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Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Democrat Party’s GOTV (Get Out the Vote) program relies on labor unions and the NGO sector. Those who organized these directly as this writer has, or those who have been on the receiving end of it, will understand how this zeal, backed by the force of law under the auspices of Contact Tracers/Compliance Officers, will change the electoral outcome.

Contact Tracers are Compliance Officers Backed by Police and Operating under Governor’s Orders

Contact Tracers are based on public sector workers in the area of public health, or NGO’s that rely on funding from DNC backed philanthropy and state budgets. They all rely on their relationship to the DNC to exist.

Among the first NGO’s to receive grants to carry out Contact Tracing work is PIH – Partners In Health. This group, funded by the Clinton Foundation, worked in Rwanda and Haiti. Chelsea Clinton sits on the governing board, and other prominent backers and allies include Rahm Emanuel, Epstein, and Gates.

An investigative report by Raul Diego for Mint Press gives a comprehensive outline of just how Contact Tracers as a type of Compliance Officers from PIH, will work. From his journalism, we see components of the program and how they are meant to dovetail as part of the coming 2020 electoral strategy.

Clinton tweeted in mid-May, urging other governors in the country to follow California governor Newsom’s order for mail-in ballots.

I hope other governors around the country follow @GavinNewsom’s lead. No voter should be forced to choose between their safety and exercising their civic duty this fall. https://t.co/kNkSQ5quw8

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) May 8, 2020

Contact tracers as part of the NGO Industrial Complex, as a private-charter variation of the public sector, only less accountable, will become a new layer of society invested in preserving their work by voting to maintain their budget.

Because Contact Tracers can enter the homes and because some voting polls may also be closed, we can see where Contact Tracers will ‘assist’ voters in their homes with their mail-in ballots. We can predict that in Democrat voting households there will be a disproportionate increase in ballots that actually wind up being counted.

While there has been focus on HR 6666 that adds financing for Contact Tracers, there are ways these can be financed (as they already are) anyway. The ‘bailouts’ at the end of March included massive provisions for the NGO sector dealing in areas of civil society ranging from immigration to public education and healthcare.

These were the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

At-home methods of electronic voting and mail-in that do away with exit-poll cross-checks, is the preferred general strategy the Democrat Party will use to steal the election.

Polls showing Biden ahead should be discounted prima facie, as these are the polls before that intentionally projected Hillary Clinton despite unpublished polls used by the campaigns to the contrary. Both campaigns had a clear understanding that Trump had a very strong chance of winning on that decisive night. This is why ‘insurance policies’ were openly discussed by team Clinton as the election approached.

The fake polls will be used to show that Biden had a strong chance of winning all along. That’s pertinent to the strategy to oust Trump by way of coup tactics.

The strategy to remove Trump is designed to work as follows:

1. Suppress voter turnout by Party identification. To limit voter turn-out by precinct based on party affiliation, and to increase voter turnout in other areas. The inclusion of Contact Tracers and the ‘Compliance Officer-like’ powers they will be granted in short-time for the election, will be among the game-changers.

2. Cancelling In-Person voting. Towards 1., for Contact Tracers to ‘quarantine’ likely Trump voters not as individual households but by ‘infected precinct’. The presence of the Covid-19 ‘disease’ in a precinct, will be determined by Contact Tracers’ data (from both apps and human agents). The governor will be able to declare that elections should be online, by mail, or using greatly limited polls. These Contact Tracers will be able to use ‘voluntary’ apps to narrow down alleged infection rates by block, neighborhood, precinct/county. That these apps aren’t ‘voluntary’ however is explained in this report.

3. Contact Tracers to Police In-Person Polls. To have Contact Tracers work as Compliance Officers under the governor’s instructions at polls, which will slow-down voting and suppress the vote, close polls early or limit exit polling in line with social distancing norms. As was done in the Democrat primaries, counter-intuitive decisions were made to close down polls to ‘limit exposure’. This had the effect of forcing would-be voters to travel greater distances, if they were still motivated, only to find long-lines. Some of these polls closed before those in line were able to vote. Those who maintained their right to vote, because they had been in line on time, were either told that due to the pandemic they did not have that right, or given provisional ballots – which are counted mostly just in the instance of a re-count.

4. Contact Tracers blur line between work and campaign visits. To have Contact Tracers work as GOTV ‘volunteers’ on off-hours and weekends, both on telephone and in person in door-knock efforts for the Biden campaign. Critical here is that in areas where movement is limited, Contact Tracers as essential workers will not have to abide by such limitations. Or, in their capacity as Contract Tracers, they will also leave election literature at locations they visit. This may seem illegal, but this is what NGO and union employees do regularly. This strategy simply increases the size of the army and having the advantage of the freedom of movement in what will prove to be a highly unusual election.

5. To give Republican households a health and safety visit on Election Day. To have Contact Tracers focus on Republican homes, and bog the family down on election day with a health and safety check which could also involve the terrifying visit by CPS and the possibility of a mandatory Covid-19 test and possibly children being removed from an infectious environment.

