time, Tesla traded at $226 a share ($1,130 pre-split). Since that propitious date two months ago, Tesla has skyrocketed another 127%.

At the time when it blew past Toyota, the value that the market put on Tesla (outstanding shares times share price) was $210 billion, which was – and I mean was – a huge number. Now, after-hours, Tesla’s market capitalization, according to YCharts, is $476 billion. Today alone, Tesla’s market cap soared by $64 billion in eight hours, including after hours. That’s $8 billion in “value created” per hour. If you have to ask, “value created by doing what,” then you don’t have the right stuff. Simple as that.

I can see how trawling is a problem, but how does that mean there is no point in cleaning it up? How about a different method?

• Norwegian Researchers Call Against Cleansing Seas Of Plastic Waste (RT)

Cleaning floating plastic from the sea is a “lost cause” and trying to remove it can actually do more harm than good, new research suggests. Instead, clean-up efforts should focus on rubbish washed ashore. Trying to clean up plastic pollution from the open seas is a “waste of time and resources,” researchers with the Norwegian-based SALT company have concluded. “The rubbish in the sea is a lost cause, there is no point in cleaning it up,” the team said in a newly released research paper. Assorted plastic, that is floating around the seas is way too scattered to be easily removed, the researchers argued. Attempting to trawl it out is not only disproportionately costly and time-consuming, but it can also do more harm than good.

Trawling large areas will catch “too much fish and wildlife compared with the amount of rubbish,” the research team noted. “In addition, rubbish is often found in marine life and organic material that is important for the ecosystems and animals that live there. In the worst case, we risk doing more harm than good by trawling over the areas,” lead author of the research paper Jannike Falk-Andersson told broadcaster NRK. Instead of wasting time and recourses on the high seas clean-ups, people should focus on hand-picking trash washed ashore, which is a far more gentle and effective method. “There, you pick one thing at a time. You do not drag large objects across the beach that kills everything it comes across, in an attempt to clean up,” Falk-Andersson explained.

The research has been praised by Norway’s Climate and Environment Minister Sveinung Rotevatn, who, at the same time, described the plastic pollution as a rapidly escalating problem that must be tackled with a broad international effort. “It is very good that a critical spotlight is placed on clearing plastic in the sea. We have long pointed out that cleaning in the sea areas starts at the wrong end and that there is a risk of damage to life in the sea when trawling for plastic,” Rotevatn told NRK. Over the past years, plastic pollution has become one of the main environmental problems with the amount of waste floating around the oceans growing at alarming rates. According to various estimates, some 15 tons of plastic gets into the planet’s seas every minute.

How many British people realize they have no justice system left? Doesn’t that worry you?

• Waiting for the Old Bailey: Julian Assange (OffG)

On September 7, Julian Assange will be facing another round of gruelling extradition proceedings, in the Old Bailey, part of a process that has become a form of gradual state-sanctioned torture. The US Department of Justice hungers for their man. The UK prison authorities are doing little to protect his health. The end result, should it result in his death, will be justifiably described as state-sanctioned murder. This picture was not improved upon by a prison visit from his partner, Stella Morris, accompanied by their two children. Almost six months had passed since the last meeting. Physical distancing was practised during the twenty-minute meeting in Belmarsh Prison.

Morris and Assange wore face masks and visors, a state of affairs curious given the conspicuous lack of protective wear that has been given to Assange during the pandemic. A prohibition on touching was observed. “We had to keep social distancing and Julian was told he would have to self-isolate for two weeks if he touched the children.” Were officials being careful and considerate? Not according to Assange, who claimed it was the first time he had received a mask “because things are very different behind the doors.” Morris noted a prevailing thinness, a yellow armband to indicate prisoner status, and the fact that he was “in a lot of pain.”

What awaits Assange next month promises to be resoundingly ugly. He will have to ready himself for more pain, applied by Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Throughout her steering of proceedings, Baraitser has remained chillingly indifferent to Assange’s needs, a model of considered cruelty. Keen followers of justicia will be crestfallen: limiting access to legal counsel by keeping him caged behind a glass screen; ignoring his health considerations in refusing emergency bail during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her behaviour has been in keeping with that of Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot, who has done her precious bit to soil the citadel of British justice in previous rulings on Assange. With a family well and truly embedded in the British intelligence and military establishment, it was alarming to even see her name allocated to the Assange case.

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Three miles north of purgatory – one step from the great beyond
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– Bob Dylan

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Debt Rattle August 31 2020

Aug 312020

August 31, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Covid19, election night, Erdogan, face masks, leaking, Moderna, pandemics, Ratcliffe, Trump, vaccine 15 Responses »

Bruce Davidson Iran 1964

• Japanese Wear Face Masks, But The Main Reason Is Just To Fit In (Asahi)

• US Floats Idea Of Early Approval For Eventual COVID19 Vaccine (ST)

• Moderna Neglected To Disclose Pentagon’s Financial Support (ZH)

• On Election Night, We Might Not Know Who Won (Mish)

• Trump Approval Rises Among Black, Hispanic Voters (Hill)

• DNI Ratcliffe Declassifying More Russia-Collusion, Media-Leak Documents (ZH)

• China’s Mega Banks Lost Billions Of Dollars In Profit As Bad Loans Rise (CNBC)

• Erdogan Criticizes Greece As Turkey Marks 1922 Victory (K.)

• Assange Travesty Continues (Craig Murray)

• Rampant Destruction Of Forests ‘Will Unleash More Pandemics’ (O.)

US new daily cases look promising, but total cases passed 6 million cases.

Upward mobility

"The decline of upward mobility in one chart" https://t.co/yRn6W5JRKi pic.twitter.com/8n0Bt05ytL

— Trevor Noren (@trevornoren) August 28, 2020

Seeing all those people walk outside with masks on, makes me wonder why we can’t inform them better. Wouldn’t that benefit everyone? If they get that wrong, what else don’t they understand?

• Japanese Wear Face Masks, But The Main Reason Is Just To Fit In (Asahi)

Japanese people have taken to wearing face masks during the pandemic, but the main reason for doing so has more to do with going along with others than preventing the coronavirus from spreading, a new study says. Peer pressure emerged as the dominant factor for wearing face masks amid the health crisis in Japan, according to the results of a survey administered by academics. A research group headed by Kazuya Nakayachi, a professor at Doshisha University’s Faculty of Psychology, published its findings in the Swiss scientific journal Frontiers in Psychology on Aug. 4. “Wearing masks is recommended to stop the virus from spreading to others, but our research suggests wearers rarely use masks for that purpose,” Nakayachi said.

“Most of them simply want to don masks just because others do.” The researchers surveyed 1,000 Japanese citizens online in March about how often and why they wear face coverings. The survey found that most people wear the protective gear, even though masks offer the wearers themselves limited protection. The results show a majority of respondents, or 51.2 percent, said they “usually” wear masks amid the pandemic, followed by 31.4 percent who said they “sometimes” wear them. Only 17.4 percent said they do “not at all” wear masks.

Promises, promises.

• US Floats Idea Of Early Approval For Eventual COVID19 Vaccine (ST)

The head of the US Food and Drug Administration raised the possibility in an interview published on Sunday (Aug 30) that a future vaccine against the coronavirus might be given emergency approval before the end of trials designed to ensure its safety and effectiveness. A request for such extraordinary approval would have to come from the vaccine developer, Stephen Hahn told the Financial Times. “If they do that before the end of Phase Three,” which involves large-scale human testing, “we may find that appropriate. We may find that inappropriate, we will make a determination.” But Hahn insisted he was not acting under pressure from President Donald Trump, who has been pushing hard for a vaccine, saying one might be ready before the Nov 3 elections.

“This is going to be a science, medicine, data decision,” Hahn said. “This is not going to be a political decision.” Three Western drugs makers are well along with their Phase 3 clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of participants. The three are AstraZeneca, which is partnering with Oxford University in England; Moderna, collaborating with the US National Institutes of Health, and the Pfizer/BioNTech alliance. By the nature of the trials it is difficult to predict when reliable results will emerge.

I think this is what we would call a racket.

• Moderna Neglected To Disclose Pentagon’s Financial Support (ZH)

Before the mainstream media transfigures Moderna founder and CEO Stephane Bancel into a corporate savior on par with Bill Gates, we’d like to remind investors (and the public) that Moderna and its insiders have demonstrated an eyebrow-raising affinity for pumping the stock with over-hyped press releases then cashing in shares or warrants (all insider stock sales were pre-scheduled divestitures, the insiders’ lawyers have argued). Despite receiving nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money via “Operation Warp Speed”, the drugmaker is planning to charge as much as $37 for a single dose, or up to $60 for two courses, of its experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. That’s far and away the highest price point disclosed yet.

And while we wait for more detailed data from the vaccine’s Phase 3 clinical trials, patent advocacy group KEI is taking Moderna and its executives to task for neglecting to disclose government funding received by the company during its early stages, before the coronavirus pandemic. Despite receiving $25 million from the Department of Defense’s “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” – or “Darpa” – Moderna has never disclosed this, or any other, government funding in its applications for 126 patents and 154 patent applications. KEI has lodged a request with the DoD and Darpa to remedy this in patents.

As KEI points out, Moderna’s “failure” to disclose its government funding could have serious consequences for Americans hoping to get their hands on an affordable vaccine. The disclosures could affect everything from the US government’s worldwide royalty free license, to the public’s march-in rights, to obligations to make inventions available to the public on reasonable terms. When approached by the FT, Darpa confirmed that Moderna was required in its contracts to disclose the funding in any patent applications that stemmed from research that the US government helped fund.

Now, Darpa is actively looking into which Moderna patents may have been produced with Darpa support, so the US government can take credit where credit is due. “It appears that all past and present Darpa awards to Moderna include the requirement to report the role of government-funding for related inventions,” Darpa spokesman Jared Adams said in an emailed response to the Financial Times. “Further, Darpa is actively researching agency awards to Moderna to identify which patents and pending patents, if any at all, may be associated with Darpa support,” he said. Mr Adams declined to comment further, saying the investigation was continuing. US federal law required government funding to be disclosed in these circumstances, he noted.

Because Trump voters vote in person and Dems don’t, on election night itself it may look like a large Trump victory. But then….

I’m not sure why Mish says: “Prepare for Trump to Claim Biden Stole the Election”. Is that more likely than Biden making that claim about Trump?

• On Election Night, We Might Not Know Who Won (Mish)

An NBC/WSJ Poll on expected mail-in votes might cause some very misleading if not totally inaccurate reporting on who is in the lead depending on when mail-in votes get counted: “Supporters of Democratic candidate Joe Biden are significantly more likely than Trump backers to say they plan to vote by mail. Nearly half – 47 percent – say they plan to mail in their ballot, with an additional 21 percent saying they will cast a vote before Election Day at an early in-person voting site. Only about a quarter of Biden voters, 26 percent, plan to vote on Election Day at a polling place. In contrast, two-thirds of Trump’s voters — 66 percent — say they will vote in person on Election Day. Just 11 percent say they plan to vote by mail, and 20 percent say they will vote early in person”.

Due to the above, FiveThirtyEight notes the Consequences Might Be Weird: “If this holds, it would mean votes cast on Election Day would skew heavily toward Trump, and votes cast by mail would skew heavily toward Biden. This has serious implications for … well, democracy. First, Trump could argue the mail ballots (which, remember, could account for most of Biden’s votes) were fraudulent and thus should not be counted. Although it’s unlikely they’d actually be thrown out, this would damage the credibility of the election in the eyes of many Trump supporters. Second, it could mean the first votes counted on election night will be disproportionately good for Trump, who might claim victory based on incomplete returns. It might not be until days later, after a good chunk of the Democratic-leaning mail vote is counted, that Biden pulls ahead.

Let’s do a quick-and-dirty exercise to show what I mean. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll overall, Biden led Trump by 9 percentage points among registered voters. But Biden led Trump by 63 points (!) among voters who planned to vote by mail, and Trump led Biden by 33 points among voters who planned to vote in person on Election Day. If this kind of partisan split occurred in every state, Biden would win the mail vote in all 50 states — from Alabama to Wyoming — and Trump would win the Election Day vote in all 50.”

