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Billionaire George Soros is blaming Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for helping President Trump win the 2016 election – completely ignoring that Trump’s 2016 digital director (and 2020 campaign manager) Brad Parscale simply outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton’s team when it came to social media.

“Facebook helped Trump to get elected and I am afraid that it will do the same in 2020,” Soros writes in a Friday New York Times Op-Ed, recounting a private conversation he says he had last week at Davos in which he argued “here is a longstanding law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that protects social media platforms from legal liability for defamation and similar claims. Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them.”

Soros then claims that there appears to be “an informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing between Trump and Facebook” in which “Facebook will help President Trump to get re-elected and Mr. Trump will, in turn, defend Facebook against attacks from regulators and the media.“

The 89-year-old Hungarian-born billionaire then argues that Parscale’s statement that Facebook ‘helped Mr. Trump’ constitutes “the beginning of a special relationship.”

Parscale, of course, was talking about the Trump campaign’s use of Facebook – not the misleading conspiracy theory Soros is peddling. A quote from Soros’s linked ‘evidence’ reveals just that:

Parscale said the Trump campaign used Facebook to reach clusters of rural voters, such as “15 people in the Florida Panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for”.

“I started making ads that showed the bridge crumbling,” he said. “I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat.” –The Guardian

Soros then points to Zuckerberg’s September, 2019 Oval Office meeting with Trump, and subsequent comments made by the president, as more evidence of collusion.

He then writes:

Facebook’s decision not to require fact-checking for political candidates’ advertising in 2020 has flung open the door for false, manipulated, extreme and incendiary statements. Such content is rewarded with prime placement and promotion if it meets Facebook-designed algorithmic standards for popularity and engagement.

What’s more, Facebook’s design tends to obscure the sources of inflammatory and false content, and fails to adequately punish those who spread false information. Nor does the company effectively warn those who are exposed to lies. -George Soros

Separate of his private conversation, Soros said last week at Davos that “Facebook will work to re-elect Trump and Trump will protect Facebook,” adding “It makes me very concerned about the outcome of 2020.”

Two days later, Hillary Clinton told The Atlantic (from the Sundance Film Festival) that Mark Zuckerberg is an “authoritarian” who “intend[s] to reelect Trump.”

In response to Facebook’s decision to remove a slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi meant to make her appear drunk, Hillary says: “I said, ‘Why are you guys keeping this up? This is blatantly false. Your competitors have taken it down. And their response was, ‘We think our users can make up their own minds,'” Clinton told the magazine, adding that Facebook is “not just going to reelect Trump, but intend[s] to reelect Trump.”

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

What if bears were right all along? What if it’s not different this time?

What if this Fed liquidity inspired rally produced precisely the kind of exuberant final thrust we often see at the end of business cycles? After all, people were really bullish in 2007, people were really bullish in 2000, both final rallies inspired by easy Fed liquidity. In 2000, the Y2k bug, in 2007 giving us the subprime mortgage crisis.

What if this latest rally has produced exactly the same conditions we’ve seen during prior tops?

Be clear: I’m not calling for a top here, that’s a fool’s errand. After all so far all we’ve seen is a minor pullback off of very overbought conditions. Heck, tech hasn’t even begun to correct yet.

But yields keep dropping like a brick, as does the Baltic Dry index, small caps, transports, the banking sector never confirmed new highs, equal weight indicators suggest a major negative divergence inside a market that appears entirely held up by tech, and perhaps by only 5-10 highly valued stocks that are massively technically extended and control more market cap in a few stocks than ever before. At the same time we have a market more extended above underlying GDP than ever and now suddenly a potential trigger nobody saw coming: The coronavirus.

Look, the track record on viruses and diseases over the past 20 years has been clear: Any market impact is temporary and/or minimal at best. Look at SARS in 2003, $SPX rallied over 20% in 2003. But the backdrop was different. The US just came out of a recession and markets had bottomed in 2002. Markets in 2003 were at the beginning of a new business cycle.

This cycle here is old, and one could argue was merely saved again by a Fed going into full easing mode in 2019.

