AP | Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing
target for conservatives, has a memoir coming out April 6.
The
book is called “Beautiful Things” and will center on the younger
Biden’s well publicized struggles with substance abuse, according to
Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Acquired in the fall
of 2019, “Beautiful Things” was kept under wraps even as Biden’s
business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and
others during the election and his finances a matter of investigation by
the Justice Department.
“Beautiful
Things” was circulated among several authors and includes advance
praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott.
“In
his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves
again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can
take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his
blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is
both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question:
Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and
the beautiful.”
In a snippet
released by Gallery, Biden writes in his book, “I come from a family
forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.”
The
president and first lady released a statement Thursday saying, “We
admire our son Hunter’s strength and courage to talk openly about his
addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find
hope.”
During one of last fall’s presidential debates, Joe Biden defended his son from attacks by Trump.
“My
son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a
drug problem,” the Democratic candidate said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s
fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
TAC | I read the files on Hunter Biden’s laptop. They paint a sleazy picture
of multi-million dollar wire transfers, potential money laundering, and
possible tax evasion. They raise serious questions about the judgment
and propriety of Jim Biden, the president-elect’s brother, and Joe
himself. Call it smoke not fire, but smoke that should not be ignored.
The files were supplied to TAC by a known source previously established to have access.
Joe Biden is lucky a coordinated media effort kept Hunter out of the campaign. The FBI has had the laptop since 2019, when they subpoenaed
the files in connection with a money laundering investigation. Federal
investigators also served a round of subpoenas on December 8, a month
after the election, including one for Hunter Biden himself. While the
legal thrust of the investigation by the federal prosecutor in Delaware
is taxes, the real focus seems to be on Hunter’s Chinese connections.
This all comes after the FBI has had over a year to examine some of the
same files TAC looked at.
In the final weeks before the election, Hunter’s laptop fell into Republican hands. The story went public in the New York Post,
revealing that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then vice president,
to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma less than a year
before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into
firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company. The meeting is
mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser
to the board of Burisma, sent Hunter Biden about a year after Hunter
himself joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month with no obvious work duties past making such introductions.
Nice
work if you can get it, and to get it your dad better be vice
president. If all that alone does not meet the test of impropriety, we
need a new test. Hunter Biden’s value to clients was his perceived
access to the White House. His father Joe was at least a passive
participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.
The
problem was many Americans never heard this story. Twitter led a social
media charge to not allow the information online. After years of
salivating over every bit of Trump family gossip, the mainstream media
claimed the Biden story did not matter, or was Russian disinfo. Surveys suggest the information could have swung the election if voters had known about it. One survey showed that enough people in battleground states would have changed their votes to give Trump 311 electoral votes and reelection.
No
mind, really. As soon as it became clear Joe Biden was going to win,
the media on all sides lost interest in the laptop. The story became
about the story. It devolved into think pieces about the Orwellian role
of social media and some online giggling about the sex tapes on the
laptop. But our short attention spans have consequences. The laptop
still has a lot to tell us.
Hunter’s laptop was chock-a-block with video that appears to show Hunter
smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as
numerous other sexually explicit images. There’s evidence there that
Hunter spent money on escorts, some $21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of depravities.
There is also Joe’s car insurance information, Hunter’s SSN, pages of
call logs, and lots of email addresses, bank account numbers, and
personal information of prominent people. None of the material is
encrypted, just dumped on a standard MacBook Pro using the password
“Hunter02.” The machine was regularly connected to the internet and
might as well have had an electronic sign on it saying “My dad is
important, here’s what you’ll need to blackmail me and others to get to
him.”
caitlinjohnstone | Remember when Americans shook the earth with massive protests
demanding an end to the police state and the entire liberal
establishment just kept saying “I hear you, I agree with you” and then
did absolutely nothing to even reduce police brutality? It’s important
to remember such lessons.
People would ask me “Why are you
supporting Black Lives Matter Caitlin?? Don’t you see all the
corporations and corporate Dems support it? Why would they do that if it
didn’t serve them?” This is why they did it. Empty words of support can defuse a situation far easier than open opposition.
