Author: admin

As Asian markets open for the start of Q4 trading, Japanese markets have hit a ‘glitch’ resulting in the halting of all buying and selling of securities.

Tokyo Stock Exchange operator Japan Exchange Group said in a statement:

We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your exceptional support for the operation of the Securities Market on this exchange.

Today, there is a failure to deliver market information, and we are pleased to let you know that we will stop buying and selling all stocks on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

At the same time, it is not possible to accept orders from that time.

Recovery is currently undecided, but we will contact you again about future plans.

Seems like it’s a system-wide issue:

• *NIKKEI, TOPIX ARE NOT TRADING DUE TO SYSTEM ISSUE

• *JPX: TOSTNET ALSO NOT EXECUTING TRADES

• *JAPAN SAPPORO EXCHANGE ALSO HALTS TRADING

• *JAPAN NAGOYA STOCK EXCHANGE ALSO EXPERIENCING SYSTEM ISSUES

Nikkei futures are modestly lower with the halt…

And Yen is weaker…

What will the BoJ do when it can’t buy Topix ETFs?

Authored by Kym Robinson via The Libertarian Institute,

There is a genre in fiction that celebrates an individual’s adversity against seemingly impossible odds. Whether this is a person who takes the war to organized crime (Mack Bolan), a secret agent saving the world for their government (James Bond), a wronged loner lost and bullied by the law and the society that rejects them (John Rambo), one who wants something so bad that they will defy social conventions (Velvet Brown), or even a rogue that hides behind a mask and inspires a revolution against tyranny (V), they are in some way inspiring. They are better than most not just because of courage, but also often principle. They are the outsider, the curmudgeon, and blowhard, or worse.

In the coming eclipse of cancel culture and layered censorship, certain allegories and metaphorical fiction will become a dangerous device for story tellers to use. It is no longer a method of sedition to lift a mirror up to a wider culture or society, to reveal an imagery that the victims or an outsider may see. The marketplace of varied opinions and diverse perspectives that is supposedly a hallmark of the abstract known as western civilization is becoming less welcome to such variations. Instead, through technology and a paternalistic tendency society is becoming a dystopia tinkering between the prose of Huxley and Orwell, but especially that found in the film ‘Demolition Man.’ It is a creation of the timid, those who shy away from difference while claiming to champion it.

Social media, like most innovations, was a promise to open our worlds and to connect and share so many different ideas and experiences. Instead it becomes a series of cultivated echo chambers that snuff out certain viewpoints and celebrate others, always confirming a particular bias. It is with an unofficial handshake that the public, made of shrill and easily offended individuals, unite with corporations and states to mash out a new moral order that mutates in instances of outrage and crisis. It clings to central planning and yet it is not necessarily centrally planned. It is a negative instinct to constrict and subvert any desires and needs for liberty. It is the widespread transformation of language to duplicate words into meanings that could only be conjured up inside the laboratories of intellect inefficiency. It is born from a need to be safe and correct, but it is a dangerous approach to any issue or problem.

The story of the individual saying no or wanting to be left alone is now one that is deemed selfish and dangerous. It is bad that one or a few may defy the collective good. The abstract religion of social contracts and duty to the state are the order and safety that a majority cling to. A society of so many dependents who demand and extract from the individual hinder productivity and creative instincts while demanding more. It would be as much of a cliché to invoke Ayn Rand as it would George Orwell—both would simplify the moment—but alas, the Randian term “moocher” is perhaps apt at times. The moochers rule. Tyranny inevitably is like a kind chef cooking a frog in warm water slowly until it boils, so that it may not leap for freedom until it’s too late.

It is with great concern that if the fiction of the past is not censored, redacted, or destroyed that it will be viewed, and that many will view the villains of the story as the hero. The individual, those who fight for freedom and liberty, are now the bad guy.  Those with the imperial conviction to control and impose law and order, however maniacal, are the true heroes, the pillars of society. John Rambo after all was carrying a knife and Sarah Connor was stockpiling weapons. Will great firemen like Guy Montag burn the pages of dangerous books and char the words of seditious thought to maintain a society of ignorance?  It is after all a state of bliss to be hidden from such dangers.