6. Weaponize the second wave of Coronavirus. To make sure that overall there is a ‘second wave’ of Coronavirus that is treated similarly as the ‘first wave’ which we have only now begun to emerge from. A Digital Trends article from April 11th depicts a Bill Gates ‘super-worried’ about a second wave of coronavirus’.

7. Governors declare State of Emergency. This can be done in such a way that, using Contact Tracers’ data, can decide which targeted parts of a state – by county – to shut down. Expect that universities, and colleges will be shut down. Bernie Sanders and the Squad will use their popularity among college students to promote an alternate reality. We will have many youth mobilized to work both in social media and as campaign workers. From this fertile soil of youth, we will find many new Contact Tracer job openings created as we approach November. This May 11th article shows that universities have already started offering Contact Tracing courses.

We can therefore expect the strategy to take shape by state this way – by comparing the Electoral College map of 2016…

to the breakdown of Dem and Rep governors by state in 2020.

The Center for Politics affirms the following points to consider:

“Following the 2019 elections, Republicans retain a narrow 26-24 edge in governorships.”

We should be looking at the governorships by state because of the authority they have in establishing the rules when there is a state of emergency.

The governors declare states of emergency. In addition, they claim other powers as well which have not been challenged yet in federal courts.

The precedent for cancelling primary elections or changing how general elections will be done ( e-voting from home or mail-in) – was already seen for New York and California respectively.

Those who may be thinking that states are opening up and that this is not a subject in play come November, have not understood the meaning of Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates that the coronavirus will return again this coming Fall.

As we have mentioned, the tracing apps that will make voter suppression through Contact Tracers using the coronavirus pretext more easy to pull-off are nominally voluntary, but does that mean citizens will really have a choice?

Voluntary Tracing May Not be Voluntary

People generally interact not with government who indeed may not ‘mandate’ the use of such an app, but rather revolve in dealings with private businesses.

What is voluntary for you will also voluntary for businesses to mandate for customers and employees to enter the premises. Most employees are at-will, and businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone.

This is already in effect the Jacinda Ardern dictatorship of New Zealand. NZ is proving to be an effective test ground which most closely mirrors the Wuhan protocols of covid-19 containment through Contact Tracing and movement suppression, except that unlike China, this is never-ending.

Unless there is tremendous pushback from Trump and his activist base, we should assume moving forward that by November 2020 when most U.S. citizens will have a Contact Tracing app on their smart phone, the election will be stolen. There are 251 million smart phone owners in the U.S.

What’s also voluntary? That your smart phone comes with an OS, and the OS makers (Android, iOS) can voluntarily place a contact tracer in the next update.

The Philosophical Problem

Whether one wants one side to win or the other isn’t as much a question of who behaves most fairly, but on what outcomes we wish to see. For those who want to see a Bourbonesque ‘restorationist’ move to Clinton-Bush-Obama-era ‘norms’, they will go for Biden. For those who see in Trump a type of Napoleonic ‘revolutionist’ against the Ancien Regime who contained and corralled the Jacobinist forces of Occupy into a new type of system, their option is clear.

We must End Quarantine, not create ‘Jobs’ in ‘Contact Tracing’

The grass-roots Republican efforts, tacitly endorsed by the Trump campaign, to mobilize against the quarantine, are a step in the right direction. In Michigan we saw an armed ‘militia’/open-carry grouping backed by over four thousand citizens who converged on the state capitol. In Wisconsin it resulted in mass protests and such pressure that the Supreme Court in that state was forced to reign in the caprice of an autocrat governor. In California we saw a mass mobilization of thousands demanding access to the beach, and more.

These moves for citizens to push against quarantine are popular and also radical. It is odd that the progressive left, some thinking themselves ‘revolutionaries’, only defer to the institutional power of the billionaire class like Bill Gates, and institutions like the WHO and the CDC. They ignore the tools available within their own Marxian analysis, that regulatory capture by big pharma, and sinister elites with misanthropist capital-accumulating platforms, should render these institutions illegitimate.

So here we find the amazing part – that those who wanted to restore the greatness of America are the revolutionists, and those who utilize the naiveté and rage of the revolutionary left are restorationists.

This coming election will be the most unusual in American history, and if the above outlined problems are not addressed, could result in a chain of extra-legal, extra-parliamentary grass-roots violence.

The APL England, a large container ship, lost 40 shipping containers in rough seas off the east coast of Australia over the weekend, reported the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA).

The Singapore-flagged container ship was about 45 miles east of Sydney when the vessel experienced a “temporary loss of propulsion” on Sunday morning. Lifeless in heavy seas, the vessel was rocked by monster waves that caused container stacks to topple over and fall overboard.   

Incident map 

In addition to the 40 containers, 74 were “damaged and collapsed on the deck of the ship, while a further six containers are reported to be protruding from the starboard side and three containers from the port side of the ship,” AMSA said in a Facebook post. 

Aerial footage of the ship on Monday

The incident forced the vessel to turn around and anchor off Brisbane in Byron Bay as AMSA surveyed the damage. 

