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As Mark Zuckerberg continues to cave to the ‘woke mob’ driving the corporate advertiser boycott of his business, Facebook has reportedly removed several pages related to the “Patriot Prayer” group, a conservative group that has been routinely identified as “white supremacist” by left-wing reporters with an agenda.

Described by RT as “a mainstay at pro-gun rallies and street protests”, the group received attention from the national media last weekend when a rumored member was shot and killed by a man who described himself as “100% Antifa” in an interview. The shooter, Michael Forest Reinoehl, was himself shot and killed by police after confessing to the shooting in an interview with – who else? – Vice News.

A Facebook spokesman told Reuters the company pulled the pages as part of “ongoing efforts to remove Violent Social Militias from our platform.” That’s presumably a reference to street brawls between members of the group and armed left-wing groups.

Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson tweeted about the victim, addressing him by the name “Jay”, and claiming to have known him through the group. Gibson’s own personal page was also caught up in the ban.

He raged at Facebook for the timing of the ban: “Antifa groups murdered my friend while he was walking home, and instead of the multibillion dollar company banning Portland antifa pages they ban Patriot Prayer and myself,” Gibson said in a statement on Friday. “People can sign up at PatriotPrayerUSA.com for future events.”

Facebook updated its policies last month, promising to ban any groups who “pose significant risks to public safety, including offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organizations and QAnon.”

While Facebook says it removed over 980 groups, 520 pages and 160 ads from the platform under the new guidelines, including “some who may identify as Antifa,” conservative critics argue the bans skew in one direction and largely target those right-of-center, despite the platform’s claims of impartiality.

The shooting in Portland hasn’t gotten nearly as much media attention as a shooting allegedly perpetrated by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who had ‘blue lives matter’ posts on his social media pages – prompting the media to label him a white supremacist as well.

A man wearing a Patriot Prayer hat was murdered in Portland by a criminal who said he was “100% Antifa” and instead of banning Antifa pages, Facebook banned Patriot Prayer. Truly Orwellian insanity from the Trotskyite garbage babies who run Facebook. https://t.co/Wa8DY5vy0e

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 4, 2020

Zuckerberg has been doing everything he can to appease the growing crowd of pundits blaming him for single-handedly destroying American democracy by hoodwinking the American people into electing Trump. All of this, of course, was orchestrated by the grand puppetmaster himself, Vladimir Putin. Earlier this week, he announced a ban on “new” political ads during the final week before the election, a completely technical and, as far as we can tell, uunremarkable, change that serves only to stand as evidence that the company “did something” to take on this imaginary threat.

 

 

The name “Thunderf00t” is the alias of Phil Mason, a British chemist and video blogger who has become well-known for posting YouTube videos that criticize, among other things, pseudoscience. We have written about him here, specifically, for debunking several of Elon Musk’s worst ideas (i.e. Musk’s rocket roadster and his Boring Company tunnel idea). 

His day job is as a scientist in the field of chemistry and biochemistry at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. His tongue in cheek, yet starkly accurate criticisms, have earned him over 950,000 subscribers on YouTube and an aggregate total of more than 220 million views.

And now, YouTube appears to have had enough of him.

Mason has once again taken to the platform and posted a video on Thursday of this week explaining that several of his videos exploring and debunking various theories about the coronavirus had been taken down off the site. 

“So, YouTube has deleted another one of my videos – just, zoom – gone!” Mason starts out by saying. He says the videos are being pulled down without YouTube issuing him strikes.

Mason said that YouTube has pulled down 3 videos in two months for “debunking coronavirus conspiracy theories”.

“Even in this last one, they took it down for ‘spreading disinformation about the coronavirus’,” he says about a video that he put up criticizing Dr. Rashid A. Buttar, an osteopathic physician from Charlotte. 

“Just so we’re clear, Dr. Rashid Buttar is an absolute fruit loop,” Thunderf00t says, detailing Buttar’s suggestions on how to cure cancer and his  theories about the Beirut explosion was caused by a missile. “They’ve been storing ammonium nitrate for 10 years, just so they could blow it up now?” he asks.

“Meanwhile the doctor makes these claims in a gazillion videos,” Mason says, “and his videos are still up”. 

Mason explains his other videos have been taken down for debunking “idiots who don’t know anything about science”. 

“What are you boys on?” he asks YouTube.