But given the fact that the Fed failed to normalize in the lead up to 2018 and was stopped dead in its tracks because of a 20% market correction and was forced to go back into full easing mode the concern is that the Fed just wasted precious ammunition.

My concern:

Good thing the Fed has been prudent in preserving their ammunition to deal with a real crisis instead of blowing their wad with a bunch of rate cuts & a massive balance sheet expansion at the first sign of an earnings slowdown inspiring a big fat asset bubble in the process.

Oh.

— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) January 27, 2020

These very concerns now suddenly very much echoed at Citi:

CITI: “What we find particularly troubling is the potential interaction between the shock from the virus, already stretched market valuations, and central banks approaching the local limits of their ability to prop up markets.”

(via @pattidomm)

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) January 31, 2020

None of us can know how this plays out, we can’t know when this virus will be contained and subsides. What we do know is that the economic impact is already real, flights are canceled, businesses are shutting down in China, etc.. To the extend that this is all temporary for a couple of weeks, fine, to the extent it drags on for months and the virus spreads quickly in other countries as well it’s not hard to imagine that a vastly richly valued market finds itself in trouble and with it: The global economy.

Markets, except tech, pretty much gave up all their gains in January with many indices now in the red. The potential good news for investors: Markets are approaching oversold readings and could be setting up for a bounce, and a larger relief rally if the news on coronavirus shows improvement, the bad news: Tech hasn’t even begun to correct and technical patterns suggest more downside risks.

And if bears have been right all along on the macro front, then rallies may well remain selling opportunities. And so far, strength in January has proven to be a selling opportunity on the larger market.

For now it’s a ‘What if” and confirmation remains outstanding and won’t come easy. But clearly some of the major banks are starting to ask similar questions.

For the technical chart review please see the market video below:

Please be sure to watch it in HD for clarity.

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Radio Free Asia (RFA) has tweeted a disturbing video on its Twitter account on Saturday morning detailing how those who died of coronavirus in Wuhan, the outbreak area in China, were loaded up on a bus and taken “directly to the crematorium.”

RFA said (in a translated tweet): “[Latest Situation of Wuhan Fifth Hospital] Some Wuhan citizens entered Wuhan Fifth Hospital on February 1st and found many patients who died of pneumonia. The corpses were packed directly to the crematorium. Paramedics are busy rescuing the dying patient.”

【武汉市第五医院最新情况】

有武汉市民2月1日进入武汉第五医院，发现多具因肺炎死亡的病人，尸体就地打包直接送去火葬场。医护人员忙于抢救垂死的病人。 pic.twitter.com/CzJN4wlRQj

— 自由亚洲电台 (@RFA_Chinese) February 1, 2020

RFA’s video is in line with our report from Friday that said those who died of the deadly virus were hauled off to a crematorium in Wuhan by Chinese authorities.

DW News East Asia correspondent William Yang cited a report from the Chinese-language news outlet Initium, which said cremation facilities in Wuhan were receiving bodies directly from hospitals without proper identification and were excluded from the official record. 

Just to add a bit more to what was mentioned in the show but I wasn’t able to elaborate on – #China’s state media has been reporting about building new hospitals dedicated to treating #Wuhanvirus patients in multiple provinces and cities, which I think reflect the … https://t.co/ibPqRjfaX0

— William Yang (@WilliamYang120) January 29, 2020

Also, one thing that #China is hiding is the number of death caused by the virus. Credible Chinese media outlet @initiumnews interviewed people working at local cremation centers, confirming that many dead bodies were sent directly from the hospitals to the cremation centers…

— William Yang (@WilliamYang120) January 29, 2020

“So, there are reasons to remain skeptical about what China has been sharing with the world because while they have been more transparent about certain things related to the virus, they continue to be sketchy and unreliable in other aspects,” said Yang.

So there are reasons to remain skeptical about what #Chins has been sharing with the world because while they have been more transparent about certain things related to the virus, they continue to be sketchy and unreliable in other aspects.

— William Yang (@WilliamYang120) January 29, 2020

“Without properly identifying these patients, which means there are patients who died from the virus but not adding to the official record. That shows the current death toll of 133 that we are seeing is way too low,” he said.