What does it say about a society or culture that will not leave people alone? That it will not let them be or demand that they must not merely comply, but pay tribute? The one who does not want these conditions is considered selfish, while those who exist at the expense of others are normal. The myth is that the elites and rulers are the only benefactors from the centrally planned nightmares that always lead to tyranny. There are many who benefit from such a regulated society, where grants, welfare, and subsidies feed the ineffective and perpetuate an ideology of employment over outcome. The many planners, agents, and ‘moochers’ all benefit, enjoying the trappings of such a state.

The individual must speak in whispers like a thief, yet they are the one getting stolen from. They must plan around impositions as though a conspirator, but it is those in conferences and on committees who conspire against them. They are the ones whose homes are invaded if they possess contraband, do not pay enough tribute to the state, or if they speak wrongly on social media. The terror regimes of North Korea and the Peoples Republic of China are often pariahs, yet the more the open nations of the west condemn them, the more they seem to employ their methods of control and order.

The majority tends to yearn for a comfortable status quo that allows them to enjoy life, often at the expense of others. They are the opulent living city dwellers of the Capitol in ‘The Hunger Games.’ They are the humans inside the pods that will not swallow the pills in ‘The Matrix,’ and those who refuse to wear the sunglasses in ‘They Live.’ To have a bitter truth revealed is painful. That means the victims of the wars, the unintended consequences of regulation, the trampled innocent of policy, all cannot have a voice, and if they do it is often skewered and redirected. The status quo is always preserved. Partisan politics allows the steering wheel to keep turning, even as the direction stays the same.

A man like John Rambo—a vagrant used by his government and then rejected—is a danger not because of his skills and experiences, or because he carries a large knife, but because he wants to be left alone. He is directionless and does not have a generic path in mind. It is a long road, but it is his to take. In time the radical individual becomes embraced and utilised by the state, in life and fiction. In the United States, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. is no longer a dangerous emblem of civil rights defying the order of his time, but a murder victim of cause, likely killed by the very government that now enshrines his name. But his ideals?

Mack Bolan, a former Vietnam war veteran like John Rambo, comes home to a society that no longer needs him. His family is murdered and wronged by the Mafia. So, Bolan deserts the military and wages his own war. In time, as the franchise succeeds and the 1970s climate of anti-establishment thinking grows into Reagan’s America, Bolan fights the Soviets and terrorists. He works with the CIA and other covert government agencies, and like the Punisher (inspired by Bolan), he serves Uncle Sam. Around the same time as this switch, so too does John Rambo in the sequels. These individuals become implements of the state, however begrudging it may be.

As the new century loomed it was not merely the state itself that was the danger, but corrupt actors from within. Gene Hackman and Will Smith as an ‘Enemy of the State’ do not go up against the U.S. government but instead rogue elements of it. This becomes the theme as the individuals continue to defy the odds, but only in a watered-down way. Mark Wahlberg in ‘The Shooter’ is a wary ex-serviceman, a loner, living remote with conspiracy inclinations. We are shown this as the camera pans across his library. He is bought in by the government as a consultant but is betrayed and used as a patsy. But again it is the secret agency of corrupt individuals, not the government itself.

Perhaps the peak of this genre was the 1990s when so many things culminated: the promise of a technological future where liberty and decentralized markets could thrive, and where no more would Cold War threaten the globe with nuclear misery and endless proxy wars. Instead the new century arrived, and it was like the last one. All those promises were betrayed. Like the fictional individuals ultimately going on to serve the odds, Arnold Schwarzenegger would become the governor of California. The man who championed Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and appeared in the documentary series introduction, the Austrian ‘Austrian’ economist of free markets who starred in many ‘individual against the odds’ films, ultimately became another statist. ‘The Running Man’ would go on to run the show in the sequel. It defeats the point.

The animated film ‘Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,’ perhaps one of the greatest tales of individual liberty told, shows a defiant horse that does not want to be owned and broken in by humans, whether that’s by a native American boy or a U.S. army cavalry officer. In the end the native American boy accepts the horse’s wishes and the cavalry officer realizes that he cannot break the stallion’s spirit. It is a beautiful and basic story, that if you love something you should let it to be free. To respect freedom itself is in a sense love.