Regardless of your thoughts on whether or not Mason is on the right side of the arguments he is making, one can’t ignore what appears to be a growing, asymmetric, strong arm of censorship that continues to protrude from the country’s top tech titans.

Heading into the election, we have already seen Twitter censor the President, Facebook mull the ideas of pulling down news articles and now, once again, YouTube selecting which global experts are allowed to have a say in matters of current events.

Orwell would be proud. 

Authored by Shaurya Malwa via Decrypt.co,

In brief

• China is reducing exposure to the US dollar amidst fears of massive inflation.

• The country has sold over $109 billion worth of US bonds in the first half of 2020.

• Its upcoming digital yuan is a contender to the US dollar’s long-held global dominance.

China is likely to reduce its holdings of US Treasury bonds to just under $800 billion from the current level of more than $1 trillion, according to local news outlet Global Times.

A major reason for the reduced exposure is the record amounts of US dollars being printed by the country’s Federal Reserve, leading to fears among investors and central banks of imminent inflation. Another is US President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the Chinese administration, the report said.

Currently, China is the world’s second-largest holder of US debts, but it has been reducing its holdings of US bonds in recent years. In the first half of 2020 alone, China sold an estimated $106 billion worth of US bonds – a 3.4% decline compared to 2019.

Xi Junyang, a professor at the Shanghai University in China was cited as saying that China is on track to reduce its holdings of US bonds from $1 trillion to $800 billion. But he added, “China might sell all of its US bonds in an extreme case, like a military conflict.”

Bitcoin critic and gold investor Peter Schiff agreed, tweeting, “My feeling is that China will reduce its exposure by much more. It’s also likely that other nations will do likewise.”

If true this is very significant. In fact, my feeling is that China will reduce its exposure by much more. It’s also likely that other nations will do likewise. That means the Fed is gonna need a much bigger printing press and Americans had better be prepared to really pay up! https://t.co/mcemxItX3o

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) September 3, 2020

Schiff added, “That means the Fed is gonna need a much bigger printing press, and Americans had better be prepared to really pay up.”

Rise of the yuan

The report added that many other countries might diversify their foreign exchange reserve assets to decrease the reliance on US-dollar assets. This would be in the hope of minimizing potential risks caused by US debt.

China’s upcoming digital yuan will be a contender. Officially called the Digital Currency Electronic Payment, it will increase the accessibility and accountability of the yuan while increasing international trade on its wholly-digital system.

Experts have already said that the digital yuan may threaten the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Now that it’s getting ready for launch, China may not need the US dollar any more.

Real Vision CEO, Raoul Pal, is joined by senior editor, Ash Bennington, to reflect on a week of extreme price action. They analyze the dramatic crash of U.S. equities on Thursday and its connection to the speculative activity in derivatives markets. After weighing the significance of Softbank’s unmasking as the big “NASDAQ Whale” that has been buying a massive amount of calls on big tech stocks, Raoul and Ash have a broader discussion about how volatility regimes evolve and bleed into each other. Raoul then provides a strategic update on his “unfolding” thesis, shares his thoughts on Europe, and explores the possibility of a W-shaped recession. Finally, Raoul and Ash discuss the “Festival of Learning” that Real Vision hosted this week, as well as give a sneak peek of Real Vision’s new community feature, “The Exchange.” In the intro, Jack Farley and Ash discuss today’s jobs report and look at market volatility.

As Germany finally officially drops its investigation into the Financial Times over the paper’s pursuit of Wirecard, a campaign for which it was eventually vindicated, the Financial Times investigative reporter who broke the story is opening up about the experience of trying to take down a veritable corporate titan, and how both Wirecard and elements within the German government tried to silence him and the FT.

The above-mentioned investigation is perhaps the most egregious example of this conduct. While Wirecard was carrying on a massive fraud in southeast Asia, conjuring billions of dollars in profits via an elaborate shell game, its now-former CEO Markus Braun was working to strike a deal with Deutsche Bank that could have served as a neat coverup.

In a statement released yesterday, Munich prosecutors said the information reported by McCrum and a colleague was “basically correct”. BaFin, the German financial watchdog that recommended the investigation, said it had no objections to dropping the investigation into the FT, though BaFin says it’s still looking into possible manipulation by short-sellers.

