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Given Elon Musk’s deepening ties to China, it’s no wonder the Pentagon thought it a great time to sign a contract with SpaceX to “jointly develop a rocket” that can “deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world” in just an hour’s time.

Tests on this rocket are expected to begin next year, according to Futurism. The rocket is expected to move weapons around the world 15 times faster than existing aircraft already do. 

General Stephen Lyons, head of US Transportation Command said: “Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.”

He continued: “I can tell you SpaceX is moving very, very rapidly in this area. I’m really excited about the team that’s working with SpaceX.”

A trip from Florida to Afghanistan, which is 7,652 miles, could be done “within about an hour” with the 7,500 MPH rocket, according to The Times. It takes conventional aircraft about 15 hours to make the same trip. 

The project indicates that SpaceX is leaning on military partnerships – and also indicates that the U.S. military clearly doesn’t see Elon Musk as a security threats, despite his deepening ties to China (which we have detailed here). SpaceX also landed a contract last week to manufacture four missile-tracking satellites, Futurism notes.

The army has also previously approached Musk’s company about converting its Starlink satellites into a military navigation network. The Space Force has also said they are working closely with SpaceX after they awarded the company a contract in August. 

If this program has the resounding success of the Hyperloop line Elon Musk was supposed to install in Chicago, we can’t wait to see these promises come to fruition!

Authored by John Steppling via Off-Guardian.org,

“it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.”

– Arthur Miller (The Crucible)

“One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.”

– Emil Cioran (On the Heights of Despair)

Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. It is almost as if people are afflicted with a kind of PTSD – only one where the trauma is generalized, relatively low grade, but ongoing.

Any of us who have questioned the Covid narrative have had to put up with an inordinate amount of hectoring, name-calling, ridicule, and ostracism. I remember when I signed on the artist appeal as part of the Milosevic Defense Committee, and the abuse and anger I faced whenever this topic came up. People who had no history with the region, knew little of the political landscape, would nonetheless wax irate, furious and near tears that I would hold such outrageous positions.

Now, over a decade later, two members of that committee have won Nobel Prizes (Harold Pinter and Peter Handke). You would think that might cause people to take a moment, reflect, recalibrate their thinking on the topic. But alas, it rarely does.

The Covid narrative has generated the same near-hysterical indignation. The narrative, as it has been constructed by the WHO, CDC, and more likely a dozen or so billionaires (including Bill Gates) is so rife with contradiction and illogic that one might think cracks would begin to show.

That many who accept the word of authority in general, might at this point start to question why none of this story makes sense. But no. Not in America anyway. (or rather, to be more precise, there is a pushback, but it keeps to a low profile lest the little Cotton Mathers of the haute bourgeoisie put one in the stocks).

Leave it to America to make the flu into a morality play. However there are clear signs of people waking up. In Europe certainly.

And not only Germany, doctors and health care professionals in Belgium, too. But the governments are sticking to the story they were handed.

In Norway here I still cannot drive to Sweden. Why? Who knows, there is no reason provided. The PM uttered something about better safe than sorry, and staying the course. Everything is discussed this way, in infantile baby talk, gibberish and slogans. Anti-democratic edicts delivered as if by a kindergarten teacher.

Someone wrote to me on social media the other day and said “Not everyone gets to live in Norway. Here we are surrounded by death”. Now he lives in Los Angeles. In a nice westside area. He is not surrounded by death. Or rather only in his hallucinatory inner theatre of the mind is death present, surrounding him.

But this language has a quality I associate with Hollywood. Its kitsch image-making. Never mind it’s literally not remotely true. But this is a version of something that I think happens all the time now. This man is in his own private movie.

It is a movie made of diverse parts; there is something from all the various post-apocalyptic zombie films (and TV, think Walking Dead), there is something of Norman Rockwell in there, or even Thomas Kincaid, there is Dr Phil and Oprah and the cheapening of emotion. The snarky pedestrian thoughts of a Bill Maher, too.

This is what has come to pass for public intellectuals and intellectual discourse. All are almost impossibly banal. There are parts from a dozen disaster movies, too. I mean literally all the way back to Towering Inferno. And there is, perhaps most significantly, a quality that is harder to define or outline, but which I associate with JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon.

It is a quality of comforting superficiality, of controlled threat in worlds of generic cheeriness. Interestingly both were born in NY and are only a year apart in age (mid fifties). Both have a background in animation and computer generated affects. Both came out of a comic book sensibility and have, more than anyone else in contemporary media, helped to shape the manufactured nostalgia for a fantasy of America.

It is the creation of a longing for a past that never was. But both have established a universe of whiteness and equilibrium where the threat is from without.

For it cannot be from within because there is no ‘within’.

In that sense these are the anti Psychoanalytic purveyors of a youth culture for adults. A comic or cartoon world view in which the sentimental plays an enormous role. It is a world without tragedy or real suffering. And just beneath the surface but always implied, is a respect for authority. It is also a world where one is encouraged NOT to grow up.

The Covid story takes place in a universe of Whedon and Abrams, with parts of The Hunger Games, Breaking Bad, and the films of John Hughes. (Hughes was really the precursor for both Whedon and Abrams). Covid is taking place on the streets where Breakfast Club was filmed. In people’s heads anyway.

Covid the virus is an overdetermined symbol — and one that only makes even a tiny bit of sense if it is located in these personal streaming sites in your brain. (and I recommend Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production).

There is a tendency toward fetishization, too, and hence the ubiquitous appearance and opinion of celebrities. Its bordering on surreal much of the time: Hip Hop moguls are asked about climate change, Silicon Valley billionaires voice opinion on overpopulation or vaccinations, soap opera stars offer thoughts on stem cell research.

