Author: admin

The anonymous psychiatrist behind the wildly popular Slate Star Codex (SSC) has taken down the popular blog after the New York Times threatened to dox him in a “mostly positive” upcoming article.

“When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks,” wrote “Scott Alexander” – the author’s real first and middle name, who says he’s tried to keep his last name secret.

(Of course, the Times’ policy on including real names is utter bullshit – and didn’t extend to, among others, the anonymous White House employee who penned an Op-Ed aimed at damaging the Trump administration – or the multitude of ‘anonymous officials’ cited for three years in support of the Trump-Russia hoax.)

1,500+ @nytimes articles on Banksy respected his pseudonymity,
because art.

1 article on @slatestarcodex cannot, because smart. pic.twitter.com/D43DH3OgSz

— Geoff Lewis (@justGLew) June 23, 2020

In re NYT vs @slatestarcodex, this seems relevant: According to the NYT itself, there is no one-size-fits-all policy. Which makes it even more difficult to understand why the NYT would promise/threaten to doxx Scott. https://t.co/d7xfZJww39 pic.twitter.com/bqSRiIdmih

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) June 23, 2020

SSC has long been considered one of the last bastions of free speech – between Alexander’s own thoughts on (what shouldn’t be) controversial topics such as feminism, or his support of ex-Google employee James Damore’s opinions against the company’s ideological echo chamber – to the largely unmoderated comments section where contributors could speak their mind.

Alas, the blog is no more – as Alexander explains, revealing his identity would compromise his relationship with current and future patients, and may lead to his firing from the clinic where he works.

I have a lot of reasons for staying pseudonymous. First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”. I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left anarchists to far-right gun nuts – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.

The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired. And I recently learned that someone on SSC got SWATted in a way that they link to using their real name on the blog. I live with ten housemates including a three-year-old and an infant, and I would prefer this not happen to me or to them. Although I realize I accept some risk of this just by writing a blog with imperfect anonymity, getting doxxed on national news would take it to another level. -Scott Alexander, SSC

The individual is outgunned at all times. We cannot easily fight back. But this is ridiculous. So many great people gathered around @slatestarcodex. I want it back.

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) June 23, 2020

So, if the Times does indeed proceed to dox Alexander, will Twitter ban them for targeted harassment?

We are all Mr. Anderson. https://t.co/H5HbsguBEH

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) June 23, 2020

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

Don’t let new highs on Nasdaq fool you. It’s still a bear market and I can prove it.

First let’s acknowledge they are have and continue to throw the kitchen sink at this: Historic monetary and fiscal stimulus with more to come apparently as the powers that be are discussing another trillion dollar stimulus package on top of the $3 trillion they’ve already thrown at this and of course the Fed’s historic balance sheet expansion.

The latest round of stimulus talk again sparking another overnight rally in the US. But note the Fed’s balance sheet expansion has for now peaked in the 2nd week of June tor so, and magically did the S&P 500:

Fed balance sheet peaked during the 2nd week of June.
So did the S&P 500.

Go figure.

To keep history alive: All highs into Q4 and Q1 also came on balance sheet expansion. pic.twitter.com/gaD3NMljGh

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 22, 2020

Coincidence? I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide.

What is factual is that we are witnessing the greatest debt explosion of our lifetimes:

While all this is advertised as consequence free and the ingredients of a new bull market let me suggest that this is not how the broader market sees it. Not at all.

This entire market remains a tech affair while the rest of the market is indeed in a major bear market.

Equal weight tells the truth. Here $XVG versus $NDX:

$NDX making new all time highs on futures in overnight while the rest of the market in equal weight sits below the December 2018 lows when $SPX was trading at 2350.

Here’s the monthly big picture:

Tech is entirely decoupled from the rest of the market similar to the year 2000, and by tech we are of course looking at the historic distortion created by handful of mega cap stocks.

Looking at new highs on $NDX the underlying $BPNDX tells a story of weakening:

What’s propelling $NDX to new highs are of course the usual suspects.  I’ll highlight 3 companies, $AMZN, $MSFT and $AAPL, their market cap now exceeding $4.35 trillion equal to 20% of US GDP. Not bad with their employee base being equivalent to 0.34% of the US population.