In a story that’s, in some ways, reminiscent of a certain actress’s story about how Harvey Weinstein cowed her into keeping quiet about a sexual assault perpetrated by him, McCrum recounts how German regulators, and later prosecutors, accused him of an illegal conspiracy. Wall Street analysts accused him of unscrupulously working with short sellers. He was stalked by shadowy figures. His emails were hacked, and swarms of twitter bots slandered him online and taunted him about “going to jail”. At times, white-shoe law firms demanded that his employer, the FT, fire him immediately.

At times, McCrum wrote, it felt like “the world had gone mad”. But he persevered, mostly because he had a high degree of confidence in his reporting, and because he and the FT’s editors and lawyers had braced for a long, difficult road from the beginning.

I’d investigated Wirecard since 2014, following a tip that something was awry with the accounts. Together with the FT’s investigations team editor Paul Murphy and in-house libel lawyer Nigel Hanson, we had learnt what to expect from scrutinising the company: furious online abuse, hacking, electronic eavesdropping, physical surveillance and some of London’s most expensive lawyers.

After publishing their first major report on leaked allegations of rampant fraud at the company, Jan Marsalek, the WIrecard COO who is currently a fugitive from justice, started finding ways to push back against McCrum and his reporting by identifying the reporter’s sources and trying to influence them.

It was amid this tumult that Paul Murphy, who at the time edited FT Alphaville, took an odd phone call. A stock market speculator and gossip who Murphy spoke to in private on a pretty regular basis — call him Bill — wanted to make an introduction. Was Murphy really sure about “the stuff on Wirecard” on FT Alphaville, he asked? Bill said he was in touch with someone who vehemently disagreed. His name was Jan Marsalek.

Marsalek, then just 36 years old, was the chief operating officer of Wirecard and the mastermind of its dirty-tricks operation. A suave dealmaker who lived half his life in private jets and luxury hotels, he thrived where the worlds of business, crime, politics and spycraft intersect, a solid gold credit card tucked in the pocket of his designer suit. We now know that he had a range of secret-service contacts in Russia and Austria, as well as deploying at least a dozen private investigators in multiple countries. Documents seen by the FT indicate Wirecard had a broad toolkit at its disposal, ranging from a cast of social-media sock-puppets spouting propaganda to physical surveillance to sophisticated eavesdropping kit used to mirror iPhones.

However he’d done it, Marsalek had identified one of Murphy’s regular sources — and hoped to use him to influence the FT’s reporting.

Pretty soon, strangers were approaching FT reporters in public, and offering them thousands of dollars to remove critical posts, while also trying to cynically plant positive news that might help bolster the stock.

Within days, Marsalek tried a different route into the FT. Bryce Elder, an equities specialist on the paper, returned from a Mayfair lunch and sat down next to Murphy in the newsroom. “A strange thing just happened to me,” he said. “I was offered money to quietly remove the Wirecard posts from Alphaville. Of course, I told him where to go but he said there’s a takeover bid coming for Wirecard.”

After that incident, Wirecard’s tactics became much more sophisticated, and Marsalek’s behavior even more brazen. Once, Marsalek personally confirmed a phony rumor about an upcoming deal between Wirecard and a major rival based in France.

Dan McCrum

The FT didn’t take the bait, but McCrum and his editors were rattled nonetheless.

In April 2016, rumours started to circulate among London stock market traders that the FT was about to report that Wirecard was in takeover talks, and that the newspaper would issue a correction and an apology for its past coverage. Elder, who keeps his ear close to this rumour mill, was quickly told the terms of the supposed bid: Wirecard would merge with its French rival Ingenico. He also received a name and number to contact for verification of the deal: Jan Marsalek. Marsalek, who was in Moscow at the time, answered his call and confirmed the takeover: Wirecard had supposedly reached heads of agreement with Ingenico in a transaction designed to create a European payment-processing powerhouse. The price would be €60 per share, 70 per cent above the prevailing market price — a bid premium that would stun investors. But as Marsalek spoke, calls were simultaneously going into Ingenico executives from our Paris office. The French were adamant: there were no talks, there was no deal, the story was fictitious. Ingenico even produced an on-the-record statement.

At the FT we were dumbfounded. A senior executive at a large publicly listed European company had brazenly tried to spoof our journalists into running a completely fabricated, highly price-sensitive story. This was simply outside of our experience and, while it cemented our conviction that something was up, it was also deeply intimidating. What other tactics would the company try, I wondered.