Nothing is investigated, really. It is all driven by whatever is most lurid or sensationalized. The ruling class has clearly encouraged, if not mandated, a certain line of thinking on the pandemic. The ruling class has profited enormously from the lockdown, and is quite happy with a semi-permanent state of crisis.

In fact it is likely that this was at least partly all planned. I mean what does one think those billionaires at the Bilderberg meeting talk about? Or at DAVOS or the like? The ruling elite anticipated crises in Capitalism, and the lockdown certainly provides cover for massive plunder or pensions, real estate, and really, most everything.

But the system, to some extent, does the work for the ruling class without instruction at this point. For revenue is generated by blood and violence, and secondly by sex. The template has already been put in place. (If it bleeds it leads). Although something has happened to the ‘sex sells’ dimension of the Spectacle. People seem less and less in the throws of passion or lust.

The societies of the west are declining into some form of neurasthenic bloodless onanism. The consumption of porn is up, but I’m pretty sure sex acts are actually down. And the allegorical dimension of the Covid narrative serves as both substitute gratification and as a symbolic purification ritual.

This week Trump announced he had “tested positive”. He had been campaigning for the previous week and felt fine. Then he tested positive and is described as having flu-like symptoms. That this is part of a strategy I have no doubt, but I also could not begin to describe that strategy. But the magical appearance of symptoms the minute he tested positive echoes the overall magical thinking involved in this entire narrative.

There is a veritable mania, now, concerning testing. And yet even the NYTimes admits the tests are virtually meaningless. But no matter. We must test more!

Magical thinking permeates the climate discourse, as well. Never in history, or never since the Enlightenment, have so many people pretended to know so much. For the educated thirty percent (white and reasonably affluent) it is the era of the TED talk. Nothing dare last longer or be more demanding than a quick (and entertaining) ten minutes. The fires in California have come primarily from downed power lines (badly out of date and rarely serviced), but exacerbated by homeless encampments (rarely mentioned) and fireworks — and of course the drought that has extended backward a decade.

California has always burnt. It was part of the ecosystem to rid the hills and forests of dead of dead shrub and trees. Climate is clearly a part — snowpack is down, and summer heat has dried out shrubbery. But much of what is dried out is shrub not native to California (stuff like cheatgrass, a native of Asia and parts of Africa, and notoriously invasive) whose forests are overstocked anyway.

Infrastructure in America is rotting, and per California, the wild areas have been neglected for almost a hundred years. But that is not a part of the narrative. The narrative must be about the rebellion of Earth itself and population. And population matters only in terms of who can afford to over consume. The problem is that the most obvious pollution issues (militarism and the packaging industry) are never addressed.

US imperialism is the cause of most of the suffering in the world. Most of the instability. But the infantile anthropomorphizing of much green discourse is just more baby talk. I often hear “we are waging war against ourselves”. This is a dangerous bit of mystification. [note that this riff goes all the way back to the Pogo comic strip in the 1960s].

Its more simplistic sloganeering and like most such chestnuts, class analysis is absent. I have written a good deal on the psychological appeal of certain hi-tech fantasies, the seductive aspect of AI, and yet the world is more proletarianized than ever.

Yes people, in a very general sense, can be seen as self-destructive. It’s one of the most troubling byproducts of the habituation to screens, the loss of literacy and numeracy and the loss, really, of an ability to think critically. But this cultic hysteria is driven by the increasing precarity and desperation in contemporary life.

The loss of unions plays a part, the absence of a real left party, a radical Marxist party. For all the terrific work activist groups do (Prison abolishment groups, criminal justice reform, and stuff like the Innocence Project) there remains a vacuum in terms of electoral politics. Perhaps that is just going to be the way this goes.

Maybe the entire electoral apparatus is dead. And maybe that is a good thing.

There is a quality of suffocating sameness and emptiness that permeates daily life. People don’t look at each other on the street, they look at their phones. One is walking, all the time, among the pod people. America’s mental health is in a dire state. The U.S. and really this is increasingly true in Europe, too, but not nearly to the same extent, is an excruciatingly lonely country. People have lost the ability to make, and more, to sustain friendships. And how the role of social media plays into that is an open question. Or media in general.

So while yes, the marketing of technology serves to manufacture an appeal, on one level there are troubling numbers of people who seem, all by themselves, to *want*, to desire, ravishment by our robot overlords. Android sex is a thing, and its growing.

And it’s not just men who want “pleasure model” androids (ok, for now they have to settle for dolls), but many want to not just fuck androids – but to get fucked *by* androids.

The engine is capitalism.

A number of world leaders have contracted Covid. Much as many get the flu. There is something curiously similar in nearly everyone of these cases. Boris Johnson, Bolsanaro, the fascist interim President of post-coup Bolivia Jeanine Anez, Mikhail Mishustin of Russia, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, and India’s Amit Shah (the #2 strongman behind Modi), and also in India, Pranab Mukherjee, former President, who subsequently died (age 84) from the virus (no, actually he died from a blood clot on his brain).

I only mention this because I experience an unsettling vertigo when trying to parse all this and make it into something comprehensible. The way Covid tests work one might well think everyone on the planet has the virus.

Already there has been significant psychological harm done to children. The clear lesson is to fear the other. That humans are contagious and potentially lethal. Intimacy is officially discouraged.

I cannot imagine that message were I fourteen or sixteen. Growing up in the sixties the idea was to promote intimacy, feelings, and to exactly *not* fear emotional openness. The English speaking west has gone from Paul Goodman to Theresa Tam.

The resurgent Puritanism is not restricted to odd ducks like Tam. Even bourgeois pundits are noticing. This is Zoe Williams in The Guardian:

There remains, in public life, a rich seam of puritanism that you notice only when times are so bleak that you could really do without it. A sense that frivolity is immoral, even if it is 95% of your economy; a feeling that they had it coming, all those people dedicating their lives to the generation of fun. Puritans tend not to announce their disapproval except in the most roundabout ways, so you can rarely pin it on them. But standing on the precipice of a year that ends without dancing, bears, dancing bears, playhouses, ale houses, music or Christmas, all I can think of is how happy Oliver Cromwell would have been. It is like all his cancelled Christmases come at once. He would be dancing (not dancing) in his grave.”