“Our team of surveyors conducted a seaworthiness inspection to establish the structural and operational condition of the ship. The outcome of this inspection will help inform if, and how, the ship might be brought safely into the Port of Brisbane.

“It appears that the affected stacks contained a wide range of goods like household appliances, building materials and medical supplies.

“We have also received a report of some medical supplies (for example, face masks) washing up between Magenta Beach and The Entrance. If you see debris which could be linked to the incident, please pass this information on to NSW Maritime,” AMSA said Tuesday. 

On Wednesday morning, AMSA said, “our surveyors conducted an inspection” and found the vessel to be “fit.” It determined to bring the vessel into port on midday Tuesday. 

“We are currently investigating the ship on two fronts. It’s compliance with both Australian and international maritime safety standards, and also whether the ship has breached any Australian environmental protection regulations or standards,” AMSA wrote. 

AMSA also said if people “discover any suspected debris or shipping containers” along the New South Wales coastline, that they should contact authorities. 

AMSA General Manager of Operations Allan Schwartz said reports are already coming in that medical supplies, such as face masks, are washing up “between Magenta Beach and The Entrance.” It appears some of the containers were packed with critical medical supplies to combat COVID-19. 

Authored by John Solomon via JustTheNews.com,

Agents fretted sharing Flynn intel with departing Obama White House would become fodder for ‘partisan axes to grind.’

Just 17 days before President Trump took office in January 2017, then-FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok texted bureau lawyer Lisa Page, his mistress, to express concern about sharing sensitive Russia probe evidence with the departing Obama White House.

Strzok had just engaged in a conversation with his boss, then-FBI Assistant Director William Priestap, about evidence from the investigation of incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, codenamed Crossfire Razor, or “CR” for short.

The evidence in question were so-called “tech cuts” from intercepted conversations between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to the texts and interviews with officials familiar with the conversations.

Strzok related Priestap’s concerns about the potential the evidence would be politically weaponized if outgoing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper shared the intercept cuts with the White House and President Obama, a well-known Flynn critic.

“He, like us, is concerned with over sharing,” Strzok texted Page on Jan. 3, 2017, relating his conversation with Priestap.

“Doesn’t want Clapper giving CR cuts to WH. All political, just shows our hand and potentially makes enemies.”

Page seemed less concerned, knowing that the FBI was set in three days to release its initial assessment of Russian interference in the U.S. election.

“Yeah, but keep in mind we were going to put that in the doc on Friday, with potentially larger distribution than just the DNI,” Page texted back.

Strzok responded, “The question is should we, particularly to the entirety of the lame duck usic [U.S Intelligence Community] with partisan axes to grind.”

That same day Strzok and Page also discussed in text messages a drama involving one of the Presidential Daily Briefings for Obama.

“Did you follow the drama of the PDB last week?” Strzok asked.

“Yup. Don’t know how it ended though,” Page responded.

“They didn’t include any of it, and Bill [Priestap] didn’t want to dissent,” Strzok added.

“Wow, Bill should make sure [Deputy Director] Andy [McCabe] knows about that since he was consulted numerous times about whether to include the reporting,” Page suggested.

You can see the text messages recovered from Strzok’s phone here.

The text messages, which were never released to the public by the FBI but were provided to this reporter in September 2018, have taken on much more significance to both federal and congressional investigators in recent weeks as the Justice Department has requested that Flynn’s conviction be thrown out and his charges of lying to the FBI about Kislyak dismissed.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen of Missouri (special prosecutor for DOJ), the FBI inspection division, three Senate committees and House Republicans are all investigating the handling of Flynn’s case and whether any crimes were committed or political influence exerted.

The investigators are trying to determine whether Obama’s well-known disdain for Flynn, a career military intelligence officer, influenced the decision by the FBI leadership to reject its own agent’s recommendation to shut down a probe of Flynn in January 2017 and instead pursue an interview where agents might catch him in a lie.

They also want to know whether the conversation about the PDB involved Flynn and “reporting” the FBI had gathered by early January 2017 showing the incoming national security adviser was neither a counterintelligence nor a criminal threat.

“The evidence connecting President Obama to the Flynn operation is getting stronger,” one investigator with direct knowledge told me.

“The bureau knew it did not have evidence to justify that Flynn was either a criminal or counterintelligence threat and should have shut the case down. But the perception that Obama and his team would not be happy with that outcome may have driven the FBI to keep the probe open without justification and to pivot to an interview that left some agents worried involved entrapment or a perjury trap.”

The investigator said more interviews will need to be done to determine exactly what role Obama’s perception of Flynn played in the FBI’s decision making.

Recently declassified evidence show a total of 39 outgoing Obama administration officials sought to unmask Flynn’s name in intelligence interviews between Election Day 2016 and Inauguration Day 2017, signaling a keen interest in Flynn’s overseas calls.

Former Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray said Friday that the Flynn matter was at the very least a “political scandal of the highest order” and could involve criminal charges if evidence emerges that officials lied or withheld documents to cover up what happened.

“I imagine there are people who are in the know who may well have knowingly withheld information from the court and from defense counsel in connection with the Michael Flynn prosecution,” Ray told Fox News.