Wirecard’s next salvo would strike even closer to home. It included a leaked cache of documents including hacked correspondence from hedge funds betting against Wirecard, as well as copies of McCrum’s emails and doctored chat logs to make it look like the FT was in cahoots with investors, all part of a nefarious conspiracy to pick on an innocent German payments-processing giant.

In December I found out, when screenshots of emails between me and a corporate investigator were posted online for all to see. More worryingly, they appeared along with a collection of doctored chat-message transcripts, presented as evidence that I was synchronising the publication of Wirecard-related content with various hedge funds. Wirecard’s associates, helped by an Indian hacker team, had invented their own “whistleblower” who published this cache of supposed evidence as a file called Zatarra Leaks. It included hacked correspondence between hedge funds, clandestine surveillance photos of investors at their homes — and my emails. This was accompanied by a rabid conspiracy about London-based traders and corrupt journalists ganging up on an innocent German technology company. Panicked, I replaced all my personal electronics and spent days setting elaborate passwords on every device. On the advice of Sam Jones, who covered the security services for the FT, I attached a timer to my WiFi router to turn it off at night and reduce the opportunity for attack.

When the paper pressed on undeterred, Marsalek arranged an interview with McCrum and his editor through a back-channel. The rumor was that he was planning to offer them $10 million to drop the investigation.

In early 2018, Murphy was lunching with one of his regular “bid-gossip” contacts at Signor Sassi, a splashy Italian restaurant near Harrods, when Wirecard came up in conversation. “You know they will pay you good money to stop writing about them,” the market contact stated. Murphy smiled, dismissing the idea. “No, I’m serious, they will pay you proper money,” he insisted. “They will pay you $10m. Go and talk to Bill. He’ll help you.”

Our immediate assumption was that this was a trap — a sting to demonstrate an FT journalist could be bribed. If there was going to be a lunch with Marsalek, we had to monitor it covertly. The meal in question was arranged with surprising speed — for February 16 2018 — and, ultimately, took place at a steak restaurant at 45 Park Lane, where the prices naturally limit the number of people dining on any given day. Along with Marsalek came Bill and his son, plus a mysterious character called Sina Taleb, who couldn’t quite explain why he was there. Nearby, presenting themselves as three “ladies who lunch”, were Cynthia O’Murchu and Sarah O’Connor from the FT investigations team, as well as Camilla Hodgson, then a trainee FT reporter. They discreetly videoed proceedings with a high-tech handbag, while Murphy was covertly mic’d up

It was for naught: Marsalek didn’t offer Murphy $10m. It may be that a last-minute venue switch exposed our amateur surveillance, or he wanted Murphy to make the incriminating “ask”. Marsalek did voice his belief, based on what he claimed was his direct experience, that journalists could be easily bought. And he repeatedly pressed his line that, knowingly or otherwise, I was working with short-sellers to damage Wirecard stock.

During that lunch, McCrum said, Marsalek openly admitted that he was running a spy operation into the FT.

What Marsalek also admitted to, albeit indirectly, was running a spying operation against us. (“Maybe friends of mine did it,” he said.) And he explained, almost candidly, why this was needed: a misinformed or malicious FT story represented an “existential threat” to Wirecard, which, like any financial institution, had to retain the trust of those it did business with. “If we lose our correspondent banking relationships, the business would go down almost overnight,” he said.

In October 2018, McCrum and one of his colleagues finally met in person with a whistleblower in Singapore who leaked a cache of documents to the FT that offered clear proof of manufactured cash flows via a process known as “round tripping”. When the FT moved to publish its next report, editors were surprised when, just hours before it went live, contacts started asking questions about an impending story. Floored by the possibility that they might have a leak, despite all the precautions taken, McCrum and his editor swiftly realized that the leak had come from Wirecard. It was clear Marsalek was now trying to frame the FT for working with speculators.

At Sweetings, he’d taken a call from a market trader, who said he’d heard there was a Wirecard article coming at 1pm and wondered what we were reporting. We sat and rolled through the names of those who knew we were planning to publish that day: the two of us, Nigel the lawyer, Lionel the editor. That was it. The copy wasn’t even in our content-management system yet. There was no leak from the FT. The penny dropped: any leak must have come from Wirecard. Alerted by our questions, it had spread the news through the London market and once again was about to accuse us of collaborating with market speculators. The evidence was in the reference by Murphy’s caller to publishing at 1pm. We were never going to publish at that time; 1pm was simply the deadline given for comment. Right on cue, a letter arrived from Schillings: “Our client has been informed of large and unusual short positions being taken out this morning against it, in anticipation of the publication of damaging information or allegations about it which would negatively impact its share price, as previous Financial Times articles have done . . . The repeated pattern of collusion with market players and, particularly, the timing of the short positions being taken out coinciding with Mr McCrum’s approaches, is particularly suspicious . . . ”