… without properly identifying these patients, which means there are patients who died from the virus but not adding to the official record. That shows the current death toll of 133 that we are seeing is way too low.

— William Yang (@WilliamYang120) January 29, 2020

The closet funeral home/ alleged crematorium is right down the street from Wuhan Fifth Hospital.

We noted Thursday night that over 100,000 Chinese had been placed under observation for suspected coronavirus. 

The virus has uncontrollably spread across China, forcing the Trump administration on Friday to restrict entry into the US from the outbreak area. 

Putting the coronavirus in the context of the deadly SARS epidemic, the coronavirus pandemic has now officially exceeded SARS in cumulative cases in just two weeks.

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio has been a fixture in the financial press for more than a year now as he has transitioned from running his firm to establishing himself as a media commentator and pseudo-prophet, loudly exhorting the public to heed his warnings about capitalism and its shortcomings. Economic inequality is an imminent threat to societal cohesion in the US, Dalio claims. And in a series of disorganized screeds published on LinkedIn and accompanied by charts that were presumably assembled on the fly by a team of Bridgewater analysts (since computers handle most of the actual investing at Bridgewater now), the billionaire has laid out his plan to repair the damage caused by decades of corporate greed (allegedly unleashed during the 1980s by Ronald Reagan’s free-market reforms).

Not only is Dalio’s plan hopelessly unworkable, and not only because it hinges on the emergence of a kind of mythical technocratic champion able to bend Congress to his or her will and push through a slate of reforms that would undoubtedly infuriate corporate America, all while preventing it from doing everything in its power to undermine the administration and its economic agenda in retaliation.

It’s unworkable because we tried all that. The answer to America’s ills isn’t more government giveaways – that’s what got us here. But politics aside, WSJ published a scathing deep dive in its weekend edition examining the turmoil at the top of Bridgewater, which has long been the subject of gossip and speculation in the industry. Dalio is 70 years old, but despite claiming that he’s not really responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations, WSJ reporters found that this isn’t true. Dalio is still very much in charge, and after a series of botched succession plans – which all fell apart because his handpicked executives eventually clashed with Dalio’s dictatorial style – it’s not exactly clear what Bridgewater’s plan is for the coming decades. 

Ray Dalio caricature courtesy of WSJ

These questions are being posed at a difficult time for Bridgewater: the firm was recently the target of a harassment complaint filed by a former employee, and last year its flagship fund badly underperformed the market, during a year that was a bonanza for most investors.

Most recently, Eileen Murray, a co-CEO of Bridgewater along with David McCormick, has announced plans to leave the company at the end of Q1. Her decision, announced in December, followed reports that she was in talks to take the top job at scandal-scarred Wells Fargo. However, that job went to former BNY chief Charlie Scharf, and it’s unclear what Murray has in mind for her next move.

Since then, there’s reportedly been some bad blood with Dalio.

Mr. Dalio – who is co-chairman and co-chief investment officer – at age 70 isn’t giving up real control over the business that helped him amass a $19 billion fortune. His word nearly always wins out in debates at Bridgewater on topics from management, staffing and investments to compensation, personnel and the wisdom of meeting with an autocratic head of state, say current and former employees.

Mr. Dalio repeatedly overruled Ms. Murray on whom to hire, fire and promote, according to the current and former employees. She has told several friends she was exhausted and couldn’t do the job anymore.

Ms. Murray is still negotiating the terms of her exit; Mr. Dalio wants to cut the value of her stake in the firm, according to some of the current and former employees. Bridgewater bars employees from independently speaking with the press.

According to WSJ, it all goes to show that all of Dalio’s preaching about ‘radical transparency’ is just that. Talk – at least where Dalio is involved. And that’s why his senior managers never seem to pan out. Because employees at the firm, from the most junior to the most senior, understand that it’s extremely risky to challenge Dalio about anything, lest he respond thusly. Several witnesses told WSJ that Dalio mocked an underling when he objected to Dalio’s plan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Several years ago, Mr. Dalio arranged a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss economic policy, said some of these employees. Employees expressed concerns about engaging with the autocratic leader, and Mr. Dalio told one that “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” according to people who heard the comment.