Imagine
if all the plutocrats, pundits and politicians had just yelled at the
BLM protesters and admonished them to stop? It would have only turned
people against them with far more aggression, and it would have exposed
the fact that they are the enemy. It’s much more effective to say “I
hear you, I agree with you” with no intention of taking any real action.
And
really this is all institutions like the Democratic Party exist to do:
defuse left populism and crush grassroots activism not with opposition,
but with empty words of agreement that have no intention of action
behind them. They’re just a bottomless pit that tricks people into
pouring their energy into it, thereby stopping all leftward movement.
A
kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will tell their parents “No! I
don’t wanna!” A very clever kid who doesn’t want to clean their room
will say “Yes! I’ll get on that right away” and then enjoy hours of
peace and relaxation without parental nagging, and without
cleaning. It’s the exact same way with the powerful. It’s much more
efficacious for them to pretend to be on your side than expose the fact
that they’re not. In the end the result is the same: the kid doesn’t
clean their room. But they don’t get the kind of pushback they’d get if
they said no.
Manipulators are good at manipulation. The people
who make their way to the top in a corrupt system are manipulators. You
can’t take their words at face value, mustn’t mistake vapid placation
for victory. They’ll happily give you a mountain of words in exchange
for your real treasure.
Commenter at Naked Capitalism called Amfortas the Hippie dropped this today, I'm copying it here apropos of nothing in particular....,
Anecdote on the vibe in north houston 2-3-2021…feels very germane to this part of the zeitgeist: cousin calls, and says he’s coming up…same worry in his voice as a year ago, when he came out here to hide from the pandemic and correlated uncertainty. (he stayed til late april).
This time, his worry is civil unrest, violence, insurrection.
He’s a self-described “manwhore”…never nailed down…having numerous women all over texas that he breezes though and stays with for a while when work brings him near(he’s a roofer and tree expert and heavy equipment operator…with ample talent in all of them). The women in question are all divorcees, and seem happy with the arrangement: playing happy married to a hot guy who leaves before he becomes a chore.
Anyway…lately, he’s been hanging around north houston…where we’re both from. Woodlands, magnolia, tomball, etc.
He lives in his truck on a spread of pineywoods he inherited…and gets a hotel room off and on, for a week at a time. He spends a lot of time in bars, beer joints, dancehalls and clubs. It is this part of his life where we find the Doom: he says the clubs, etc are at best ¼ populated…and that the ratio of men to women is, at best, 3 to 1. of course this is the pandemic, and all…we both understand that…although he chafes at the mandates more than I do.
The scary part is the sentiments of the remaining men in these stag halls: “f&&k it…i ain’t doing this any more…they’ve screwed us all…” etc.
the way he puts it:”they’re tired of everything…the pandemic, the half-assed attempts at mitigating the pandemic, the economic results of those half-assed attempts, the lack of material support to mitigate the half-assed mitigations…and on and on in that vein…”
I interject: “so…blue balls, combined with hopelessness and angst”
him:”exactly!”
so I ask what he thinks will become of this mood/vibe…
“While it’s a relief to see
briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information,
the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White
House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House
correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”
“It
pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House
Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source
reportedly said.
While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move
“textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press
secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt
questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.
“The
requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose
members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they
are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.
Having questions in advance would indeed be a good way to help
insulate press secretary Jen Psaki (for whom liberals are already developing an unwholesome celebrity crush)
from hard questions. This would avoid sticky situations like when Psaki
deflected inquiries about treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s conflict of
interest with the Citadel controversy by babbling about Yellen being the first woman in her position and claiming that receiving $800,000 in speaking fees from that company is no reason for her to recuse herself.
So
this is just one more item on the steadily growing pile of fake things
about this administration. Everything about it is phony. This is the
Astroturf Administration.
mondediplo | Worrying about the crisis of authority is what liberals do these days in
the United States. Older concerns, like the economic problems of
blue-collar whites, have become a subject for liberal sneering, but
restoring the rightful hierarchy of credentialed expertise has become a
matter of real moral urgency. ‘Respect Science’ say the signs and stickers you see in liberal neighbourhoods. Respect expertise. Respect hierarchy. Know your place.