Even more amazing: Almost the entirety of the German business establishment, including BaFin, the German financial regulator, sided with Wirecard over the FT. Soon Munich prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation into McCrum. False claims that McCrum and a colleague had tried to bribe the company’s southeast asian partners also spread. BaFin followed up the investigation with something even more extraordinary: a ban on short-selling in Wirecard shares. This, combined with news that Japan’s SoftBank – back in the news late this week – had just backed Wirecard to the tune of more than $1 billion.

Wirecard shares came roaring back. And yet, despite the company’s seeming invulnerability, Wirecard’s efforts to target critics and shortsellers only intensified. Soon, the company hired a former head of Libyan intelligence, who in turn worked with an old contact from MI5 to build a team of nearly 30 operatives to surveil not just McCrum, but a whole gaggle of reporters and investors bound by the common thread that they were all Wirecard skeptics.

The list of targets included Hedge Fund legend Crispin Odey.

Overseeing the surveillance effort was a maverick Libyan, Rami El Obeidi. He was briefly the head of foreign intelligence in the transitional government installed after the country’s leader Colonel Gaddafi was killed in 2011. He liked to be addressed as “The Doctor” and always stayed at the Dorchester when in London, meeting there with officials from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to press a case that I was crookedly conspiring with short-sellers to bring Wirecard down.

It was “Dr Rami” who brought in an ex-special forces guy from Manchester called Greg Raynor to work the Wirecard case. He, in turn, reached out to an ex-MI5 counter-terrorism operative, Hayley Elvins, and together they assembled a collection of 28 private investigators to follow me, my colleagues and a baffling array of investors and hedge fund bosses, including Crispin Odey.

It was pretty clear by now that the FT had become a huge moneymaking machine for these black operations pressing back against our reporting. Arcanum Global, owned by Ron Wahid and advised by a string of former senior military, policing and intelligence leaders, had a £3.2m contract with Wirecard. Elsewhere Charlie Palmer, partner in the public relations arm of FTI Consulting, failed to get the Mail on Sunday to reprint nonsense written by newspapers in the Philippines.

In October 2019, McCrum and the FT finally published the story that sealed Wirecard’s fake. After spending months trying to track down Wirecard’s Southeast Asian “partners” – and running into dead end after dead end – the paper published a story claiming most of Wirecard’s revenues from the region, ostensibly its most profitable operation, were fraudulent.

It only took another 8 months of dithering from the German authorities before Wirecard finally collapsed in the face of an auditor report confirming $2.1 billion was missing from Wirecard’s balance sheet.

Now, Marsalek is an international fugitive, and McCrum has clinched the biggest corporate takedown by a crusading journalist since the fall of Theranos.

Authored by John Tamny via RealClearMarkets.com,

“I wanted to stay put in Colombia to build a better future for my daughter, but we have to go back.” Those are the words of Nelson Torrelles to Wall Street Journal reporter John Otis. As Otis reported in the August 31 edition of the Journal, the “haggard and hungry” Torrelles along with his wife and 5-year old daughter are walking back to Venezuela on a Colombian highway.

They’d initially moved to Colombia to escape Venezuela’s socialist hellhole, only for Torrelles to get a job as a waiter at a barbecue restaurant in Bogota. But when Colombia joined much of the rest of the alarmed world in shutting down its economy in March in response to the coronavirus, Torrelles lost his job and soon enough the family apartment that he couldn’t make rent on. Hard as it may be to imagine for those of us lucky enough to live in the United States, the hungry Torrelles and his family are moving back to Venezuela.

Please stop and think about this for a minute. Please stop and imagine the pain Torrelles is in. It surely extends well beyond hunger. Imagine not being able to adequately provide for your family, including a daughter too young to understand that your failures are largely beyond your control. Words don’t begin to describe what Torrelles must be going through, nor can someone lucky enough to be in the United States understand just how awful things must be for Torrelles and his family.

About the coronavirus shutdowns, this column will stress yet again what it always has: the greater the presumed lethality of any virus, the less of any kind of need for shutdowns or government intervention.

Practicality is behind this simple assertion.

