Category: zerohedge

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Anyone who cares for someone with a developmental disability, as well as for disabled people themselves [lives] every day in fear that their behavior will be misconstrued as suspicious, intoxicated or hostile by law enforcement.”

– Steve Silberman, The New York Times

Think twice before you call the cops to carry out a welfare check on a loved one.

Especially if that person is autistic, hearing impaired, mentally ill, elderly, suffering from dementia, disabled or might have a condition that hinders their ability to understand, communicate or immediately comply with an order.

Particularly if you value that person’s life.

At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people are being shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

Unfortunately, police—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces.

Just recently, in fact, Gay Plack, a 57-year-old Virginia woman with bipolar disorder, was killed after two police officers—sent to do a welfare check on her—entered her home uninvited, wandered through the house shouting her name, kicked open her locked bedroom door, discovered the terrified woman hiding in a dark bathroom and wielding a small axe, and four seconds later, shot her in the stomach.

Four seconds.

That’s all the time it took for the two police officers assigned to check on Plack to decide to use lethal force against her (both cops opened fire on the woman), rather than using non-lethal options (one cop had a Taser, which he made no attempt to use) or attempting to de-escalate the situation.

The police chief defended his officers’ actions, claiming they had “no other option” but to shoot the 5 foot 4 inch “woman with carpal tunnel syndrome who had to quit her job at a framing shop because her hand was too weak to use the machine that cut the mats.”

This is what happens when you empower the police to act as judge, jury and executioner.

This is what happens when you indoctrinate the police into believing that their lives and their safety are paramount to anyone else’s.

Suddenly, everyone and everything else is a threat that must be neutralized or eliminated.

In light of the government’s latest efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data such as FitBits and Apple Watches and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA, the “Health Advanced Research Projects Agency”), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability.

Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers.

That’s according to a study by the Ruderman Family Foundation,  which reports that “disabled individuals make up the majority of those killed in use-of-force cases that attract widespread attention. This is true both for cases deemed illegal or against policy and for those in which officers are ultimately fully exonerated… Many more disabled civilians experience non-lethal violence and abuse at the hands of law enforcement officers.”

For instance, Nancy Schrock called 911 for help after her husband, Tom, who suffered with mental health issues, started stalking around the backyard, upending chairs and screaming about demons. Several times before, police had transported Tom to the hospital, where he was medicated and sent home after 72 hours. This time, Tom was tasered twice. He collapsed, lost consciousness and died.

In South Carolina, police tasered an 86-year-old grandfather reportedly in the early stages of dementia, while he was jogging backwards away from them. Now this happened after Albert Chatfield led police on a car chase, running red lights and turning randomly. However, at the point that police chose to shock the old man with electric charges, he was out of the car, on his feet, and outnumbered by police officers much younger than him.

In Georgia, campus police shot and killed a 21-year-old student who was suffering a mental health crisis. Scout Schultz was shot through the heart by campus police when he approached four of them late one night while holding a pocketknife, shouting “Shoot me!” Although police may have feared for their lives, the blade was still in its closed position.

In Oklahoma, police shot and killed a 35-year-old deaf man seen holding a two-foot metal pipe on his front porch (he used the pipe to fend off stray dogs while walking). Despite the fact that witnesses warned police that Magdiel Sanchez couldn’t hear—and thus comply—with their shouted orders to drop the pipe and get on the ground, police shot the man when he was about 15 feet away from them.

In Maryland, police (moonlighting as security guards) used extreme force to eject a 26-year-old man with Downs Syndrome and a low IQ from a movie theater after the man insisted on sitting through a second screening of a film. Autopsy results indicate that Ethan Saylor died of complications arising from asphyxiation, likely caused by a chokehold.

In Florida, police armed with assault rifles fired three shots at a 27-year-old nonverbal, autistic man who was sitting on the ground, playing with a toy truck. Police missed the autistic man and instead shot his behavioral therapist, Charles Kinsey, who had been trying to get him back to his group home. The therapist, bleeding from a gunshot wound, was then handcuffed and left lying face down on the ground for 20 minutes.

In Texas, police handcuffed, tasered and then used a baton to subdue a 7-year-old student who has severe ADHD and a mood disorder. With school counselors otherwise occupied, school officials called police and the child’s mother to assist after Yosio Lopez started banging his head on a wall. The police arrived first.

In New Mexico, police tasered, then opened fire on a 38-year-old homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia, all in an attempt to get James Boyd to leave a makeshift campsite. Boyd’s death provoked a wave of protests over heavy-handed law enforcement tactics.

In Ohio, police forcefully subdued a 37-year-old bipolar woman wearing only a nightgown in near-freezing temperatures who was neither armed, violent, intoxicated, nor suspected of criminal activity. After being slammed onto the sidewalk, handcuffed and left unconscious on the street, Tanisha Anderson died as a result of being restrained in a prone position.