“If it turns out that that can be proved, then there are going to be referrals and potential false statements, and/or perjury prosecutions to hold those, particularly those in positions of authority, accountable,” he added.

Investigators have created the following timeline of key events through documents produced piecemeal by the FBI over two years:

• April 2014: Flynn is forced out as the chief of DIA by Obama after clashing with the administration over the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, and other policies. The Obama administration blames his management style for the departure.

• July 31, 2016: FBI opens Crossfire Hurricane probe into possible ties between Trump campaign and Russia, focused on Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Flynn is not an initial target of that probe.

• Aug. 15, 2016: Strzok and Page engage in their infamous text exchange about having an insurance policy just in case Trump should be elected. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” one text reads.

• Aug. 16, 2016: FBI opens a sub-case under the Crossfire Hurricane umbrella codenamed Crossfire Razor focused on whether Flynn was wittingly or unwittingly engaged in inappropriate Russian contact.

• Aug. 17, 2016: FBI and DNI provide Trump and Flynn first briefing after winning the nomination, including on Russia. FBI slips in an agent posing as an assistant for the briefing to secretly get a read on Flynn for the new investigation, according to the Justice Department inspector general report on Russia case. “SSA 1 told us that the briefing provided him ‘the opportunity to gain assessment and possibly some level of familiarity with [Flynn]. So, should we get to the point where we need to do a subject interview … would have that to fall back on,’” the IG report said.

• Sept, 2, 2016: While preparing a talking points memo for Obama ahead of a conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin involving Russian election interference, Page texts Strzok that Obama wants to be read-in on everything the FBI is doing on the Russia collusion case. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” Page texted.

• Sept. 5, 2016: During an international summit in China, Obama meets face-to-face with Putin and tells him to “cut it out” with election meddling.

• Nov. 10, 2016: Two days after Trump won the election, the president-elect meets with Obama at the White House and the outgoing president encourages the incoming president not to hire Flynn as an adviser.

• Jan. 3, 2017: Strzok and Page engage in the text messages about Obama’s daily briefing and the concerns about giving the Flynn intercept cuts to the White House.

• Jan. 4, 2017: Lead agent in Flynn Crossfire Razor probe prepares closing memo recommending the case be shut down for lack of derogatory evidence. Strzok texts agent asking him to stop the closing memo because the “7th floor” leadership of the FBI is now involved.

• Jan. 5, 2017: Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates attends Russia briefing with Obama at the White House and is stunned to learn Obama already knows about the Flynn-Kislyak intercept. Then-FBI Director James Comey claims Clapper told the president, but Clapper has denied telling Obama.

• Jan. 5–23, 2017: FBI prepares to conduct an interview of Flynn. The discussions lead Priestap, the assistant director, to openly question in his handwritten notes whether the bureau was “playing games” and trying to get Flynn to lie so “we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

• Jan. 24, 2017: FBI conducts interview with Flynn.

Investigators are trying to determine whether Obama asked for the Flynn intercept or it was offered to him and by whom. They also want to know how many times Comey and Obama talked about Flynn in December 2016 and January 2017.

“We need to determine what motivated the FBI on Jan. 4, 2017 to overrule its own agent who believed Flynn was innocent and the probe should be closed,” one investigator said.

The Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can be added to the growing chorus of rational voices who are open to the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) – where scientists infamous for creating hybrid bat coronaviruses that can infect humans swear they have nothing to do with the current outbreak.

NIH Director Francis Collins says that while he believes coronavirus was “absolutely not” genetically engineered, he cannot rule out the possibility that it escaped from the Wuhan lab.

“Whether [the coronavirus] could have been in some way isolated and studied in this laboratory in Wuhan, we have no way of knowing,” Collins told Politico on Wednesday. “Nature created this virus, and has proven once again to be the most effective bioterrorist,” he added.

In April, WIV vice director Zhiming Yuan told Chinese state broadcaster CGTN, “there is no way this virus came from us,” according to NBC News. “We have a strict regulatory regime and code of conduct of research, so we are confident.”

Did the Beijing laboratory which had two SARS escape incidents follow the same ‘regulatory regime’ we wonder?

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both repeatedly claimed that the virus may have emerged from the WIV, while the so-called ‘five eyes’ intelligence agencies (US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada) are investigating the origins of the virus – and in particular are “looking closely at the work of a senior scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Peng Zhou,” as part of a joint international investigation into the origins of COVID-19, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Meanwhile the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed weeks ago that the US government is participating in the investigation, though there is no reason to believe the virus was manmade or genetically altered.

Collins refused to comment on his agency’s recent — and controversial — decision to pull funding from researchers studying how coronaviruses spread from bats to people. In late April the NIH told the EcoHealth Alliance, whose collaborators included scientists at the Wuhan virology lab, that its project did not “align with the program goals and agency priorities.”