For one, economic growth has long been the biggest enemy of virus and disease precisely because economic growth produces the surplus resources that can be mobilized in pursuit of cures for what ails us. If something threatens us with sickness or even death, no reasonable person would respond with forced economic contraction.

Second, the greater the presumed lethality of any virus, the more that any laws or rules meant to limit its spread are superfluous. Really, what about the high possibility of sickness or even death requires a law? People don’t need to be told to not hurt or kill themselves. No reasonable person would seek to expand government power over human action during the spread of a virus precisely because wise people would govern themselves.

To which some who absolutely revel in being told what to do will respond that not everyone is rational when it comes to protecting themselves. So true.

All of which speaks to the third reason any kind of governmental response to a virus is impractical. It is because accepted wisdom rarely ages well. Think back to AIDS in the 1980s, and the popular view that it could be spread by people merely existing in the same room.

Some people will most certainly throw caution to the wind about any virus, and it cannot be stressed enough that these people are crucial. Their indifference or their disagreement with accepted wisdom means essential information will be produced. Specifically, those who don’t share the alarmism of doctors like Anthony Fauci and Scott Gottlieb, two individuals who in no way face the risk of going without food, shelter or life’s comforts if it turns out they’re wrong, can tell us if those who aim to protect us are wrong or right. In particular, if some wholly ignore the Faucis and Gottliebs of the world only to experience no ill health effects for doing just that, the medical profession and society more broadly will be much smarter as a consequence.

Lest we forget, Fauci was the doctor who told us a husband could pass on AIDS to his wife just by being in the same room. This was 1983. He knew so little. So did everyone. The past raises an obvious question about the present: why would doctors and scientists eager to know the truth be so adamant as Fauci and Gottlieb are about ongoing governmental limits on human action? Those wholly interested in the truth would presumably cheer those not eager to follow official, or unofficial rules and accepted societal norms. They produce information as important, and arguably more important than the rule followers. Again, there’s so much we don’t know.

At the same time, what we know is that per the CDC, the hospitalization rate for those infected with the virus is .1 percent?

As for deaths, the New York Times reported once again on August 18th that “More than 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the United States have been tied to nursing homes.”

“Once again” is operative mainly because the Times has long reported this fact, and it’s one that has long led the half-awake to a very simple conclusion: some, or maybe a lot of the U.S. coronavirus deaths have been a consequence of the elderly dying with the virus as opposed to having died directly because of it.

It turns out the CDC agrees with this blinding glimpse of the obvious. It recently released a report indicating that over 94 percent of the U.S. coronavirus deaths occurred among individuals with “underlying medical conditions” like diabetes, heart failure, respiratory failure, and other maladies. So while there’s so much so many don’t know, including doctors, what’s long been apparent is now being accepted even by the CDC; U.S. death counts related to the virus are overstated. Perhaps wildly so.

It’s a reminder that the answer to any illness or any other presumed problem must always begin with freedom. Not only does it produce crucial information that truth-focused doctors and scientists would plainly want to know, not only does it produce the growth that provides cures, it also helps those with the least avoid what Nelson Torrelles is enduring right now.

Again, please stop and imagine the many layers of his agony. Having done that, please ask yourself in your relative comfort just how deep your corona-religion is? Is it so deep that you’ll continue to turn a blind eye to the global suffering that’s taking place so that you can feel safe from a virus that thankfully kills so few? Please think deeply about this.

The lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people with exponentially less than you hang on your level of alarmism, and the strange joy you derive from being told what to do.   

But, but, but… everyone was so certain!!

S&P Dow Jones Indices have just issued a statement confirming new additions and deletions from their major indices.

S&P Dow Jones Indices will make the following index adjustments to the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600 to ensure each index more appropriately represents its market capitalization range.

The changes will be effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, September 21, 2020 to coincide with the September quarterly rebalance:

S&P MidCap 400 constituents Etsy Inc. (NASD:ETSY), Teradyne Inc. (NASD:TER), and Catalent Inc. (NYSE:CTLT) will move to the S&P 500, replacing H&R Block Inc. (NYSE:HRB) Coty Inc. (NYSE:COTY) and Kohl’s Corp. (NYSE:KSS), all of which will move to the S&P MidCap 400.