Foreign policy, it is said, must be reclaimed by the foreign policy ‘community’. Central bank policy must be protected
from the influence of farmers. From the consensus views of the relevant
professions there can be no dissent, at least not in public. ‘Doubt,’ I
read recently in the Washington Post,
‘is a cardinal virtue in the sciences ... But it can be disastrous in
public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those
same experts.’ Therefore it has to be kept quiet, if not removed from
view altogether — a thought-suppressing logic that can be extended into
any field of knowledge you care to mention.
This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to
rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is
about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and
here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable.
A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again
and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great
national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional
elites.
Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented
unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and
justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war
against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and
likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to
truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.
Which is to say that the effect of all this moral judgmentalism has
been the opposite of what was intended. To spend four years scolding
people in the shrillest notes of moral hysteria was perhaps the perfect
recipe for convincing Trump supporters to redouble their dedication to
this deluded and prejudiced man. It is well known that shaming people
for failing to live up to your personal high standards of Covid hygiene
is not a good strategy for changing their behaviour. Multiply that
dynamic by 300 million and you’ve got America in the age of Trump. Ten
per cent of a nation energetically scolding the other 90%.
If historians still exist in 30 years, they will look back upon these
last four years with disgust and bewilderment. Disgust when they
contemplate the loud, vain ignoramus who sat in the White House scarfing
hamburgers and spinning conspiracy theories on Twitter while Covid
burned through the nation.
But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with
disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the
great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon
Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU
chief, relates
how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined
themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What
these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that
‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great
weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target
in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically —
and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’
As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack
on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship
(via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem
is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to
describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself
contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the
authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.
antiwar | The Department of Homeland Security issued on Wednesday a nationwide terror
alert lasting until April 30. The alert warns of potential terrorist attacks
from Americans who are “ideologically motivated” and have “objections
to the exercise of government authority and the presidential transition, as
well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
The language used in this alert suggests that millions of Americans are potential
terrorists. Second Amendment supporting, antiwar, anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-militarization,
pro-life, and anti-Federal Reserve activists certainly have “objections
to the exercise of government authority.” They are certainly viewed by
the political class and its handmaidens in big tech and the mainstream media
as ideological extremists. Anyone who gets his news from sources other than
mainstream media or big tech, or who uses certain “unapproved” social
media platforms, is considered to have had his grievances “fueled by false
narratives.” For something to be considered a false narrative, it need
only contradict the “official” narrative.
The "domestic terrorist” alert is the latest sign that activities
on January 6 on Capitol Hill, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, are being
used to advance a long-standing anti-liberty agenda. Legislation expanding the
federal government’s authority to use its surveillance and other unconstitutional
powers against “domestic terrorists” is likely to soon be considered
by Congress. Just as the PATRIOT Act was written years before 2001, this legislation
was written long before January 6. The bill’s proponents are simply taking
advantage of the hysteria following the so-called insurrection to push the bill
onto the congressional agenda.
Former CIA Director John Brennan recently singled out libertarians as among
the people the government should go after.
This is not the first time libertarians have been smeared. In 2009, a federally-funded
fusion center identified people who supported my presidential campaign, my Campaign
for Liberty, or certain Libertarian and Constitution parties candidates as potentially
violent extremists.
The idea that libertarianism creates terrorists is absurd. Libertarians support
the non-aggression principle, so they reject using force to advance their political
goals. They rely instead on peaceful persuasion.
Libertarianism is being attacked because it does not support just reforming
a few government policies. Instead, it presents a formidable intellectual challenge
to the entire welfare-warfare state.
Reuters | BGI Group, the world’s largest genomics company, has worked with China’s
military on research that ranges from mass testing for respiratory
pathogens to brain science, a Reuters review of research, patent filings
and other documents has found.
The review,
of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in
Chinese and English, shows BGI’s links to the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) include research with China’s top military supercomputing experts.
The extent of those links has not previously been reported.
BGI
has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the
outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia
and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co, the company’s
subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price
over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.
But
top U.S. security officials have warned American labs against using
Chinese tests because of concern China was seeking to gather foreign
genetic data for its own research. BGI has denied that.
The
documents reviewed by Reuters neither contradict nor support that U.S.
suspicion. Still, the material shows that the links between the Chinese
military and BGI run deeper than previously understood, illustrating how
China has moved to integrate private technology companies into
military-related research under President Xi Jinping.