And in North Carolina, a state trooper shot and killed a 29-year-old deaf motorist after he failed to pull over during a traffic stop. Daniel K. Harris was shot after exiting his car, allegedly because the trooper feared he might be reaching for a weapon.

These cases, and the hundreds—if not thousands—more that go undocumented every year speak to a crisis in policing when it comes to law enforcement’s failure to adequately assess, de-escalate and manage encounters with special needs or disabled individuals.

While the research is relatively scant, what has been happening is telling.

Over the course of six months, police shot and killed someone who was in mental crisis every 36 hours.

Among 124 police killings analyzed by The Washington Post in which mental illness appeared to be a factor, “They were overwhelmingly men, more than half of them white. Nine in 10 were armed with some kind of weapon, and most died close to home.”

But there were also important distinctions, reports the Post.

“This group was more likely to wield a weapon less lethal than a firearm. Six had toy guns; 3 in 10 carried a blade, such as a knife or a machete — weapons that rarely prove deadly to police officers. According to data maintained by the FBI and other organizations, only three officers have been killed with an edged weapon in the past decade. Nearly a dozen of the mentally distraught people killed were military veterans, many of them suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their service, according to police or family members. Another was a former California Highway Patrol officer who had been forced into retirement after enduring a severe beating during a traffic stop that left him suffering from depression and PTSD. And in 45 cases, police were called to help someone get medical treatment, or after the person had tried and failed to get treatment on his own.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, as might be expected, has thus far continued to immunize police against charges of wrongdoing when it comes to use of force against those with a mental illness.

In a 2015 ruling, the Court declared that police could not be sued for forcing their way into a mentally ill woman’s room at a group home and shooting her five times when she advanced on them with a knife. The justices did not address whether police must take special precautions when arresting mentally ill individuals. (The Americans with Disabilities Act requires “reasonable accommodations” for people with mental illnesses, which in this case might have been less confrontational tactics.)

Where does this leave us?

For starters, we need better police training across the board, but especially when it comes to de-escalation tactics and crisis intervention.

A study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that CIT (Crisis Intervention Team)-trained officers made fewer arrests, used less force, and connected more people with mental-health services than their non-trained peers.

As The Washington Post points out:

“Although new recruits typically spend nearly 60 hours learning to handle a gun, according to a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum, they receive only eight hours of training to de-escalate tense situations and eight hours learning strategies for handling the mentally ill. Otherwise, police are taught to employ tactics that tend to be counterproductive in such encounters, experts said. For example, most officers are trained to seize control when dealing with an armed suspect, often through stern, shouted commands. But yelling and pointing guns is ‘like pouring gasoline on a fire when you do that with the mentally ill,’ said Ron Honberg, policy director with the National Alliance on Mental Illness.”

Second, police need to learn how to slow confrontations down, instead of ramping up the tension (and the noise).

In Maryland, police recruits are now required to take a four-hour course in which they learn “de-escalation tactics” for dealing with disabled individuals: speak calmly, give space, be patient.

One officer in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “mental response teams” suggests that instead of rushing to take someone into custody, police should try to slow things down and persuade the person to come with them.

Third, with all the questionable funds flowing to police departments these days, why not use some of those funds to establish what one disability-rights activist describes as “a 911-type number dedicated to handling mental-health emergencies, with community crisis-response teams at the ready rather than police officers.”

In the end, while we need to make encounters with police officers safer for people with suffering from mental illness or with disabilities, what we really need – as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People – is to make encounters with police safer for all individuals all across the board.

On Wednesday Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the earlier than scheduled opening of Beijing Daxing International Airport in a public ceremony. Abbreviated PKX, it’s the Chinese capital’s latest boost to support tourism and business related to Xi’s flagship infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, and is vying to eventually be the world’s busiest international hub.

The city’s current main aviation hub, Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA) —currently the second busiest in the world behind Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, is considered at capacity and increasingly wracked with delays. 

The ambitious expectations for the massive ‘starfish’ designed airport is that it will handle 300 take-offs and landings an hour, seeing 45 million passengers go through its gates by 2021.

The long-term projection is that by 2025 it will handle 72 million travelers and by 2040 the hub hopes to see 100 million passengers per year, making it the busiest and largest in the world. 

To reach these numbers will require a planned for increase in runways from its current four to seven runways in total, eventually serving up to 620,000 flights annually. 

Beijing Daxing International Airport, pictured below last December while under construction, was designed by architect Zaha Hadid as a ‘giant six-armed alien starfish’.

Its opening also comes days before the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic, which will include a huge military parade through central Beijing on Oct. 1.

Located south of Beijing the entire expanse of the airport takes up a whopping 47 square km (18 square miles – over half the size of Hong Kong Island).

The main terminal itself is the largest in the world at nearly 700,000 square meters.

Construction on Beijing Daxing International Airport, funded primarily by the Chinese government, came in at around $17.47 billion.

The new airport boasts of its own Huawei 5G base station as well as ‘facial ID’ check-in and security clearance upon boarding. 

Submitted by Harris Kupperman of Adventures in Capitalism

Miami has a highly cyclical property market where the magnitudes of the booms and busts dwarf anywhere else in the country.  In my experience, trends in Miami real estate also tend to lead national trends by a few quarters. Therefore, smart guys always watch Miami.

Roughly a year ago, I noticed that Miami property prices started to decline after a two or three-year period of leveling off. The pace of decline has clearly accelerated recently. Most properties on South Beach (where I live) are off by 20 to 35% from peak prices, but that is nothing compared to the carnage across the bridge in areas like Brickell and Edgewater.

Why are prices dropping? It’s more than simple supply and demand—though the glut of new supply is clearly part of it. Rather, your typical condo has a carrying cost of 4-7% of fair value before financing costs (property tax/condo fees/insurance/maintenance/special assessments/etc). This adds up fast when a property is worth hundreds of thousands or even millions. It is pretty much mathematically impossible to have a positive yield from buying and renting out a Miami condo (trust me, I’ve done the math many times). The only way owning is viable, is if prices go up and allow you to extract capital to fund the carrying costs—though debt service then makes the monthly cash flow even worse. The basic law of Miami condo pricing is that if prices stop going up, they collapse due to the carrying cost. Suddenly, it seems as though a lot of owners are becoming financially distressed—forcing them to hit bids at a time when demand is somewhat lacking.

With all of that in mind, I got drinks last weekend with a buddy in the hard-money lending market to discuss the state of the market. For those of you who are unfamiliar with hard-money lending, these are loans made on the basis of the asset value, not the ability of the borrower to pay. In fact, in some cases it is assumed that the borrower will not repay the loan and through penalty interest, you rapidly chew through their equity and get to own a high-quality property at a great initial entry price. This works well in an up market. How does it work when things go no-bid?

Friend: Holy sh*t Kuppy, it’s about to blow!!

Me: You said that 3 months ago…

Friend: It’s different now, the whole system is jammed up.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Before, when a borrower would default, we’d put him into penalty default interest (which is 25% on loans over $500k in Florida).  My business is to underwrite safe loans and to clip a coupon, not to own real estate.  The lenders that ARE looking for big returns (and risks and headaches) on real estate watch the public records for notices of defaults and then barrage the distressed borrower with offers of 12-16%, interest only private loans… not any borrower’s idea of a good time but still better than 25% default rate plus legal fees.  These offers often come with periods of prepaid interest that temporarily take some pressure off the borrower… but also help sharpen the axe for when it finally falls (larger, artificially inflated final loan amount).  We could play these same games with the defaulted borrowers, but my investors want the defaulted paper off the books—we don’t want to re-possess the property and have to sell it. Our specialty is underwriting—not foreclosure. We’re happy when someone takes our problems away.

Me: So?

Friend: The story usually ends with a “fire sale” of the property by the defaulted borrower or by the lender (after foreclosure).  End users are seeing that the “fire sale” price may very well be next quarter’s market price, and the units aren’t moving.  Even the County foreclosure sales, which have been loaded with fix-and flip reality TV fans bidding 110% of value for the past 5 years, are seeing below market priced deals with no bids.

Suddenly, no one wants our defaulted borrowers. The shark lenders are all jammed up with loans they poached last year. They used to be able to recycle their capital by selling the assets, but now they can’t. This means that no one is buying the distressed loans off our books without demanding a discount on principal. The whole conveyer belt is frozen. Even a few months ago, there were still idiots from out of town, or kids with daddy’s offshore money who’d come down here with a new hard money-fund and make stupid decisions. Now those guys are jammed up too or at least they’re not coming down here anymore. This means that we need to now take possession of our defaults.

Me: How’s that going?

Friend: Lemme explain it this way. We underwrote this one deal two years ago for a $4.5 million purchase of a new construction condo, we leant $2 million against it. The guy defaulted and we’re up to $2.5 million in principal and default interest and we took possession—figuring we were plenty protected by over a million in equity left on the asset. Remember, our basis is $2 million. Well, it’s been for sale for 9 months now. It may not even trade with a 2-handle. Meanwhile, I’m stuck carrying the thing—which isn’t cheap. I have no idea how to even sell it. We’re on our 3^rd broker now. No one has a clue what to do with it, yet these assholes keep building more product.

Me: Welcome to the Miami property cycle. If your build cost is $300 a foot and you think you can sell it for $700, you’ll flood the market. Once you’ve made a “go decision” you’re gonna finish the thing—even if you only sell it for $200 in the end.

Him: It’s even worse. Every month they break ground on hundreds of additional units when the existing ones won’t sell. Some of the most high-profile buildings have had less than 50% sell-through and the majority of what’s “sold” is immediately dumped onto the market unfinished and unfurnished, below the developer sale price for fear that the developer will drop his price and leave these guys even further underwater. Pretty soon they’ll all be forced into another round of price cuts. It makes no sense to build more, but they keep doing it!!

Me: Won’t the 50-bps the fed cut help clear the log-jam?

Him: Are you f*cking kidding me? I’m charging these guys 10% because they cannot get traditional loans. They can cut a few points off rates and it wouldn’t matter. Besides, the guys who qualify for real loans are all selling because they cannot hold onto their own properties. That’s why every third unit is suddenly for sale. Prices stopped going up and the whole thing blew apart and now there’s no buyers. Remember, the price for a whole building is set on the last trade. Banks look at the data and won’t underwrite new loans.

Me: So, what are you doing to clear these bad assets?

Him: I have no idea. I’ll probably smack the bid wherever it is and take the hit—before someone else does. At least I won’t have to keep making condo payments and 2% property tax payments. My fund has basically stopped lending on condos and is well below 50% LTV on everything else. We’re building cash. I don’t want any more of this crap on my balance sheet!! A surprising number of my existing loans are starting to go bad. I know what my competitors underwrote, trust me, they’re in MUCH worse shape. They underwrote all sorts of nonsense that I wouldn’t ever touch. I’ll be fine, but they’re toast.

Me: …and Bank of Ozarks? Haha

Him: They underwrote the stuff the scumbag local lenders wouldn’t touch at 15%, but those jokers got paid fed funds plus 3 to take the risk. We should build a fund to pick at their carcass in 2 years. Good thing they just popped down a new branch in Sunset Harbor. We can use it as the REO office. Haha

Me: Why isn’t any of this showing up in the data yet?

Him: Most traditional borrowers have money and are trying to hold on. Besides, property is a slow burn process. Guys are in extreme pain, transaction volumes have collapsed, properties on offer have exploded. Eventually someone blinks, people realize where the real marks are on their assets, then they ask themselves why they are paying 10% a year to hold onto something that they’re underwater on and dropping in price. It’s going to be just like 2009. Wait 6 or 9 more months. They can take rates to zero, it won’t matter. That’s not the key cost of holding these things anyway.

Me: Will it really be as bad as last cycle?

Him: Last time, a lot of the stuff that defaulted was upper middle-class product. It just needed lower prices and it eventually cleared. This time, the glut is fake “super-luxury.” 3,500 ft units with private exterior jacuzzies don’t ever clear. The property tax is $50,000 alone. Who the hell can afford this stuff? You can give it away for free. A middle-class guy cannot afford to hold it. Last cycle, it was a few hundred units of high-end that went bad. Now you have whole city blocks that are nothing but high end. 200 units per building. There’s thousands and thousands of these things. The property prices can halve and that means the property tax halves, but you’re still paying condo fees and remember, when your neighbors stop paying, you’re on the hook for their payments.

There aren’t enough rich Venezuelans and Russians to buy all these units. Besides, those guys aren’t buying here anymore. They’re scared of Trump and they’re broke anyway. This time it really is gonna blow…

Me: Sweet!! Lemme know when I can get a great deal on something nice.

In a wrong-way derivates bet, we reported last week that a ‘rogue trader’ from Mitsubishi Corp. was fired after losing a whopping $320 million. Now Bloomberg is providing some clarity on what exactly happened after conversations with the trader’s lawyer.  

The trader, who worked for Petro-Diamond Singapore Pte Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation, incurred significant losses when a “premature” settlement of a derivatives positions had to be closed out, said Joseph Chen, the Singapore-based lawyer for the trader, Wang Xingchen.

“Our client takes the position that he had not engaged in unauthorized trades in crude oil derivatives,” Chen said in a statement.

Mitsubishi Corp. and Petro-Diamond said the trader had been taking unauthorized derivatives positions since January, and suffered massive losses over the summer as oil prices plunged.

Xingchen reportedly occupied a relatively senior position, and was in charge of all transactions involving China for the subsidiary.

Mitsubishi Corp. said Petro-Diamond launched an investigation into Xingchen’s trading logs while he was on vacation and sick leave in August. They found unauthorized positions, and decided to unwind them in August. The losses are expected to be about 6% of Mitsubishi’s projected profit for the fiscal year.

Both companies allege Xingchen had manipulated its risk-management system, and was able to make it look like the derivative trades were associated with customer orders.

Chen told Bloomberg his client followed internal reporting procedures and policy at all times. “Internal controls were in place” throughout the period in question, he said. 

Chen said his client is in hiding because of concerns for his safety, adding that Wang has given “appropriate responses” to Petro-Diamond.

Singapore Police Force officials confirmed to Bloomberg that they’re investigating the matter, declined to give further details. 

Mitsubishi and Petro-Diamond said after an internal review – all-sufficient controls were in place at the time. It added that new controls could be put in place to detect trading mishaps “at a much earlier stage.”

The incident is a reminder of the destruction that a rogue trader can cause to a large financial institution.

* * *

Read Mitsubishi’s announcement below:

Losses from Overseas Subsidiary’s Crude Oil Trading

This is to inform you that Mitsubishi Corporation (hereinafter “MC”) can confirm that one of its subsidiaries based in Singapore has realized a previously unidentified loss from derivatives trading. Investigations are currently ongoing to determine all of the details, but what is known so far is outlined below.

MC recognizes the seriousness of this matter and shall be redoubling efforts throughout the entire MC Group to ensure that it does not happen again.

1. Situation at Present

Petro-Diamond Singapore (Pte) Ltd. (hereinafter “PDS”), a subsidiary of MC that engages in the trade of crude oil and petroleum products, has confirmed that it expects to book a loss of approximately 320 million USD from its trade of crude oil derivatives.

Although PDS has already closed the position in question and determined how much was lost on the underlying derivatives, we are now examining the total amount of losses.

2. Facts Determined Thus Far

An employee who was hired locally by PDS to handle its crude oil trade with China (hereinafter “the employee”) was discovered to have been repeatedly engaging in unauthorized derivatives transactions and disguising them to look like hedge transactions since January of this year. Because the employee was manipulating data in PDS’s risk-management system, the derivatives transactions appeared to be associated with actual transactions with PDS’s customers. Since July, the price of crude oil has been dropping, resulting in large losses from derivatives trading. PDS began investigating the employee’s transactions during his absence from work in the middle of August, and that is when the unauthorized transactions were discovered.

3. MC’s and PDS’s Response

After recognizing that the transactions being investigated could result in a loss for PDS, MC and PDS immediately consulted with an outside lawyer and established an investigation team, including local outside experts, to gain an overall picture of the situation and identify the causes.

• PDS quickly closed the derivatives position in question and determined the losses caused by the transactions which were not associated with any crude oil transactions with PDS’s customers. PDS also has since prevented the commencement of any similar transactions.
• MC conducted internal investigation at PDS, which included inspections of PDS’s contracts, rules, risk-management system and internal controls. Based on its findings, MC has reconfirmed that PDS has sufficient internal controls in place, including a middle office responsible for risk management. MC also confirmed PDS already tightened its governance to ensure that any similar improprieties can be detected at a much earlier stage.
• MC also performed investigations at its other MC group companies and MC’s in-house business departments engaged in derivatives trading to determine whether or not any similar improprieties have been taking place. These investigations confirmed that there are no such problems or risks at present.
• PDS terminated the employment of the employee on September 18. In order to take a strong action in response to the violation of internal rules and laws committed by the employee, which has caused PDS this significant loss, PDS lodged a police complaint against the employee on September 19.

4. Impact on MC’s FY2019 Forecast

How the losses will impact MC’s forecast for FY2019 is under investigation and shall be announced if and when a performance review is necessary.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This is how they silence us: your content has been secretly flagged as being “unsafe,” i.e. “guilty of anti-Soviet thoughts;” poof, you’re gone.

Big Tech claims it isn’t silencing skeptics, dissenters and critics of the status quo, but it is silencing us. Here’s how it’s done. Let’s start with Twitter. Twitter claims it doesn’t shadow ban (Setting the record straight on shadow banning), which it defines as deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.

Nice, but what do we call labeling legitimate websites “unsafe” and banning Twitter users from retweeting links to posts on those sites? This is what’s happening to oftwominds.com– Twitter has labeled this site “unsafe” due to unspecified violations of the Twitter User Agreement, which I have reviewed and can categorically state the oftwominds.com site and posts have never violated the terms of the Agreement or the Twitter Rules, except if posting several tweets that contain the URL of my current post somehow violates the Rules. (If bloggers can’t list the URL of their original content more than once a day, then the Twitter Rules are prejudicial and should be amended.)

Note that Twitter doesn’t identify or provide the user with evidence of the violation of its User Agreement that justifies the “unsafe/can’t retweet” shadow-banning. The process of contesting such arbitrary and opaque censorship is absurdly unsatisfactory. There is no form for content owners/Twitter users to contest being tossed in the “unsafe/can’t retweet” gulag; users must click through a bunch of “contact us” screens, none of which have an option for contesting being tossed in the “unsafe/can’t retweet” gulag.

When you give up and just send Twitter Support a “report on spam,” i.e. that your own site is wrongly being labeled spam, you get (of course) an automated response in which Twitter promises to do nothing and tell you nothing.

If original content that is obviously not violating the Terms of Service/User Agreement can be arbitrarily banned from being retweeted without any evidence or due process, how is this not censorship? This is straight out of Kafka: an unaccountable, all-powerful, completely opaque bureaucracy arbitrarily bans your Twitter followers from retweeting a link to your original, copyrighted content.How is that not flat-out censorship (by a privately owned and operated entity with extra-legal powers)?

This is exactly like the Soviet Union, where citizens were routinely tossed in the gulag for having “anti-Soviet thoughts.” Twitter, Facebook and Google routinely hold the equivalent of extra-legal administrative “trials” in which those accused of violating open-to-interpretation (“anti-Soviet thoughts”) Terms of Service are not presented with evidence of their “crimes” nor are they given a chance in a transparent, fairly administered process to contest their “guilty” verdict.

As for Facebook: direct links from Facebook users to oftwominds.com dropped by 90% last year over the course of a few days. What could have caused this sudden collapse? The only possible cause is Facebook limiting the number of people who could see my posts on their feeds. If this isn’t shadow-banning, then what do we call it, other than censorship?

As for Google–who knows how your rankings in search are jiggered? We do know that having “anti-Soviet thoughts” will get you de-platformed from YouTube, which not only silences you but also demonetizes your content, so not only are you thrown into the censorship gulag, you’re stripped of your livelihood as well.

I have long suspected that the root of oftwominds.com being censored by the Big Tech platforms is my “false arrest for sedition” via the scurrilously fabricated PropOrNot list that was gleefully promoted by the odious propaganda organ Washington Post— promoted, we should note, without any journalistic investigation or even rudimentary fact-checking.

Having been put on a list of sites deemed “guilty of anti-Soviet thoughts” by propagandists purporting to reveal propaganda, I’ve been shadow-banned and censored without any recourse or opportunity to contest my sentence in the Big Tech gulag. This is how Big Tech silences us, quietly, without any evidence, without any hearing, without any recourse, in secret extra-legal proceedings where we are refused the opportunity to question our accuser and contest the “evidence,” if any.

Big Tech is a privately owned and operated gulag straight out of Kafka. As I have argued before, the only way to dismantle this privately owned and operated gulag, whose sole purpose is to maximize profits from adverts and selling user data, is to turn their services into public utilities that cannot collect any data and cannot target adverts.

This is how they silence us: your content has been secretly flagged as being “unsafe,” i.e. “guilty of anti-Soviet thoughts;” poof, you’re gone.

*  *  *

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A Fremont police Tesla engaged in a high speed chase last Friday ran out of battery power while in pursuit of “felony vehicle”, according to the Mercury News. 

The department’s Model S was in pursuit of a vehicle and was traveling at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour on the highway when the officer driving it radioed in that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading. 

Officer Jesse Hartman said to fellow officers nearby: 

“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec. If someone else is able, can they maneuver into the number one spot?”

But the officer lucked out: shortly after radioing the battery warning in, the person he was chasing began driving on the shoulder and police had to call off the chase for safety reasons. 

While the rest of the officers made their way back to headquarters, Hartman had to make a pit stop.

“I’ve got to try to find a charging station for the Tesla so I can make it back to the city,” Hartman said. 

He eventually found a charger in San Jose and was able to return back to headquarters. The Tesla had reportedly not been recharged after its previous shift before Hartman took it out on Friday, so the battery level was “lower than it normally would have been”, a Fremont police spokeswoman said. 

“Hartman was monitoring the charge and responsibly notifying everyone of its status,” the spokeswoman said.

Recall, Fremont’s police department made headlines for being the first police agency in the nation to roll out Teslas as part of its fleet. The used 2014 Model S is considered as part of a “pilot program” to determine whether or not Teslas are suitable for police use on a larger scale. 

The four year old Model S cost the department $61,000 when they bought it in 2018 – $20,000 more than a new Ford Explorer police vehicle that the department uses for its other patrol vehicles. 

You can listen to the audio of the chase here: 

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Financial and precious metals expert Egon von Greyerz (EvG) says the signs abound that we are nearing the end of this global fiat money experiment while central bankers are befuddled.

EvG explains, “The central banks are panicking…”

“They don’t know what to do anymore. They are just starting to print money and with the euro on a daily basis…

Europe is starting QE again with $20 billion a month, but that’s nothing compared to what is coming. . . . The panic that started with central banks in the summer in late July and August was, to me, the first step towards total chaos in the world that we will be seeing in the months and years to come.  They (central bankers) see it clearly.

They know the banking system is absolutely on the verge of collapse.  They know Deutsche Bank (DB) and CommerzBank, too, are down 95%.  If you show this chart to a child and ask where is that likely to go, it is likely to go to zero. DB, with their $50 trillion in derivatives, there is no chance they will survive. Of course, Germany and the ECB is panicking because that will affect the whole banking system worldwide.  This is why they have started to print money now because there is a massive liquidity problem, and that’s Germany, which is the best country in the EU from the point of economics.  Then you take Italy, Spain, France and Greece and they are in a real mess. 

This is why the whole system is on the verge of disappearing into a black hole… With the U.S., there is massive liquidity pressure there too.”

The massive amount of money printing to keep the fiat system afloat is just starting.  EvG contends, “This is just a practice round…”

”  This is just more money at this point.  The balance sheet . . . of the Fed is going to go from around $4 trillion to $40 trillion.  It is going to go to $100 trillion before this is over. So, right now, they are just practicing a bit because they are going to put the pedal down to the bottom very soon…

There is no other way to save this system, it has gone too far. I am not a pessimist. I don’t want to see the end of the world, but you can see their actions. You can see that now there is absolutely no way out. The only thing they know is to print money. They have already reduced rates to zero or negative, which is a disaster in and of itself.”

EvG predicts, “All of these bubble assets that are based on just credit and credit expansion are going to implode measured in real terms, measured in gold.”

“I expect the stock market and the property market to lose at least 95% or more in real terms. . . . The next up cycle for gold (and silver) has started. The next phase of this market has started, and it is going to go on for a long, long time. It is going to go to levels that will be hard to believe today. . . .The world cannot have solid growth until this debt has imploded . . . the transition will be terrible, but I don’t see any other solution to this…

The debt can only be wiped out by also wiping out all the asset values. You can’t just make the debt disappear and have the assets stand there at the values that they are today. . . . When this debt is written off or implodes, or whatever they want to call it, that means all these assets are going to go down. That’s why I am saying it is going to go down 95% against gold. There is absolutely no other way, in my view.”

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Egon von Greyerz, founder of Matterhorn Asset Management, which can be found on GoldSwitzerland.com.

*  *  *

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California businessman Devin Sloane is now the second parent to be sentenced to prison for participating in the largest ever college admissions scandal in the U.S., according to Reuters. Sloane was accused of offering bribes to help get his son into a prestigious university and was charged with fraud. 

The 53 year old Sloane was sentenced to four months in prison and was also ordered to pay a $95,000 fine and perform 500 hours of community service. 

Sloane said he wanted to do what was best for his son, telling the court: “There are no words to justify my behavior.”

He had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and one count of honest services mail fraud. 

Sloan’s sentence was significantly harsher than the 14 day prison term given to Emmy-award winning actress Felicity Huffman, which we reported on earlier this month.

Huffman was fined $30,000 and was ordered to perform 250 hours of community service.

More than 50 people have been charged in the scheme where wealthy parents have been accused of offering bribes and other forms of fraud to guarantee admission to several universities for their children. The schools in question included names like USC, Georgetown, Stanford and Yale, among others.

Fifteen parents in total have pleaded guilty in the scandal.

Sloan will remain free on bond and has been ordered to report to the Bureau of Prisons on December 3. Back in May, we reported that Sloane was accused of paying scandal mastermind William “Rick” Singer $250,000 to help his oldest son gain admission to USC as a purported recruit for the school’s water polo team.

Last week around this time, most of the self-described repo experts on twitter and elsewhere were pounding the table, screaming to anyone who would listen that the unprecedented spike in overnight general collateral repo from 2.25% to 10% was a non-event, and reflects one-time items such as the mid-September tax remittance, the rapid build up of cash in the Treasury’s general account and a flurry of Treasury settlements. 

Alas, as we warned, and as the NY Fed today confirmed, the sudden heart attack in the critical, overnight funding market has turned out to be anything but a one-time event. First, as we saw first thing this morning, the latest repo overnight repo operation was the most oversubscribed yet, with $91.95BN in securities tendered for $75BN in reserves, the most yet since the Fed resumed these “unclogging” operations after a decade plus hiatus.

However, the big surprise came later on Wednesday morning, when in an “unexpected” move, the Federal Reserve expanded the size of its two dollar funding operations, the overnight and term repo, from $75BN to $100Bn, and from $30Bn to $60BN heading into quarter-end, effectively injecting up to $250 billion in funding ($30BN in already concluded term repo as well as two $60BN term repos yet to come, together with the $100BN overnight repo, assuming full allottment on all operations, for a grand total of $250BN).

Commenting on this dramatic expansion in Fed liquidity injections, BMO’s rates expert ian Lyngen, had a simple, if very powerful observation: “the fact that we’re discussing a quarter trillion dollars is telling as to the depth of the constraint in repo.” Indeed a far cry from the “all clear” the twitter repo “experts” were screaming from the top of their lungs last week.

As we approach quarter-end, it’s intuitive that funding markets are attracting heightened attention after last week’s repo fiasco. One thing has become clear, however, and that is that the Fed is willing to provide significant  amounts of liquidity to primary dealers to alleviate as much stress as possible. By upsizing injections to $250 bn or  more (assuming overnight remains at $100 bn through October 1 and the terms are $30 bn/$60 bn/$60 bn, respectively) the fact that we’re discussing a quarter trillion dollars is telling as to the depth of the constraint in repo as well as the New York Fed’s desire to make September 30 boring. At the end of the day, only primary dealers are counterparties of this facility. This presents a possibility of some upward pressure on rates were cash not to have permeated throughout the system by the reporting date.

Confirming Lyngen’s fears, and in a troubling indication that despite the Fed is now clearly throwing the kitchen sink at the repo problem and failing, was today’s increase in the overnight G/C repo rate which has once again started to rise ominously.

Unfortunately, in its attempt to window-dress the issue, and pretend there is no problem at all, the Fed continues to pretend as if the problem isn’t there, and following on this morning’s comments from Lael Brainard that the repocalpyse was the result of a “simple imbalance” of supply and demand – and not a sign of deeper distress in credit markets – Dallas Fed president Kaplan said late on Wednesday that whereas the repo strain is important, it does not signal broader stress, and merely shows that the system needs more liquidity.

To be sure, as we explained over the weekend, he is right about the latter, but wrong about the former, and to make it crystal clear to everyone that something is clearly broken with the systemic plumbing, here is repo market guru, Scott Skyrm, who works for Curvature Securities, and whose sole business is Repo financing in U.S. government securities, so yes, he knows better what he is talking about than any so-called fintwit expert.

Let’s just say that the Repo market is not so simple. Just a week ago I was singing praises to the Fed’s overnight and term RP operations. Then, when rates backed-up the past two days, I was worried there was not enough cash in the system and the existing operations had failed. Now, it looks like smooth funding again! The Fed announced they are doubling the term and overnight RP operations tomorrow to $60 billion and $100 billion, respectively. When in doubt, throw more money at the problem!

To be sure, if there is anything the Fed has demonstrated amply over the past decade, is that when in doubt, it will throw “enough money at the problem” that it will inflate the biggest asset bubble in history in the process.

But it was Skyrm’s punchline that was especially troubling as it confirms our worst fears:

Now, here’s the rub. It’s great that the Fed is pumping liquidity into the system, however, why were the existing operations insufficient?

As of today, the Fed had injected $105 billion in liquidity into the Repo market, but rates were still stubbornly high. Whatever changed last week to cause the funding spikes is clearly still an problem.

Indeed it is, and unfortunately neither the Fed nor apparently anyone else, still has a clue what is going on.

Which brings us to something else that Kaplan said late on Wednesday, namely that the Fed will now study what size the balance sheet should be in the future. Sound familiar? It should: that’s precisely the exercise we conducted over the weekend, when we analyzed how much bigger the Fed’s balance sheet will be in the coming year, and how the Fed will get there. For those who missed it: the Fed needs to boost its reserves by roughly $400 billion to get the total to $1.8 trillion.

The only question is what how it will do it. And here we get to the bottom line, because whereas the Fed and its sycophantic media enablers are desperate to avoid calling the upcoming bond purchases by their real name, instead settling for the far more technical POMO, or permanent open markets operations, which as Goldman estimates will have to by roughly $15BN per month for a total of about $150BN per year…

… it was Bank of America that let it slip, and in a chart from BofAs’ Michael Hartnett, the Chief Investment Strategist called what is coming by its real name: QE4.

The problem, as Hartnett also identified, is that this will take the central banks’ balance sheet to new all time highs, resulting in the biggest asset bubble in history getting even bigger… and setting up the world for an even greater crash when the fed’s pushing on a string fails. And while nobody knows when that will happen, the fact that the financial system nearly collapsed last week even with $1.4 trillion in “excess” liquidity for reasons still unknown, means that like a great white shark, the market now needs constant liquidity injections, or else it will collapse.

Finally, considering that it has now filtered down to even the average American that – courtesy of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – that it is the Fed’s market distorting operations that have resulted in a record wealth and income gap, we wonder: is it Trump’s impeachment, or is it the Fed’s upcoming QE4, that sets the stage for the now upcoming US civil war?

The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office released a new video from within an Ohio jail that shows the moment when a consumer drone buzzed overhead and dropped a bag of drugs to an inmate, reported WTHR Indianapolis News. 

The video, caught on a closed-circuit television system of the Cuyahoga County Jail, located in Cleveland, Ohio, shows several inmates in a fenced-off courtyard playing cornhole. 

One inmate is seen walking around the courtyard with his head in the air, apparently lining up a drop from the drone operator. The inmate is holding a shirt like a catcher’s mitt as the drone operator releases the bag from an unknown altitude. The clumsy inmate missed the drop and tripped over the cornhole set, as the bag tumbled across the courtyard. Seconds later, he recovers the bag and walks away. 

Wait for it…

An inmate at an Ohio jail was caught on camera waiting for a drone to drop a package of marijuana and a cell phone: https://t.co/OcTGszjoqx pic.twitter.com/1XC4tGTGLD

— WTHR.com (@WTHRcom) September 24, 2019

Authorities told WTHR, the incident took place over the summer, and the contents in the bag included marijuana and a smartphone. Prosecutors said the case is “under review,” although no criminal charges have been filed.

An air space map below shows drones are prohibited from flying over the Cuyahoga County Jail, located at 1215 W 3rd St, Cleveland, Ohio. The area is clearly marked in red, indicating the drone pilot broke Federal Aviation Administration laws. 

The drone incident follows several instances where drugs were smuggled into the facility. In one example, authorities discovered a hole in one of the jail cells.

Cuyahoga County Jail will likely install contraband netting systems that are designed to deter, mitigate, and or deny drug airdrops via drones.