This is a lament from the privileged class, but perhaps that’s actually a good sign.

The ruling class don’t wear masks or have travel restrictions imposed on them.

There is no longer even a pretense. The rich are entitled to special treatment. The rich deserve a clean depopulated world where they can cavort on the green, frolic in elysian fields by murmuring brooks, and to not be troubled by darkies and riff-raff. Remember it was a mere hundred years ago that Belgium brought Congolese from their African home, to be paraded in human zoos. Those they hadn’t already murdered.

Covid is the final act in the transference of wealth to the top 1%. And culture is being destroyed along with everything else. Cinemas are closing, permanently, theatres, too, permanently, and museums. Galleries and other art spaces are shuttered, likely to never reopen. Something like 30 million jobs have been lost. There is an acute desperation across America.

Who survives? Amazon, Netflix, Google, Comcast, Facebook, et al. Those who control the screens control the world. It is a new morning in hell.

With Microsoft becoming the latest major tech company to signal to employees that they can apply to make “WFH” a permanent element of their schedule, millions of Americans are contemplating moving away from densely packed cities – indeed, many have already made the move. According to data released Friday, the apartment vacancy rate in Manhattan has hit 6%, more than double the average at this time of year.

According to Pew Research, 22% of American adults have relocated during the pandemic, or know somebody who did. It’s a sudden reversal to a yearslong trend of Americans largely staying put.

Anybody who’s thinking about “pulling a geographic” might want to take a look at a report published this week by Smartest Dollar, which digs into the cost of living in different cities across the US. The general theme should be familiar by now: workers from expensive cities like NYC could potentially maximize their earning power by moving to a sleepy Midwestern city where the cost of living can be significantly lower.

Here’s more from Smartest Dollar:

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a surge in geographic mobility. According to Pew Research Center, 22 percent of adults in the U.S. have relocated during the pandemic or know someone who did. Interestingly, this reverses a longstanding trend in which Americans were staying put.

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that prior to COVID-19, Americans were moving a lot less. In 1981, 3.4 percent of Americans moved to a different county within the same state while only 2.8 percent moved to a different state entirely. By 2019, those percentages dropped to 2.1 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. The share of Americans moving across county lines has remained at a relatively flat, low level since 2010.

As people think about where to move during COVID-19 and beyond, job prospects and earning potential will be top of mind. Median earnings for full-time workers in the U.S. was $50,078 in 2019, a 20.6 percent increase since 2010 in nominal dollars. However, the relative cost of living in a given area impacts purchasing power and should be an important factor when weighing employment opportunities. There is significant regional variation in cost-of-living adjusted earnings across the U.S., with residents in the Northeast and Midwest generally faring better than those in the South or West. For example, median adjusted earnings range from a low of $41,063 in Florida to a high of $58,029 in Massachusetts.

To find which metropolitan areas offer the greatest purchasing power, researchers at Smartest Dollar calculated cost-of-living adjusted earnings using data for full-time workers from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. To improve relevance, metros were grouped into the following categories based on population: small (100,000–349,999), midsize (350,000–999,999), and large (1,000,000 or more).

Similar to the statewide trends, the small and midsize metros offering the highest adjusted earnings are concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast. Unlike the state-level trends, the large metros with the best pay are scattered throughout the country, with similar levels of representation in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. Here are the metropolitan areas with the highest cost-of-living adjusted earnings.

Meanwhile, here’s a list of large metros with the highest salaries adjusted for the cost of living (which is already notably high in many of these places).

1. San Jose- Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA

2. Hartford-East Hartford-Middletown CT

3. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV

4. Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH

5. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA

6. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington MN-WI

7. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley CA

8. Baltimore-Columbia-Towson

9. Cincinnati OH-KY-IN

10. Raleigh-Cary NC

11. St. Louis MO-IL

12. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood

13. Cleveland-Elyria OH

14. Pittsburgh

15. Columbus OH

Look up your city’s stats here:

* * *

Source: Smartest Dollar

Authored by Daniel Bobinksi via UncoveredDC.com,

America is at a crossroads with revolution on our doorstep. On one side are the Patriots; those who seek to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. On the other side are Marxist insurrectionists; those who believe that America is evil and the cause of so many problems in world.

The Marxist-friendly side is pulling for Joe Biden to be ushered into the White House. They don’t call themselves Marxists, but as the saying goes, if it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.

I’ve been writing since January that the Globalists don’t care if there’s bloodshed in America, and in March I wrote that the Left is waging a scorched-earth war against Trump.

At the risk of sounding like I’m saying, “I told you so,” I told you so.

If you’ve been reading tea leaves from the news lately, you may have already figured out what’s coming at us in the next few months. If so, the following may simply affirm your observations. But I wanted to put this out there so everyone knows what to expect and therefore won’t be surprised.

My seven predictions for how 2020 comes to an end:

Prediction 1: Trump will win the election in a landslide. I know, the media is telling you the polls are tight, but just look around. Trump rallies are packed to the gills while Biden can’t fill the bleachers at a high school football field. Trump supporters hold huge boat parades while we see NONE for Biden. Trump supporters hold freeway caravans around that country that take up all lanes of a freeway, while an attempted caravan for Biden in Las Vegas drew only 30 people. Just like in 2016, pollsters today are making it look like it’s a close race. This is gaslighting – they’re telling you something that runs directly opposite of what your own eyes are telling you, but they’re expecting you to believe what they say.