Prominent scientific societies and 77 Nobel laureates have asked the administration to investigate why the nonprofit group’s grant was terminated, alleging that the decision was made for political, rather than scientific, reasons. The NIH awards grants using a merit-based system in which researchers evaluate the work of their peers, and ending a grant early is unusual. –Politico

Zero Hedge exposed Zhou’s involvement in bat research in January, along with studies by his colleague, “bat woman” Shi Zhengli. As we reported in February, Shi co-authored a controversial 2015 paper  which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. This research sparked a huge debate at the time over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

Nature.com responded with concern, penning a 2015 rebuke , that reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought.

Collins says he “seriously hopes” that if China develops a COVID-19 vaccine before the United States, that tensions between the two nations “wouldn’t be a dominant factor” in whether the US would have access to the treatment.

That’s assuming, of course, that a vaccine arrives.

Authored by Randy Hicks via InsideSources.com,

Georgia recently began the long process of reopening its economy in the wake of what it is hoped will be the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beginning in late April, certain categories of businesses were allowed to open in Georgia, including restaurants and barber shops. The encouraging news is that infection rates have not spiked and, instead, are flattening and even declining.

Many are concerned that we’re moving too early, too fast — and that safety will take a back seat. That worry is understandable. The toll of the virus in suffering and loss of life is indescribable, as thousands of families are affected in ways they will never forget.

On the other side, many are clamoring for even quicker action to get people back to work.

In truth, both sides have it right. Our first priority should be health. Clearly, that trumps all. But a key aspect of health is not just avoiding a virus, but the full spectrum of human well-being and flourishing. And to achieve that, we can’t afford to remain on lockdown much longer.

We clearly know the economic devastation wrought by the virus: About half of low-income households have reported job or wage loss due to the coronavirus. These job losses could be felt for years as families struggle to get back on their feet — or are never able to at all, plunging them into poverty.

The toll is real. I’m thinking of young moms like Jessica (not her real name to protect her identity), who had been living in her car with her small child as a result of work cutbacks and being evicted. Stories like this one are countless.

But what about the toll on mental health and general well-being? The picture is beginning to emerge, and it’s not pretty. In fact, we are facing a public mental health crisis.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that more than half of U.S. adults (56 percent) report that worry related to the coronavirus outbreak has caused them stress-induced symptoms like insomnia, poor appetite or overeating, or frequent headaches or stomach aches.

That’s only the beginning. We have also seen the effects of social isolation in a 1,000 percent increase in calls to distress hotlines in April alone.

Rates of substance abuse and suicide will doubtless skyrocket. One analysis predicts that if the United States reaches Depression-era level unemployment rates, we could see 18,000 additional suicides and additional overdose deaths of 22,000.

The Well Being Trust recently released a report estimating the pandemic could lead to 75,000 additional “deaths of despair” from drug and alcohol abuse and suicide.

During this lockdown, people are missing the ingredients that make for a flourishing life: community, relationships, purpose and belonging. And the truth is that, for many Americans, a major way they experience these benefits is through a job. It’s where we find community, socialize and discover a sense of meaning.

A job is about so much more than just a paycheck.

We know that human beings function best when they are involved with meaningful work. Until this point, the dialogue on reopening has largely focused on “essential” vs. “non-essential” jobs.

But every job is essential for the person who holds it. And not just from a financial standpoint: It’s one key gateway to what makes life meaningful for many of us.

Protecting public health and getting people back into their jobs and communities are not mutually exclusive priorities. We can, and must, do both. We can be sensitive to loss of life and human suffering during this pandemic.

But we also must acknowledge the pain of those whose means of surviving economically has been shattered.

A new report in the Asia-based online tech journal Insider Paper cites open source satellite images to confirm the latest widespread reporting on the major Chinese PLA troop build-up underway along disputed Sino-Indian border regions.

The report cites the following via a reputable open-source satellite imagery analyst: 

According to a few satellite images published by a local Indian news publication, the Chinese troops have commenced the expansion of its airbase, 200 km from Pangong Lake, in Ladakh. The images, also showing Ngari Gunsa airport in Tibet, originated from open-source intelligence expert @detresfa_, an analyst with ShadowBreak Intl.

“The first image shows how the territory originally looked. However, the second image clearly shows massive construction activity going on in the territory.”

According to the report, this suggests a significant and rapid Chinese military build-up in the past months along the contested border region amid what Indian media has widely reported since this weekend to be PLA forces digging into fortified positions.  

Importantly, the strategic base is a mere 200km away from Pangong lake, where recent skirmishes between Chinese and Indian border patrols took place on May 5th-6th.

The Insider Paper report continues, based on satellite analysis: “The expansion has included something that looks more like a secondary tarmac to combat aircraft or taxi-track. Also, the third image shows a line-up of four fighter jets. They are either J-11 or J-16 fighters of the Chinese PLA Air Force.”

The high altitude airport in Tibet, among the highest in the world, is a dual-use military and civil airport which appears to have undergone major expansion during the same period of increased border skirmishes with Indian troops. 