The above scenario in all 50 states isn’t likely, but it is likely in some states. The election day results could easily swing Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and that could swing the election night apparent winner. Trump will howl and his supporters will believe him. Some of my friends believe Trump will refuse to stand down, but I am sure it would not come to that. A bluff in that direction, however, is another matter. Chaos could last for days or even weeks in such a scenario with severe consequences on the stock market as well as potential riots which Trump would then try to pin on Biden.

Shift.

• Trump Approval Rises Among Black, Hispanic Voters (Hill)

President Trump’s support among black voters rose 9 percentage points amid the Republican National Convention, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds. Twenty-four percent of registered black voters in the Aug. 22-25 survey, which included the first two days of the convention, said they approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 76 percent said they disapprove. That is up 9 points from the previous survey conducted Aug. 8-11, where the President received 15 percent support among this group. The survey found support among Hispanic voters also grew by 2 percentage points, from 30 percent in the last poll to 32 percent in this most recent survey. Forty-four percent of overall registered voters in the Aug. 22-25 survey approved of Trump’s job as president, a 1 percentage point dip from the last poll.

Eighty-two percent of Republican voters approve of Trump, a 1 point increase from the last poll, while 18 percent disapprove. Eighty-seven percent of Democratic voters disapprove of Trump along with 64 percent of independent voters. The survey found the president remains underwater with suburban voters and urban voters, at 42 percent support each. His support remains steady among rural voters, at 53 percent. Thursday, Trump officially accepted the 2020 Republican presidential nomination during the last night of the RNC. The Hill-HarrisX poll was conducted online among 2,861 registered voters between Aug. 22-25. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.83 percentage points.

Leaking secret docs to the press has become far too normal.

• DNI Ratcliffe Declassifying More Russia-Collusion, Media-Leak Documents (ZH)

John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he has been coordinating with US Attorney John Durham and plans to soon declassify more documents related to the Trump-Russia probe. “I pledged to a bipartisan group of senators that I would look at all of the underlying intelligence surrounding the intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s interference and this idea of Trump-Russia collusion, but I’m not going to prejudice John Durham’s work in connection with that, so we’ve had to coordinate with his office about the timing of that. But I’m optimistic that I’ll be declassifying additional documents soon.”

As a reminder, Durham, the US attorney for Connecticut, is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into several aspects of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities against Trump associates. Ratcliffe went on, referring to Durham’s review of the investigation: “He’s looking at the same documents that I am,” “He’s not sharing his findings or the work that he’s doing. But I’m coordinating with him to make sure that he has the intelligence documents that he needs to do his work. And what I don’t want to do is declassify something that might prejudice his work. So we’re going to have to coordinate as we go forward with the completion of his work with my ability to declassify documents.”

Additionally, Ratcliffe, said Sunday he has filed multiple “crimes reports” regarding alleged leaks of classified information to the media. “When I become aware of intelligence community information that is disclosed unlawfully, I do what’s called a crimes report. I’ve done that now on a number of occasions, and so those investigations are moving forward.” He said that the leaks were “for political purposes” to create what he said is a false narrative “that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than China.”

“The brunt of the asset quality pressures might not have come through yet because of the still existing moratorium on the repayment of loans as well as its interest payments..”

• China’s Mega Banks Lost Billions Of Dollars In Profit As Bad Loans Rise (CNBC)

China’s five largest banks reported their biggest profit declines in at least a decade as they brace for further increases in bad loans in an economy weakened by the coronavirus pandemic. The five lenders — Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and Bank of Communications — released their latest financial report cards last week. All five posted at least 10% year-on-year declines in profit for the first half of 2020 as they set aside more funds for potential loan losses in the coming months — much like many banks around the world. “The banks have been asked to … perform ‘national service.’

They’ve been asked to support the economy at the expense of their own operational strength,” said Jason Tan, research analyst at CreditSights, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. Chinese banks, among the world’s largest by assets, have been placed at the front line of the government’s effort to soften the economic blow on households and businesses. Authorities in Beijing reportedly asked financial institutions to sacrifice 1.5 trillion yuan ($219 billion) in profits this year to help companies by lowering lending rates and deferring repayments on loans. The Chinese economy — the world’s second largest — is expected to grow just 1% this year as measures to contain the coronavirus hit global economic activity, according to the IMF.

That would be China’s weakest growth in at least 40 years, according to data by the fund. China, the first country to be hit by the fast-spreading coronavirus, has shown some signs of economic recovery. But the effect of the economic slowdown on banks have not materialized fully, said Tan. “The brunt of the asset quality pressures might not have come through yet because of the still existing moratorium on the repayment of loans as well as its interest payments,” he explained. “So, these will probably come in the second half, if not in the first half of 2021 when the moratorium lifts in March 2021,” he added.

Are Merkel and the EU just waiting for the shooting to start? Ironic that Erdogan ignored, if not insulted, Kemal Ataturk when he made the Hagia Sophia a mosque, but now lays a wreath at his tomb.

• Erdogan Criticizes Greece As Turkey Marks 1922 Victory (K.)

Turkey marked the 98th anniversary of the decisive War of Independence battle against Greek forces Sunday as the threat of a new conflict with Athens looms in the eastern Mediterranean. “Turkey’s struggle for independence and future continues today as well,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a message to commemorate Victory Day. “It is absolutely not a coincidence that those who seek to exclude us from the eastern Mediterranean are the same invaders as the ones who attempted to invade our homeland a century ago.” In recent weeks, Turkish and Greek forces have engaged in a series of cat-and-mouse military exercises in the seas between Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete.

The confrontation was sparked when Turkey sent a research vessel accompanied by warships to search for gas and oil reserves. Greece, a member of the European Union, claims the waters are part of its continental shelf and has enlisted the support of the 27-nation bloc, which has condemned Turkey’s “illegal activities” and warned of potential sanctions against Ankara. Turkey says Greece and others are denying its rights to explore for energy resources in the Mediterranean. Greece and Cyprus have recently been joined by France, Italy and the United Arab Emirates in carrying out naval and aerial war games in the region. On Saturday, Turkey began its own military maneuvers until Sept. 11 off its southern coast.

Turkey’s Defense Ministry also released cockpit footage of what it said were Turkish jets in mock dogfights with Greek F-16s between Crete and Cyprus. “No one should have any doubts about our resolve in this matter and our unshakeable belief in victory,” Erdogan said. In an interview with broadcaster AHaber on Saturday, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Greece extending its territorial waters from six to 12 nautical miles would be a “cause for war.” Earlier this week, Athens announced plans to extend its maritime border with Italy to 12 nautical miles. Erdogan laid a wreath at the tomb of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Ankara later Sunday. Ataturk led the Turkish troops in the independence struggle following World War I and went on to establish modern Turkey.

Cancel culture wherever you look.

• Assange Travesty Continues (Craig Murray)

The travesty that is Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumes fully on 7 September at the Old Bailey. I shall be abandoning my own legal team and going down to London to cover it again in full, for an expected three weeks. How this is going to work at the Old Bailey, I do not know. Covid restrictions presumably mean that the numbers in the public gallery will be tiny. As of now, there is no arrangement for Julian’s friends and family in place. It looks like 4am queuing is in prospect. By 7 September it will be six months since I applied to resume my membership of the National Union of Journalists. I STILL have not the slightest idea who objected, or what the grounds were for objection. I have not heard from the NUJ for months.

A senior official of an international journalists’ organisation has told us that he inquired, and learnt that the NUJ national executive has considered my application and set up a sub-committee to report. But if so, why is this secret, why have I not been informed, and why am I not allowed to know what the objection is? I find this all very sinister. At this stage it is not paranoid to wonder whose hand is behind this. The practical effect of this is that without NUJ membership I cannot access a Press card, and avail myself of whatever media arrangements are in place for the Assange hearing (just as I was kept out of most of the Salmond trial). I have now reached the stage where I would like to take legal action against the NUJ, but the finances are beyond me.

I am not going to ask you to donate because we are going to need all our resources for the contempt case against me, which the Crown drags out. I shall be writing next week about my own case and that hearing earlier this week. I would just note now that the “virtual hearing” is entirely unsatisfactory and unfair on defendants. There was at least one occasion when my QC agreed with a suggestion of the judge when I would have instructed them not to had I been, as I should normally have been, seated near them in court and able to instruct.

Yes, forest destruction is terrible, but you can’t link it to COVID19, because we don’t know where it comes from. You’re just destroying a perfectly viable argument.

• Rampant Destruction Of Forests ‘Will Unleash More Pandemics’ (O.)

Scientists are to warn world leaders that increasing numbers of deadly new pandemics will afflict the planet if levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss continue at their current catastrophic rates. A UN summit on biodiversity, scheduled to be held in New York next month, will be told by conservationists and biologists there is now clear evidence of a strong link between environmental destruction and the increased emergence of deadly new diseases such as Covid-19. Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of farming and the building of mines in remote regions – as well as the exploitation of wild animals as sources of food, traditional medicines and exotic pets – are creating a “perfect storm” for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people, delegates will be told.

Almost a third of all emerging diseases have originated through the process of land use change, it is claimed. As a result, five or six new epidemics a year could soon affect Earth’s population. “There are now a whole raft of activities – illegal logging, clearing and mining – with associated international trades in bushmeat and exotic pets that have created this crisis,” said Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation at Duke University. “In the case of Covid-19, it has cost the world trillions of dollars and already killed almost a million people, so clearly urgent action is needed.” It is estimated that tens of millions of hectares of rainforest and other wild environments are being bulldozed every year to cultivate palm trees, farm cattle, extract oil and provide access to mines and mineral deposits. This leads to the widespread destruction of vegetation and wildlife that are hosts to countless species of viruses and bacteria, most unknown to science. Those microbes can then accidentally infect new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock.

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Debt Rattle August 29 2020

Aug 292020

August 29, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:48 am Finance Tagged with: absentee ballots, Baghdad Bob, Biden, CNN, Covid19, fiery but peaceful, Joint Chiefs, Kenosha, Lin Wood, masks, social fabric, Trump, zombies 20 Responses »

Johannes Vermeer Woman (in Blue) Reading a Letter 1662-3

• The US Social Fabric Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling (Greenwald)

• Kyle Rittenhouse Worked as a Lifeguard in Kenosha the Day of the Shooting (GP)

• CNN Has Turned Itself Into America’s Baghdad Bob (Widburg)

• Kamala Harris Promises National Mask Mandate If Elected (NYP)

• Judge Voids 50,000 Absentee Ballot Requests In Iowa County (AP)

• Chairman of Joint Chiefs: No Role For Military In Presidential Election (AP)

• France Sees ‘Exponential Rise’ In COVID Cases (BBC)

• German Court Overturns Protest Ban (ZH)

• German Economy Succumbing to Zombie Companies – Lacalle (SL)

• End of an Abe Era for Japan

There are serious infection problems popping up in Europe, exposing even more incompetence.

The Dark Side Of Social Media

On this week’s #FridaysWithFrank, I talked to @TristanHarris who explained how social media hijacks our brains and keeps us addicted to emotion.

Watch the trailer to his upcoming Netflix documentary #TheSocialDilemma below, and our full conversation here: https://t.co/fQjolsjxqi pic.twitter.com/BIbyRx4gbP

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) August 29, 2020

It’s coming from within. It comes from the realization across -social- media that people’s sub-conscious can be easily manipulated into generating fear and anger.

• The US Social Fabric Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling (Greenwald)

The year 2020 has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American history. To find events remotely as destabilizing and transformative, one has to go back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001, though those systemic shocks, profound as they were, were isolated (one a national security crisis, the other a financial crisis) and thus more limited in scope than the multicrisis instability now shaping U.S. politics and culture. Since the end of World War II, the only close competitor to the current moment is the multipronged unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial assassinations of political leaders, mass civil rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation of a corruption-plagued president.