The
U.S. government has recently been warned by an expert panel that
adversary countries and non-state actors might find and target genetic
weaknesses in the U.S. population and a competitor such as China could
use genetics to augment the strength of its own military personnel.
BGI
has worked on PLA projects seeking to make members of the ethnic Han
Chinese majority less susceptible to altitude sickness, Reuters found,
genetic research that would benefit soldiers in some border areas.
Elsa
Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, who has provided testimony to U.S. Congressional
committees, told Reuters that China’s military has pushed research on
brain science, gene editing and the creation of artificial genomes that
could have an application in future bioweapons. She added that such
weapons are not currently technically feasible.
BGI’s pattern of collaboration with the Chinese military was a “reasonable concern to raise” for U.S. officials, said Kania.
weforum | In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and
these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt
human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways,
ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data
colonialism and of digital dictatorships.
Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs,
and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether
people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough.
Suppose you are a fifty-years-old truck driver, and you just lost your
job to a self-driving vehicle. Now there are new jobs in designing
software or in teaching yoga to engineers – but how does a
fifty-years-old truck driver reinvent himself or herself as a software
engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just
once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation
revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job
market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a
cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full
potential.
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new
jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to
struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really
big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be
irrelevant than exploited.
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a
new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of
their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic
and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an
ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which
I think might be the defining equation of life in the twenty-first
century:
B x C x D = AHH!
Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh.
If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you
can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me
better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my
political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest
fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And
you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.
WaPo | The
particular targets of the GameStop crowd are hedge funds and short
sellers. Here, a couple of definitions may be useful. Generally
speaking, a hedge fund is a small-to-medium-size company that makes
money by choosing smart investments. There is nothing nefarious about
this. To the contrary, if you don’t like too-big-to-fail banks that get
backstopped by taxpayers, small-enough-to-fail hedge funds ought to be celebrated.
If you worry about complex financial conglomerates with corrupting
conflicts of interest, single-purpose investment boutiques are simpler
and healthier. On the online forums where the GameStoppers congregate,
you read complaints about hedge funds being bailed out during the crisis
of 2008. Actually, banks, brokers, insurers, mortgage providers, money
market funds and even car companies got rescues. Hedge funds got
nothing.
What
about short sellers? These are specialists who research stocks that
might go down, sometimes because bosses are illegally covering up bad
news about their companies. When short sellers identify a case of fraud
or similar, they borrow and sell the stock, hoping to buy it back at a
lower price later. Again, there is nothing evil about this. To the
contrary, it’s a way of keeping prices honest. A market without short
sellers is like a political system without investigative journalists.
This,
however, is not how GameStoppers see things. They have gone after a
short seller named Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts,
sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be
delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his
children with threatening and profane language, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps not surprisingly, Left has announced he will stop playing the game. Irrational stock prices will be that much likelier.
The
worry is that the GameStoppers will now target others. Short sellers
operate in the open: You can check short-selling volumes for any given
stock on Yahoo.
By whipping up frenzied buying of a heavily shorted company,
speculators can cost the shorts billions and maybe put them out of
business. Already, GameStoppers are buying other beaten-down companies,
such as cinema giant AMC. A Goldman Sachs index of heavily shorted
stocks is up sharply this month because the shorts have been routed.
Hedge
funders and short sellers are out to get rich: They are certainly not
angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and
research and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics. Over
the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels —
they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the
fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth matters.
wired | At its heart, the GameStop story is about small-time traders—many, according to pressaccounts,
young and inexperienced—going up against established players and
winning, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a person (so far,
at least). The WallStreetBets subreddit describes
itself as “a gathering place of millions of unique individuals who are
tired of being run over by the big guys and are each fighting back in
their own way.” Its investors, who use the page to discuss strategy and
timing, were exploiting the rigidity in “short” positions of hedge
funds, who bet that GameStop’s stock would decline in value. Such
“short” funds represent a commitment to provide a share of GameStop at a
specific time, no matter the price, magnifying the profit potential if
the redditors could push the stock in the other direction and send the
hedge funds scrambling to meet their obligations.