In the follow-up sequel, the whole point is missed. It is a cynical defeat of an established franchise, an all too common theme for any fan that has seen the terrible litany of remakes in the modern era. Instead of Spirit the stallion being free—a rebel—he becomes submissive and a prop to a city girl. It is a complete about face of what the original film was about. The hero of individual defiance is again saddled and broken in by the very odds that he was heroically defying. No longer does the individual stand up to do the right thing despite personal risk, but instead he is relegated to be a vapid avatar for contemporary consumption, spiritless and all too common.

Perhaps this is the theme: no longer will individuals be this feral radical, but instead be tamed in the end. The uniqueness and dignity of their principles becomes perverted by a mandate devised inside the cauldron of academia by a committee of experts or the reactionaries on social media. In the end, like Spirit the stallion they must be broken in and ridden for some collective monolith. Maybe in the future the spirit of the individual will be found inside the broken algorithms of a machine’s mind, like WALL-E, a lowly robot with basic AI that eventually sees the world for what it is. And the comfortable obese humans wrapped in technology, having destroyed nature—both their own and the wider world’s—will be saved by the touch of a machine who simply thinks for itself and says, “no more.” By then will it be to late? Will the sacred beauty of the individual flower pushing through the filthy mess of the collective be plucked for good?

Bryce Courtenay, in The Power of One, wrote, “Pride is holding your head up high when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”

Good live TV is tough to pull off, especially on CNBC, but once in a while, an otherwise boring debate about the economy or policy will fly ‘off the rails’ and traders and other financial professionals will turn the volume up and tune in.

That happened back in the spring, when Ventuer Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya debated CNBC’s Scott Wapner about whether the Trump Administration should bail out the airlines, and other industries suffering from the pandemic. Palihapitiya famously asserted that the government should “Let them [the airlines] fail” before explaining that these companies burnt up their rainy day funds and took on unnecessary debt to finance share buybacks. And since airlines are asset rich, the businesses will survive bankruptcy intact, along with all or most of the staff.

This response horrified Wapner, and we chronicled the reulting clash. Thrilled with the response, CNBC has brought Palihapitiya and Wapner together for at least one interview since that initial encounter, and on Wednesday, the pair sat for yet another interview as part of CNBC’s “Seeking Alpha” Conference, which was hosted digitally this year.

Remarkably, the two men essentially circled back to their original debate about bailouts, and Palihapitiya delivered on the colorful quotes. Troubled airlines shouldn’t be bailed out, Palihapitiya argued, because they have been so poorly managed. Handing government money to the airline CEOS and their boards would be “idiotic and dumb”.

CNBC has frequently hosted airline executives and lobbyists to argue the other side – that not delivering on the bailouts could put the industry in jeopardy (while implying that customer safety could ultimately be impacted). But Mnuchin’s comments this morning seemed to put hopes for a bail out to rest, even though President Trump promised that the airlines would be taken care of.

But instead of blaming COVID-19 for the airlines’ woes, Palihapitiya pointed out that the companies essentially put themselves in this situation. Instead of building up reserve funds, these companies focused on buying back stock and bolstering the company’s valuation. It was “the most absolutely horrid and idiotic form of capital allocation you could imagine,” he said.

“Not a single extra dollar should go to these companies. All this money should be focused on those people.” Chamath Palihapitiya says people out of work should be assisted through unemployment benefits and eviction protections. #deliveringalpha https://t.co/CSZkx3uhQc pic.twitter.com/ManLHAZScj

— CNBC (@CNBC) September 30, 2020

If governments are going to hand out money to corporations every 10 years, then the government should impose new restrictions on how that money is spent, Palihapitiya said, hinting at support for making share buybacks illegal, or subject to greater restrictions.

“This has been happening for the last 15 or 20 years,” Palihapitiya said. “If you were going to give these folks money, you should have created some much tighter guardrails for what you were going to do in the future.”

Instead of topping off the rescue programs instituted by Congress and the Fed, Palihapitiya argued that any future stimulus funds should go to small business owners and individuals only.

“If you really believe in trickle-down economics, then let’s actually see how trickle-down economics would work. Give money into the hands of ordinary Americans…What I guarantee you they will do is they will spend.”