But those events unfolded and built upon one another over the course of a decade. By crucial contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of historic significance in their own right — a global pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a presidential election centrally focused on one of the most divisive political figures the U.S. has known who happens to be the incumbent president — are happening simultaneously, having exploded one on top of the other in a matter of a few months. Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very troubling data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological and scientifically proven sickness.

Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact know anecdotally — from observing others and themselves — that these political and social crises have spawned emotional difficulties and psychological challenges. But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June. One question posed by researchers was whether someone has “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in their lifetime, but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past 30 days. The results are staggering.

For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5 percent — just over 1 out of every 4 young Americans — said they had. For the much larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the percentage was somewhat lower but still extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6 percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of African Americans said they had seriously considered suicide in the past month. The two groups with the largest percentage who said yes: Americans with less than a high school degree and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30 percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent of the U.S. population generally had seriously contemplated suicide in the month of June.

In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.

No, I don’t know all the facts. But I’m always wary of people crucifying minors. And I’m intrigued by the interest of Lin Wood in the case, since he took on the defense of Nicholas Sandmann, himself also a minor the media crucified, on completely false and fabricated grounds. It has cost those same media not only millions, but also a great deal of their reputation.

• Kyle Rittenhouse Worked as a Lifeguard in Kenosha the Day of the Shooting (GP)

Kyle Rittenhouse is a community lifeguard who was working in Kenosha the day of the shooting. This simple fact destroys the narrative being peddled by the mainstream media that he had “crossed state lines” to harm the rioters. In a statement by Rittenhouse’s legal team at Pierce Bainbridge, provided to the Gateway Pundit, “after Kyle finished his work that day as a community lifeguard in Kenosha, he wanted to help clean up some of the damage, so he and a friend went to the local public high school to remove graffiti by rioters.” Additionally, the weapon Rittenhouse was using to protect himself and others never crossed state lines. “Later in the day, they received information about a call for help from a local business owner, whose downtown Kenosha auto dealership was largely destroyed by mob violence,” the statement continues.

“Business owner needed help to protect what he had left of his life’s work, including two nearby mechanic’s shops. Kyle and a friend armed themselves with rifles due to the deadly violence gripping Kenosha and many other American cities, and headed to the business premises. The weapons were in Wisconsin and never crossed state lines.” When Rittenhouse arrived at the mechanics shop, he and others stood guard to prevent further destruction. Later that night, long after the 8 p.m. curfew had passed, the police began to disperse a group of rioters. His lawyer, John M. Pierce, explains that while dispersing the mob, they maneuvered a mass of individuals down the street towards the auto shops. Rittenhouse and the others were threatened and taunted, but he did not react. “His intent was not to incite violence, but simply to deter property damage and use his training to provide first aid to injured community members,” Pierce says.

After the situation seemed to be diffused, Rittenhouse became increasingly concerned about people who were injured at the gas station, so he went in that direction with his first aid kit. He helped those he could find who were injured, either by administering aid or directing them which way to go for help beyond what he could offer. The statement says that by the final time that Rittenhouse returned to the gas station and “confirmed there were no more injured individuals who needed assistance, police had advanced their formation and blocked what would have been his path back to the mechanic’s shop. Kyle then complied with the police instructions not to go back there. Kyle returned to the gas station until he learned of a need to help protect the second mechanic’s shop further down the street where property destruction was imminent with no police were nearby.”

“As Kyle proceeded towards the second mechanic’s shop, he was accosted by multiple rioters who recognized that he had been attempting to protect a business the mob wanted to destroy. This outraged the rioters and created a mob now determined to hurt Kyle. They began chasing him down. Kyle attempted to get away, but he could not do so quickly enough. Upon the sound of a gunshot behind him, Kyle turned and was immediately faced with an attacker lunging towards him and reaching for his rifle. He reacted instantaneously and justifiably with his weapon to protect himself, firing and striking the attacker,” Pierce explains. Additionally, Rittenhouse stopped to ensure care for his attacker, hardly sounds like someone who had went to the riot with intent to kill.

“Kyle stopped to ensure care for the wounded attacker but faced a growing mob gesturing towards him. He realized he needed to flee for his safety and his survival. Another attacker struck Kyle from behind as he fled down the street. Kyle turned as the mob pressed in on him and he fell to the ground,” his legal team says. “One attacker kicked Kyle on the ground while he was on the ground. Yet another bashed him over the head with a skateboard. Several rioters tried to disarm Kyle. In fear for his life and concerned the crowd would either continue to shoot at him or even use his own weapon against him, Kyle had no choice but to fire multiple rounds towards his immediate attackers, striking two, including one armed attacker. The rest of the mob began to disperse upon hearing the additional gunshots.” Rittenhouse then attempted to turn himself in, but was told to keep moving. He went and turned himself in to his local police that evening.

Lin Wood

“Video eye” does not lie. Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Murder charges are factually unsupportable. An egregious miscarriage of justice is occurring with respect to this 17-year old boy. I love truth & justice. I deplore lies & injustice. Had those feelings ALL my life.

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) August 28, 2020

Tucker Rittenhouse

WATCH: @RichieMcGinniss was back on Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk about what he saw the night of the chaos in Kenosha that resulted in two deaths. pic.twitter.com/rBsThEQnUm

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 29, 2020

There are no limits anymore.

• CNN Has Turned Itself Into America’s Baghdad Bob (Widburg)

On Tuesday, with its reporter standing in front of a raging fire, CNN ran a ludicrous chyron stating, “fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be worthy of reporting three days later. However, for some reason, this chyron was a bridge too far for many people, and the internet is still flooded with memes. It’s apparent that, with this latest denial of objective reality, CNN has finally completed its transformation into Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, whom many Americans remember almost fondly as Baghdad Bob, the Hussein regime propagandist who insisted that Saddam was winning even as U.S. troops entered Baghdad.

In 2003, when our military successfully invaded Iraq and quickly captured Baghdad, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhafk, AKA Baghdad Bob, was Saddam Hussein’s minister of information. As troops neared and then entered Baghdad, al-Sahhaf gave daily press briefings during which he announced the most outrageous lies about the wars. For example, Baghdad Bob insisted that American troops were committing suicide “by the hundreds” and that none had entered Baghdad. Meanwhile, Americans were a few hundred yards away from him, and the audience could hear the sounds of their fighting. On April 8, four days before Americans captured Baghdad, al-Sahhaf was still insisting that U.S. troops “are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender. It is they who will surrender.”

Baghdad Bob was last heard from some years ago, living in the United Arab Emirates. However, it’s entirely possible that he’s currently working for CNN, a former news network and now a sloppy propaganda outlet for the anarcho-Marxists of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Obviously, things are a bit different here for Bob. Last time, American troops were closing in on Baghdad as Bob spun manifest lies about events. This time, American anarchists and communists are closing in on an American city as CNN spins manifest lies about events. But aside from the details, that chyron running across the bottom of the CNN screen is vintage Baghdad Bob:

14 Mostly Accurate CNN Headlines From The Last 6,000 Years Of Human History https://t.co/2hDXFaRHKw

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 27, 2020

Still thinks she wants to win?

• Kamala Harris Promises National Mask Mandate If Elected (NYP)

Kamala Harris said on Friday that a nationwide mask mandate would be among the first orders of business if she and Joe Biden were elected to the White House in November, calling it the “responsible” thing to do. The Democratic vice presidential nominee expanded on the three-month plan that Biden has promised to enact if he won the White House, explaining that every American would be expected to wear a face covering amid the pandemic. “Yes,” Harris, 55, said when asked if that would be one of their first actions in power during an interview on NBC’s “TODAY.” “It’s a standard. I mean, nobody’s going to be punished,” Harris continued when asked how it would be enforced.

“Nobody likes to wear a mask, this is a universal feeling, right? So, that’s not the point,” she said. “The point is this is what we as responsible people who love our neighbor, we have to just do that right now. God willing, it won’t be forever.” The CDC recommends mask-wearing in public when you are unable to stay 6-feet away from others so as to stop the spread of disease. President Trump rejected Biden’s mandate earlier this month during a White House briefing, telling reporters the Democratic nominee had showed an “appalling lack of respect” for the American people. “It’s up to the governors. We want to have a certain freedom,” Trump said. “If the president has the unilateral power to order every single citizen to cover their face in nearly all instances, what other powers does he have?” he asked.

There are dozens of such lawsuits pending.

• Judge Voids 50,000 Absentee Ballot Requests In Iowa County (AP)

A judge ordered an Iowa county Thursday to invalidate 50,000 requests for absentee ballots, agreeing with President Donald Trump’s campaign that its elections commissioner overstepped his authority by pre-filling them with voters’ personal information. Judge Ian Thornhill issued a temporary injunction ordering Linn County Auditor Joel Miller to notify voters in writing that the forms should not have been pre-filled with their information and cannot be processed. Instead, they’ll have to either fill out new requests for absentee ballots or vote on Election Day. The ruling marks an initial victory for Trump’s challenges to absentee voting procedures in three counties in Iowa, which is expected to be competitive in his race against Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

They’re part of an unprecedented legal battle involving dozens of lawsuits nationwide that will shape the rules of the election. Republicans said the ruling would hold a “rogue auditor” accountable and enhance voting security, while outraged Democrats called it an act of voter suppression. Miller said he would abide by the order, pledging to void the returned requests and send out new blank forms to voters next month. At issue was Miller’s decision to send absentee ballot request forms to 140,000 voters in July that were already filled with their personal information, including names, dates of birth and, most significantly, voter identification numbers. Miller, a Democrat, has said his goal was to make it as easy as possible to vote absentee during a pandemic, as the virus spreads uncontrolled across the state.

Voters had to review, sign and return the forms to request ballots that will be mailed beginning Oct. 5. About 50,000 requests have been returned in the Democratic-leaning county, which is Iowa’s second largest and is recovering from a derecho that devastated the region Aug. 10. The phone system for the county elections office remained out of service Thursday. Thornhill ruled that Miller’s mailing violated a “clear directive” from Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, who told county officials in July that absentee ballot request forms mailed to voters must be blank in order to ensure uniformity.

Both sides will sell this as an affirmation of their views.

• Chairman of Joint Chiefs: No Role For Military In Presidential Election (AP)

The U.S. armed forces will have no role in carrying out the election process or resolving a disputed vote, the top U.S. military officer told Congress in comments released Friday. The comments from Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, underscore the extraordinary political environment in America, where the president has declared without evidence that the expected surge in mail-in ballots will make the vote “inaccurate and fraudulent,” and has suggested he might not accept the election results if he loses. Trump’s repeated complaints questioning the election’s validity have triggered unprecedented worries about the potential for chaos surrounding the election results.

Some have speculated that the military might be called upon to get involved, either by Trump trying to use it to help his reelection prospects or as, Democratic challenger Joe Biden has suggested, to remove Trump from the White House if he refuses to accept defeat. The military has adamantly sought to tamp down that speculation and is zealously protective of its historically nonpartisan nature. “I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” Milley said in written responses to several questions posed by two Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S armed forces in this process.”

Milley’s tone reflects the longstanding views of military leaders who insist that the nation’s military stays out of politics and that troops are sworn to protect the country and uphold the Constitution. But the two Congress members, Reps. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, said Friday that Trump’s recent comments and his efforts to use the military to quell protests have fueled their concerns. The two lawmakers released Milley’s answers.

“On Friday, masks were made mandatory outdoors in Paris to fight the rising infections.”

How does that work exactly?

• France Sees ‘Exponential Rise’ In COVID Cases (BBC)

France has recorded its biggest daily rise in coronavirus infections since March, as President Emmanuel Macron raised the possibility of another nationwide lockdown. A further 7,379 cases were confirmed on Friday, bringing the country’s total to 267,077. It was the largest daily spike since 31 March, when 7,578 cases were tallied at the peak of the first wave. France was seeing an “exponential” rise in cases, the health ministry said. The ministry said Friday’s rise follows daily increases of 6,111 on Thursday and 5,429 on Wednesday. Despite the sharp rise, hospital numbers and daily deaths were relatively stable, as young people less vulnerable to the disease make up most of the new infections, the ministry said. Another 20 people were confirmed to have died with Covid-19 on Friday, bringing France’s overall death toll to 30,596.