This week, the
GameStop story became a national talking point, particularly on Twitter,
where users of all stripes and political persuasions cheered on the
financial chaos. The billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Mark Cuban defended WallStreetBets, as did the left-wing representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
each pleased to see hedge funds undone by their own greedy ways. An
arcane finance story became a class-warfare parable for the general
public, with regular folks acting just as clinically as the hedge fund
executives they were vanquishing—that is, being upfront about treating
investments as mere manipulations, as opposed to some complex matter
meant to assess the genuine value of a company. As Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter:
“Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long
history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message
board of posters also treating the market as a casino.”
On Thursday, Robinhood blocked
the kind of speculative trades of GameStop stock that were used by the
redditors to drive up its share price. Though the brokerage reportedly
did this to protect its own finances, the move nonetheless seemed
destined to backfire in ways similar to Egypt’s drastic internet
shutdown, which ultimately helped the protests spread. Suddenly, the
GameStop controversy changed from a revenge fantasy against hedge funds
to a matter of economic fairness: Are the same tools available to all
investors, no matter their wealth? (The comparison is obviously
imperfect—unless you really see the Reddit day traders as freedom
fighters. More to the point, by blocking speculative trades of GameStop,
Robinhood could be seen as protecting new investors who seem destined
to lose money when GameStop’s share price comes back to earth.)
Next
up in this cycle, one imagines, is the recognition that this
revolution, whether tolerated or quashed, won’t change much at all. And
like the authoritarians who found their way back to power, the hedge
fund managers are likely to rein in the trading apps and their
mischievous fans, ensuring their hold on the markets.
That’s the
thing about the internet—time and again, it has proven better for the
top dogs. At the very least, it certainly won’t threaten them. If we are
foolish enough, and heartless enough, to allow a financial system that
so thoroughly separates wealth creation from work and genuine
improvement to society, well then the internet will make this skewed
system even more lucrative for those who play. The richest will reap the
wealth and the poorest, least experienced traders will end up holding
the bag. An empty bag, at that.
caitlinjohnstone | I really hope Americans get rid of that dangerous right wing lunatic in congress, by which I mean all of the people in congress.
Marjorie
Taylor Greene is not more crazy than all the DC politicians who agree
the US should maintain planetary hegemony using bombs, regime change
ops, starvation sanctions and nuclear threats. She’s just a less popular
genre of crazy.
There is an ideological struggle to determine
whether the Republican Party will be the kind of bat shit crazy that
believes in QAnon and Jewish Space Lasers or just the kind of bat shit
crazy that believes in carpet bombing Iran and destroying the ecosystem
for money.
Stop normalizing status quo politics.
Stop normalizing ecocide.
Stop normalizing imperialism.
Stop normalizing mass murder.
Stop normalizing nuclear standoffs.
Stop normalizing starvation sanctions.
Stop normalizing exploitation.
Stop normalizing oppression.
Stop normalizing the mainstream so-called “centrists” who promote these extremist evils.
If
people could really grasp how horrific our status quo is, wingnut
freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t stand out against the
background, because everyone who helps bolster this murderous and
depraved status quo is also a wingnut freak. And there would be just as
urgent a push to cast out all the other freaks as there is to cast out
her.
The
ruling class keeps Americans as poor as possible so they can’t use
their money to do naughty things like fund leftist political campaigns
or sabotage hedge funds.
People
are like two clicks away from burning Wall Street to the ground and
setting up guillotines and mainstream analysts are still wringing their
hands about how gamer trolls might be compromising the integrity of the
market somewhat.
deagel |There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing
on the United States of America (USA). They won't be answered one by one but
below you can find some explanation, thoughts and reflections. We are going to
keep this as short as possible.
The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of
the
forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN,
USG,
etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page.
There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources
such
as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources
are from
the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority. For
example, several years
ago Dagong, the Chinese ratings agency,
published a report analyzing the physical economy of the States
comparing it with those of
China, Germany and Japan. The conclusion was that the US GDP was
something
between $5 to $10 trillion instead of $15 trillion as officially
reported by the
USG. We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by
governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree. Historically it
is well
known that the former Soviet Union was making up fake statistics years
before
its collapse. Western as well as other countries are making up their
numbers
today to conceal their real state of affairs. We are sure that many
people out
there can find government statistics in their own countries that by
their own
personal experience are hard to believe or are so optimistic that may
belong to
a different country.