Forgive me for showing linear charts, but the yearly charts have to be appreciated for the risk appetite that has investors chasing these stocks far above their yearly 5 EMAs and Bollinger bands:

The narrowest and most concentrated market cap risk ever. In the middle of a major global economic recession.

Yet the larger market says something completely different.

Look at $NYSE, the broader index, it’s a big fat rising wedge with an island reversal to boot:

MACD is down and it’s barely hanging on with an island reversal to boot. This is bearish full stop.

And we see similar charts on other indices:

Fact remains markets are tethering at major trend line support see also $DJIA:

And ironically all this is happening in context of this $QQQ chart:

$QQQ close to hitting a 10 year trend line while printing a massive negative divergence, a classic warning sign, especially in context of the historic extension we see in the yearly charts above.

So from my perch: Don’t be fooled by all this bull talk. The larger economy and markets are in major trouble. With all this intervention they’ve produced the largest asset bubble concentrated in a few stocks ever, a massive imbalance all of which bears major reversion risk.

If they lose tech for any reason it’s all over. Every fund on the planet is exposed to big cap tech, they’re all hiding in it from the SNB on down.

Bubbles defy reason and this historic set of liquidity injections have created the illusion we can print ourselves out of the current mess and as long as the liquidity equation retains control the asset bubble can grow, grow to become ever more of a risk to the economy’s long term health for nothing good comes out of a bubble bursting.

For now tech is in a liquidity driven bull market driven by a few stocks. The broader market is not:

Equal weight this:
Index performances YTD:$SPX: -3.61%$IWM: -13.81%$NYSE: -13.57%$BKX: -30.75%$NDX:+15.65% pic.twitter.com/dXh6OntN7i

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) June 22, 2020

Ignore the message of the broader market, and the banks in particular at your own risk. Their message: We’re still in a bear market.

Among some of the more disturbing features revealed at yesterday’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote were the additions of CarKey – a feature that is going to allow some BMW owners to unlock their car with their phone – and an app on your watch that literally listens to you wash your hands and reminds you if you haven’t washed them for long enough. 

The company was adamant on Monday that it wants to replace your car keys, despite the fact that the company’s long-held goal of making its own EV hasn’t materialized. Instead, it appears to have surrendered the whole car and is now focusing on something a little bit easier: putting your car keys on your smartphone. 

“They’ve been around for over 100 years but they’ve become big, bulky and ripe for reimagining,” am Apple company executive said on stage yesterday. 

The company is going to be rolling out the feature for 2021 BMW 5 series vehicles to start and demonstrated the “feature” on Monday, showing that even just a door handle top with an iPhone can now unlock a sedan. Drivers can then place the phone on the car’s charging pad and start the vehicle. 

But that’s not all: BMW owners will be able to unlock their car from long distances using a technology called “ultra wideband” and will also be able to share their car’s key simply by sending a message to someone else’s phone. 

Recall, we wrote about a year ago about hackers that have cracked similar key fobs by using cloners and range extenders to steal vehicles, notably Teslas. 

It was back in 2018 that researchers unveiled a serious flaw in the security of Tesla’s vehicles, relating to the Model S keyless entry system, according to Wired. With little more than standard radio equipment, hackers were able to defeat the car’s encryption and wirelessly clone the sedan’s key fob in seconds, allowing them to unlock the car and drive away without ever touching the owner’s key.

In response to this report, Tesla created a “new” version of its key fob that supposedly patched the underlying flaw. But now, predictably, the same researchers are back and say that they have found yet another vulnerability that even affects the replacement key fobs.

And if that wasn’t enough technology in your life, Apple is also installing new Covid-19 software on its Watch that is going to tell people if they don’t scrub their hands long enough when they’re washing them. 

“Your Apple Watch can sense how long you wash your hands and coach you to make sure you’re doing it for as long as you’re supposed to,” a CNBC reporter Tweeted. The feature includes a hand washing timer that counts down using motion sensors and “listens to the sound of water on people’s hands”. 