Shortly before Friday’s figures were released, Mr Macron said a second national lockdown could not be ruled out if infections spiralled out of control. However he said his government was trying to avoid the return of restrictions that would set back the country’s fragile economic recovery. “Containment is the crudest of measures to fight against a virus,” said Mr Macron, urging people to be “collectively very rigorous”. France began easing its eight-week-long lockdown in May. But some parts of the country – including the capital Paris – remained under tighter controls. Local authorities have been given powers to enforce lockdown measures, such as closing down bars and restaurants, in areas where cases are surging. On Friday, masks were made mandatory outdoors in Paris to fight the rising infections.

HCQ OTC

In the US, there has never been a large enough demand for hydroxychloroquine to be made available as an over-the-counter medicine.

Due to arbitrary restrictions implemented on HCQ, it should be made available prophylactally OTC in the United States. pic.twitter.com/nWL76OnoiD

— Dr. Simone Gold (@drsimonegold) August 28, 2020

Germany, too, has fallen into the trap of allowing one type of protest, but banning another. That’s just politics, nothing to do with health care.

• German Court Overturns Protest Ban (ZH)

Earlier in the week, we reported that authorities in Berlin had banned a series of planned demonstrations against the country’s COVID-19 lockdown measures – claiming they were organized by “right-wing extremists” and would lead to the spread of the virus. The city said it would deploy several thousand police around the German capital this weekend, citing threats. Notably, the German city did not ban a June Black Lives Matter protest in which approximately 15,000 people turned out. Meanwhile, the Assembly for Freedom had 17,000 registered demonstrators for the August 29 event before Berlin shut it down. “We are still in the middle of a pandemic with rising infection figures,” said Berlin Interior Minister, Andreas Geisel.

“This is not a decision against freedom of assembly, but a decision in favor of infection protection,” he continued, adding that Berlin should not be “misused as a stage for corona deniers… and right-wing extremists.” About 20,000 people, including libertarians, constitutional loyalists, far-right supporters and anti-vaccination activists, marched in Berlin on Aug. 1. But now, as Off-Guardian reports, the Berlin Senate’s decision to ban the coronavirus protest planned for this weekend has been overturned by the Administrative Court. That said, the protest will still be under some restrictions – the court ruled that the organizers must follow all the laws and restrictions they are protesting against.

According to a report from Deutsche Welle: “…the judges said protest organizers and participants must provide barriers in front of the stages where speeches will be held – and must regularly remind participants to observe social distancing rules and keep their distance. Wearing masks was not included in the judge’s guidelines for the protest.” The court’s decision can be appealed by the Senate, but given the timeframe that seems unlikely at this stage. Many thousands were reportedly travelling to Berlin regardless, as it was thought the protest organizers intended to go ahead in spite of the ban. A similar protest on August 1st drew tens of thousands of people. The Berlin protest is taking place alongside other events around the world for a global day of action. Protests are planned for London, Ottawa, Paris and Zurich.

“..these types of policies are relatively social at the beginning but they become the most anti-social afterwards..”

• German Economy Succumbing to Zombie Companies – Lacalle (SL)

Zombie companies are generally defined as companies that have been in business for at least ten years and whose debt servicing costs have exceeded profits for at least the last three years. Such structurally unprofitable companies, once a rarity, now represent a terrifying 18% of publicly traded companies in the US. The trend is growing in Europe as well, and as Mr. Lacalle warns, endless stimulus, low interest rates, and bailouts in the wake of Covid are exacerbating the phenomenon. The end result is a stifling of innovation, lower long term productivity, and decreased economic mobility. Some excerpts from Daniel Lacalle:

“The (German) government has given enormous levels of subsidies to keep companies that had problems in 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic, to keep them alive…” “Huge transfers of public money go to companies that… don’t allow a certain level of creative destruction, which is very important for progress…. The rise of Zombie Companies, which is a big problem in the European Union, is doing three things: It’s stopping innovation…, consumers end up with worse products and services, and the third problem is that these companies don’t hire and invest more…” “Something that looks quite good as a headline can be extremely damaging for jobs, for growth, and for the future development of the economy… The rise of zombie companies inevitably leads to a financial crisis when those companies inevitably become insolvent…”

“The biggest lesson for the United States is that these types of policies are relatively social at the beginning but they become the most anti-social afterwards when higher unemployment, lower growth, and lower productivity become the norm.” Another problem with larger and larger swaths of the economy being taken over by structurally unprofitable companies is taxes. Companies only pay taxes on profits and with governments running deficits like there is no tomorrow, there is simply no feasible tax plan that will come close to balancing America’s budget deficits. The economy is simply insufficiently productive to support current levels of government spending. Keeping money-losing companies in business only makes the matter worse.

This can’t help but make me laugh: “He was widely praised for early “Abenomics..” One look at Japan’s debt-to-GDP tells you all you need to know.

• End of an Abe Era for Japan

Abe’s political legacy is substantial. After working as cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, he became prime minister in 2006 but crashed and burned and resigned – officially due to ulcerative colitis – in 2007. He was older, wiser and better advised when he started his second term at the helm in December 2012. In that term, which ended on Friday, he served the longest premiership in Japanese history. In many ways, Abe has overseen a success story. Economically, his inflationary “Abenomics” overcame Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, and socially, as Asia Times recently noted in a review of an Abe biography, the country boasts low unemployment, equal distribution of income, fine infrastructure, minimal public disorder, a low crime rate and low Covid-19 death rates.

Even so, his legacy is mixed. In neighboring countries, he is widely seen as a raging nationalist for his claimed historical revisionism and his moves to empower Japan’s military. However, in terms of trade and tourism, many of his actions in office have been those of an internationalist. He was widely praised for early “Abenomics,” but while its loose monetary and expansionary fiscal policies beat back the deflation that had plagued Japan, it’s “third arrow” – corporate reform – never rose from the deck. He won hosting rights to the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics to local acclaim, only to see the multi-billion dollar dream crash amid the pandemic.

Politically, Abe appears to have maintained a balance within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party between its center-right and hard-right elements, and as a result, a true hard-right party has not appeared on Japan’s political scene. There have also been clear failures. Abe talked about “creating a Japan where women can shine,” but according to the World Economic Forum’s annual gender equality ranking, last year Japan placed 121st out of the 153 countries, the worst among G7 economies. Abe has also leaned on media. National broadcaster NHK has been ridiculed as “Abe TV” and Japan’s Freedom Of Press ranking, 22 when he took office, is now 66th. And when it comes to Japan’s biggest national challenge – its ongoing demographic decline – he proved incapable of reversing it.

Abe’s grandfather and a strong personal influence was war criminal Nobuskue Kishi, who was rehabilitated by the US and then became Japan’s prime minister. Many in China and the Koreas, countries which suffered from Japan’s militarism and imperialism in the first half of the 20th century, consider Abe his grandfather’s grandson, a dangerous nationalist. However, he has declined to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine since 2013, although his cabinet members, in a sop to Japan’s hard right, have done so. Abe’s oft-stated hopes of rewriting article 9 of Japan’s constitution – a Herculean task – enabling a wider, more expeditionary role for Japan’s Self Defense Forces, came to naught. Even so, during his term, he quietly oversaw the expansion and empowerment of Japan’s military. Notably, the Maritime Self Defense Force took on a far more expeditionary look under his oversight, standing up a marine brigade and green-lighting the conversion of two existing warships into F-35-armed aircraft carriers.

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Debt Rattle August 28 2020

Aug 282020

August 28, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: Abe, Biden, commuting, Covid19, Fed, Laura, masks, Pelosi, RNC, Russia, subprime, Trump, vaccine, WHO, Wuhan 13 Responses »

Frans Hals Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer 1626 (stolen 3rd time yesterday)

• Pelosi Says There Shouldn’t Be Any Debates Between Biden And Trump (Hill)

• Trump Denounces Riots, Cancel Culture, Failed Political Class In Speech (RT)

• 61 Million Americans Have Stopped Commuting (ZH)

• WHO Skips Wuhan During China Trip; “Sat In Beijing For Three Weeks” (ZH)

• US Imposes Sanctions On Russian Institute That Developed COVID19 Vaccine (GZ)

• Germany Imposes Fine For All Non-Mask Wearers In New National Crackdown (ZH)

• The Fed Policies Have Become Part Of The Problem (ZH)

• Subprime Mortgages Fall Massively Delinquent (WS)

• Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Longest-Serving PM, Resigns Due To Health Issues (RT)

• Laura Ravages Louisiana Coast With Wind Speeds Not Seen In A Century (Hill)

260,000 reads for yesterday’s Are The Tables Starting To Turn? on Zero Hedge alone so far.

Nancy’s 80, and she’s losing again, in her final battle. When saying things like this, she will be seen by many people as a sore loser. Not by those who follow her anyway and anywhere, but by the undecideds. The polls say her party is losing those people. And she’s right, Biden will be hammered, but running away is not a viable option.

Most of all, if you ask me, Biden and Pelosi just look like very old and bitter people. Look at Biden!

• Pelosi Says There Shouldn’t Be Any Debates Between Biden And Trump (Hill)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday she doesn’t think there should be any presidential debates ahead of the November election, arguing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden shouldn’t “legitimize” a discussion with President Trump.“I don’t think that there should be any debates,” Pelosi told reporters. “I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts.”“I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States,” she added.

“I think that he’ll probably act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency,” she said, citing what she called his “disgraceful” actions during the 2016 debates with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “He does that every day,” she added. “But I think he will also belittle what the debates are supposed to be about.” Instead, Pelosi proposed that the candidates take separate stages and answer questions about their policies in a “conversation with the American people” instead of “an exercise in skulduggery.” But she acknowledged that the Biden campaign “thinks in a different way about this.”

Take from RT. I’m pretty sure CNN’s take is slightly different.

• Trump Denounces Riots, Cancel Culture, Failed Political Class In Speech (RT)

Speaking at the finale of the Republican National Convention, President Donald Trump doubled down on American exceptionalism and once again painted himself as an outsider fighting the Democrats and the entrenched establishment. The speech went on for over an hour, much longer than Joe Biden’s address a week ago at the Democratic convention. But whereas Biden spoke in an empty auditorium in Milwaukee, Trump spoke outside the White House, in the wilting heat of late summer in Washington, DC – and in front of more than a thousand people. In the absence of a formal party platform, Trump defined the Republican position for 2020 as undoing the damage done by the establishment; defending law and order from mobs and anarchy; fighting ‘cancel culture’ and making American great(er) again.

Though the tone of it was uneven – at times a campaign rally, at other times sounding like a State of the Union – and Trump was visibly running out of steam by the end, the underlying message was crystal clear. Time and again, Trump hammered Biden and the Democrats on the difference between their accomplishments during decades in power, and his over just one term. “We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years.” Trump painted Biden and the Democrats as globalists beholden to China economically, destroying American jobs and industries, opening the borders and starting endless foreign wars – which he was trying to end.

“How can Joe Biden claim to be an ally of the light, when his own party can’t even keep the lights on?” Trump joked, bringing up last week’s power outages in California – but it was also a dig at the theme of Biden’s speech last week, and the efforts by the media to accuse Republicans of being “dark and divisive.” “At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas,” Trump said. “This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.” Democrats, Trump argued, see America as a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins, with giving them power as the only path to redemption. Yet Republicans – and most Americans, he argued – look to god for salvation, not politicians.

[..] Throughout, Trump cast himself as the outsider who left behind his comfortable life to battle the “failed political class” in Washington. He has done so with mixed success, dealing with brutal political intrigue, hostile media, endless lawfare, congressional gridlock, the ‘Russiagate’ probe and even an impeachment. But as he himself quipped, pointing to the White House, “we’re here and they’re not.” Even after four years of that, and an hour in the brutal heat of an August evening, Trump seemed ready, even eager, for more. Democrats may have believed the media and the polls to think this election was in the bag, but it isn’t – not by a long shot.