Prediction 2: On the evening of November 3, Joe Biden will not concede the election, even though the vote will clearly be for Trump. Hillary Clinton has publicly stated that Joe should not concede, so the seed has been planted in our minds to expect this. And, because we’re expecting it, we won’t be shocked by it.

Prediction 3: Massive mail voter fraud will create confusion and Marxists (e.g. Democrats) will insist that “every vote counts.” They know Americans want to be fair so Marxists will play on that. They will cry and wail and plead that every vote needs to get counted, so they’ll ask for sympathy for voters who didn’t follow confusing new election rules about how to cast their mail-in ballots. That will be their story, but many votes will be fraudulent. As they’ve demonstrated on America’s streets, Marxists don’t care about following laws; they care about power.

Prediction 4: Because of massive mail fraud ballots showing up late, election results WILL be delayed. The deceptive Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and the clearly biased Jack Dorsey at Twitter have already announced they will flag any posts or tweets that claim a victory for Trump. They KNOW Trump will have more than enough votes to win, but as Zuckerberg already told us, we should expect results to take “DAYS OR EVEN WEEKS.” In other words, Facebook and Twitter are well-aware of the planned mail-in voter fraud, and they’re already providing cover for it. The planned vote count confusion will be dragged out as long as possible. The Marxists’ intention is to keep confusion swirling at least until December 14 in hopes that the electoral college won’t be able to identify a winner. Expect ballots to keep showing up out of nowhere.

Prediction 5: If Marxists cannot keep up the façade until December 14, some states will obfuscate the electoral process by choosing not to follow the rules laid out in the 12th Amendment. In fact, both may happen. Either way, by attempting to throw the electoral college into confusion, Marxists (again, the Democrats) will make a push for the electoral college to be eliminated. Believe me when I say you don’t want this. Students of the Constitution know that if the electoral college is eliminated, the Republic will be gone.

Prediction 6: Expect Nancy Pelosi to be acting all patriotic and concerned about the Constitution during the chaos, but rest assured, it’s a passive-aggressive act. She is among the Marxist vanguard in both houses of Congress orchestrating the whole mess. You will also see some Marxist-friendly governors making a lot of noise.

Prediction 7: While Marxists in Congress are messing with the electoral process, Marxists on the streets (Antifa and BLM) will intensify their violence by burning, looting, and murdering even more than what we’ve seen to this point. There’s already a movement that seeks to lay siege to the White House. Not only do the puppet masters want all the street chaos to distract our attention from what’s going on in the electoral process, the street Marxists see this election as their only chance to either grab power or put up with Trump for four more years. The protestors have been trained to instigate violence, and copy-cat wannabes will want to join in. Street Marxists will view these riots as the fight of their lives: it will get intense.

To perpetuate the riots, puppet masters like George Soros will continue pouring money into organizations that fund them. Also remember that Antifa and BLM have threatened to go into the suburbs. Their purpose for doing so is to trigger the Soccer Moms who wants peace at all costs. Marxists will hope that these suburban moms will apply pressure on their elected representatives to give in to the Marxists so the violence will end. Life on American streets will be unpredictable and dangerous.

How does it end?

The Marxists are desperate, so the fighting will be like nothing the country has ever seen before. I predict we’ll see horrific things happening in our cities and on our streets, and traditional media (read: Marxist-friendly media) will be spewing twisted truths and lies about everything listed above. And we can’t forget that social media giants favor the Marxists in this revolution, so they will be squelching debate in whatever ways they can.

The final months of 2020 will be an emotional roller coaster, but in the end, I predict Trump prevails. It’s not going to be pretty, and many who are now thinking life will return to normal after November 3 will be sadly mistaken. They will be wondering what happened to the country they once knew.

Whether the Democrats implode or not after all this happens remains to be seen, but it is my prayer that when the dust settles, all the Marxists plotters and schemers be exposed and truth will be recognized as truth. And then … maybe then … Trump can get on with his promise to drain the entire swamp.

Last weekend, in its Sunday Start note, Morgan Stanley raised some eyebrows across Wall Street when it global strategist Andrew Sheets suggested that the 2020 market cycle was actually quite “normal”, with economic data leading risk assets, and that the recovery would continue in a “normal” way, with inflation expectations rising, yield curves steepening further, small caps continuing to outperform and defensive stocks have lagging (even as yields have remained range-bound). This is what Sheets concluded:

Twists and turns as the US election nears, the uncertainty regarding additional US fiscal stimulus, a rise in global COVID-19 cases and a still-unresolved Brexit saga all create significant uncertainty, and should keep markets volatile and range-bound over the next month. But amid that volatility, we maintain our central tendency – this cycle is more normal than appreciated, and should be treated as such until proven otherwise.’

Today, in yet another provocative piece this time from Morgan Stanley’s head of US Public Policy, Michael Zezas, the bank makes another contrarian argument, namely that for all the confusion and anticipated turbulence over the upcoming election, traders – whipsawed by months of pandemics, trade conflicts, legislation, and elections – may instead be rewarded with a “brief moment of policy clarity giving investors a reprieve from the chaos of 2020” and offer them “some unexpected, and underpriced clarity.”

To be sure, Morgan Stanley is not the first to suggest that the market is overly obsessing over the potential vol surge around the election as a result of it getting drawn out into a contested election: two weeks ago, Nomura‘s x-asset strategist Charlie McElligott recommended selling the “kink” in the Nov-Oct VIX spread…

… saying the market had priced in more than a fair amount of election risk, and said that “some brave vol traders will try to take advantage as a perceived “generational” opportunity to sell this POST-NOV election “richness” (Dec / Jan)” which “could be a career “maker or breaker,” with the potential to see monster returns if the event were to pass and all that crash is puked back into the ether” although as he also hedges, conversely returns could “be turned to dust into a God-forbid realization of chaos, with civil disorder, dual claims to the throne etc.”