Mr. Dalio overruled the dissenters. Indeed, Mr. Dalio went on to meet with Mr. Putin several times in person, one of the people said. Other employees believed Mr. Dalio was right to discuss economic policies with Mr. Putin.

Representatives of Mr. Putin declined to comment, and Mr. Dalio declined to comment on the discussions. The company said it does not disclose “who Bridgewater people meet with.”

Would you look at that: Dalio, an ardent critic of President Trump, is a friend and routine business confidant of Putin. We’d be curious to see his FBI file.

Meanwhile, even the most senior employees like Dalio’s current co-CEO (who was just recently abandoned by Murray, his co-CEO) has reportedly complained about a kind of vindictiveness that Dalio displays toward departing employees that manifests in the form of frugality.

Dalio has reportedly worked to reduce senior employees ‘phantom equity’ to which they are entitled upon leaving the firm. However, the senior employees denied this to WSJ.

“He is so cheap,” Mr. McCormick told colleagues late last year, speaking about his boss, according to the contemporaneous notes of one person who heard the comment. “Not only did he want to sell the house but he wanted to get the nickels out of the couch.”

Mr. McCormick said the attempt to reduce his stake “did not happen and I did not make that comment.” He said he has a “terrific working and personal relationship” with Mr. Dalio. He also said “I never discussed a job at BlackRock.” A company spokesman added that Mr. McCormick “never discussed with Larry about leaving Bridgewater.”

Though as much as we might mock Dalio for his obvious hypocrisy and his laughably unimaginative plan to fix capitalism (hint, hint, hint: it involves raising taxes on the rich).

But there’s one thing about Bridgewater that nobody can dispute. The firm remains the world’s most successful hedge fund shop, with few qualified rivals for the crown. Surrounded by a sea of fakers, imitators and interlopers who together suffered some of their worst outflows in recent memory last year, Bridgewater continues to grow, and outperform, despite the flagship fund’s lackluster performance in 2019 (it outperformed by a wide margin the year before).

Since then, Bridgewater has delivered the biggest net gains of any hedge fund, according to a 2019 report from LCH Investments, a result due partly to Bridgewater’s large size. Its investors include endowments, public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. It manages about $160 billion, making it the largest hedge-fund firm in the world.

But in recent years, Bridgewater has been less than impressive. The flagship hedge fund, Pure Alpha, barely made any money last year despite a banner year for assets of all stripes, according to data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It bets on and against markets world-wide in an effort to stay ahead of macroeconomic trends.

A smaller fund called All Weather that makes automated, computer-driven trades gained 16.6%. That lagged the 21.7% return of a Vanguard Group fund that uses a conventional mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds.

Mr. Dalio has described the investment performance as embarrassing in meetings with staff, according to people familiar with the conversations. The company said in a statement that “we don’t know of any such comment.” It added that “while Bridgewater’s alpha last year was disappointing to Ray it was within the range of expectations.” Mr. Dalio said in a statement that “there is a waiting list to invest” in Pure Alpha, which he said made 10% in 2018 when “most assets were down.”

While we’re sure Dalio will blast the WSJ for fabricating its reporting (he does this every time WSJ writes about him), it’s worth noting that the genius comics behind 1990s sketch comedy “Mr. Show” came up with a name for Dalio’s professed money-based value system.

It’s called Worthington’s Law.

It was created by David Worthington – a truly great man. Quite simply, the law stipulates that an individual’s intelligence and overall value to society increases along with his or her personal fortune. By this logic, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are two of the smartest, most honorable and beloved individuals in all of America. So are Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates.

Oh, and Dalio, of course – but we have a feeling you figured that out already for yourself.

But the billionaire hedge fund founder took a major hit last year when he gave $100 million to the State of Connecticut to improve its schools, step 1 in his plan to save capitalism. But Dalio’s ‘philanthropy’ was a massive PR blunder, and his reputation took a serious hit.