I’m trying! I am! I’m trying to feel stupid for thinking that it’s great we finally found a way to make people NOT drive a car an hour+ every day that is 20x their weight and uses less than 10% of the energy effectively that moves it forward. I’m trying to feel stupid because, I know, the economy!

• 61 Million Americans Have Stopped Commuting (ZH)

A new survey from ValuePenguin.com, commissioned by LendingTree, found 61 million Americans have stopped commuting to work due to the virus-induced recession. The reduction of motor vehicles on highways will result in deep economic scarring across the entire economy. “The coronavirus has upended nearly every aspect of life in the United States, and Americans’ driving behavior and commutes are no exception. ValuePenguin surveyed drivers to see how their habits have changed. We found a large number of drivers are no longer commuting to the office, whether because they are working from home or have lost employment due to COVID-19.” -ValuePenguin. The survey found three in 10 respondents with motor vehicles are no longer making the daily commute to work in a post-COVID-19 world:

“About three in 10 consumers with a motor vehicle said they no longer have a commute due to COVID-19, either because they’re working from home (19%) or they temporarily or permanently lost their jobs (10%). On the other hand, 26% are back to their daily commute as of August, including essential workers (17%) and those whose employers reopened their offices (9%). (The remainder don’t have commutes either because they worked from home prior to the pandemic, or they were not working prior to the pandemic.)” -ValuePenguin [..] The decline in travel has resulted in respondents making fewer trips to the gas pump. Almost a third said they’re driving every day, compared to 50% of drivers pre-pandemic. The number of respondents who fill up their tanks every week dropped by 26% in August versus before the pandemic.

Can we close them down now, finally? I get the point behind having a global health organization, but this is not that point. The WHO should have loudly denounced not being able to access Wuhan a long time ago.

• WHO Skips Wuhan During China Trip; “Sat In Beijing For Three Weeks” (ZH)

A delegation from the World Health Organization tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19 failed to go to Wuhan, China – ‘ground zero’ for the pandemic, and instead “sat in Beijing for three weeks” according to a senior US official, who told the Financial Times that Western governments are skeptical over China’s commitment to identifying the origins of the pandemic. “Any chance of finding a smoking gun is now gone,” the official continued. Though we’re not sure what any team of investigators would find after China blocked international epidemiologists for eight months after the outbreak began. Australian MP Dave Sharma told the Times: “The international community is right to have serious concerns about the rigour and independence of the WHO’s early response to this pandemic, and its seeming wish to avoid offending China.

“If this allegation is proven, it is another disturbing incident of the WHO — which is charged with safeguarding global public health — putting the political sensitivities of a member state above the public health interests of the world, in the critical early stages of this pandemic. We are all now bearing the immense costs of such a policy.” The WHO, meanwhile, says that the three-week visit was ‘merely laying the groundwork in advance of a full international mission,’ but gave no indication when this might happen. “After initially bristling at calls from Australia, the US and other countries for a probe into the outbreak, which has claimed more than 800,000 lives, Chinese president Xi Jinping in May endorsed a WHO-led inquiry.

But the WHO resolution “to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population” — which was backed by more than 130 countries — has been dogged by concerns over transparency and access.” -Financial Times. “A two-person WHO team has recently concluded its three-week assignment in China to lay the groundwork for an investigation into the source of the virus. This was in advance of the full mission, therefore, there are no ‘results of the WHO’s recent mission’ to share.”” said the UN agency in a statement last week.

Like Russia cares. But shouldn’t we seek cooperation in things like this?

• US Imposes Sanctions On Russian Institute That Developed COVID19 Vaccine (GZ)

The Russian government announced this August that it had registered the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V. Sputnik V was developed by the Russian Health Ministry’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. This scientific facility created the vaccine in a joint research project with the Russian Defense Ministry’s 48th Central Research Institute. On August 27, the US Commerce Department imposed sanctions on Russia’s 48th Central Research Institute, blacklisting the scientific body. While Russia took a state-led approach to create a coronavirus vaccine, the Trump administration announced a “public-private partnership” in May.

The program, called “Operation Warp Speed,” saw the US government dole out billions of tax dollars to Big Pharma companies. The Trump administration awarded massive contracts to private corporations like Novavax, Pfizer, and Moderna, while Trump reportedly offered “large sums of money” for exclusive rights to a vaccine being developed by a German firm so it could be sold for profit. But the US public-private partnership was unable to develop a vaccine before foreign countries with government-led research efforts did. Besides Russia, a state-owned Chinese company says its vaccine will be ready by the end of 2020, while Cuba is doing clinical trials for a vaccine of its own.

It would really help to know what this mask mandate entails. Does it include people outside? In their own homes? These are important details.

• Germany Imposes Fine For All Non-Mask Wearers In New National Crackdown (ZH)

It should surprise nobody that this happens first within the EU. While much of the world takes to mask-wearing more out of a social and health consciousness “most people are on board” type attitude, the government of Germany has announced fines as punishment for people not wearing them. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced during a virtual meeting Thursday with state governors that almost the entire country will be under a 50 euros minimum ($59) fine for breaching the national mask mandate. After the meeting it was announced that all federal states except the east’s Saxony-Anhalt agreed on setting a minimum fine. In her comments Merkel also urged Germans to stay home “wherever it is possible” and avoid traveling to “hot spots” like the United States. Berlin also agreed to impose a strict limiting on gatherings.

Not only have many major public events been canceled outright, but police are enforcing a ban on private parties of more than 25 persons. Large public events will not return until 2021. The new stringent measures including the mask fines go into effect by the end of the day Thursday. This also as most German schools are now back in session, though there’s been a handful of closures due to new coronavirus cases. It’s part of a broader initiative proposed by German health officials to crackdown on people flouting social distancing measures amid the pandemic, even though in recent weeks authorities say coronavirus clusters are due mainly to incoming vacationers. Germany’s confirmed COVID-19 numbers have been on the whole relatively low compared to other Western nations, at about 240,000 out of a population of 83 million.

You sure it shouldn’t read they ARE the problem?

• The Fed Policies Have Become Part Of The Problem (ZH)

In one of the most overt criticism of the Fed we have read to date, [Rabobank’s Philip] Marey writes that “while the Fed’s step to make the inflation target “more” symmetric may benefit the wages of the average American somewhere beyond 2022, it does not really address the deeper problem with the role the Fed is playing in the US economy. It could be argued that the Fed’s policies have become part of the problem, instead of the solution.” And, as the Rabobank strategist suggests, “at least this should be a topic for debate in the FOMC, instead of talking a whole year about whether to use an average or not.”

To this all we would add is that the Fed should take a long, hard look at its prefered metric of core PCE: as we have repeatedly explained in recent years, the Fed continues to purposefully undercount inflation, and on top of that, it now has openly said it will disregard the politically palatable core PCE/CPI number just so it can continue blowing an asset bubble of epic proportions. It was Marey’s conclusion however that was the piece de resistance:

“The much deeper problem for the US economy is the asymmetric impact of Fed policies on households and businesses. The Fed’s monetary and regulatory policies have contributed to a form of capitalism where the rewards are going to the 1% and the risks are borne by the 99%. The current crisis response has made it painfully clear again that the Fed’s policies benefit high income individuals and large corporations, while small businesses and low income individuals bear the burden. While the Fed likes to see itself as part of the solution to America’s economic problems, it should ask itself whether it is also part of these problems.”

The amounts of leverage everywhere in the system makes a price decline of 10-20% an absolute catastrophy.

• Subprime Mortgages Fall Massively Delinquent (WS)

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) prides itself in insuring subprime mortgages with, as it says, “low down payments,” “low closing costs,” and “easy credit qualifying” – all true. Of its active portfolio of 8 million mortgages that it insures, 17% were delinquent in July, the highest rate in FHA history. In many metros, the delinquency rates of FHA mortgages are above 20%; and in two metros, the delinquency rates exceed 27%. The delinquency rates include mortgages that were delinquent and then entered a forbearance agreement with the lender, where the lender agreed to not pursue its rights due to nonpayment of the mortgage.

During the term of forbearance – six months, under the CARES Act, extendable by another six months – the borrower isn’t making payments, but the missed interest and principal payments are added to the mortgage balance and will need to be paid somehow. A FICO credit score below 620 is considered “subprime.” The FHA insures mortgages of borrowers with credit scores well below that. • If the borrower has a credit score of at least 580, the FHA will accept down payments of only 3.5%. • If the FICO score is below 580, no problem, but then down payment is 10%. Many of the people whose mortgages the FHA insures have lost their jobs or had had their hours or work reduced. In terms of the lenders, the good thing is that they don’t carry the risk. The FHA and thereby the taxpayer carry the risk.

In terms of the taxpayer, the good thing is that home prices have risen in many markets in recent years, and are rising there right now, and that many fallen-behind homeowners can sell their home and pay off the defaulted mortgage with the proceeds from the sale, and maybe have a little cash left over. And if the home goes into foreclosure because the proceeds wouldn’t have been enough to pay off the mortgage, the losses would be relatively small. The widespread home price declines that occurred during the subprime crisis of Housing Bust have not happened yet. And that’s why at the moment no one is panicking about these sky-high delinquency rates. But when millions of homeowners cannot make the mortgage payments and have to put these millions of homes on the market – forced sellers – they trigger a sudden surge of supply of homes for sale, and the entire supply-and-demand equation, and thereby the pricing environment, are going to change.

No more Abenomics would be a plus.

• Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Longest-Serving PM, Resigns Due To Health Issues (RT)

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who led Japan for eight consecutive years, has said he is stepping down hours after he informed his ruling coalition that he was suffering from health issues. Explaining his decision earlier in the day, Shinzo Abe said he feared the illness would affect his decision-making. “I will not be able to make proper judgments due to illness,” the outgoing premier clarified, as quoted by Kyodo news agency. Abe has been suffering from ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory chronic disease, for many years. The prime minister himself revealed that his condition started to worsen around the middle of the last month, possibly prompting him to consider stepping down.

Moving on, Abe apologized “from the bottom of my heart” to his fellow countrymen, adding that he didn’t want his resignation to cause trouble for Japan’s domestic politics. With his eyes getting misty, the prime minister said it is now up to the Japanese to judge his legacy. He noted that his administration had created four million jobs while keeping the economy going. Meanwhile, local media reported that he will continue to serve as prime minister until a new leader is chosen, thus avoiding the need to appoint an acting premier. Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is reportedly set to arrange a leadership election next Thursday.

Seems to have been okay so far?!

• Laura Ravages Louisiana Coast With Wind Speeds Not Seen In A Century (Hill)

Hurricane Laura made landfall as a powerful Category 4 hurricane early Thursday morning packing 150 mile-per-hour winds and bringing a storm surge with the potential to inundate coastal areas of western Louisiana to the Texas border with up to 20 feet of water. Laura made landfall around 1 a.m. near Cameron, La. The 400-person community is more than 30 miles east of the Texas border. Around 7 a.m. CDT, the storm was centered near Leesville, La., roughly 100 miles north of the Gulf Coast. The storm ties with a hurricane from more than 160 years ago as the strongest storm to hit the region. A hurricane called “Last Island” made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds in 1856, according to CNN.

Laura weakened to a Category 2 hurricane after making landfall but still packs sustained winds of more than 100 mph and will continue to produce heavy rain and flash flooding that are not expected to recede for several days. Government officials had warned people to find safety and get out of harm’s way as the storm approached. More 500,000 people in the storm’s path in coastal Texas and Louisiana were under evacuation orders, although as many as 150 people in Cameron Parish, where the hurricane came ashore, ignored the orders and were unreachable as of Thursday morning, according to The Associated Press. “This is a time for all of us to be praying for the best, while we’re prepared for the worst. God bless you and your families,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) tweeted just before the storm made landfall.

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Are The Tables Starting To Turn?

Aug 272020

August 27, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:16 pm Finance Tagged with: Biden, DNC, job approval, Kenosha, police, polls, Rasmussen, Reuters/Ipsos, RNC, Trump, violence, voters, Zogby 9 Responses »

Leon Levinstein Head of Man with Hat and Cigar c1960

A Pew Research Center poll that’s already a month old (and a lot happened since) concluded that violent crime is a major issue according to 59% of voters (almost as much as coronavirus): 74% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats. But during the DNC, held after the poll was already out, the issue wasn’t addressed at all. Democrats talked about police violence, but not riot violence.

At this week’s RNC, this situation is -of course- very different. The DNC pushes the GOP into the role of the party of law and order, and they’re all too willing to take up that role. But I was wondering about something else, or “bigger”, this morning. That is, Joe Biden et al are very light on policies, because in their view their most important issue is to get people to vote *against* Donald Trump, rather than *for* Biden.

And I’m thinking maybe that’s starting to boomerang, to blow up in their faces, whether perhaps people are beginning to lean towards NOT voting for Joe Biden, instead of NOT voting for Donald Trump, “at any cost”. In that context, it appears telling that according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Biden saw no “convention poll bounce” in his numbers after the DNC, while ironically, Trump did.

Whereas according to a Zogby Analytics poll, Trump’s job approval numbers are now at record high levels. And I know polls -and pollsters- can be biased, and so can the press quoting them, but to see three in a row, Reuters/Ipsos, Rasmussen, Zogby, all reporting similar movement, may still be significant.

Trump Job Approval Rating Hits Record At 52%

Buoyed by blacks and independent voters, as well as urban dwellers shocked by the Black Lives Matter protest violence raging in some cities, President Trump’s approval rating has hit a new high, according to a survey heavy with minority voters. The latest Zogby Analytics poll just shared with Secrets had Trump’s approval at 52%. “The president has recorded his best job approval rating on record,” said pollster Jonathan Zogby.

What’s more, his approval rating among minorities was solid and, in the case of African Americans, shockingly high. Zogby said 36% of blacks approve of the president, as do 37% of Hispanics and 35% of Asians. Approval among independent voters is also up, to 44%. And “intriguingly,” said Zogby, 23% of Democrats approve of Trump.

It was the latest to show that Trump’s approval went up during the Democratic National Convention. Rasmussen Reports had it at 51% at the end of the convention. In a shock from past election years, Joe Biden got no convention poll bounce, according to a newly released Reuters/Ipsos poll. [..] Zogby, in his analysis, took a stab at the reasoning. First, he said, his and other polls are confirming that the nation is nearly evenly divided politically and that despite some showing a big Biden lead, the race is extremely close.

He suggested that the battle is for the “10%-20%” who haven’t made their minds up on whom to vote for and who likely won’t make up their minds until Election Day, just like in 2016. “We are as polarized a nation, on a level not seen since the Civil War,” said Zogby. He also said that the violence playing out in cities such as Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, are pushing urban voters to Trump.

A fresh Rasmussen poll about Biden’s lead in the polls (which reached double digits not long ago), indicates that there’s not much left of that lead. That, but the way, is similar to a CNN poll a number of weeks ago. Significantly, Rasmussen suggests that: Even if Biden’s now-slim lead in the polls were to remain frozen as of today, Trump would still have a clear path to an electoral college victory.

Biden’s Polling Lead Has Collapsed

Just a month and a half ago, Rasmussen Reports had Joe Biden 10-points ahead of President Donald Trump in the polls. Now he’s only ahead by one point, within the margin of error. Even if Biden’s now-slim lead in the polls were to remain frozen as of today, Trump would still have a clear path to an electoral college victory, as Hillary Clinton lead Trump in the popular vote by just over two points in the 2016 election. While it is impossible to know the exact reason (or reasons) for Biden’s polling collapse, it comes as the economy continues to rebound from the coronavirus, riots continue to ravage liberal run cities longer than anyone expected (to no condemnation from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris)..

[..] Rasmussen was among the closest mainstream pollster in approximating the popular vote in the 2016 election. Rasmussen had Hillary Clinton up 1.7 points over Trump on election day 2016, while she ended up winning the popular vote by 2.1 points above him (48.2% vs. 46.1%). The Real Clear Politics average of polls had Hillary up for six points. Unlike the other polls, Rasmussen correctly saw Trump had a path to victory in the electoral college.

Rasmussen

Last night @donlemon called for the rioting to end, "because it's showing up in the polling."

What polling? The media polling after the DNC Convention that was never released over the weekend.

Yes, folks, it exists. You’re just not allowed to see it. https://t.co/yjm1UUdfmf

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) August 26, 2020

And of course Don Lemon warned yesterday on CNN that Biden has to start addressing the riots, because by remaining silent he’s letting Trump run away with the issue. But it’s not entirely clear how Biden would do that: the Democrats have supported BLM and protesters -as well as rioters- in general for most of the year, and now they would have to turn against them?

The sports boycotts that yesterday came seemingly out of nowhere all at the same time, look like they’re well intentioned but too late. There is too much news, and there are too many videos, out there to keep portraying what’s happening in the streets of Kenosha and Minneapolis and many other cities, as a one-sided problem. There is violence on both, or even many, sides.

Tonight, Thursday August 27, it’s Donald Trump’s turn to address the RNC, and the entire press, the entire nation, will pay attention. Nobody feels they can afford not to. Almost half the country will already have their minds made up about what a terrible person he is, while the other almost half will think he’s doing great. It’s the “10%-20%” who haven’t made their minds up that he must reach, and given how the country feels about violence in the streets, he may well succeed in reaching quite a few.

For which he can thank the DNC. “Orange Man Bad” may have once looked to be a winning strategy, but by now it feels mostly a limiting one.

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A Society of Emasculated Liars

Aug 242020

August 24, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:08 pm Finance Tagged with: coronavirus, Covid19, Cuomo, facemasks, lies, lockdowns, Trump 21 Responses »

Edward Hopper Tables for ladies 1930

Haven’t heard from Dr. D in a while, other than in the Comments section here at the Automatic Earth. Where I stopped reading his comments after the umpteenth time he said the COVID fatality rate was only 0.000001%. I find that only repetitious, annoying and more importantly, entirely irrelevant.

But of course over the past 8 months, since I first started to address the virus problem, many things have changed. We have a ton more information on the disease, even if we still don’t appear to know much about it. But one thing we still do know: there is not a government on the planet that has a mandate to kill off its own citizens. And so measures will continue to be taken, no matter how misguided they may be, as long as the virus spreads and people die.

For the media, or what’s left of them by now, COVID is identical to a presidential election: an opportunity to generate clickbait dollars. The priority is not to get the most relevant information to readers and viewers in the best possible way, it’s to present things in those ways that cause the most scandal and anger, because that is what sells.

More specifically about Dr. D’s article below: It’s absurd to claim that Andrew Cuomo killed 20,000 people, just like it’s insane to claim Trump killed 170,000, something I nevertheless read multiple times every single day. What’s neither absurd nor insane is to acknowledge that the US health care system is a giant black hole where money goes in and very little returns. But neither man built that system, it was a society-wide effort.

Fix that and you won’t have to rely on politicians to deal with matters they don’t know the first thing about. “But we listen to the scientists”, they all say. That doesn’t help if you don’t know which scientists to listen to, and to find that out you need to know more about the topic. Catch 22.

There are many many things wrong with both Trump and Cuomo, but in the end they merely epitomize the American political system as a whole, just like their COVID-related actions epitomize the failures of the health care system. Neither system was at all prepared for a pandemic, despite decades of warnings that it would come at some point.

Nor is this just an American problem. European countries, though they often have very differently structured health care systems, were caught just as unawares and unprepared. And you can think and hope that this won’t happen again, that they all will have their blueprints ready for the next one, but I wouldn’t be so sure. There’s not enough money, or power, to be gained from such things.

And no, lockdowns and face masks are not in and of themselves useless or oppressive, but you always need to weigh when to use them, and when not to. And since nobody seems to know that either, we most often see them used for all the wrong reasons and at all the wrong places.And yes, that does get to be oppressive.

But none of this is a reason for me not to let Dr. D speak.

Dr. D: NY’s Governor Andrew Cuomo bans dancing. When are we going to realize they are the lemon-sucking church ladies? He does this AFTER he killed 20,000 people, AFTER the ICUs are long empty, AFTER there are no deaths in NY at all. They’re already intentionally killed 20,000 elderly citizens with their ‘helping’ in a nod to the old eugenics programs. Isn’t that enough?

They always said, growing up, “How could Germany happen?” Didn’t seem that hard to understand to me: men are men. We are not immune. But here watching such madness universally lauded as the best outcome, an example to all, is certainly not what I most expected.

So…crime up 400% in NYC, muggers are beating police and murdering people in the streets. Since this is generally a response to the lockdowns, it won’t be a minute until the bad economy kills more people and ruins more lives than the virus. …Like I said. But beyond that, it has ruined more lives by actually removing all fun, all humor, all discussion, all discovery, all ‘humanity’ from society toward each other. Mask-Nazis are beating fellow shoppers for non-compliance. In what seems to be a competition to show that they don’t believe either in Covid, or in masks at all. If a guy was a leper, would you run up and jump on him to hang his bells on? Clearly they do not believe – in any way – that this is real. That this is dangerous. They just are ze rules. And ze rules are ze rules. Papers please, citizen. Except when it’s US, we’re the good people and we ourselves don’t follow ze rules…you understand. Astonishing.

Even if it were dangerous, wouldn’t there be a human approach to this: Oh do you have a condition? Did you forget? Did you know our policy? Can I help you? In my experience so far, the PoA, Person of Authority, comes up with their mask below their nose, gets 2 feet away, then proceeds to order you about while having not the faintest idea what the actual law – that is, non-law, never passed, doesn’t exist — policy, is. Then I have to quote their policy TO them, they having never even THOUGHT to read it themselves, while they protest ignorance of the law…to me. Ain’t rocket science folks. I’m only literate and can read the little black lines. Their city, state, corporation posted it publicly. Not genius level.

The compliant and fully participating people, quaran-teaming, staying home, wearing masks, also then have people over if it’s their mother/brother/friend…who is then in their own quarantine…which you just broke completely…with not the slightest self-awareness of science, while spending time complaining about “stupid red people who won’t wear masks”…while the parties doing the complaining are themselves medical professionals and the medically compromised. If it’s “us” it’s not dangerous, the ‘Rona is our god, the ‘Rona can tell. …Oh wait: just like I said. Any quarantine will be quarantine theater, and the worst of all worlds.

We’ll BOTH destroy the economy – by which I mean the jobs and dreams of all who work, leaving the traders, insiders and oligarchs stronger than ever – AND have no reduction in transmission. Which exactly happened. Killing TWICE as many, because of YOUR choices, not the virus at all, which has killed hardly anyone not on death’s door, and still counting. But that’s okay: we saw the same “camera off, mask off” behavior by Birx, Fauci, and every reporter at the White House. Again, they don’t believe a word. Because again, if this was a Black Plague, coughing up blood with a black neck, they wouldn’t act this way.

This is what happens when you tell lies, especially universal lies: your brain takes it in, it can follow, but your heart and body know better and stand aside. They are not “integrated.” Which means you are a person lacking “integrity.” Worse, when everything is a lie, soon you stop even examining data as it arrives, putting it in its proper place (e.g. that Covid CAN hurt you, but the numbers are different) and resisting or pushing back on the lies, so that there is a) open discussion and b) logical, practical, worked-out agreement on size, scale, and approach. Universal lies here lead to universal obedience despite all science, math, statistics, and personal experience, as we see; but also universal disobedience, yes as we see that some resist, but most just don’t follow the rules and claim they are, then justify themselves while attacking the “other” on the thinnest pretenses, the worst of both worlds.