The major Indian broadcast station NDTV also republished the satellite photos:

@detresfa_ with this incredible image of Chinese J-11/J-16s at the high altitude Ngari Gunsa airport. On @ndtv, an exclusive report with satellite images of rapid Chinese air base construction at Ngari in April and May this year, including a possible second runway. https://t.co/1cmUHY43so

— Vishnu Som (@VishnuNDTV) May 26, 2020

Over the past weekend Indian media began reporting that thousands of PLA troops have now moved into Ladakh’s disputed Galwan river area, and at multiple locations in eastern Ladakh.

Sporadic but fierce clashes have occurred going back to the 1960’s along the shared but pretty much completely unmarked 2,100 mile border, which often involves literal fist-fights among opposing troops and border patrol guards. 

The satellite images appear to confirm Chinese troop movements along and inside of the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh:

Images via @planetlabs @sbreakintl help spot the #China PLA camp near the #Hotsprings Sector few Kms behind the LAC (Here china contests the LAC), approximately 11Kms North West of the #India base at Gogra, this unit size is the largest seen till now with adequate vehicle tracks pic.twitter.com/9eywCqD1Bk

— d-atis☠️ (@detresfa_) May 26, 2020

And The Guardian also said on Wednesday: “Thousands of Chinese People’s Liberation (PLA) troops are reported to have moved into sensitive areas along the eastern Ladokh border, setting up tents and stationing vehicles and heavy machinery in what India considers to be its territory.”

The escalating crisis has grabbed the White House’s attention, with President Trump issuing a surprise tweet early Wednesday which said: “We have informed both India and China that the United States is ready, willing and able to mediate or arbitrate their now raging border dispute.”

China expands airbase near Ladakh, including placing advanced fighter jets on tarmac.

It’s a fast escalating situation that FP recently noted could explode into major conflict between two nuclear armed powers.

Update (1830ET): Following up on earlier threats, a White House spokesperson has confirmed that President Trump will sign an executive order on Social Media tomorrow.

Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany made the remark to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida.

There are no details of what the order will contain, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said today that he is working with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee to craft legislation that would strip social media giants of their Section 230 legal immunity if they fact check content on their platforms, according to a copy of his podcast which Breitbart News exclusively obtained.

Gaetz said:

A lot of people don’t see that Facebook and Twitter … you see Twitter disadvantaging the president, they enjoy liability protections that are not enjoyed by your local newspaper or your local TV station, or Fox News, or CNN, or MSNBC. They have special benefits under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as digital platforms because they’re not creating content for which they should be liable. They’re not making decisions about content, they’re simply saying come one, come all with your content. And as a consequence of that, they’re getting a bunch of protections. 

And as Breitbart concludes, noting that the social media companies have become increasingly biased against conservatives, Gaetz questioned whether social media companies deserve to keep their Section 230 immunity.

All of which raises a serious question about the future of these social media giants under a more “media-esque” regulatory framework and points to an obvious line of attack in any executive order that President Trump could be considering.

Don Bongino tweeted a quasi-confirmation of this angle for the executive order:

“Twitter made a HUGE mistake. They have now injected themselves into a US election and decided to become editorialists, rather than a platform. ALL platform protections should be immediately revoked and Twitter should be treated as a publisher. They did this to themselves.”

*  *  *

Update (1025ET): That did not take long. As more and more information is exposed about Twitter’s bias, President Trump has tweeted an ominous warning to “Jack” and his crew of social justice warriors…

Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

And Kellyanne follows up with devastating blows…

Kellyanne Conway: “Twitter cannot suppress voices and others can’t suppress votes.” pic.twitter.com/NIyq2azxmJ

— The Hill (@thehill) May 27, 2020

*  *  *

Update (0845ET): Last night, President Trump slammed Twitter for tagging several of his tweets touting the alleged risks of mail-in ballots as ‘misinformation’, with the president accusing the social media giant of interfering in the 2020 election.

On Wednesday morning, Trump issued a couple more tweets claiming the federal government will “strongly regulate, or close them down” – referring to social media companies who suppress conservative voices in the name of protecting “the truth” (ie the progressive narrative that Silicon Valley tech giants have promised to perpetuate).

He also linked his accusations of bias with his opposition to mail-in ballots.

“We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In ballots take root in our Country,” Trump said in a series of tweets.

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

….happen again. Just like we can’t let large scale Mail-In Ballots take root in our Country. It would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots. Whoever cheated the most would win. Likewise, Social Media. Clean up your act, NOW!!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

Weeks ago, anonymously sourced reports claimed that the White House was considering a panel to investigate anti-conservative bias on popular social media platforms and across Silicon Valley, an issue that has been explored in a series of Congressional hearings involving top officials at the biggest tech firms.

*  *  *

Shortly after Twitter announced it would start “fact-checking” President Trump’s tweets, yet more evidence has been exposed of the blatant anti-Trump bias at the most senior levels of the social media giant.

In the past we have seen Project Veritas expose the ‘fact’ behind the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ of shadow-banning for conservative voices on Twitter.

A former Twitter software engineer who explains how/why Twitter “shadow bans” certain users:

Abhinav Vadrevu:  “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content.”

“So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.”

Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

Then there is the company’s associate General Counsel, Jeff Rich (his LinkedIn page is here) who in January urged his 1,500 followers to “cull” and “excise” the “cancerous” president Trump from the herd.

YES!! Again, this 👇 Excise the Trump cancer, then deliberate over policy differences. He is the single most destructive force against our system of government, way of life and American values EVER! He must be culled from the herd. ASAP! https://t.co/MVfdAylV2H

— Jeff Rich (@jeffrich) February 1, 2020

One wonders, Rich, does this violate Twitter’s “Abuse and harassment” rules?

And more recently expressed his biased opinion:

BAHAHAHA!! I love how this perfectly accurate ad has gotten under his thin, orange skin. What a small, pathetic, weak person he is. Such a sad, neglected child. https://t.co/4xNooiJx1a

— Jeff Rich (@jeffrich) May 5, 2020

And now, as Jonathan Turley details below,  the latest controversy concerns the person who has said that he is in charge of “developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules,” Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth.  Critics have highlighted fairly extreme postings from Roth calling Trump and his supporters Nazis.  I do not agree that the problem is Roth’s personal views or postings. The problem is his role and the rules at Twitter.

The problem is anyone exercising this power of speech regulation. Indeed, as this controversy grew around Roth, Kathy Griffin is the latest poster to face calls for removal for effectively calling for Trump to kill himself.  Again, Griffin should be allowed to post such hateful thoughts and the rest of the world should be allowed to denounce her, again, for her unhinged humor.

Roth has attacked Bernie Sanders supporters and proclaimed how he is working against Trump. He compared senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. He  has referred to Trump and his team as “ACTUAL NAZIS” and called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a “personality-free bag of farts.” As Fox noted, “last August, Twitter suspended McConnell’s Twitter account, prompting the GOP to threaten to cut off advertising on the site until Twitter relented.”

This person is the “head of site integrity” at Twitter pic.twitter.com/hyZcl5VIe0

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 27, 2020

The attacks are numerous, raw, and offensive.  However, conservatives calling for him to be fired or his tweets censored are reaching the wrong conclusion.  

The problem is not Roth but his role.  He has a right to express himself. I have no problem with Twitter hiring people with such political views and I believe it is a good thing for people to express themselves on social media.  Indeed, we have discussed the free speech concerns as private and public employers punish workers for their statements or actions in their private lives. We have addressed an array of such incidents, including social media controversies involving academics. In some cases, racially charged comments have been treated as free speech while in others they have resulted in discipline or termination. It is that lack of a consistent standard that has magnified free speech concerns.  We have previously discussed the issue of when it is appropriate to punishment people for conduct outside of the work place. We have followed cases where people have been fired after boorish or insulting conduct once their names and employers are made known. (here and here and here and here and here and here).

Roth’s comments highlight how bias is always a concern for those who take it upon themselves to decide who can speak or who must be “corrected” in communications with others.  Twitter is notorious for a lack of consistency and coherence in the enforcement of its rules.  However, regardless of such enforcement, there remains a core free speech issue in the regulation of speech. I recently criticized the calls of Democratic leaders like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff for greater censorship of the Internet and social media. Such calls have been growing for years but leaders like Schiff are citing the pandemic as a basis for speech monitoring and censorship. Roth is merely the personification of the problem of such speech regulation.  Again, the real problem is his role and Twitter’s rules.

“He leads the teams responsible for developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules” pic.twitter.com/OdBTqlInDZ

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 27, 2020

As Summit News’ Paul Joseph Watson notes, Roth has been head of site integrity at Twitter since July 2018 and is responsible for “election security” and “misinformation,” meaning he almost certainly played a key role in the decision to ‘fact-check’ Trump’s tweets.

In the meantime, We await Twitter ‘fact-checking’ false claims about ‘Russian collusion’ or any other of the erroneous issues pushed by the blue check mark brigade that have proven to be spectacularly wrong.

Don’t hold your breath…

So much changes in just over two years. Back in late 2017 and early 2018, Goldman Sachs emerged as one of the most fervent adopters of bitcoin (perhaps because it presented at least some opportunity to trade vol in a market where the VIX was single digits), and even hired a head cryptocurrency trader . Then the cryptocurrency market crashed and despite fits and starts, has failed to recover its December 2017 highs.

Fast forward to today when Goldman prompted howls of outrage among the bitcoin faithful when the bank released a multi-strategy report that took some pot shots at crypto, saying among other things, that “we do not recommend Bitcoin on a strategic or tactical basis for clients’ investment portfolios even though its volatility might lend itself to momentum oriented traders.” The report also took the completely unoriginal track to compare Bitcoin’s rise, if not so much fall, to the Tulip mania of the 1600s in the Netherlands, although one look at the chart below suggest that such comparisons are woefully inaccurate with most bitcoin bulls laughing at repeated rumors of bitcoin’s demise.

Goldman also issued several rebuttals against the merits frequently cited by crypto fans that aim to hold up the superiority of the digital tokens. As Bloomberg notes, Goldman said that cryptocurrencies are not an asset class, they do not generate cash flow or earnings and do not provide consistent diversification benefits, nor is there evidence they are an inflation hedge.