Despite the numeric data "quantity" there is a "quality" model which has not a
direct translation into numeric data. The 2014 strain of Ebola has a death rate
of 50-60% but try to imagine what would happen if there is a pandemic of Ebola
with hundreds of thousands or millions infected with the virus. So far the few
cases of Ebola-infected people have "enjoyed" intensive healthcare with
anti-viral and breathing assistance but above all with abundant human support by
Physicians and nurses. In a pandemic scenario that kind of healthcare won't be
available for the overwhelming number of infected leading to a dramatic increase
of the death rate due to the lack of proper healthcare. The "quality" factor is
that the death rate could increase to 80-90% in a pandemic scenario from the
stated 50-60% rate. The figure
itself is not important what is relevant is the fact that the scenario can
evolve beyond the initial conditions from a 50% death toll to more than 90%. By
the way, no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.
The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the
upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th
century, the
key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was
immigration
with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit
expansion and
the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The
collapse
of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of
its
population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the
pension
funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles
and ponzi
schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse
accelerating
itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States.
This
unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern
with
unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring
will
surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus
becoming
foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American
population
migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe -
suffering a
similar illness - won't be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be
horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union's population was
poorer than
the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the
following struggle in
the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride.
Might we
say "Twice the pride, double the fall"? Nope. The American standard of
living is
one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having
added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial
system. When
pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and
there are
no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least
younger
people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the
population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or
40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet
Union's one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.
The Demographic crisis in the former Soviet Union countries has extended for
over two decades, if we accept that it ended early in this decade (2010s). The
demographic crisis will hit the World in the near future and is projected to
last between three and eight decades more or less depending on technological
breakthrough and environmental issues. The aftermath is more likely a frozen
picture with the population numbers staying the same for a very, very long
period of time. The countries forecast population numbers do reflect
birth/deaths but also migratory movements. Many countries are going to increase
their gross population due to immigration while their native population may
shrink.
Over the past two thousand years we have witnessed the Western civilization
built around the Mediterranean Sea shifting to Northern Europe and then by the
mid 20th century shifting to an Atlantic axis to finally get centered into the
States in the past 30 years. The next move will see the civilization being
centered in Asia with Russia and China on top. Historically a change in the
economic paradigm has resulted in a death toll that is rarely highlighted by
mainstream historians. When the transition from rural areas to large cities
happened in Europe many people unable to accept the new paradigm killed
themselves. They killed themselves by a psychological factor. This is not
mainstream but it is true. A new crisis joins old, well known patterns with new
ones.
Sorry to disappoint many of you with our forecast. It is getting worse and worse
every year since the beginning of the pre-crisis in 2007. It is already said
that this website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our
information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees.
We are not linked to any government in any way, shape or form. We are not a
death or satanic cult or arms dealers as some BS is floating around the internet
on this topic. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a model
whether flawed or correct. It is not God's word or a magic device that allows to
foresee the future.
nakedcapitalism | Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.
Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.
Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.
What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.
FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE
thehill |Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets
(WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur
online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this
week.
A Discord
spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to
remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory
content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”
“The
server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time
due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines,
including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading
misinformation,” the spokesperson added.
The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of
personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to
college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring
this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal
activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”
This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win.
theverge |Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organizedcampaigns
to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s
App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a
one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it
back up to nearly four stars.
Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z
Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks
made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have
already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make
their anger heard.
RT | A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook
due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the
page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge
the GameStop debacle.
The Robinhood Stock
Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken
offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.
The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.
Tran,
however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on
the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions”
after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed
in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic
price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop,
AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.
“The major institutions are
attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting
people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more
powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”
americancompass | Certainly don’t laze about smoking weed, or even worse, mango Juul
pods, playing that god-forsaken game machine. That PS fucking 4, or
whatever. My generation, we didn’t sit staring at a computer, wasting
our days away. We made things. We worked out our bodies. We built
things. Come on. Make something of yourself. What are you going to do
all your life? Stock shelves during the day, and eat nuggets and play
that game at night? What are you, a loser? Be like Jim. You remember
Jim. He studied hard, went to Harvard, and now works at a big financial
firm. Come on, you lazy loser. Make something of yourself.