Don’t be like Ray, kids. Hoard your money.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

We haven’t seen an outbreak like this in any of our lifetimes, and it is really starting to frighten a whole lot of people.  This virus has an incubation period of up to 14 days, it spreads very easily from person to person, and it also appears to be mutating very rapidly.  For now, the vast majority of the confirmed cases are still in China, but the virus continues to pop up in more locations around the globe. 

In fact, on Friday we learned that the U.K. and Russia have both confirmed their very first cases.  This is obviously a very dangerous disease, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.  But videos that are circulating on social media are fueling speculation that this could become a horrifying global pandemic of epic proportions.  In particular, a brand new video that shows a man that suddenly dropped dead on a street in Wuhan is causing quite a bit of fear and speculation…

Police in hazmat suits yesterday surrounded the body of a man who was found dead on the pavement at ground zero of China’s virus epidemic.

The grey-haired man collapsed and died while wearing a face mask on a street in Wuhan, a city of 11million people which is under quarantine amid the coronavirus crisis.

It is feared that the virus caused the man’s death, and the reaction of police and medical staff in forensic suits highlighted the fear pervading the city.

It is very important to stress the fact that we don’t know why this man died.  He could have just had a heart attack.  But when authorities showed up to collect the body, they were wearing “protective suits” and the entire street “was thoroughly disinfected”…

Although it’s not known if the grey-haired man died of the killer bug, it is clear from these pictures the authorities were taking no chances.

After being inspected the body was eventually zipped into a medical bag and carried into a van before the street was thoroughly disinfected.

Those who examined him were also sprayed down by colleagues after removing their protective suits.

Other videos that have come out of China have shown trucks spraying an unknown liquid on the streets of Wuhan.  Apparently authorities believe that this is going to do some good in fighting the virus.

Meanwhile, fear is also spreading rapidly in parts of the globe where only a few cases have been confirmed so far.

In the United Kingdom, surgical masks are almost totally sold out at this point.  The following comes from Paul Joseph Watson…

Surgical masks have almost sold out across the United Kingdom over fears of coronavirus despite the fact that there hasn’t been a single confirmed case of it in the country.

Pharmacy retailer Boots says that its six-pack of “safe & sound” surgical face masks is sold out, as is another box of 50 masks.

The company said it was “working to make additional stock available for customers to purchase in store and on boots.com which we hope will land over the next week.”

Of course a case has now been confirmed in the U.K., and that is only going to make the fear even worse.

In Australia, an argument between two mothers about the coronavirus became so heated that both of them ended up in the hospital…

The fight started between a pair of moms on a Sydney mothers’ group chat site and ended with the two in the hospital, according to police.

“The argument quickly escalated from verbal to physical; pushing, slapping, hair pulling and finally both on the ground, briefly unconscious, all despite the efforts of bystanders trying to intervene,” Northern Beaches Police said on Facebook Thursday.

As this outbreak intensifies, the amount of bizarre behavior that we are going to witness is only going to increase.

Fear is a very strong motivator, and an invisible killer virus that spreads very easily from person to person is going to cause a lot of people to really freak out.

Here in the United States, an entire school district in the state of Ohio was completely shut down on Thursday and Friday…

An entire school district in Ohio was shut down for two days this week after nearly 600 students called in sick, the district’s superintendent said.

All classes and after school activities at Three Rivers Local School District in Cleves were cancelled for Thursday, Jan. 30 and Friday, Jan. 31. because of a major flu outbreak.

We aren’t just talking about one school.  An entire school district kept students away for two days, and I can’t recall ever hearing about such a thing happen due to a flu outbreak before.

Could it be possible that 600 students all had the flu?

Sure, it is possible.

But what is more likely is that a lot of parents decided that their kids should “call in sick” once rumors started to fly.  Some of the students exhibited symptoms including “high fever, vomiting and body aches”, and those exact same symptoms are also associated with the coronavirus outbreak.  Cases of the virus are already starting to pop up all over the country, and it is certainly understandable that many parents would be overly cautious in this sort of an environment.