“We should be improving unemployment benefits, we should make sure they don’t get forced out of their homes, to the extent that they have loans that are coming due…they need to be compensated,” Palihapitiya.

Prodded again by Wapner about the tens of thousands of airline employees who may lose their jobs this week, the venture capitalist who recently launched a SPAC of his own, stood his ground and insisted that “not another dollar” should go to “these CEOs and boards”.

Moving on to the subject of politics, Palihapitiyah dismissed Tuesday night’s debate as “shambolic” and called it a “Dumpster fire” that was “so bad”. However, he also said that, in a way, it was also “incredibly clarifying,” before cautioning that a shift toward brand over substance could one day lead to Kim Kardashian, the pioneering reality TV starlet, to the White House.

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Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Military personnel outnumber civilian scientists in the United States government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program. With the military so heavily involved in the distribution of this vaccine, is it any surprise that most Americans don’t want anything to do with it?

An organizational chart obtained by Stat shows, raising concerns about whether military officials are qualified to lead the massive public health campaign. The military is used for war. Rolling it out to distribute a rushed vaccine signals one thing to the public if you’re brave enough to admit it: this vaccine distribution is a war on the public perpetrated by the government. Wake up.

This vaccine won’t be voluntary by any sense of the word.  You don’t have to take it, but if you don’t, you won’t be able to eat, buy food, pay rent, or leave your house that will be taken from you if you cannot pay the mortgage because you refuse the vaccine. That doesn’t sound like anyone will have much of a choice.

This vaccine could be ready before the election, however, it may not be. Political chaos surrounding the elections is all a part of this vaccine agenda.  The goal is to have everyone tracked, traced, monitored, and under authoritarian control. The goal is the New World Order.

The Health and Human Service’s $300 million “pandemic-related” ad campaign (propaganda rollout) touched off an outcry, and rightfully so, after Politico reported leaked details. Among the concerns were its funding sources: Food and Drug Administration contributed $15 million for pre-campaign work, while most of the program’s $300 million budget was requisitioned from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention funds appropriated by Congress, Politico revealed.

Additionally, the Ohio national guard was called upon to help provide “security” for the presidential debate. Around 300 members were sent to the city to “ensure a safe and secure environment for those attending Tuesday’s presidential debate in Cleveland.”

The military will be increasingly used in the coming months and it’s rollout will be seen as a way to provide peace and safety. Please remain vigilant and prepared. Stay alert and know all the possibilities of what could be coming, as it’ll give you an idea of the additional preps that will be needed. As of right now, refuse to live in fear, and make sure you can defend yourself and your family, especially if you intend to deny the vaccine.

Changes are coming, so prepare and stay alert.

Earlier we detailed that computer systems for Universal Health Systems (UHS), a major hospital and healthcare provider with over 400 locations across the U.S., was hit with what appears to be one of the largest medical cyberattacks in US history.

Demonstrating just how prone America’s vital infrastructure remains to large-scale cyber attacks which could debilitate the country’s response efforts in emergency situations, the spate of ransomware attacks have impacted the operations of 53 US health care providers or health care systems so far this year, according a cybersecurity firm cited in the latest NBC report on the attacks.

The worst and most recent instance was centered on a major Cleveland area hospital, which was taken offline for a full week following an apparent cyberattack. The damage from the hack of the Ashtabula County Medical Center’s systems was so bad that all elective procedures at the hospital had to be postponed, reports NBC.

The facility’s computer systems have been offline since Monday, Sept. 21, according to hospital officials. It’s as yet unclear when full hospital operations will be restored, though elective procedures are expected to begin again this week. 

“As a result of this incident, we have postponed all elective procedures through Wednesday, Sept. 30,” the medical center CEO Michael Habowski said. “Our emergency department remains open to life-threatening emergencies and walk-in patients, and our outpatient departments and physician offices are continuing to provide care for patients.”

Once inside a system via malicious software which encrypts key files, hackers typically demand payment as a condition for restoring network capabilities. That appears to have happened in this case, part of a broader worrisome trend of hackers targeting American health and industrial sectors. 

The NBC report did not delve into the possibility that any particular nefarious outside state actor or entity are behind the surge in cyberattacks, though prior allegations from the State Department and FBI have previously pointed the finger at China and Iran.

These two countries in particular are believed after valuable coronavirus research and vaccine information; however, they would likely attempt to conceal their intrusions.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via The Daily Reckoning,

America has a new manufactured crisis, ElectionGate, as if all the other troubles piling up like tropical depressions marching across the September seas were not enough.

America needs a constitutional crisis like a hole in the head, and that’s exactly what’s being engineered for the holiday season by the clever folks in the Democratic Party’s Lawfare auxiliary.

Here’s how it works:

• The complicit newspapers and cable news channels publish polls showing Joe Biden leading in several swing states, even if it’s not true.

• Facebook and Twitter amplify expectations of a Biden victory.

• This sets the stage for a furor when it turns out that he loses on election night.

• On cue, Antifa commences to riot all around the country. Meanwhile, a mighty harvest of mail-in votes pours into election districts utterly unequipped to validate them.

• Lawfare cadres agitate in the contested states’ legislatures to send rogue elector slates to the electoral college. The dispute ends up in congress, which awaits a seating of newly-elected representatives on January 4, hopefully for Lawfare, mostly Democrats. Whoops…!

• Turns out, the Dems lost their majority there too. Fighting in the streets ramps up and overwhelms hamstrung police forces in Democratic-run cities.

• January 20 — Inauguration Day — rolls around, and the Dems ask the military to drag Trump out of the White House “with great dispatch!” as Mr. Biden himself put it so nicely back in the summer.

The U.S. military breaks into two factions. Voilà: Civil War Two.

You didn’t read that here first, of course. It’s been all over the web for weeks, since the Democratic Party-sponsored Transition Integrity Project (cough cough) ran their summer “war game,” intending to demonstrate that any Trump election victory would be evidence of treason and require correction by any means necessary, including sedition, which they’d already tried a few times in an organized way since 2016 (and botched).

The Democrats are crazy enough now to want this. They have driven themselves crazy for years with the death-wish of eradicating western civ (and themselves with it). There are many reasons for this phenomenon, mostly derived from Marxist theories of revolution, but my own explanation departs from that.

The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just as “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem — as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.

The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natural gas company, Burisma.

And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold U.S. aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs.

Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.

The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution — all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries.

This week, the Senate released a report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It didn’t look good.

Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 — a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme.

Of course, the Senate was not so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

If Mr. Biden actually shows up at this week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?

Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in U.S. political history?

All of which is to say that the Democratic Party has other things to worry about, besides who will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

That may be hard to believe, but it’s how things are now after four years of implacable, seditious perfidy from the party.

A week ago, all the talk centered around the Democrats’ election coup plan, as publicized stupidly by the so-called Transition Integrity Project. Nice try. What if all those mail-in ballots sent out recently have Joe Biden’s name on them and it turns out that he is no longer a candidate?

Hmmmm…. No doubt the recipients were so eager to fill them in and send them out that there’s no going back on that scam. Apparently, a Biden withdrawal was not one of the scenarios scrimmaged out in the Transition Integrity Project’s “war game.”

What then? A do-over?

Hence, panic in the swamp. Joe Biden’s misadventures, and his pitiful fate, are but the outer rainbands of the brewing storm.

There’s the threat of further and widespread riots, of course, but since when has insurrection proved to be a winning campaign strategy in a country not entirely gone to the dogs?

People who are not insane usually object to their businesses being torched and their homes invaded. At this point, after months of violent antics by criminal nihilists, one can even imagine Multnomah County, Oregon, turning Trumpwise.

The orgy of political hysteria, insane thinking and violence is a psychotic reaction to the collapsing techno-industrial economy — a feature of it, actually.

When all familiar social and economic arrangements are threatened, people go nuts. Interestingly, the craziness actually started in the colleges and universities where ideas (the products of thinking) are supposed to be the stock-in-trade.

The more pressing the practical matters of daily life became, the less intellectuals wanted to face them. So, they desperately generated a force-field of crazy counter-ideas to repel the threat, a curriculum of wishful thinking, childish utopian nostrums and exercises in boundary-smashing.

As all this moved out of the campuses (the graduation function), it infected every other corner of American endeavor, institutions, business, news media, sports, Hollywood, etc.

The country is now out of its mind… echoes of France, 1793… a rhyme, not a reprise.