S&P SmallCap 600 constituents Wingstop Inc. (NASD:WING), Medpace Holdings Inc. (NASD:MEDP), and Fox Factory Holding Corp. (NASD:FOXF) will move to the S&P MidCap 400, replacing PBF Energy Inc. (NYSE:PBF), Allegheny Technologies Inc. (NYSE:ATI) and Mack-Cali Realty Corp. (NYSE:CLI), all of which will move to the S&P SmallCap 600.

Jazz Pharmaceuticals plc (NASD:JAZZ) will replace Transocean Ltd (NYSE:RIG) in the S&P MidCap 400. Transocean is no longer representative of the mid-cap market space. Mr. Cooper Group Inc. (NASD:COOP) and R1 RCM Inc. (NASD:RCM) will replace Express Inc. (NYSE:EXPR) and Pennsylvania Real Estate (NYSE:PEI) respectively in the S&P SmallCap 600. Express and Pennsylvania Real Estate are no longer representative of the small-cap market space.

And… drum roll please… no TSLA addition to the S&P 500.

And TSLA is tumbling back below $400 after-hours…

Elon has some ‘splaining to do!

As a reminder, this comes a week after the index providers kicked Exxon, Pfizer, and Raytheon out of the Dow.

Two weeks after jaws dropped across Wall Street when the latest Berkshire 13F revealed that the Warren Buffett, now 90, had dumped his entire stake in Goldman and trimmed most of his other bank holdings (including cutting his Wells Fargo holdings by about a quarter) while buying Barrick Gold in a bet on “hard assets” that was formerly seen as anathema for Buffett…

… moments ago it emerged that Buffett has continued to pare his bank exposure and according to its latest Berkshire 13G filing, Berkshire Hathaway showed that as of Sept 4 it had sold another 100 million shares of Wells, taking its position to just 136.3 million. The reduction is a 42% drop in Berkshire’s last disclosed position of 237.6 million shares; Berkshire’s stake is now 3.3% of Wells stock, down from 5.96% previously.

Considering that for years Wells Fargo was synonymous with Buffett’s long-running bet on US banks – and on America in general – the move is certainly ominous for all those predicting an imminent bank stock renaissance (and comes at a time when Buffett is also pivoting toward Japan’s largest trading houses).

The 13G showed that in addition to 136.3 million shares held by Berkshire, another 1.2 million shares were held directly by Warren Buffett, and another 7.7 million shares by Nebraska Furniture Mart, The Fechheimer Brothers Company and BH Finance LLC.

As a reminder, heading into Q2, Buffett trimmed his stake from 323.2 million as of March 31 to 237.6 million shares at the end of Q2. The continued liquidation of about 100 million share every month suggests that Buffett is well on its way to dumping his entire Wells stake. The question now is whether Buffett was also dumping other US banks – failing to see a rebound catalyst – or his liquidation was confined solely to the bank which has emerged as the most distressed among US money center banks.

Beijing isn’t letting a global pandemic and deteriorating relations with the US stop it from pursuing eternal national glory in the final frontier – space.

According to reports in mainland state-backed media picked up by the SCMP, China has successfully launched a reusable experimental spacecraft.

The launch took place in the northern province of Inner Mongolia, where the reusable vessel was launched via a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan satellite center in Inner Mongolia on Friday. It’s scheduled to return to the landing site after orbiting the earth for a period.

The spacecraft will test reusable technologies during its flight “providing technological support for the peaceful use of space.”

The latest mission was shrouded in secrecy: a copy of an official memo circulating on social media warned staff and visitors not to take any video, or allow any details about the event to leak.

A memo that served as a warning read that “all units should strengthen personnel security education and personnel management during missions to ensure that there is no leakage of secrets.”

A military source confirmed the document’s authenticity to the SCMP, saying “there are many firsts in this launch. The spacecraft is new, the launch method is also different. That’s why we need to make sure there is extra security.”

Over in the US, Boeing is developing the US X-37B, which experts noted appears to be similar to China’s new reusable space craft.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the US X-37B is an unmanned space plane that operates like a smaller version of a space shuttle. It’s launched into space by a rocket and cruises back to earth for a runway landing, allowing the vessel to be reused.

SCMP says the Chinese reusable space plane has flown on missions before, but never before in a test of space flight. It’s only the latest development in China’s space program, which also recently launched the first independent probe mission to Mars. US Space Force’s official website said the primary objectives of the X-37B missions were to develop “reusable spacecraft technologies for America’s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on earth.”