Just like the lemon-sucking church ladies. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Well, it’s a good thing masks don’t work against viruses at all, or I’d be annoyed about this stuff. As it is, it’s simply compliance theatre, and having a lifetime of that already, I have a wealth of experience in how to navigate our oppressive, hypocritical, insane, unscientific, and self-defeating our culture, which will spare no expense to use a helicopter to track you down in the Outback, in the most solitary outreaches, and demand irrational compliance to a law that was never passed and doesn’t exist. Every day. With every person. Because of the lies no one will address, and the self-evident right and order no one will remedy. Like Assange.

But don’t worry, with our world-wide slave markets, human trafficking, organ harvesting, family-killing, property-destroying, mis-reporting, slanderous, self-serving ways, we’re everso much more enlightened than 1950, before the civil rights they trot out all day, having done not a single other Good Thing™ they can point to in the last 50 years. They also are now all so young, they mis-remember everything it actually was, and just invent, make up, fabricate, whatever-they-want-it-to-be. Reality-as-democracy, the mob, the majority, decide what’s reality, and then it is so! Reviving MLK’s peace torches and peace bricks, I’m sure. The Southern Democrats manning the front lines for Integrated schools against evil Republican Governors from Ohio, while openly communist JFK joined hands with Khrushchev and re-distributed property and set up social justice re-education camps, just like Bernie’s organizers said. I mean, that’s how I remember it, right?

This is where lies get you. This is why people warn not to use them, you know, right before they use them on you. It’s because “People who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you to commit atrocities.” As we see very clearly today. This is the one motto of Cuomo and the rest: We must never, ever, leave people alone. To their own actions and their own consequences. Their own discovery. Their own lives. The only ways are my ways. The only opinions are my opinions. The One True Party UniOpinion™. Submit or die.

“When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
– Dalrymple

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Debt Rattle August 20 2020

Aug 202020

August 20, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, Clinesmith, Convention, coronavirus, Covid19, gold, Iraq War, lockdown, mail-in, Operation Legend, Snowden, Trump, UBI 28 Responses »

Pierre-Auguste Renoir The Return of the Boating Party 1862

• Clinesmith Pleads Guilty In First Criminal Case Arising From Durham Probe (Fox)

• Clinesmith Gets The Wolfe Plea Deal… (CT)

• You Would Never Get The Deal That Clinesmith Got (SAC)

• Operation Legend: Over 200 Charged With Federal Crimes, 1,000 Arrested (Fox)

• Judge Orders New Election In New Jersey Race Cited For Mail-In Fraud (Hill)

• Iraq War Cheerleaders Front & Center At Last Night’s DNC AC)

• You Don’t Have To Be Excited (Sirota)

• History Is On Edward Snowden’s Side (Hill)

• New Zealand Lockdown Unlawful For First Nine Days, High Court Finds (NZH)

• Gold Pressures Empire (Brown)

• Germany Launches Universal Basic Income Experiment (ZH)

• Brilliant Trump Puts Himself On All Postage Stamps (Babylon Bee)

• Biden: ‘I Don’t Have Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Or Alzheimer’s’ (Babylon Bee)

US new cases now remain consistently lower than they’ve been since the last week of June. Surely a positive sign.

But the global trend looks very different.

Grenell LBGT issues

President @realDonaldTrump made history for #LGBT Americans — and nobody knows that better than @RichardGrenell. #GetOUTspoken pic.twitter.com/HJhY5kSuh0

— LogCabinRepublicans (@LogCabinGOP) August 19, 2020

There’s a feeling that people in the DOJ conspire with the FBI to single out Clinesmith, paint him as a lone wolf, and leave his superiors, which also include Mueller and Weissmann, alone.

That constitutes an enormous risk for the credibility of the DOJ, the FBI, and the entire US judicial system. For better or for worse, the right will simply not accept it.

• Clinesmith Pleads Guilty In First Criminal Case Arising From Durham Probe (Fox)

Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia James Boasberg accepted the plea. Clinesmith’s sentencing date has been set for Dec. 10 at 11 a.m. ET. Durham’s office on Wednesday said that Clinesmith’s guilty plea was to “one count of making a false statement within both the jurisdiction of the executive branch and judicial branch of the U.S. government, an offense that carries a maximum term of imprisonment of five years and a fine of up to $250,000.”

Clinesmith was referred for potential prosecution by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office, which conducted its own review of the Russia investigation. The inspector general accused Clinesmith, though not by name, of altering an email about former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to say that he was “not a source” for another government agency. Page has said he was a source for the CIA. The Justice Department relied on Clinesmith’s assertion as it submitted a third and final renewal application in 2017 to eavesdrop on Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

During the plea hearing, Boasberg asked Clinesmith to affirm that he “intentionally altered an email, and added language” that “individual number one” was “not a source…and you knew that statement was in fact not true.” Clinesmith replied, “At the time I thought the information I was providing was accurate, but I am agreeing the information I inserted was not originally there, and I inserted the information.” Boasberg went on to ask: “You intentionally altered the email to insert information that was not originally in the email?” “Yes, your honor,” replied Clinesmith.

Looks like he got a sweetheart plea deal without giving up anything for it.

• Clinesmith Gets The Wolfe Plea Deal… (CT)

As noted in the DOJ press release: “Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, 38, pleaded guilty today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to a false statement offense stemming from his altering of an email in connection with the submission of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) application.” Despite the falsification of court documents within a FISA document; and despite the likelihood of an intentional conspiracy to commit fraud upon the court in order to obtain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign – via Carter Page; the DOJ entered into a plea agreement on a single count of lying to federal officers. The agreement holds a maximum penalty of zero to six months in federal prison and a $250k fine.

This is the same plea agreement the DOJ (DC U.S. Attorney) previously gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe, who leaked the SAME, earlier, top-secret classified FISA application to the media on March 17, 2017. Judge James Boasberg noted early in the phone hearing that he is “currently the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” but that “this case, however, is a criminal case, it is not a FISC case, and it is a case that was randomly assigned.” As anticipated Boasberg said the FISA court could be seen as a “victim” in the case, but also said he would preside over the case fairly without recusing himself. He stated if either the defense or prosecution wanted him to recuse, then he would. Neither party requested.

Judge Boasberg noted the maximum penalty for a single false statements charge was five years in prison but the sentencing guideline calls for zero to six months. Sentencing is scheduled for December 10, 2020, after the election, at 11am. [..] From the nature of the plea, and the defense arguments in court and public, it is obvious there is no arrangement for Clinesmith’s assistance or cooperation on other investigative matters. This does not bode well for the proper administration of justice….

How dumb is Clinesmith?

• You Would Never Get The Deal That Clinesmith Got (SAC)

Judge James E. Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.who oversees the case reminded Clinesmith that he had the right to a trial by jury, which Clinesmith declined. Boasberg accepted his guilty plea Wednesday and scheduled a Dec. 10, sentencing hearing. Clinesmith’s lawyers reiterated that their client deeply regretted his actions which were not intentional but none-the-less were in violation of the law. What? Let’s talk about what Clinesmith did and think about what would happen to you if you lied on a document like a FISA warrant? Wait, look at what happened to Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone who was accused of lying to Congress (by the way, former CIA director John Brennan, former DNI James Clapper and a litany of others blatantly lied to Congress and are now selling books on Amazon).

Clinesmith didn’t just tell a small lie, he specifically omitted information that allowed the FBI to spy on a presidential campaign for political reasons. He had worked at the FBI for four years and was a subordinate that was made the fall guy by FBI leadership. He altered an email he received from the CIA in 2017 that showed Page was in no way a Russian asset and that he was an asset for the CIA. The Judges at the FISC court approved the application to wiretap Page, according to court records and numerous investigations. He altered an official government email indicating that Page wasn’t “a source” for the CIA, when it originally said he was. WOW! Folks, that is no small crime.

More than 100 participants listened in to the court ‘plea agreement hearing’ Wednesday and listened as Clinesmith waived his right to a trial by jury. He is expected to get only six months or less for altering the FISA application, which is considered one of the most classified documents pertaining to national security and its contents must be validated thoroughly by the FBI before being submitted to the court. “Mr. Clinesmith you understand we’ve already talked about your jury rights,” said Boasberg. He then said do you understand your decision to waive your rights to a jury?” “Yes, your honor,” said Clinesmith.

What about all those above Clinesmith, who absolutely ordered him to operate the way he did and who tacitly approved his omission in the FISA application. Clinesmith is nothing more than the fall guy. He’ll serve a short sentence for a massive crime against our nation and duly elected president.

Obamagate

Welcome, Barack and Crooked Hillary. See you on the field of battle! pic.twitter.com/ZrTKXcc6aU

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

Peaceful protesters one and all.

• Operation Legend: Over 200 Charged With Federal Crimes, 1,000 Arrested (Fox)

At least 217 people have been charged with a federal crime, and more than 1,000 arrests have been made in major metropolitan cities since the Department of Justice launched Operation Legend in July, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced on Wednesday. Nearly 400 firearms have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Barr launched Operation Legend on July 8 as “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative in which federal law enforcement agencies work in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight violent crime,” the DOJ said in a release.

It was named in honor of 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept in the early morning of June 29 in Kansas City, Mo. Last week, a Jackson County prosecutor announced second-degree murder charges against his suspected killer, 22-year-old Ryson Ellis, who was being held in Tulsa County Jail. “LeGend is a symbol of the many hundreds of innocent lives that have been taken in the recent upsurge of crime in many of our urban areas,” Barr said at a press conference in Kansas City. “His life mattered and the lives of all of those victims matter. His name should be remembered and his senseless death, like those of all the other innocent victims in this recent surge, should be unacceptable to all Americans.”

Barr said the federal government has dispatched to nine U.S. cities more than 1,000 additional agents from the FBI, ATF, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals Service to work shoulder to shoulder with state and local partners on homicide and assault squads to crack cases. The government has also allocated $78.5 million in grants to support additional police positions, hire more prosecutors and improve technology to solve firearms crimes. “We saw one result of those efforts last week when Kansas City Police arrested the suspected murderer of LeGend,” Barr said. “This arrest will not bring LeGend back but it will make his case an example of how we can come together to take violent criminals off the street and to make our communities safer.”

Election result in August 2021?

• Judge Orders New Election In New Jersey Race Cited For Mail-In Fraud (Hill)

A New Jersey judge on Wednesday ordered a new election for a Paterson City Council seat whose apparent winner has been charged with voter fraud. State Superior Court Judge Ernest Caposela ruled Wednesday that the new election will be held in November, The Associated Press reported. Alex Mendez appeared to have won the May 12 special election, but the U.S. Postal Service’s law enforcement branch said hundreds of mail-in ballots had been found in a Paterson mailbox. The Passaic County Board of Elections ultimately discounted 800 ballots. In June, Mendez and Paterson Council Vice President Michael Jackson were charged with voter fraud.

Officials also charged two other men, Abu Rayzen of Prospect Park and Shelim Khalique of Wayne, according to the AP. Lawyers for Councilman William McKoy, Mendez’s opponent, secured an injunction against Mendez being sworn in. All four defendants have denied the charges. President Trump has seized on the case, saying allowing nationwide mail-in voting in the fall election will lead to a similar scenario. In June, he cited the case, saying that comparatively, “Absentee Ballots are fine,” although many states make no such distinction between absentee and mail-in voting. The president’s reelection campaign on Tuesday sued the state in an attempt to stop plans to conduct the election predominantly by mail.

The virtual war party. Why AOC was snubbed: a giant move to the right is how the Dems see themselves win. They feel they have BLM and #MeToo in their pocket, so now they can leave them behind.

• Iraq War Cheerleaders Front & Center At Last Night’s DNC AC)

Democrats want to woo disaffected Republican and independent voters. But the degree to which the DNC convention prime time speaking slots favored defecting Republican neocons like Cindy McCain, John Kasich and Colin Powell over upstart fresh-faced Democrats like Julián Castro, Rep. Pramila Jayapal or Rep. Ayanna Pressley, was jarring; unabashed support for the Iraq War seemed to be the main thread that connects these erstwhile Republicans with Democrat speakers like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. On the first night, in a speech recorded at a literal crossroads in Westerville, Ohio, former Ohio governor John Kasich, said, “I’m a lifelong Republican, but that attachment holds second place to my responsibility to my country. That’s why I’ve chosen to appear at this convention. In normal times, something like this would probably never happen. But these are not normal times.”