It is pretty simple. At the very, very top of our meritocracy is a
big game called Wall Street, that the smartest and cleverest get to
play, and get paid big bucks for it. They get to choose their character:
Trader, Salesperson, Broker, or Lawyer. The traders get to choose their
weapon: Stocks, Bonds, Mortgages, Derivatives. Then they are off,
navigating different levels, slaying this and that company, currency, or
country.
Below that is that vast landscape of losers who spend their days
building roads, growing food, flipping hamburgers, teaching kids,
building small businesses, landscaping yards, and their nights shooting
hoops, or reading books, or caring for kids, or going to church. Or, God
forbid, playing XBOX or PS4. Those are the worst.
A lot of those losers, of every variety but especially the people who
play video games, also spend a lot of time on Reddit, or Discord, or
Twitch, live-streaming, shitposting, and just having fun.
When they were doing this, some of them noticed that Wall Street was
also just a game, and a very profitable one. Sure, it was a little
different than Zelda, or Grand Theft Auto, or Demon Souls, but it was a
game nonetheless. So they started dipping their toes in and learning
this pretty cool and serious game. Then they started telling their
friends about it, who told their friends and so on and so on.
Some made a little money here and there, others got run over, but
hey, it was just another game. Cool. Of course they were the outsiders,
the losers, the clowns fucking around for shits and giggles. They
understood that. They knew nobody treated them seriously. Hell, they had
been called lazy losers all their lives. Might as well embrace that. So
they proudly named themselves “Degenerates” and “Autistic Retards.” Own
the stigma, because you ain’t gonna ever shake it or lose it no matter
how hard you try.
They dabbled here and there, got a little better at it, and soon
attracted a few serious players with serious money into their fold. Wall
Street players, slumming it, who saw a community of misfits they could
lead, teach, or scam, depending on their ethics.
So it went, and their numbers and ability grew, and then this summer
some of the cleverest Wall Street players, who specialized in making big
bets on companies failing, came after GameStop, something they had
personal views on. That perked up their interest. Making it even cooler,
some legitimately skilled Wall Street players who had joined their
island of misfit toys pointed out that GameStop was a good buy, not a
good sell, and convinced some of the degenerates to join them.
CTH | Everything from within the DC system is designed to lie to you.
Accept that and you begin to realize how events are NEVER what they
appear on the surface.
The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is Jeffrey Sprecher.
Remember the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in
regards to Senator Loeffler? Well, Mr. Sprecher is the husband of
former Senator Kelly Loeffler.
Kelly Loeffler’s seat was purchased by their elite status and
position. Why would a billionaire run for an elected office paying a
few hundred thousand?
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell positioned Loeffler with committee assignments based on that status of influence and affluence.
Jeffrey Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler entered politics for their elite interests.
The ruse of the DecptiCons is always that a motive to the benefit of
the republic lies behind their candidacy. This is the same ruse that lay
behind Mitt Romney, another DeceptiCon. There are no purely altruistic
motives behind these politicians, particularly in the Senate.
Their motives are all about status, power and greed. They are not
representatives of the people; they are representative of their own
elite fellowship and interests, and this crosses both parties.
Everything else is chaff and countermeasures to ensure their position.
That is the brutal and uncomfortable reality to accept. The entire system is corrupt.
The swamp is deep and filled with DeceptiCons who will strike at any
given moment once they attain a useful position. President Trump went to
Georgia to campaign for Senator Kelly Loeffler. Simultaneous to
President Trump’s visible support, Loeffler’s husband Jeffrey Sprecher, owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), announced the NYSE will not blacklist Chinese telecommunications firms outlined in Trump’s executive order.
CTH | It started with a bunch of smart ordinary Wall Street market watchers
assembling on Reddit and noticing that hedgefunds were making millions
destroying the stock value of GameStop (GME) -and others- by short
selling the stock and trading the position.