Apparently not worried at all about their watch listening to them go about their daily business, there were no shortage of people who praised the idea. “Handwashing detection on the Apple Watch is one of those things that seem so incredibly small but can be so incredibly useful and important,” Tweeted one social media user. 

What’s next, a watch that watches you when you shower and tells you when you’ve missed a spot?

Update (1200ET): The US National Weather Service just warned that a tsunami could hit Mexico, and/or parts of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

• TSUNAMI WAVES 1-3 METERS ABOVE TIDE LEVEL POSSIBLE ALONG MEXICO
• TSUNAMI WAVES 0.3 TO 1 METERS ABOVE TIDE POSSIBLE ALONG ECUADOR
• TSUNAMI WAVES LESS THAN 0.3 METERS POSSIBLE ALONG COSTA RICA

So far, there have been no reports of falling buildings in Mexico City, though the mayor of the city said there has been “some” structural damage.

* * *

With its hospital system already overwhelmed by the coronavirus, Mexico City has just been struck by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake (according to the Mexican geological officials) just moments ago. There have been reports of buildings shaking.

The epicenter was traced to the southern state of Oaxaca, not far from the capital city.

First-person reports are pouring in on twitter and other social media, but there haven’t been any reports of substantial damage yet. Some people reported feeling their house shake in villages that are miles away from Mexico City.

Just had a surreal moment: whilst calling my family in Mexico City, the city’s earthquake early warning system went off and my grandma and I were talking while her apartment building was gently shaking and she was standing in her safe spot. Sometimes I miss the tremours lol.

— Alex Griffin 🌵 (@forbiddencactus) June 23, 2020

for context, we are 1.5 hours away from Mexico City and our house was moving enough to run outside.

— Jennifer Noelle Castro 💙 (@JenniferNCastro) June 23, 2020

Aftershocks that were even more powerful have already been recorded, with magnitudes as high as 7.7 according to the USGS.

BREAKING: Powerful prelim. magnitude 7.7 earthquake has hit near El Coyul, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, USGS website says.

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 23, 2020

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

The left’s war on America’s past crossed several new frontiers last week.

Portland’s statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated.

While the statue stood, an American flag was draped over its head and set ablaze. After it was pulled down, a new fire was set on another American flag spread across the statue, and also burned. The vacated pedestal was painted with the words, “You’re on Native Land.”

In Portland also, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that stood at the entrance of a high school named for the author of the Declaration of Independence was torn down. In New York, city council members demanded that the Jefferson statue in city hall be removed.

Anticipating what was coming, the New York Museum of Natural History got the permission of city hall to have the giant statue of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse, flanked by an African and a Native American, removed from the front of the museum.

What was wrong with the 80-year-old statue?

Said museum president Ellen Futter, the problem is its “hierarchical composition.” Only Roosevelt was mounted.

With Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt all under attack, three of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore are now repudiated by the left.

Our Taliban have moved on, past Columbus and the Confederate generals, to dislodge and dishonor the Founding Fathers and their patriot sons.

In Philadelphia, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, with its statue of Washington, was defaced. The tomb is the final resting place for thousands of soldiers, known but to God, who died in the struggle for American independence.

“Committed Genocide” is the charge scrawled on the memorial.

Local authorities or police did not stop the vandals. One wonders what will happen should the haters of Washington and Jefferson decide to torch their ancestral homes at Mount Vernon and Monticello.

Still another line was crossed last week in the war against the past.

A statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was toppled. Police watched as hundreds gathered to take down the general and 18th president, who accepted the surrender of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Also pulled down in Golden Gate Park was a statue of Francis Scott Key, who wrote our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after he watched all through the night in 1814 as British warships bombarded Fort McHenry.

A third statue torn down in Golden Gate Park was that of Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priest who founded nine of the 21 Spanish missions in California that run from San Diego to San Francisco.

Serra lived in the 18th century, long before the U.S. acquired California and decades before Mexico won its independence. Pope Francis canonized him in 2015.