And the federal government has finally decided that being overly cautious is the right move for the nation as a whole.  In fact, just moments ago the Trump administration declared a public health emergency in the United States…

The Trump administration on Friday declared the coronavirus a public health emergency in the United States, and announced that certain foreign nationals deemed to pose a risk of transmitting the disease will temporarily be denied entry to the U.S. Some returning American citizens potentially at risk will be quarantined.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that President Donald Trump signed an order for the U.S. to deny entry to any foreign nationals who have traveled in China within the past two weeks, aside from the immediate family of U.S. citizens.

This should have probably been done a week or two ago, but nobody really knew how bad this outbreak was going to become.  Over the last two weeks, the number of confirmed cases has gotten 236 times larger.  At this point it has become quite clear that something really big is happening, and governments around the world are starting to act.

Initially, the Trump administration didn’t want to alarm the public, but now it is safe to say that the public is definitely alarmed.  In fact, it is being reported that a lot of people are actually buying face masks for their dogs.

For several years we had been enjoying a period of relative peace, prosperity and stability, but now things are starting to change in a major way.

During the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, approximately 500 million people got sick and tens of millions of people died.

Hopefully this current outbreak will not evolve into that sort of pandemic, but if you want to see something that will really freak you out, just read what Zero Hedge just posted.

This does not appear to be an ordinary virus.

Global authorities are not disclosing everything that they know, and this is another reason why fear is spreading like wildfire.  Most people just want accurate information so that they can make good decisions, and from the very beginning of this crisis the information that we have been getting has definitely not been accurate.

Well that didn’t take long. Despite President Trump previously touting support from some Gulf Arab states like Bahrain and United Arab Emirates for his ‘deal of the century’ Mideast peace plan unveiled at the White House Tuesday, the Arab League on Saturday declared it has officially rejected the plan. 

Meeting in an emergency session in Cairo the pan-Arab bloc stated it “rejects the US-Israeli ‘deal of the century’ considering that it does not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people.”

Simultaneously Mahmoud Abbas announced in a scathing speech before the assembly of Arab leaders that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is cutting all ties with the US and Israel.

“They told me Trump wants to send me the deal of the century to read, I said I would not,” Abbas told the meeting. “Trump asked that I speak to him over the phone, so I said ‘no’, and that he wants to send me a letter, so I refused to receive it.”

Holding up a map produced by the White House of the envisioned future ‘two-state solution’ and what the proposed new state of Palestine will look like, Abbas said further: “I challenge any of you, if you can even see us on the map.”

“If you ask a child in first grade to draw Trump’s map he will never know how to.” He added, “This is a disgrace.”

Abbas said he refused to go down in history as the person who “sold out Jerusalem”. The deal controversially cuts Palestinians out of control over holy sites of the Old City in Jerusalem, while claiming to offer parts of the city’s eastern sector to serve as capital of a future Palestinian state, but only if certain “conditions are met” long term. 

The Arab League further agreed “not to… cooperate with the US administration to implement this plan” while emphasizing that a two-state solution must include a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders recognized by the UN with the capital being East Jerusalem, according to Al Jazeera.

From the start both the PA and Hamas indicated the plan would be dead on arrival as they were not even privy to negotiations related to key components of the plan. Especially the crucial part of the White House plan giving Israel ‘annexation’ rights over at least 30% of West Bank territory, which Netanyahu has said parliament will move to vote on Sunday.

However, a number of commentators have noted the 181-page US-Israel proposal was almost designed to fail in the sense that it concedes all that Israel desires with little significant in the way of concessions to the Palestinians. Israel can then move forward with taking West Bank and Jordan Valley territory while claiming it extended an ‘open hand’ as part of the deal. 

Authored by Aaron Maté via The Nation,

When liberals start rallying around John Bolton, you know something is off…

Donald Trump’s far-right administration is one of the most dangerous in US history, which makes the disappointment over the imminent failure of his impeachment case understandable. But the impeachment proceedings never challenged what actually makes the Trump White House so fraught. In adopting hawkish Cold War chauvinism toward Russia, Democratic House impeachment managers embraced rather than opposed a perilous right-wing agenda. They did this while presenting a weak, overblown, and hypocritical case that posed no threat to Trump.

The holes in the Democrats’ impeachment case were apparent from the start, and the House proceedings and Senate trial brought them to the fore. The lone witness who communicated with Trump about the frozen military funding to Ukraine—and, even more crucially, the only Trump official thought to have relayed a quid pro quo to the Ukrainian side—is EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland. But Sondland testified that the link between aid and the opening of investigations was only his “presumption” and that he had communicated this presumption only in passing. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko, and Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, have all said that they saw no ties between the frozen funding and pressure to open investigations.

In the face of rejections by top Ukrainian officials of his core allegation, Schiff has mischaracterized the available evidence and engaged in supposition. Sondland, according to Schiff’s account, told Yermak, “You ain’t getting the money until you do the investigations.” But both Sondland and Yermak offer a radically different account. According to Sondland, he told Yermak in “a very, very brief pull-aside conversation,” that he “didn’t know exactly why” the military funding was held up, and that its linkage to opening an investigation was only his “personal presumption” in the absence of an explanation from Trump. Yermak does not even recall the issue of the frozen aid being mentioned.

To overcome that, Schiff has gone to the extraordinary step of arguing that it’s not just Sondland who is lying but the Ukrainians as well. “Like they’re going to admit they were being shaken down by the president of the United States,” Schiff told the proceedings.

Sure, that’s one possibility, but it is also wildly speculative.

Ukrainian officials say they did not learn about the weapons freeze until it was publicly reported more than one month after the Trump-Zelensky call. And even after they did find out, and even voiced concerns to their US counterparts, there is no record of any complaints about the alleged linkage. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy recalled of a meeting with Zelensky in early September—after the funding freeze became known—the Ukrainian president “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani.”

House impeachment managers have not overcome this evidentiary flaw. They have tried to claim that the White House effectively admitted to their allegation in an October 2019 news conference by acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. But as I detailed back when Mulvaney’s comments initially caused a stir, Democrats and media outlets pundits rendered them as damning by isolating one fragment and ignoring the bulk of what Mulvaney said.

The absence of concrete evidence explains the last-minute excitement over compelling the potential testimony of another Trump administration official, former national security adviser John Bolton. A New York Times report about Bolton’s forthcoming memoir led to declarations that Bolton confirmed the quid pro quo allegation at the heart of the impeachment trial. As in other cases, that is based on a mistaken and maximalist interpretation of the available facts. The Times did not quote from Bolton’s manuscript. In its characterization of what Bolton wrote, the Times reports that Bolton said Trump “preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. Clinton in Ukraine” (emphasis mine).

If this account is accurate, then Bolton is not confirming that Trump conditioned military assistance to Ukraine’s announcement of an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. Instead, Bolton is relaying that Trump “preferred” that Ukraine assist efforts to uncover the extent of Ukrainian meddling to hurt Trump’s campaign and help Democrats in 2016 – meddling that did in fact happen. Recall that Trump is not on trial for preferring that Ukraine hand “over all materials they had about the Russia investigation,” but for pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation of Trump’s political rival.

The faulty interpretation of available evidence has been accompanied by hyperbole, fearmongering, and militaristic chauvinism.

“The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box,” Schiff declared in his opening arguments.

“For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

Even if every allegation against Trump were proven correct, this is a ridiculous statement. Suppose Ukraine had announced an investigation of Burisma, the gas company where Hunter Biden obtained his lucrative board seat, as well as of Ukrainian meddling in 2016. Does anyone believe that such an announcement from Kiev would somehow undermine the fairness of the 2020 US election?

We already have precedents to test Schiff’s scenario. In December 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that Ukrainian officials had illegally interfered in the 2016 US election when they leaked documents purporting to show illegal payments to Paul Manafort. The ruling made headlines in several US outlets, but beyond that, the response was null. If Ukraine were to now announce a follow-up investigation of Burisma and 2016, it is reasonable to expect that some outlets would report on it, but absurd to suggest it would mean that the 2020 election could not “be fairly won.”

In 2016, the Clinton campaign paid a former British spy to dig up dirt on Trump from foreign sources, including Russians. That solicitation of foreign interference was massively consequential, fueling three years of all-consuming innuendo and serving as the basis for an FBI surveillance warrant on a member of Trump’s campaign. Had Clinton won, would that have undermined the legitimacy of her victory or been impeachable?

The Democrats have delivered an underwhelming answer. On Thursday night, House impeachment manager Hakeem Jeffries said that the two incidents are not analogous, because in Clinton’s case the Steele dossier “was purchased.”

Far more worrying rhetoric comes in Schiff and company’s repeated invocations of Russia. They have argued throughout the trial that Trump’s pause on military funding for Ukraine “put our national security at risk,” because “the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there so we don’t have to fight Russia here.” US hawks from the Johnson administration in Vietnam to the Bush administration in Iraq have used the same language. It’s not a serious argument: Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, refused to send that same military funding at all. By Schiff’s logic, Obama is guilty of an even more egregious offense.

The very fact that such militarist chauvinism is being adopted by the leadership of the Democratic Party is far more dangerous than anything they have accused Trump of in this impeachment trial. Rather than alleging that Trump has been insufficiently confrontational toward Russia, Democrats should be working to stop Trump policies that have increased tensions with the world’s other top nuclear power.

The dangers of warmongering toward Russia were underscored on the second day of the Democrats’ arguments. Just blocks away from the Capitol, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that it had moved its Doomsday Clock t0 100 seconds before midnight, the closest it’s been since 1953. The Trump administration’s nixing of the INF treaty and its signaling that it won’t renew the last treaty limiting nuclear weapons, New START, were cited as major reasons. Under Trump, the Bulletin noted, “the United States has adopted a bullying and derisive tone toward its Chinese and Russian competitors.” There is no hope of reversing this existential threat so long as Trump’s political opposition is adopting a tone toward Russia that is just as bullying and derisive.

We might also consider what hopes Democrats have of defeating Trump so long as their prevailing tone through Trump’s entire first term continues unchanged. The self-reflection that should have resulted from losing to him in 2016 has been replaced by an obsession with blaming Russia and demonizing it in the process. Democrats have also chosen to prioritize two scandals that highlight corruption and elitism in their top ranks. The stolen Democratic Party e-mails at the heart of Russiagate exposed a bias against Bernie Sanders and a preference for the neoliberal, militarist policies he opposes; and the allegedly sought-after investigation at the heart of Ukrainegate centered on an unqualified son receiving a lucrative gas company board seat in Ukraine while his vice president father was supposedly battling corruption there.

In the process, voters have seen a party that fights harder for the pride and privilege of its establishment candidates than it does for working people. The devotion to centering intra-elite drama has gotten so extreme that it has meant bigger liberal rallies to save Jeff Sessions’s job than to save the Iran nuclear deal. Now, liberal energy is being poured into an even more reactionary, right-wing figure who has been deemed a potential savior: John Bolton. If that is not a wake-up call, it is hard to think of what is. Rather than mourn the loss of a drawn-out impeachment trial, Democrats might wish to recall the failed results of their last drawn-out fixation, Russiagate, and break their Cold War–addled impeachment fever.

It’s been a tough few months for China…

First, they faced food shortages (and soaring food costs) as African Swine Fever swept across the nation cutting China’s pork production in half and slaughtering hundreds of millions of their porcine pals.

Then, they faced total economic shutdown and social lockdown as the deadly Wuhan Coronavirus spread across the nation faster than a Buzzfeed ‘which cat suits your social justice needs best’ article, killing hundreds and leaving 10s of thousands sick.

And now, as if things weren’t bad enough, according to the website of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the Information Office of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, bird flu is back!

As Reuters reports, the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak of H5N1 subtype of poultry occurred in Shuangqing District, Shaoyang City, Hunan Province.

The case reportedly occurred on a farm with 7,850 chickens, 4,500 of which have died of the bird flu.

Authorities have culled 17,828 poultry following the outbreak.

As a reminder, Avian influenza is deadly to most birds, and it’s deadly to humans and to other mammals that catch the virus from birds. Since the first human case in 1997, H5N1 has killed nearly 60% of the people who have been infected.

But unlike human flu bugs, H5N1 bird flu does not spread easily from person to person. The very few cases of human-to-human transmission have been among people with exceptionally close contact, such as a mother who caught the virus while caring for her sick infant.

What next?