Kasich was followed by former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R-N.J.), former Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.) and former Hewlett-Packard and eBay CEO and failed Republican gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman. Ostensibly, the purpose of this procession of former Republicans was to solidify Biden’s ranking with independent voters on the fence, but activists on the left were quick to notice the snub given their own compatriots’ positions. “The party should be focused on energizing Democratic voters rather than using their convention to reassure billionaires, corporate donors and Republican lobbyists that they won’t actually try to challenge the status quo,” said David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders and editor of Jacobin magazine.

While the left’s rising star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was given just a minute to speak, wherein she endorsed Bernie Sanders, Iraq War supporters and cheerleaders were prominently featured: failed Democratic presidential candidate and Obama’s former Secretary of State John Kerry unabashedly intoned that Joe Biden “knows you can’t spread democracy around the world, if you don’t practice it at home.” Gen. Colin Powell, chiefly remembered for his 2003 speech to the United Nations packed with lies about WMDs to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said Biden would “restore… values to the White House.” Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain also endorsed the long-time Delaware Senator, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will endorse him Wednesday night.

Sirota is sticking out his neck, and it won’t be appreciated that he tears into his own party, but he’s also still stuck in “but Trump is so much worse” mode.

• You Don’t Have To Be Excited (Sirota)

I’m wondering because this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m told I should be bouncing up in the morning, uplifted by the Democratic convention and its promise of a new era soon — 75 days. But at least for me, watching the cable TV snippets, the convention speeches and the celebratory Twitter dunks has left me with that feeling you get after eating junk food — full, but not nourished, bloated, tired and vaguely nauseous. I’ve worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, wins and losses. I’m literally married to a Democratic elected official. Over 20 years, I’ve put in an almost embarrassing amount of time working to support the Democratic Party.

So these feelings are somewhat new for me, and I don’t think I’m having them just because Democratic officials decided to turn this year’s convention into a promotional platform for Republican icons who attacked unions, laid off thousands of workers, promoted climate denial, endangered 9/11 survivors and lied us into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I’m also not glum just because the Democrats’ presidential standard-bearer is often an uninspiring mishmash of incoherent here’s-the-deal colloquialisms that mean nothing. I think the despair is deeper — and has something to do with the now-yawning gap between social expectation and reality.

Right now, if you are following politics at all, you are asked to feel chipper and energized. We are expected — no, required — to conjure 2008-level enthusiasm during this even darker time than the financial crisis, all so that we can move into a new, glorious moment of Hope™. Enthusiasm, though, comes from the assumption that the process is authentic and that what we’re told by our leaders is real. But that feeling has waned, because there is no pretense. For all the high-minded rhetoric, everyone on all sides of this situation — and I mean literally everyone — knows that Democratic politics today is more about brand and pantomime than about power and legislative action. You may not say it out loud, you may not like thinking about it — but I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, because somewhere deep down in there, everyone senses the fraudulence at hand.

Minds are wiped and Iraq War architects become Resistance heroes and Democratic convention speakers. Memories are scrubbed and Wall Street thieves become Democratic economic gurus and treasury secretaries. Amnesia takes hold and the Democratic governor of Mount Covid becomes a pandemic mancrush. Democrats lose a presidential campaign to Donald Trump by defending the Washington establishment — and now four years later they are running the same Washington valor campaign again, telling themselves they’re too legit to quit, baby.

If someone can explain the logic to me of pardoning Snowden but not Assange, I’m game.

• History Is On Edward Snowden’s Side (Hill)

It is an addictive tendency in politics to feel a sense of history about what it is one is fighting for. Everyone wants to believe that their heroes from ages past are smiling down on them while simultaneously rolling in their graves at the sight of whatever the opposition is doing. But the fact of the matter is that the vast network of scandal-ridden government agencies, clandestine secret courts, and diabolically unconstitutional statutes trying to destroy Snowden hails from a particularly dark, shameful chapter of America’s past. Snowden stands accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, championed by then-President Woodrow Wilson. Passed just two months after America’s entrance into World War I, the law sought to silence criticism of the war effort and crush dissent within the ranks of the armed forces.

In his State of the Union address just two years earlier, Wilson begged Congress to pass it, declaring, “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out… they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.” Now the law has withstood over a century of criticism and legal challenges from civil liberties advocates, and the misery it has inflicted on countless Americans has proven painfully obvious. In 1918, antiwar activist Charles Schenck was arrested for distributing flyers encouraging men to resist the draft. That same year, socialist Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison, deprived of his citizenship, and disenfranchised for life over nothing more than a speech he made criticizing the war. In January 1919, however, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to freedom of speech by concluding that neither’s arrest constituted a violation of the First Amendment.

And these are far from the only people to have been victimized by the very law being used to terrorize Snowden today. A search for just a few of the more well-known cases will yield the stories of journalist Victor L. Berger, activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning, and former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee Henry Kyle Frese. Discussing recent events in an April 2020 interview with journalist and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, Snowden warned, “Now, the only thing we have left — our rights, our ideals, our values as people — that’s what they’re coming for now, that’s what they’re asking us to give up, that’s what they’re wanting to change. And remember that, from the perspective of a free society, a virus is a serious problem… but the destruction of our rights is fatal — that’s permanent.”

Unlawful but the right thing to do. Yeah, you’re really helping.

• New Zealand Lockdown Unlawful For First Nine Days, High Court Finds (NZH)

The first nine days of lockdown were unlawful, a High Court decision says. New Zealanders were not actually required by law to stay at home in their bubbles until April 3, more than a week into lockdown, today’s ruling has found. “Even as this country returns to a state of semi-lockdown, there is one thing on which most commentators are agreed. The decisions taken by the New Zealand Government in March this year to “go hard and go early” were the right ones,” said the High Court decision, released this afternoon. “Even in times of emergency, however, and even when the merits of the Government response are not widely contested, the rule of law matters.” That was why Wellington lawyer Andrew Borrowdale sought a judicial review of the lockdown decision, asking for declarations of illegality in relation to three aspects of the Government’s initial Covid-19 response.

People like to blame the rise of gold on the demise of the dollar. But is it really the weakest horse in the glue factory?

• Gold Pressures Empire (Brown)

Before COVID and since the repo crisis of 2019 the stability and safety of the US financial system has increasingly come into focus. The US financial system has been forced to lower real interest rates to real negative territory, causing gold to look more attractive than holding increasingly worthless US dollars, since gold has intrinsic value when the US dollar has none. Instead of a classic store for inflationary dollars, the new demand for settlement in real bullion threatens the existence of the US gold exchange (COMEX) and threatens serious financial loss for the largest global players, including HSBC, JP Morgan, and UBS. Even Goldman Sachs has warned of this threat.

So… what has changed? It appears that some new element is at work. As explored in a prior article, the US regime’s new cold war versus China has caused that country to re-assess its relationship to US assets. China began divesting itself of US debt instruments in 2019. And, seldom reported in the west, China has recently escalated its effort to divest itself of US public debt (Treasury) holdings in 2020. In tandem with improved convertibility of the yuan (CNY) intel sources indicate that China may be the second largest holder of gold globally. Likewise, China may be using gold as a medium of exchange to avoid the aforesaid weaponization of the US dollar so favored by the current US regime. Even so, the foregoing does not fully explain the events we are seeing.

Traditionally the Federal Reserve and their dealers have controlled gold to limit central bank losses and prevent gold from effectively competing with or displacing the US dollar as a primary trusted monetary medium. But someone or some entity somewhere is now battling the US central bank for that control. Bottom line, monetary realists as observers still don’t understand why the historic central bank market manipulation of gold is presently failing. The US Central Bank must suppress the price of gold or face catastrophic losses that will cause an escalating downward spiral in the standing of the US dollar. [..] Regardless, argue, ignore, or deny it… the golden rule, “He who hath the gold rules” is as true now as it has ever been. The problem arises when that being of real value is supplanted by illusion. And it is only the illusion we have seen since August, 15th, 1971.

One “experiment” with a group of 120 people, the other with 668. The term “universal” is apparently very hard to understand. But it’s in UBI for a reason.

• Germany Launches Universal Basic Income Experiment (ZH)

Germany is about to try their hand at a universal basic income (UBI), after 1,500 people signed up for a three-year study to observe the effects on the economy and the wellbeing of the recipients, according to Business Insider. Of those who signed up, 120 individuals will receive the equivalent of US$1,430 per month for three years – just above Germany’s poverty line. Their lives will be compared to the remaining 1,380 people who will not receive the payments. The participants will be asked to complete questionnaires about their lives – including their emotional state and their work status, to see if UBI has had a meaningful impact.

Of course, as we and others have noted over and over and over, UBI experiments typically end in disaster. That said, it really helps if you’ve got a giant printing press and happen to be the world’s reserve currency during a pandemic (and for how long?). The study will also seek to determine whether UBI is a disincentive to work, or whether people will continue to ‘do fulfilling work, become more creative and charitable, and save democracy,’ according to the study’s lead investigator, Jürgen Schupp. Germany’s experiment has been funded by 140,000 private donations, and is being conducted by the German Institute for Economic Research.

“Universal basic income is the idea that a government should pay a lump sum of money to each of its citizens, usually once a month, regardless of their income and employment status, effectively replacing means-tested benefits. Its proponents argue that it would reduce inequality and also improve public wellbeing by providing people with more financial security. Its opponents say it would be too expensive and discourage people from going to work. The idea has gained traction in recent years amid recent financial crises and growing inequality in some Western countries.” -Business Insider

“A pro-basic income lobby group called Mein Grundeinkommen is funding the experiment. The group has used donations from its supporters to fund monthly €1,000 ($1,194) payments of for 668 people since 2014. Finland experimented its with own form of Universal Basic Income for nearly two years between January 2017 and December 2018 but concluded that while it led to people out of work feeling happier, it did not lead to increased employment, the BBC reported. During the experiment, 2,000 unemployed Finns received €560 ($667) a month.” -Business Insider

“..forcing the Democrats to reverse course and abolish the USPS once and for all.”

• Brilliant Trump Puts Himself On All Postage Stamps (Babylon Bee)

..Forcing Democrats To Push For Abolishing USPS

Sources are reporting that Trump has dealt a killer blow in his ongoing war against his sworn enemy, the U.S. Post Office. In a move of sheer, mind-blowing brilliance, Trump directed the Post Office to put his face on every single stamp, forcing the Democrats to reverse course and abolish the institution once and for all. The new stamp, dubbed “The Trump-Stamp,” to be used on all pieces of mail features a smiling Donald Trump, with the caption “GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER.” Don Lemon broke the news in a tearful address to the nation last night. “Our democracy is over,” he said. “It doesn’t exist anymore. I will never send another piece of mail ever again, and neither should you or else you’re a racist.” Antifa and BLM responded by marching on local post offices and burning them down. Enthusiastic Trump supporters quickly bought up all the stamps. They are now selling for $3,000 apiece online.

“Oh, and he also cleared me of Alzheimer’s.”

• Biden: ‘I Don’t Have Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Or Alzheimer’s’ (Babylon Bee)

In a recent live stream, Joe Biden proudly declared that his physician had cleared him of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. “My doc says I don’t have Alzheimer’s, dementia, or Alzheimer’s,” he said confidently. “Oh, and he also cleared me of Alzheimer’s.” Aides could be heard scrambling around to try to cut the video feed. “Yep — completely clear of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s,” he said. “Wait – who are you people? What are all these cameras doing here? Who am I? WHO AM I!?!?!” At the end of the video, after aides finally calmed him down but before they were able to cut the feed, Biden added, “My doc says I don’t have Alzheimer’s, dementia, or Alzheimer’s.” The Press quickly praised the speech as one of Biden’s most coherent.

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Video Carl Jung

“We need to understand psychology because the only real danger that exists is man himself”—Carl Jung, 1959 pic.twitter.com/KIbcKYSOqx

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 20, 2020

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