At the end of last week, the last statue of a Confederate soldier in the nation’s capital, that of Gen. Albert Pike, who spent his years after the war doing good works, was pulled down, while Mayor Muriel Bowser’s D.C. cops watched from police cruisers.

We erect statues to remember, revere and honor those whom we memorialize. And what is the motivation of the people who tear them down and desecrate them?

In a word, it is hate. A goodly slice of America’s young hates this country’s history and the men who made it. It hates the discoverers and explorers like Columbus, the conquistadores and colonists. It hates the Founding Fathers and the first 15 presidents, all of whom either had slaves or coexisted with the injustice of slavery. But hating history and denying history and tearing down the statues of the men who made that history does not change history.

So, where are we going?

Today, as was true in the 1960s, the American establishment is on the run. It recoils from mob action but cannot bring itself to condemn those tearing down the statues, for it basically agrees with them and seeks to marshal their energy to help it get back into power in November.

But this cannot go on. The political and propaganda war on the cops, the vandalism of the statues and memorials, the disgracing and dishonoring of American heroes cannot go on indefinitely.

At some point, in the near future, the establishment, and its questionable political instrument, Joe Biden, will have to have his Sister Souljah moment, and stand up and stay, “This should stop.”

For, whatever happens in this election, the American people will not stay united around a party and a movement built on the proposition that America has been, from before its birth, a racist criminal enterprise.

You cannot lead a people whose history and heroes you hate.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. And a society whose history is hated by millions of its members will not survive.

After last night’s chaos, The White House has wheeled out Larry Kudlow to calm frayed nerves and pump stocks ever higher.

Speaking with Fox Business, the senior economic adviser said that there would “absolutely, definitely” not be a second national lockdown.

Additionally, Kudlow offered some tasty morsels of hope by suggesting tax rebates, direct-mail checks were on the table in the next round of stimulus and that he expects a v-shaped rebound in the economy as the nation reopens.

So nothing new or substantive but enough to spark some panic-buying…

If in doubt, wheel Kudlow out… he’s better than the Powell Put.

Public health experts are already bracing for one of the worst flu seasons in recent memory as they prepare for the novel coronavirus to become intermixed with influenza infections, potentially leading to a devastating preponderance of dual infections, Bloomberg reports.

With few experts actually expecting a widely available vaccine before the end of the year, Covid activity is expected to “continue for some time” and “could place a tremendous burden” on a health care system that remains vulnerable even as cases and hospitalizations have tapered off in the worst-hit areas, even as other parts of the US rise up to fill their place.

Dr. Fauci is expected to share more warnings about the upcoming flu season, which typically begins in the fall, during his Congressional testimony on Tuesday.

on an already stretched health-care system if coupled with the influenza season that comes each fall, top officials including Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will tell House lawmakers on Tuesday, according to prepared testimony.

According to already released testimony, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, Fauci and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn will tell Congress that the duration of the pandemic remains unknown, and that despite all the fanfare surrounding “Operation Warp Speed” and the 130+ ongoing trials for various candidates, the likelihood of a vaccine available before the end of the year remains low.

“The rigorous clinical testing required to establish vaccine safety and efficacy means that it might take some time for a licensed SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to be available to the general public,” according to prepared testimony by NIAID. “The Covid-19 response currently is focused on the proven public health practices of containment and mitigation.”

In preparation for the coming onslaught, the CDC has developed a test that can check for both of the viruses at the same time. Emergency approval by the FDA has been requested, and will likely be granted.

“This will save public health laboratories both time and resources, including testing materials that are in short supply,” the officials said.

The administration is already taking steps to help parts of the country prepare for flu season. The CDC gave $140 million earlier this month to 64 jurisdictions throughout the country to help states prepare for the flu season through an existing immunization agreement in an attempt to increase vaccination and testing among vulnerable populations.

At this point, the biggest risk factor is the growing exodus of public health officials who are simply tired of being harassed and treated by political footballs by both Republicans and Democrats.

Dr. Fauci and several other top-ranking federal health officials (including the heads of the FDA and CDC) will testify before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

These include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn and the administration’s testing czar Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir.

The testimony is set to begin shortly.

Watch live below: