Category: zerohedge

Cohen ‘Coached’ By Schiff Staffers Prior To Anti-Trump Testimony: Report  

Republicans are questioning whether meetings between disgraced former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen amounted to coaching a witness, according to a Fox News report.

According to the report, which follows revelations this week that Cohen likely lied to the House Oversight Committee about his pursuit of a presidential pardon, Congressional Republicans were not convinced by Cohen’s testimony claiming that his meetings with members of Adam Schiff’s staff in the days before the hearing constituted routine prep, or preparations for “well-rehearsed theater.”

Schiff

Ohio Rep. Mike Turner sent a letter to Cohen’s team demanding more details about with whom their client met and the length of the meetings and their locations.

But, Republicans have signaled they’re not convinced, with Ohio Rep. Mike Turner sending a letter to Cohen’s team on Wednesday demanding answers.

Turner specifically asked for confirmation of Cohen’s contacts, if any, “with Democratic Members or Democratic staff of SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence], COR [House Committee on Oversight and Reform], or HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] prior to his appearances before House and Senate committees last week” – as well as the lengths of such contacts, their locations and who exactly was involved.

“These questions are important for the public to understand whether or not they were watching witness testimony, a public hearing, or well-rehearsed theater,” he wrote.

During last month’s seven-hour public hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen hesitantly acknowledged, under questioning from Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”

In a statement, Schiff’s staff replied that it was “completely appropriate” to carry out “proffer sessions” and give witnesses an opportunity to review their testimony ahead of these meetings.

Asked about the revelations by email, a House Intelligence Committee spokesman defended the Schiff staff’s pre-hearing discussions with Cohen.

“We are running a professional investigation in search of the facts, and we welcome the opportunity to meet with potential witnesses in advance of any testimony to determine relevant topics to cover in order to make productive use of their time before the Committee,” spokesman Patrick Boland told Fox News.

“Despite this professed outrage by Republicans, it’s completely appropriate to conduct proffer sessions and allow witnesses to review their prior testimony before the Committee interviews them – such sessions are a routine part of every serious investigation around the country, including congressional investigations.”

However, sources told Fox News that Cohen’s meetings lasted longer than 10 hours, while the hearing itself lasted seven, and that they were more involved than Cohen let on during his testimony. The sources said the sessions covered a range of topics, including the National Enquirer’s “Catch and Kill” policy and Cohen’s allegations about Trump undervaluing his assets.

During last month’s seven-hour public hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen hesitantly acknowledged, under questioning from Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”

But, he did not elaborate on the discussions, which Fox News is told extended significantly longer than the seven hours that the public hearing itself lasted.

One by one, during the dramatic hearing, Cohen fielded questions on precisely the same topics that the sources told Fox News he discussed with Schiff’s staff during the sit-downs in New York.

For example, in response to questioning from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Cohen discussed the purported practice of paying for the rights to news stories harmful to Trump, only to bury them.

“I was involved in several of these catch-and-kill episodes,” Cohen told Maloney, “but these catch-and-kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr. Trump long before I started working in 2007.”

If Republicans are right, and Democrats did coach Cohen, they clearly didn’t do a very good job, as more of Cohen’s multiple prevarications are exposed.

And now that Schiff has been drawn into it, they are probably regretting the fact they clearly didn’t take the time to get their stories straight.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NVdmwc Tyler Durden

Grand Jury Slaps Jussie Smollett With 16 Felony Counts In Hate-Crime Hoax

Jussie Smollett has bigger issues than just an untreated drug problem and a false police report – as a Cook County, IL grand jury just returned a 16-count true bill of charges against the Empire star, as first reported by CWB Chicago and confirmed by CBS 2. The new charges each carry a potential sentence of probation to four years if convicted, according to CWB. 

The grand jury’s true bill states that Smollett lied about the attack to two separate police officers–the beat cop who took his initial report and a detective who conducted a follow-up interview the same day.

In one set of charges, the grand jury found that Smollet filed a false police report around 2 a.m. on Jan. 29th in which he told an officer that he was attacked near 341 East Lower North Water Street by two unknown men who were dressed in black and one of whom wore a ski mask. The jury further found that Smollett told the original officer that the attackers called him racial and homophobic slurs and struck him in the face with their hands. The police report connected to these charges also indicate that Smollett claimed that a noose had been placed around his neck and a “chemical” had been poured on him.

The second set of charges returned by the grand jury involves Smollett’s alleged false reporting of the incident to a police detective later the same day. Additional details that Smollett apparently included in the second interview include: the men approached him from behind, Smollett fought back, and all three men fell to the ground where Smollett said he was kicked in the back and felt someone pulling on his neck. During this interview, Smollett also told the officer that one offender was a white male wearing a black mask with an open area around the eyes that exposed the attacker’s skin, the grand jury found. –CWB Chicago

Smollett was charged in February with a single count of felony disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. The actor claimed that he was the victim of a predawn hate crime on January 29 in which two men assaulted him while he was on his way home after buying a sandwich; hurling racial and antigay slurs at him, dousing him in a liquid, placing a noose around his neck (which he was still wearing when police arrived later that morning), and punching him in the face. 

The incident sparked national outrage – with the left-leaning mainstream media and prominent Democrats uncritically supporting Smollett’s version of events; holding it up as a prime example of violent Donald Trump supporters. 

The two suspects in the case, Nigerian-American brothers Ola and Abel Osundario – one of whom has been an extra on Empire, told police that Smollett paid them a combined $3,500 to stage the “attack,” and that the three of them had practiced it beforehand. They also said that Smollett was involved in creating a racist letter containing a white substance that was sent to the actor on the Chicago set of Empire.

When the letter failed to achieve the desired level of national outrage, the Osundario brothers say Smollett concocted the hate-crime.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VJaogN Tyler Durden

Chelsea Manning Jailed For Refusing To Testify About Wikileaks

Following a dramatic hearing at a federal district court in Eastern Virginia, activist and former military prisoner Chelsea Manning was jailed by a judge for contempt of court after refusing to testify to a grand jury empaneled in the government’s long running criminal investigation into Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

The judge, the Hon. Claude H. Hilton, ruled that Manning must remain in civil detention until she testifies, her lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen told the New York Times.

Chelsea

Manning was subpoeaned in January to testify before the jury. But she vowed not to cooperate even though prosecutors offered immunity for her testimony.

“In solidarity with many activists facing the odds, I will stand by my principles,” she said on Thursday. “I will exhaust every legal remedy available. My legal team continues to challenge the secrecy of these proceedings, and I am prepared to face the consequences of my refusal.”

Manning’s jailing offers another glimpse into the government’s secretive investigation into Wikileaks, which was started under the Obama Administration and picked up by the Trump Administration. Manning served seven years in prison for leaking the infamous “collateral murder” tape to Wikileaks, by far the longest prison term ever served for leaking government secrets. Manning, who transitioned to a woman during her time in prison, twice tried to commit suicide before she was pardoned by Obama.

Late last year, an accidental leak of some information in the case revealed that Assange had been charged under seal last summer. And while Manning has decided to refuse to cooperate, a Wikileaks volunteer recently agreed to testify against Assange in exchange for immunity. The grand jury has been investigating Assange for nine years.

In a statement released earlier this week, Manning said she was ready to “face the consequences” of her refusal to answer questions before the jury. Manning had appeared before the grand jury on Wednesday, and also refused to answer questions, according to NBC and her statement.

“I responded to each question with the following statement: ‘I object to the question and refuse to answer on the grounds that the question is in violation of my First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendment, and other statutory rights,” Manning said in a statement.

“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in 2010 — answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” the statement said.

Manning has already admitted to sending Wikileaks an archive of secret documents while working as a military intelligence analyst, and she told the court that everything she would be willing to disclose has already been revealed during her court martial hearing back in 2013.

Chelsea Resists, a group supporting her, has published a statement about her imprisonment.

And, as one twitter wit suggested, now would be an interesting time to be a fly on the wall in the Alexandria jail.

While the ruling is appealable, it’s unclear if or when Manning might be released.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VNzMCi Tyler Durden

Jim Kunstler : “You Can’t Over-Estimate The Damage We’ve Done To Ourselves”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Do you know your place? In these days of hysterical Wokesterism, the question would surely provoke a riot of cowbell-clanging Antifa cadres, fainting spells in the congressional black caucus, and gravely equivocal op-eds from David Brooks of The New York Times. Yet it’s a central, unacknowledged quandary of our time that so many Americans have no place and suffer terribly from it.

Human beings need a place in the social order, in the economic order, and in actual geography in order to function optimally in a life fraught with the normal challenges and difficulties that reality presents.

Let’s take these places in reverse order…

It’s a fact that most Americans live in everyday environments that are, at best, not worth caring about, and at worst actively punishing to human neurology. Have you taken a good look at the American landscape and townscape lately? How do you feel venturing down the six-lane commercial boulevards lined with cartoon architecture? Either anxious or numb, would be my guess. Or a Main Street of empty storefronts? Or an avenue of looming, despotic glass skyscrapers? Or a vast subdivision of identical McHouses where the buffalo once roamed? Is it any wonder that Americans require more antidepressant medication than people in other lands? Or, that failing to find treatment, they self-medicate with alcohol, opiates, sugary snacks, and anything else that takes them out of the soul-crushing reality of their surroundings.

I don’t think you can overstate the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the sheer material arrangement of our national life. A decade ago, I sat in on many zoning board meetings called to approve new WalMarts and other chain-stores around my region of upstate New York and southern Vermont. Inevitably, the companies organized a claque of locals in the meeting hall — itself a depressing, low-ceilinged chamber of cinder blocks and fluorescent lighting — to fill the seats and yell in support of “bargain shopping.”

That was some bargain they got. The chain-stores got approved and the Main Streets died, but that wasn’t the end of it. This dynamic also destroyed networks that gave local citizens an economic and social place. Locally owned business people were the caretakers of the town. They took care of two buildings — their place of business and their home. They sat on library, school, and hospital boards and donated money to running local institutions. They employed people who lived in town and there were consequences for treating them well or badly. There was even a time in this country when local business people wouldn’t dare to put up an insultingly ugly building.

A lot of this economic behavior has produced the social perversities of our time. Exterminating an entire class of local merchants has eliminated the heart of the American middle-class and grotesquely concentrated the nation’s wealth among corporate leviathans who comprise one percent of the population. It also eliminated the place where young people learned how to do business, preparing themselves to try ventures of their own, and to make a place for themselves in the world.

What is your place now? A cubicle in the marketing department of Old Navy? An aisle in the Home Depot? A desk in the Diversity and Inclusion office of some State University, pushing to sort the student population into racial and sexual categories because all other ways of belonging in society are gone? Or do you occupy ten square feet of sidewalk with a tarp and a shopping cart? None of those places are liable to furnish a personal sense that life is worth living.

Those of you out there still sincerely clamoring for “change” might start asking yourselves if you have a clue about finding a place worth caring about in this country and what it might actually take to get there, including the revision of a lot of ideas in your head that you take for granted. Hint: if you’re looking for it in the current political leadership you are probably wasting your time and energy. If you’re looking for it in some group identity, you may not ever discover the power in your own individual ability to make choices for yourself.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2tZ4Cf8 Tyler Durden

Venezuela Now 24 Hours In Darkness; Maduro Blames US “Electricity War”

Venezuela’s worst ever power outage in recent history has continued since Thursday, as video and photos continue to come out of the cash and resource strapped country showing entire cities blanketed in darkness.

Stretching into day two of the mass electrical shutdown, 23 out of 24 states remain in darkness, according to the AP, in a prolonged situation now reaching crisis levels given reports that hospitals are struggling to keep back-up generators running and many businesses are forced to remain shuttered. 

Caracas streets Thursday evening, via the AFP/Getty

The nation-wide blackout quickly turned into a blame-game over who’s at fault, with many in the opposition blaming the Maduro government’s mismanagement and notorious corruption, and with pro-regime voices blaming right-wing saboteurs taking orders from the United States.

Caracas has even gone so far to point the finger at Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who only yesterday as part of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing said that the US should promote “widespread unrest” in order to bring down the Maduro government. Though offering no specific proof Caracas officials accused the US and opposition activists of causing “pandemonium” for several days, culminating in the blackout. 

President Nicolas Maduro gave brief public acknowledgement of the outage on Twitter, saying, “The electricity war declared and directed by the imperialist United States against our people will be overcome!” and added, “No one can defeat the people of Bolivar and Chavez. Maximum unity patriots!”

According to the AP the blackout struck during Thursday evening’s peak rush hour period, and after extending through the night Maduro reportedly ordered all schools and government locations closed. Businesses were further ordered closed in order allow work crews easy access to the failing power infrastructure.

Power in some parts of Caracas has reportedly begun to return, though remains off or intermittent in may other parts of the country. Some parts of the country reportedly had power restored within hours, but others remain in darkness now 24 hours later.

According to VOA news Venezuelan officials “said the hydroelectric station at the Guri Dam, one of the world’s largest, had been sabotaged, but offered no evidence.”

And predictably, US officials capitalized on the Venezuelans’ plight, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo taking to Twitter to say: “Maduro’s policies bring nothing but darkness,” and “No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.”

Pompeo also expressly denied pro-Maduro officials’ accusations that the United States and its regional allies were engaged in acts of sabotage aimed at regime change. 

According to the AP, limited social media posts coming out of Venezuela by those who still had cell phone charges and signals included images of darkened cities that looked like “ghost towns”. 

The AP report described: 

One user posted a video of a nurse manually pumping air into the lungs of an infant. Others posted photos of long lines of cars queuing up at gas stations in hopes of getting fuel. A man anguished that he’d gone 17 hours without hearing from his mother.

“What impotence!” he lamented.

And crucially, the AP continued, “Netblocks, a non-government group based in Europe that monitors internet censorship, said online connectivity data indicates the outage is the largest in recent record in Latin America.”

The extreme nature of the blackout impacting cell and internet communications also continued in to Friday: “The observatory warned Friday that some of the remaining networks were starting to fall offline as generators and backups began depleting and cell towers shut down,” the AP reported. 

However, 23 hours in to the mass outage there were signs of electricity coming back to some regions of the country, with Net Blocks still reporting “new outages slowing the recovery” and internet connectivity back up to 20%, down from just 2% nationwide earlier in the day Friday. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Camx7o Tyler Durden

Trannies Tumble To Worst Losing Streak Since Nixon As Yields Hit 2019 Lows

Biggest US payrolls miss since 2008 and biggest collapse in China exports in years (after the biggest credit injection ever)…

Take your pick from China – tech-heavy small-cap dominated CHINEXT surged over 5% while megacap-heavy China 50 tumbled almost 5%…(SHCOMP ended the week marginally lower with the worst day since October and first losing week of the year)…

 

By the end of the week, only UK’s FTSE managed to hold on to gains as weakness rippled through global markets in the latte half of the week…

Dow, S&P, Nasdaq and Small Caps are down 5 days in a row but The Dow Transports is now down 11 days in a row – the longest losing streak since Nixon in 1972…

 

This week was the first down week for US stocks since 2018… Small Caps were the biggest laggards

 

The machines went wild as always, desperate to get stocks green on the day…

 

Everything green from the shitty payrolls print…

 

Stocks tried twice to accelerate and ignite momentum for a green push but China trade headlines in the last hour spoiled the party briefly before the panic bid ensued, pushing the market above the pre-payrolls levels…

 

“Most Shorted” Stocks are down 7 days in a row (first down week of the year)

 

Buyback-related stocks are also down 8 of the last 9 days…

 

The S&P and Nasdaq both broke back below their 200DMA this week…

 

FANG Stocks suffered their biggest loss of 2019 this week…notably breaking back below its 200DMA

 

Semis were slaughtered – worst week of the year…

About two-thirds of its members are down, led by Marvell Tech after disappointing earnings. There was also a Nikkei report that the global semiconductor market contracted in January for the first time in 30 months. Momentum on the SOX is negative, as measured by the MACD. Falling below the 200-DMA could be an excuse for a broader selloff in stocks, I pointed out yesterday.

Credit spreads have widened 5 days in a row (and VIX is up 5 days in a row), blowing out by the most since Dec 21st…

 

The VIX term structure has re-inverted…

 

Treasury yields tumbled all week, with the belly outperforming…

 

The long-end dropped back to a 3.01 handle – erasing last week’s losses…

 

And the belly reached down to its lowest since the first day of the year…

 

In fact the belly is the richest it has been in years (5Y lowest relative to the 2s10s curve) as bond traders are no longer so concerned about a policy error, but still seem to be pricing in a major growth slowdown in the next few years.

 

And before we leave bond land, we note that 10Y CAD yields are now less than 2bps above the BOC policy rate!!!

 

After rising for 7 days straight, the dollar index tumbled today but remains above the key 97.00 level…

 

Yuan weakened – as you’d expect with USD gains – but closed at the lows of the week after Xi headlines…

 

After yesterday’s bloodbath to a new record low, Argentina’s Peso rebounded notably as BCRA raised its benchmark rate by 500bps to 56.76%!!

 

Litecoin had a big week but the rest of Crypto was practically flat…

 

Despite the dollar surge on the week, PMs and oil gained on the week – rallying after the dismal jobs data…

 

WTI dropped off $57 and bounce back off $55…

 

Today’s dismal jobs data sparked a revival in gold – bouncing off unchanged for 2019…

And Gold rebounded notably against the Yuan…

 

Finally, deja vu all over again?

Because the gap to reality is wide…

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HljBYR Tyler Durden

Nobody Believes This Market: 2019 Is Now The Worst Year For Stock Outflows Since 2008

For the past two months, we have been highlighting what emerged as one of the greatest paradoxes of this market in 2019: even as stocks kept grinding higher, having almost wiped out all their Q4 losses as recently as last week, investors were locked in non-stop liquidation mode, selling stocks and pulling money out of equity funds week after week after week, for 12 consecutive weeks since December.

We noted most recently this in “How Are Markets Higher: Buyers’ Strike Continues For 11th Straight Week“, “Buyers’ Strike Continues For 12th Straight Week“, “This Is Strange”: Despite Historic Rally, Investors Continue To Dump Equities“, and even though we identified the “buyer” in the form of a persistent short squeeze and another record wave of stock buybacks, the question remained: who would be proven right – the market, which had successfully risen above the critical 2,800 level (if only briefly), or investors whose boycott suggested that few had any trust in the biggest market rally to start the year since 1987.

So now that the market appears to have finally reversed and the “goldilocks” rally is over, with BMO’s technician predicting that a retest of the December lows is now underway, it appears that all those skeptics who continued to sell even as stocks rose, were correct.

And sell they did again, because one week after it appeared that bearish investors had finally thrown in the towel with a modest inflow into US equity funds, EPFR reported that the latest week saw another $10.1 billion equity outflow ($1.7bn ETF outflows, $8.4bn mutual fund outflows), with the US seeing about half, or $5.5 billion, of this, while inflows into fixed income accelerated with $8.8bn flowing into bonds, $1.2bn pulled from gold.

But back to stocks, where the outflows have now entered historic territory and as Bank of America calculates, 2019 is now the worst start to year for equity outflows since 2008; of course, recall that it wasn’t until March 2008 that Bear collapsed and it was only in Q3 and Q4 that the financial crisis fireworks really erupted. Which means that for whatever reason, investors were well ahead of the curve in 2008 when they rushed to pull money out of the market. The question is whether lightning will strike twice, and the same financial Armageddon that hit in 2008 – when investors pulled some $100BN from stocks in the first 10 weeks – will strike again this year.

And while equity outflows may be the largest in 11 years, something which naturally does not jive with market action YTD, this week marks another historic anniversary, with BofA reminding us that on Saturday, the bull market turns 10 years old, with the market cap of US stocks up $21.3 trillion, or 3x the rise in US GDP of $6.5tn, with the 3 Dow performers Boeing, Apple, Unitedhealth Group; while the worst performers are Walgreen, Exxon, IBM.

But while the US remains a case study of how a central bank should inject trillions into its market, if not economy, the rest of the world remains lacking, and 10 years after the GFC, the Eurozone remains trapped in deflationary “Japanification” of growth & interest rates, with EU rates unlikely to rise ever and EU equities in “value trap” according to BofA.

Ironically then, according to BofA “Europe = Japan” is now the most consensus trade in the world, with European stocks now the “ultimate contrarian trade”…

… which to BofA means they are likely to outperform in Q2’19 as: a) tightening Euro credit signaling Euro stocks higher; b) China “greenshoots” rally confirmed by rebound in March PMIs; c) dovish ECB = EUR @ 20-month low = boost for cheap, high beta Euro cyclicals.

Finally, just as Hartnett showed that Japan “enjoyed” no less than 13 rallies that exceeded 20% during its secular bear market years from 1990 and 2003…

… he points out that in Europe too there have been nine +10% rallies in the Eurostoxx since ’14, with BofA confident that #10 is coming up.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XLgFdW Tyler Durden

Stocks Slide On Report Xi Has Removed Mar-A-Lago Trip From Calendar

As President Trump tries to push more positive trade talk on the markets, reports that China might be getting cold feet about a sweeping trade deal with the US just keep coming.

With barely 40 minutes left in the session and stocks in the midst of another intraday rally, Fox News poured cold water on the market’s party when it reported that President Xi had removed a tentatively-planned trip to Mar-a-Lago from his calendar. The report appeared to substantiate earlier reports taht the Chinese leader was wary of traveling all the way to Florida, only to leave without a deal.

Stocks

Now we wait to see if the US manages to revive hopes for a trade deal before stocks close with their worst weekly drop of the year.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TxU3yf Tyler Durden

Global Warming A “Hoax And Scam” Pushed By Greedy Government Scientists: Greenpeace Co-Founder

The co-founder and former president of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, says that climate change is a “complete hoax and scam,” which has been “taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology.” 

Moore, who recently made headlines for calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “pompous little twit” and “garden-variety hypocrite” on climate change, sat down with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

The Greenpeace co-founder’s message echoes that of John Coleman, the late Weather Channel founder who called global warming “the greatest scam in history.” 

Moore told Breitbart how fear and guilt are driving the climate change argument, reports Breitbart News. 

Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign — well, fear and guilt — you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.

LISTEN: 

According to Moore, the climate change movement has co-opted and corrupted politicans and bureaucracies in order to exert further control over people, Moore explained – noting that “green” companies only exist on the back of taxpayers. 

And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber — fake news — repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children, and then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials, and then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this, and then of course you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.

When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that’s a completely ridiculous and false numbers, but most of the scientists — put it in quotes, scientists — who are pushing this catastrophic theory are getting paid by public money. They are not being paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M to do this research, where private companies expect to get something useful from their research that might produce a better product and make them a profit in the end because people want it — build a better mousetrap type of idea — but most of what these so-called scientists are doing is simply producing more fear so that politicians can use it control people’s mind and get their votes because some of the people are convinced, ‘Oh, this politician can save my kid from certain doom.’

Moore also warned that manmade climate change, known scientifically as anthropogenic global warming, threatens modern reasoning itself – much like the persecution of Galileo. 

“But this abomination that is occurring today in the climate issue is the biggest threat to the Enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo,” said Moore. “Nothing else comes close to it. This is as bad a thing that has happened o science in the history of science.” 

It is the biggest lie since people thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. This is Galileo-type stuff. If you remember, Galileo discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. He was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church, and only because he recanted was he allowed to live in house arrest for the rest of his life.

So this was around the beginning of what we call the Enlightenment, when science became the way in which we gained knowledge instead of using superstition and instead of using invisible demons and whatever else, we started to understand that you have to have observation of actual events and then you have to repeat those observations over and over again, and that is basically the scientific method.

“It’s taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology. There is no truth to this. It is a complete hoax and scam,” Moore concluded. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EWqpdW Tyler Durden

Bitcoin Mining Profits Rise After 19-Month Slump

Authored by Inbar Preiss via Crypto Insider,

After over a year and a half of decreasing Bitcoin mining revenue, a new report shows a small yet significant recovery in the gross margins. Let’s take a look at what the mining industry has been through in recent years, and what this recovery could mean for the near future.

A dip in the industry

 Last month, Bitcoin mining revenues fell to their lowest intake since August 2017. The total mining income in February 2019 totalled $195 million – a mere fraction compared to the $951 million peak of December 2017, and a 10 percent decline from the previous month.

The digital currency data analysis institution, Diar, reports the following statistics:

“In December 2017 fees alone earned miners over $295Mn. But along with the price drop and the adoption of SegWit rising from an average of 12 percent in January 2018 to over 43 percent in February this year, revenues from fees have become an afterthought.”

The downturn of the crypto-market towards the end 2018, which saw deflation of around 50 percent in the crypto-market, caused the mining industry to suffer. Smartereum reported last November that a great deal of bitcoin miners began leaving the network after BTC dropped 40 percent in price within two weeks. This was the point where the market valuation of bitcoin fell below $4000 for the first time since September 2017.

Even miners with an optimal set-up of equipment and electricity prices have been experiencing reduced growth margins, thus needing to deploy a great deal of the hashpower to remain afloat. Private miners and individuals who don’t have significant capital for investment would not be able to keep up. Only pools who can afford the newest equipment and have a cheap energy supply can profitably mine Bitcoin.

A shift into growth

However, this 18-month dip is seeing a small yet hopeful turn-around. Diar’s report showed us a rise in the mining gross margins of Bitcoin.

The gross margins of the miners went down from 94 percent at the beginning of 2018, to 32 percent at the beginning of 2019. But in February, the gross margins rose up slightly to 39 percent as shown in the graph below.

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Diar

Another indication of things looking brighter for the mining industry is Bitmain’s recent success. Despite the recent hardships of the mining empire, some of their equipment sales show a growing interest in mining.

For example, their most recent flagship miner, the S15, has already sold out twice, with the next batch becoming ready for distribution in April. The S15 is expected to bring 84 percent more return compared to the older model. Furthermore, Bitmain introduced the next generation 7nm ASIC Chip for SHA256 mining which is supposed to be 28.6 percent more efficient.

What can we expect?

While there is a positive turn in the mining industry, we cannot make wild assumptions about the implications it may have on the market in the near future. The information here is not sufficient to conclude that an indication for a nearing bull market or an improvement of price stability.

Nonetheless, Smartereum reports a hopeful perspective on the matter:

“The total daily trade volumes for BTC have increased significantly since the beginning of the cryptocurrency winter hitting as high as 350,000 transactions in March. What this means is that people are beginning to focus less on the price of BTC and more on the BTC technology. So, even if the price isn’t at its best, the confidence of the true Bitcoin believers is still stronger than ever. It is this confidence that drives adoption.”

Another important point to note is that in May 2020, Bitcoin is going to be halving – namely, the bitcoin mining rewards will be algorithmically reduced by 50 percent. This means that the rewards per newly discovered block will drop from 12.5 to 6.25. Mining will be significantly less profitable if the Bitcoin price will not grow by then.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ENbjG5 Tyler Durden