The hedgefunds were so greedy the short-sellers borrowed more than
140% of the total number of shares of stock of GME (GameStop) in order
to destroy it. The stock value dropped from $20 to $4 as the sharks
made millions in the short-sells. That’s when the Reddit investment
community,Wall Street Bets, noticed an opportunity.
One of the issues with short-selling is that short-sellers must always
eventually purchase the stocks they borrowed. That means if the stock
value increases you are committed to buying it, you will lose money, and
you cannot get away from the loss in your short-sell position so long
as the stock value is high.
Knowing the borrowed shares were more than the total number of
outstanding shares of the entire GME stock, the rebellious alliance knew
the short-sellers (hedgefunds) would have to eventually buy them. So
the independent group, mass numbers of individual investors, started
purchasing shares and driving up the GameStop stock value.
WaPo | The market gyrations involving GameStop’s 64-fold rise
in price since August are certainly eye-opening. How a money-losing
company whose stock previously traded less than 10 million shares a day
can shoot up to trading 50 million-plus shares
in a day — and cause the stock price of a completely unrelated but
similarly named Australian company (GME Resources) to rise 50 percent on
Thursday — is hard to reconcile with today’s uber-efficient
high-frequency markets.
Media
coverage routinely refers to GameStop’s price surge as a bubble. But
what are financial bubbles — and what causes them? As I noted when
writing about bubbles in 2008 in the Review of Financial Studies,
the phenomenon had been around for centuries — in the 18th century,
Scottish economist Adam Smith called it “overtrading.” But that doesn’t
explain what starts a bubble in the first place. Plenty of economists,
historians and others have tried.
The
Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, in an observation that resonates
today, argued in 1898 that bubbles are attributable to interest rates
that are too low. In 1929 — we know what happened
in the markets then — the Dutch economist historian N.W. Posthumus
cited the entrance of nonprofessional buyers fueled by credit. In this
view, today’s Federal Reserve and the Reddit crowd would seem natural
culprits.
An
alternative view in history is that bubbles can emerge if traders are
rational but markets are irrational. The economist and historian Charles
P. Kindleberger makes this argument in his classic 1978 book, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises.”
What drives market irrationality, Kindleberger says, is the fallacy of
composition: Each trader believes he can sell at a higher price, and if
he can in fact do so, then it is rational for him to buy. But not
everyone in the market can do that, so the market as a whole behaves
irrationally.
A variant on this irrationality of the market theme underlies the “beauty contest”
analogy offered in 1936 by the English economist John Maynard Keynes.
He argued that individuals do not pick stocks based on what they think a
firm is worth, but rather on what they think other people will
think it is worth. (Has Keynes’s “beauty contest” morphed into today’s
“chat room”?) In that description, each individual is acting rationally,
but the market overall is not.
Short sellers in GameStop — mostly hedge funds that had been betting massively on the company’s stock to fall — had reportedly lost $23.6 billion
as of Wednesday. They may find little consolation in the dictum often
attributed to Keynes: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can
stay solvent.”
westonaprice | Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our
presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the
pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not
vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines
may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to
distinguish the difference. Fist tap Dale.
factcheck | If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,”
then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout
the video, making claims primarily about patents.
Martin runs a company calledM-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.
M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive
modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne
Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC
filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.
Samuel Rosen,
an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of
Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research
company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin
manages a small hedge fund, too.
But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel
in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged
2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks
on Sept. 11, 2001.
Since the pandemic began, he has used hisYouTube channelto promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”
In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19
is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data
sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”
The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill
Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health
organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments
to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to
enrich themselves.
For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the
software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes
aim largely at government entities.
Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.
“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.
Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story
about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support
his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the
patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from
monopolizing research.
“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling
the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as
saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers
reasonable access to the samples.”
Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told
reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make
sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”
“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is
that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus
if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure
patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the
virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain,
and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of
this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to
patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.
So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.
Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.
Again, he’s wrong.
Instead of reading from U.S. patent law,
as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme
Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision,
which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10
years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes
SARS.
“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either
SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it
legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”
But that’s a false dichotomy.
While the Supreme Court did find
that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and
not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision
came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.
“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence)
used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just
the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused
enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli,
a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No
more. A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a
gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and
therefore unpatentable.”
So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
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FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
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SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
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