Well, the Morgan Stanley strategist is even more sanguine than McElligott as the bank only focuses on the bullish scenario, one where clarity over fiscal stimulus – either before or after the election – emerges in the coming days, while at the same time, Zezas also looks at the outcome of the actual Nov 3 election, and contrary to expectations of a long, drawn-out process which culminated with a SCOTUS decision, sees a quick resolution to the election with little “risk that it would take more than a few days beyond election day for investors to reliably know a result.”

He explains why in The Next ‘October Surprise’: A Moment of Clarity?

Investors crave precision in quantifying risk. Yet that level of precision is wanting when it comes to sizing up risk from events like pandemics, trade conflicts, legislation, and elections. Like it or not, we see investors being pressed into this style of analytical action as the new normal. Geopolitical trends towards multipolarity, fiscal expansion, and ‘slowbalization’ are not going away and will have lasting ramifications for market strategy.

But what if a brief moment of policy clarity is about to emerge, giving investors a reprieve from the chaos of 2020? Some emerging information could quickly turn into trends on two key US policy debates. This would give investors some unexpected, and underpriced, clarity.

• Fiscal stimulus: There appear likely paths to stimulus in the medium term, even if near-term paths dead-end: The market debate on the next US fiscal stimulus has been framed for months in terms of whether or not such action would come in the short term. Last week’s developments effectively answered ‘no’ to that question. Yet, it’s possible that a stimulus delay wouldn’t fully develop into the economic challenge it has the potential to be. Our economists now see evidence that US consumption can carry on for longer without fiscal support, given built-up excess household savings. This is good news as there are many viable political paths towards stimulus over the next three months. We see three out of the four most likely post-election party configurations delivering stimulus by early 2021. The biggest potential stimulus could come in a Democratic sweep, a result that may appear increasingly probable to investors, given a body of polling data that shows Joe Biden with a sizeable and stable lead in sufficient battleground states, and Democrats competitive in key Senate races. In this scenario, in addition to an upsized COVID-19 relief package, we believe that the ‘plausible policy path’ is further fiscal expansion as Democrats enjoy legislative consensus regarding their spending agenda but not regarding sufficient tax increases to fund it.
• Voters appear to be returning mail-in ballots quickly, limiting the risk that investors must wait beyond ‘election week’ to reliably know results: Voters did not lie in our surveys about their intent to increasingly vote by mail (VBM). State data show VBM requests shattering records. But voters also appear to be returning those ballots much quicker than anticipated. Consider the swing state of North Carolina (NC). VBM requests are already nearly five times their 2016 total. But over 30% of them have already been returned. Of those, over 50% are from registered Democrats. While these numbers don’t put to rest concerns about a delayed result (unreturned VBMs in NC remain nearly 20% of the 2016 vote), this would change if the trend continues. Consider that in NC, VBMs can be counted before election day. Hence, their rapid return could have two key effects: 1) Quickening the pace of the overall count; and 2) Reducing the risk that vote count progression sews uncertainty by initially showing large Republican leads that erode slowly on VBM counting. This would reduce the risk that it would take more than a few days beyond election day for investors to reliably know a result. Exhibit 1 shows a similar trend emerging in other swing states. Hence, the skew now appears away from not reliably knowing the result beyond a few days post-election, and we’re adjusting our scenario probabilities accordingly. Our base case remains ‘Election Week’ (70%), but we’re increasing the chances of ‘Silent Night’ (20%) and reducing for ‘Election Month’ (10%).

The conclusion:

In our view, key markets are not geared for such a moment of policy clarity should it emerge before year-end, presenting opportunities for some proactive and reactive tactics: We detail these dynamics in our most recent collaboration with Morgan Stanley’s cross-asset strategy team. One proactive idea that stands out for its asymmetrical response is being short duration in USD fixed income, the 30-year in particular. Despite its strong move last week, it should still be a bellwether for clearer expectations on deficit expansion and a continued V-shaped recovery in the US. A more reactive idea is in US equities, where a dip-buying opportunity could emerge. For example, if a Democratic sweep outcome in the election becomes known quickly, markets could initially reflect concerns about rising taxes before giving way to the benefits of fiscal expansion and, perhaps more importantly, an economy that remains in the recovery phase of the cycle.

There is just one problem with Morgan Stanley’s reco to short the 30Y: everyone and their grandmother is already in it, and in fact, one can argue that the entire Morgan Stanley line of thought is not contrarian at all, with markets now appearing to fully price in a reflation trade.

In fact, for those betting on outcomes, the best upside/downside risk-adjusted trade is to fade the reflation trade which in the past 3 weeks has allowed Russell stocks to strongly outperform their Nasdaq-based deflationary proxies. In further fact, for those cynics among us, one could almost argue that Morgan Stanley is merely hoping to take the other side of the trade that it is pitching to its clients. The next few days of trading should reveal the answer if the unprecedented 30Y short and heavy positioning into further curve steepening can continue, or will punish the momentum-chasing macrotourists.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

According to the Department of Defense’s dismally short sighted vision for the Arctic, U.S. strategic interests were best maintained not by cooperation with Arctic partners, by rather by belligerent sabre rattling under the guise of “competition” with nations who have continuously professed a desire to work with the west as allies.

In recent weeks, this belligerence has taken the form of a new forward posture of 150 advanced U.S. fighter jets to be housed at the Eielson Airforce Base in Alaska including a mix of F22 Raptors and F35 Lighting II jets only 600 miles away from the Russia border. Each fighter plane carries the ability to launch strikes onto Russia after a brief flight across the 100 mile Bering Strait gap. Considering the entire American air force only has 187 F22s and 250 F35s, the proportions of this absurd build up can best be appreciated.

In the most recent DOD Arctic Strategy Report which has shaped this suicidal battle plan, Russia and China are defined as nothing but existential threats to the world order which must he stopped at all costs with the report’s authors stating:

 “In different ways, Russia and China are challenging the rules-based order in the Arctic. U.S. interests include limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behavior.”

Describing this aggressive display that folds into the renewed threats of attack faced by dangerous NATO maneuvers across Europe in recent months, Russian Major General Vladimir Popov told Sputnik News:

“Alaska is remote from the U.S. mainland, but is an outpost in relation to Russia—we are separated only by a strait, and the border is literally within the line of sight. This is a strategic region for the U.S. Adding 150 more fighters would at least double the combat potential of the existing forces there.”

Continuity of Government and NORAD

What makes this dire situation ever more precarious is the fact that President Trump has found himself stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine.

What should be a mere hiccup in governmental procedures is quickly being turned into something much greater as renewed calls for enacting Continuity of Government procedures secretively written into law this past March 2020 arising by various leading figures of the deep state such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When MSNBC asked Pelosi (now second in line to take the mantle of presidency) if anyone reached out to her from the White House regarding Continuity of Government, Pelosi said: “No, they haven’t. But that is an ongoing, not with the White House but with the military, quite frankly, in terms of the — some officials in the government.”

That these calls are occurring amidst a heightened clamor for military coup to unseat the President, the general threat of civil war and the looming danger of economic meltdown, statements like those uttered by Pelosi to CNN and MSNBC this week should not be taken lightly.

In the updated March 2020 Continuity of Government protocols, General Terrance O’Shaunessy (head of both NORAD and NORTHCOM) would take the “temporary” reins of the presidency under crisis conditions of ungovernability which are not too difficult to imagine amidst the storms currently sweeping America. Military staff who would take up a parallel chain of command continue to be stationed 650 meters below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado where they have been deployed since March 2020 following Mark Espers’ orders to NORTHCOM to “prepare to deploy”.

O’Shawnessy has repeatedly echoed the views of the Washington/NATO establishment that the greatest threats to the world stem from Russia and China directly referencing their supposedly nefarious intentions in the Arctic.

The Polar Silk Road: A Healthier Paradigm for the Arctic

Rather than bring the forces of war to the Arctic, Russia and China have together been demonstrating a far more efficient and moral approach which certain patriotic forces within North America tend to be in alignment with, including the current President.

Since January 2018, the Arctic has increasingly become dominated by the positive extension of the New Silk Road northward in the form of the maritime and land based “Polar Silk Road” which has united brilliantly with President Putin’s Far East development program. This program aims to increase arctic shipping five fold by 2024 and begin a bold program of infrastructure, rail, road, pipeline, mining and port building in order to begin accessing the vital raw materials desperately needed for the coming centuries of multipolar development.

On September 26, President Trump working alongside political allies in Alaska, Alberta and the private sector alike streamlined a project which taps into this spirit of genuine economic cooperation and long term thinking unseen in decades in the form of the Alaska-Canada Rail connection. Looking at the business models guiding this emerging project, it is important to note that the destructive thinking of globalization and zero sum logic are not to be found at all as the entire program is vectored on tying North America economic interests into China’s Belt and Road and growing Asian markets.

The Wallace Doctrine for the Arctic Must Be Revived

As I wrote in my recent report Trump’s A Revival of the Wallace Doctrine for the Post-War World, the last serious pro-development strategy to arise from a leading American politician took the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ardent anti-imperial Vice President Henry Wallace, who spent years with his Russian counterparts during WWII arranging the conditions of mutual development of both nations  during the post-War age with a strong focus on the long awaited Bering Strait Rail connection and obvious Alaska-Canada transport corridors. In his Two Peoples One Friendship, Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 saying:

“Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

The Molotov/Wallace vision wasn’t something entirely new.

Earlier programs for building the Bering Strait rail connection were advanced by Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte and Czar Nicholas II who in 1906 sponsored teams of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies of the project, then estimated to costs $200 million.

On the American side of the project, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin (a man who was known as a leading spirit of America’s own Trans Continental Railway) and later Governor of Colorado promoted the work throughout his life saying of the Alaska Canada rail connection:

“It is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an unpracticable undertaking”.

Gilpin’s global program was outlined thoroughly in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Exhibiting the stark raving fear of the renewal of this latent spirit of U.S.-Russian friendship in the build up to the November elections, Thomas Wright (senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute) wrote a panicky op ed in the Atlantic on September 30 called “What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World”. In this article, Wright echoes the broader fears of the deep state of a revival of the Henry Wallace doctrine which the author laments would have been just terrible had it not fortunately been sabotaged by the “great” figure of Harry Truman in January 1945. Wright says:

“Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union… The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints and a vulnerable world, a re-elected Trump could set the trajectory of world affairs for decades to come.”

It should be clear to all that the renewal of the Wallace-Gilpin spirit of development into North America’s Arctic is not only good business but also serves as a vital precondition to re-establishing a world order founded upon trust, win-win cooperation, and non-zero sum thinking. While it is fairly clear that Trump’s political instincts are vectored in this direction (giving rise to such frightful diatribes by emissaries of the Cold War at Brookings and the CFR), it still remains to be seen if sufficient political influence can be exerted to rein in the swamp before a hot war and military coup are unleashed.

Ratings for the NBA Finals continue to see a historic collapse. Game 3 of the finals averaged just a 3.1 rating and 5.94 million viewers, making it “the least watched and lowest rated NBA Finals game on record,” according to Yahoo Sports.

It is the latest chapter in an NBA Finals that has continued to set the bar lower and lower for itself in terms of ratings:

“Game 3 of the #NBAFinals was the least watched @NBA Finals game on record.

The previous record? Game 2 ..”

The previous record before that? Game 1.

(via @RenderAnalytics) pic.twitter.com/WSm6id5fWy

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) October 10, 2020

In a poll on Yahoo Sports with 22,266 responses, people were asked why they thought the NBA’s ratings had dropped off. Player protests/politics was the overwhelming favorite, at 61%, as to why people are turning away from the NBA.

Although we may not see those in the industry brave enough to admit that the politics are causing a problem just yet:

NBA Finals ratings being at an all-time low is due to the fact that an NBA Finals game without a crowd is not a great product. Combine that with increased chord cutting and even more options. The NBA’s position on politics and race has very little to do with it.

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) October 5, 2020

Recall, just days ago we noted that Game 2 also saw a ratings collapse of 68% to all time lows. 

It appears that viewers are no longer interested in the political and social justice messages of the NBA but rather were tuning in for (believe it or not) actual basketball. As the balance of the league has tipped from less sport to more activism, viewers are tuning out.

Game 2 of the NBA Finals saw a major collapse in viewers, with just 4.5 million people tuning in. This is down 68% from last year’s game two, we noted. In fact, the ratings made Game 2 the least watched NBA Finals game on record, dropping below the 7.41 Game 1, which was the lowest viewed finals opener in history. 

There really doesn’t seem to be much of a spin that the NBA can put on the terrible ratings, other than the league has simply lost the interest of many who would have once tuned in. In fact, one of the league’s most “outspoken” voices on oppression and racism, LeBron James, should have been the feature draw for this year’s finals. 

Instead, it appears he could be exactly what is turning viewers away. 

We have also been documenting the recent ratings collapse that the NFL has suffered in the midst of turning its league into a political movement over the last few months.

In early October the NFL reached out to players, telling them “not to worry” about the decline in ratings. Also in denial, they blamed the Presidential race for the drop in ratings, telling players: “The 2020 presidential election and other national news events are driving substantial consumption of cable news, taking meaningful share of audience from all other programming. Historically, NFL viewership has declined in each of the past six presidential elections.”

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearPolitics.com,

“In whichever way others hit us, we will hit, we will give tit for tat, and defeat them by surprise moves,” China’s leader Xi Jinping said in August 2013 at a conference on national propaganda and ideology, a year after becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

“We cannot hold up the larger strategic picture because of tactical rigidity. This means that ‘Even if we are right, we will not use this at times; even if we are wrong, we must go ahead sometimes.’”

Xi’s remarks would have come as no surprise to Ronald Reagan, who famously said of the Soviet leadership that the only morality it recognized was “what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”

Writing in the London Times last month, Edward Lucas observed that while Communism itself is dead, those same Leninist doctrines of political warfare to gain and exercise power, what became known as “active measures,” are still alive in the Chinese Communist Party.

Last week, Lord Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, reminded us how badly wrong China watchers had gotten their assessment of the Beijing leadership. The Chinese Communists might be thuggish dictators, these experts said, but they were men of their word and could be trusted to do what they promised.

Patten busts that myth, citing four chilling examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s duplicity:

1. its denial of the existence of some 380 internment camps to imprison over 1 million Muslim Uighurs;

2. its breaking of World Health Organization rules by not notifying the body within 24 hours of the COVID-19 pandemic;

3. Xi’s breaking his word to President Obama that he would refrain from militarizing the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea;

4. and Xi’s tearing up the promise China made to Hong Kong and the international community that the city would enjoy its liberties until 2047.

“The last thing the world should do is trust the Communist Party of China,” Patten concludes.

Yet that is exactly what the international community wants to do when it comes to climate change, by taking at face value Xi’s U.N. address, in which he said that China would aim to achieve “carbon neutrality” before 2060. It’s not hard to see Xi’s motives. Five years on from the Paris climate accord, it’s time for the second round of five-year climate pledges. Western leaders – with the exception of Donald Trump – are competing with one another to make climate promises that will effectively sunset much of their economies. Xi wants to help them. As Lucas points out, in a 1920 tract, Lenin accused left-wing Communists of suffering from an infantile disorder for focusing too heavily on ideology rather than agitating to pull apart the seams of the capitalist world.

Lenin’s successors play the environment card because they know it works. In 1975, the Soviet Union used the environment as a strategic propaganda tool when Leonid Brezhnev claimed the environment as something on which East and West shared a common purpose. It was a transparent attempt to deflect Western pressure on the Soviet Union’s brutal human rights record.

The Kremlin’s most daring use of environmental “active measures” was the nuclear winter scare of the early 1980s. In a bid to split the Atlantic Alliance and win the Cold War, the Soviet Union deployed medium-range nuclear missiles. The West responded with a nuclear arms build-up of its own. In June 1982, the Swedish Academy of Sciences published a paper predicting a nuclear winter across the northern hemisphere in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

The paper was picked up by the Rockefeller Family Fund and amplified by Carl Sagan and many American scientists. An October 1982 nuclear-winter conference in Washington called for a nuclear arms freeze. Conference attendees represented a roll call of progressive groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Planned Parenthood, Common Cause, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, all of which would later stand at the forefront of the climate wars.

It was obvious, or should have been obvious, which side would benefit from an arms freeze. The conference even had a TV satellite link-up with the Kremlin, funded by Tides, another progressive group. Wittingly or not, the scientists, foundations, and NGOs were acting as mouthpieces of the Kremlin in its aim of defeating the West in the Cold War. In fact, the nuclear winter scare had been concocted by the KGB to cause terror in the West and promote the nuclear freeze. If the scientists, NGOs, and foundations behind the nuclear winter scare had succeeded in halting Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up, the West could not have won the Cold War without a shot being fired.

Western politicians who denounce the Chinese Communist Party for its genocide of the Uighurs and its tearing up of international commitments on Hong Kong want us to believe that China is somehow an angel when it comes to climate change. The reason for this suspension of disbelief is simple. If the word of the Chinese Communist Party is not believed, the rationale for climate action evaporates.