Of course none of that is news to anyone by now, with bitcoin increasingly seen as a limit-supply store of value and an alternative to fiat in a world where the money supply is exploding. Just ask Paul Tudor Jones, who last month said he’s buying Bitcoin as a hedge against the inflation he sees emerging from the Fed’s money-printing, even telling clients that bitcoin reminds him of “the role gold played in the 1970s”.

Preempting Goldman, PTJ, who said “I am not a hard-money nor a crypto nut”, also laid out the various key verticals that set aside bitcoin, including Purchasing Power; Trustworthiness, Liquidity and Portability (his full note is below), and compared the total value of various financial assets showing just how significant the growth potential for bitcoin was in a world of wider adoption.

All of this left one of the world’s greatest traders to conclude that, contrary to Goldman’s conclusion, “at the end of the day, the best profit-maximizing strategy is to own the fastest horse. Just own the best performer and not get wed to an intellectual side that might leave you weeping in the performance dust because you thought you were smarter than the market. If I am forced to forecast, my bet is it will be Bitcoin.”

Finally, let’s not forget, it is Goldman…

who would’ve thought pic.twitter.com/LDLRE1O3cT

— Mark Constantine (@vexmark) May 27, 2020

Goldman, and its catastrophic predictive track record aside – especially since the bank dumped most of its iconic prop traders and decided to become a subprime lender and issuers of credit cards- aside, we found a far more interesting take in the latest Flows and Liquidity report from JPM’s Nick Panigirtzoglou who analyzed something far more valuable to both fans and enemies of bitcoin: its intrinsic value.

As the JPM strategist writes, “ahead of the halving of the bitcoin block reward from 12.5 bitcoins to 6.25, we updated our intrinsic value framework for bitcoin and used it to infer that markets effectively priced in a 25% decline in the amount spent on energy per day assuming market participants are rational and prices forward looking. How have things developed in the time since the halving event?”

To answer that question, the derivative strategist recapped his model for estimating this “intrinsic value.” The approach taken to estimate a quantifiable intrinsic value for Bitcoin was to effectively treat it as a commodity and base it on the marginal cost of production. Mining cryptocurrencies consumes electricity, which results in a real-world cost incurred in nominal currency terms. In principle, a market price above that cost should induce miners to increase resources to mine coins, bringing the cost of mining higher until the marginal cost approaches the market price, while a price below that cost should induce higher cost producers to exit the market lowering the overall cost until it again approaches the marginal cost. The methodology was adopted by Hayes (2018), which first estimates the daily cost of production as a function of the computational power employed, cost of electricity, and energy efficiency of hardware. It then divides the daily cost of production by the expected number of bitcoins produced daily, estimated as a function of the block reward, hashing power employed and difficulty, to get a marginal cost of production per Bitcoin.

Long-story short, the market price and JPM’s updated estimate of the intrinsic value of Bitcoin are shown in the chart below..

… while the ratio of actual to intrinsic price is in the following chart.

Given the halving of the bitcoin rewards that took place on May 11th, the intrinsic value estimate effectively doubled. Ahead of the halving event, JPM argued that, assuming market participants are rational and that the price is forward looking, the actual price trading 25% below what the intrinsic price would be after the event suggested markets effectively implying a significant decline in mining activity.

How have things developed since the halving? As the next chart shows, there has been a more than 20% decline in the hash rate on the bitcoin network since the halving event, similar to the one in magnitude that occurred during the nearly 50% collapse in bitcoin prices from late Feb to mid-March.

Moreover, the decline appears to have taken place against a backdrop of an improvement in average efficiency of mining hardware, as energy consumption per GH/s has declined by more than 15% from the day before the halving event according to estimates from Digiconomist, which would be consistent the idea that miners with less efficient rigs and/or in higher cost locations would in the short term bear the brunt of the decline in mining activity.

As JPM concludes, “the net effect of the two has been that the gap between our intrinsic value estimate and the market price has now effectively closed.” In other words, a price of $9-10K is right around there bitcoin should be trading, something which the Goldman report failed to mention.

Intrinsic value of bitcoin aside, JPM looked at how institutions are positioned vis-a-vis the crytpocurrency. JPM found that the collapse in the market value of bitcoin in early March also saw a contraction in open interest of both bitcoin futures and options, which initially was slow to recover. However, in the run-up to the halving event, the open interest of both options and futures increased sharply, with option open interest in particular making new highs.

Moreover, futures open interest appears to have recovered faster for CME contracts than crypto exchanges, which saw a steep increase in open interest not just in dollar terms (partly due to the rise in prices since the March lows) but also increasing to 70% above its previous peak in bitcoin terms.

And the CME bitcoin options contracts launched in January this year, where aggregate open interest after an initially encouraging start had largely remained below $20mn, rose from around $13mn at the start of the May to around $170mn in recent days.

This suggests that, all else equal, the institutional adoption of bitcoin is starting to ramp up aggressively, just as Paul Tudor Jones predicted it would.

For those eager to read the PTJ report, it’s attached below.