Given all the similarities to the X-37B, we wonder how long it will take for Peter Navarro to tell Fox or, better yet, CNN that Beijing stole the original technology from the US before building on it.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity?

Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

Mark Zuckerberg predicts civil unrest in November

File this one away under “No sh*t, Sherlock…” In a yet-to-be aired interview with Axios HBO, Mark Zuckerberg states the obvious that, come election night in the Land of the Free, there most likely won’t be a winner declared because it will take days, if not weeks, to count all the mail-in ballots.

Moreover, says Zuckerberg, there is “a heightened risk of civil unrest” especially between the end of voting and the time the results are announced.

(And to be even more obvious, depending on who wins the Presidency, we believe the resulting civil unrest will make all the rioting we’ve seen so far in 2020 look like a picnic in the park… but that’s another story.)

Disney cancels “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” song 

There may be no other large corporation that’s more woke than Disney. The media giant has changed everything– its shows, movies, rides, and attractions, to conform to the Twitter mob.

Disney has now opted to remove the song “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” from its Disneyland theme park.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah was released as part of Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South… and as you can probably imagine, Song of the South didn’t handle the issue of race as delicately as it would be treated today.

(I mean, the movie title has the word ‘south’ in it, so it is automatically offensive to the Twitter mob.)

OK great. So the movie offends the Twitter mob. But Disney is cancelling a SONG that was part of the movie’s original soundtrack. WHY?

According to Disney’s official response, “The removal of the song from Downtown Disney’s background music is part of a continuous process to deliver an environment that features stories that are relevant and inclusive.”

What exactly are the lyrics of Zip-a-dee-doo-dah that make it so inflammatory?

“My oh my what a wonderful day / plenty of sunshine headin’ my way.”

Rage! Fury!

Click here to read the full story. 

Coffee mug cancelled for promoting domestic violence

Finally, the real source of domestic violence has been identified and eradicated.

The Twitter mob successfully secured the removal of a coffee mug from the British grocery chain, Sainsbury’s.

The mug featured a quote from the classic children’s book Matilda by Roald Dahl.

The mug said, “A brilliant idea hit her.”

After multiple Twitter-mobsters took note of the mug, the leader of a women’s group also got in on the action.

They claimed that the mug promoted domestic violence against women, because it could be read, “A brilliant idea: hit her.”

The grocery store apologized, and removed the mug.

Well done ladies! (But not in the cooked meat sense of the term.)

Click here to read the full story. 

University creates tech to scan Twitter for misogynist Tweets

An Australian University is developing a technology that can identify misogynist and sexist Tweets.

Currently, Tweets have to be reported before they are deleted, which the team sees as a problem.

This technology will make it easier to censor the Tweets automatically– or at least send the Twitter mob after fresh victims.

Think of this as a way to automate the thought police, so that no stone goes unturned in identifying microaggressions. And in the future, it can be expanded to any woke principles that the Twitter mob sees fit.

Of course, the algorithm is only partially accurate. So the misidentified will just have to take one for the team.

Click here to read the full story. 

German man fined €1,500 for flipping off speed camera

For driving 9 km/h over the speed limit (about 5 mph) Germany usually issues a €20 ticket.

But when the automatic traffic cameras flashed to take a picture of the minor infraction, one man decided to flip it the bird.

The picture of him with his middle finger up made it to the German authorities. And they decided to fine him €1,500 ($1,775) instead, for the crime of being offensive.

He also had his license revoked for a month.

But at least he wasn’t caught walking his dog for only 59 minutes per day otherwise the penalties would have been even more severe!

Click here to read the full story. 

Pregnant Australian woman arrested for social media post about COVID

Police in Victoria, Australia entered a pregnant woman’s home, handcuffed, and arrested her in front of her two young children.

It was all because of a post she made encouraging people to attend an anti-lockdown protest.

The woman was also served with a search warrant for her electronics.

The encounter was recorded until police apparently turned off the recording in order to seize the cell phone it was being filmed on. “Any device in the house, we’re taking,” the officer in the video says.

The woman was taken into custody, and charged with incitement.

It is a breach of law, under Covid rules, to gather in large groups. And encouraging people to break that law is also illegal.

It’s absolute insanity that this is where we are at.

The government can do whatever it wants to restrict the freedom of its citizens– right up to shackling and caging a pregnant woman, in front of her kids, over a Facebook post.

All in the name of safety from a virus.

Click here to read the full story and watch the video.

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On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.