Lenin’s heirs in Beijing have a far better understanding of Western leaders than Western leaders have of them. China’s expansionism will continue unchecked until the West has leaders with the moral clarity that it was blessed with in the 1980s, who called out the Soviet empire for what it was. For the time being, history is moving China’s way.

According to the latest data from the Bank of America “machine-learning based US business cycle indicators through August
2020″, both the full-sample indicator, which uses data from November 1962 onwards, and the short-sample indicator, which starts in January 1985, remained in the strongest “boom” regime for the third consecutive month.

According to BofA global economist Aditya Bhave, the bank’s indicators reflect the stronger-than-expected US recovery:

Fiscal stimulus has supported consumer spending, particularly on goods. In turn, inventories have stabilized. Housing has benefited from 150bp of Fed cuts and pandemic-induced moves from cities to suburbs. Perhaps most importantly, the June/July surge in virus cases did not significantly derail the recovery.

As Bhave further explains, moderate targeted restrictions across the US instead of shotgun shutdowns, which even the WHO admits were a mistake to the great embarrassment and humiliation of “scientists” everywhere – or what the bank calls “learned immunity” – proved sufficient to bend the cases curve. And in part, people and policymakers have become tolerant of case counts that would have led to broad lockdowns in the spring. Incidentally, this is a point which Goldman Sachs made last week, when the bank found that the pandemic recession was actually not that bad.

That said, a day of reckoning is coming and as BofA admits, “once the quick gains from reopening have been exhausted, the recovery will inevitably slow”:

Growth was already slowing in August, with the first principal component (i.e., the common trend) of our short-sample dataset dropping slightly from its all-time high in July (Chart 2). But it remains elevated, and as a result the economy will have to dig itself out of a smaller hole when reopening has run its course.

Furthermore, as we cautioned two weeks ago  and as BofA agrees, the bad news is that risks are accumulating to the downside.

Consumers are facing an income cliff as another round of fiscal stimulus now looks very unlikely before the elections. Personal income fell by 2.7% in August, and additional declines are likely as the Lost Wage Assistance Program’s supplemental  unemployment insurance benefits have expired in some states and are due to expire soon in others. Spending actually increased in August, but the divergence from income is not sustainable.

Naturally, the other key concern is a major surge in the virus in the fall or winter that prompts much stricter, economically costly restrictions. In this regard the US’ “tolerance” for elevated case counts is a worry because a higher baseline level of cases increases the risks of a large outbreak. The outcome here would be political: if Trump wins on Nov 3, we expect Democratic governors to promptly shutdown their states in hopes of obliterating any hope for a recovery. Alternatively, under a Biden administration, expect the media to completely forget all about the covid pandemic within hours of Trump conceding, and to declare the coronavirus crisis over just days after the election.

In conclusion, BofA has raised our 3Q growth forecast to 33% Q/Q saar, which would leave GDP about 3.5% below its 4Q 2019 level: “so the good news is that the base case for the economy has improved significantly” while “the speed of the recovery is offsetting some of the pain from the depth of the downturn” even as a much more difficult phase in the cycle is about to be unleashed. 

Authored by Bill Hansmann via AmericanThinker.com,

I watched an extremely troubling movie the other night on the recommendation of my friend Rich.  It was on Netflix but is also available on YouTube and is called The Social Dilemma.

We wonder why partisan rancor and political division are at an unprecedented level in our country.  This film suggests a likely answer.

We spend a lot of time on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, but not nearly as much time as they spend on us.  It seems that these platforms are populated and are indeed driven by algorithms that are individually calibrated to give each user what the platform decides that person wants to see, demonstrated by his pushing the “LIKE” buttons.  Liberals get items with a liberal slant.  Conservatives receive stories and items that match their previous likes.  Those individuals who exhibit a liking of conspiracies get more of the same, as well as ads designed to sell black helicopters.

In other words, every time we “LIKE” an item on Facebook, our individual settings are fine-tuned.  Our news feeds, as well as our comments, are monitored and used to even more precisely shape what we see on our screens.  No two individuals get the same variety of items on their Facebook pages or on any other platform.

More and more when considering the opinions of people I know, I ask myself, How can they think that way?  How can they believe that?  They are, in fact, being programmed to feel that way by their interactions with their social media.  And unfortunately, I am receiving the same treatment, with different modalities resulting in a different mindset.

Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, taught us that if you tell a lie enough times, it will be accepted as the truth.  It is obviously also true that different spins on facts and stories can be individually tailored to each individual’s demonstrated tastes.  Paul Simon penned the lyric “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”  We watch and listen to news feeds that tell us what we want to hear.  We never tune in to the others.

I’m not suggesting that Facebook, et al. possess Goebbels’s evil intent.  I do suggest that they, in their driven purpose of monetizing our likes and dislikes, have inadvertently helped to drive a wedge in our population that quite possibly could lead to civil war.

I recall a social experiment from a few years back.  In one, people looked at a picture of a woman in a dress.  Half the people looking at the picture saw a blue dress, and half saw silver.

Two individuals standing side by side and seeing the opposite of each other in this experiment often questioned the sanity or truthfulness of the other.  In this instance, there was nothing designed to cause the differing results.  It would seem that in some ways, we are hardwired to interpret certain things differently.  But when you add the tactic of designing individual inputs to reinforce a belief system in the way the social platform algorithms perform, the often seen results are ironclad sets of conflicting beliefs that become woven into our population.  It is undeniably dividing our house, and we know what Lincoln told us about that.

What is the answer to these troubling circumstances?  I wish I knew.  But I find it quite telling that many of the executives of the large social platforms stated in the movie that they did not allow their children any time on the very platforms that they are selling to the rest of us.  That is certainly food for thought.