Tag: news

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece wondering if there was a deeper meaning behind the Trump administration’s bizarre maneuvers in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) over snapback sanctions on Iran.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the resumption of these sanctions by the U.S. and demands that all the signatories to the JCPOA abide by them or face serious consequences.

In that article I noted the following:

Now at the same time, Trump and Pompeo have been very active across Europe rewriting the U.S. troop deployment map there to pressure Russia into signing new INF and START treaties under threat of U.S. expanded deployments in Poland.

Is this just more aggressive posturing by Trump? We’ll see. I remain convinced that a lot of his foreign policy ‘blundering,’ as Philip Giraldi called it recently (which I don’t disagree with), is part of his purposefully blowing up the old order between the U.S. and Europe now that it’s clear to me the globalists’ goal of a Great Reset involves destroying the U.S. and moving the center of western power to the European Union.

This morning Martin Armstrong shifted his analysis of the current push by the global elite I call The Davos Crowd in an important post stating that the goal of this push was to bring about the rise of the UN to the status of world government during this next period of history .

The stated goal? Bring on the Green New Deal to save us all from Climate Change. The real goal, the concentration of power into the hands of an un-elected bureau of technocrats.

And it may start as early as 2021 with the need to cancel sovereign debt as the next phase of the financial crisis creeps up on us. That debt will be defaulted on by converting them into perpetual bonds, as promoted by none other than George Soros himself.

Eventually, they’ll give the UN tax and spend authority through MMT and, most likely, the IMF, who will provide the ‘capital’ to make the conversions akin to the power just accreted to the European Commission in their COVID-19 relief package described breathlessly by a truly clueless (and complicit) media as Angela Merkel’s Alexander Hamilton Moment.

So, while I fundamentally disagree with Trump and Pompeo’s tactics here because they are horrific. They betray a fundamental misunderstanding of many of the players on the world stage.

But it seems now, that the greater strategic play from the beginning was to curtail the UN and disengage the U.S. from all of the post-WWII institutions put in place by the people whose descendants are fighting tooth and claw to stop his re-election and effect their apotheosis.

So, while Trump is still nearly equal parts shit-lord and shit-bag, to turn a phrase, it’s becoming clear that he does understand how deeply the American people are being sold down the river to global totalitarian government.

And he’s not having any of it.

That’s why he pulled funding from the World Health Organization, it’s why he’s putting the UNSC in a bind over the snapback sanctions on Iran. It’s why he refuses to give an inch on Nordstream 2, is pulling troops out of Germany while simultaneously telling the Russians to accept new START and INF treaties without any commitments to NATO pulling back from its borders.

Trump understands just how big the problem he’s taking on is. He lacks any sense of tact or diplomacy, understanding only blackmail, extortion and the Big Ask as negotiating tools.

It won’t win him any friends at all nor will it win him the respect and trust of those he needs to cut new treaties and deals with, i.e. Russia and China.

Telling the Russians that a new nuclear arms race is acceptable because he refuses to back away from any restrictions on putting nuclear weapons in Europe is pure insanity.

While the Kremlin has yet to comment on Billingslea’s offer, a Russian senator called it “outrageous,” suggesting that it won’t go down well in Moscow. “One doesn’t act this way if one wants to achieve actual results,” Senator Oleg Morozov from the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house said in response. “It’s like saying ‘Give me your gun and the gun of your neighbor or I’ll shoot you in the head.’”

And he’s not wrong.

So, in looking at this situation dispassionately, knowing that Trump has avoided new wars to date, even when any other U.S. president would have done so, we have to look at this and ask if there is a bigger game at play here.

Trump will cut a deal with the Russians over the new arms race.

He won’t risk nuclear war with them over Syria, Ukraine, Belarus or Nordstream 2. Putin won’t give him an inch on these places nor will the sanctions stop him from ‘selling’ arms to Iran to solidify its ability to stop any further regime change operations emanating from Trump’s out of control State Dept.

Back in 2018, Trump told the world, funny enough, at the UN that he would use the dollar as the greatest weapon of mass destruction to bend it to his well. To date, it’s been the one thing he hasn’t lied about one whit.

And I’m sure he angry with Putin for telling the world, “No!” and crashing oil prices back in March. I’m also sure Trump is paranoid enough to think Putin did it to get rid of him.

No, Putin did it because it was the right thing to do to get Trump to see the folly of his dollar belligerence.

Trump’s punishing Russia, who should be his ally against the UN and Europe, finally cost him greatly. Putin chose that moment to again announce to the world Russia, too, has real weapons.

Trump today is pushing Russia on all of these fronts simultaneously hoping to create leverage when he goes for his real goal, undermining the UN and the European Union.

Right now the threats of U.S. hypersonic weapons in ten years are empty ones. Russia has them now and we know it, which is why Trump is saying he welcomes an arms race. We need, in Trump’s mind, the freedom to catch up.

Eventually there will be new treaties with Russia as the Russians will treat Trump exactly as they’ve treated him for the past three years, as irrelevant and Trump will most likely come off his high horse.

The Russians think he’s bluffing. Trump often bluffs.

But these new treaties, which the Russians want because an arms race serves no one’s interests, are just chips to Trump to offer Russia to stand aside as he stops the UN. Since I don’t see Putin any more welcoming of a globally-powered UN than Trump this is the issue where they can, finally come to an agreement.

But Trump has to continue his attacks on the UN in the same way that Putin attacked it in his speech on the eve of Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015.

Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping are the keys to ending the threat of the UN and the EU to the sovereignty of nation states.

Trump has embroiled himself in a chaotic mess of interlinked skirmishes with all the major players of the world.

He likes to operate in chaos because that’s how you keep your opponent off-balance, leaving them vulnerable to a mistake, while he keeps his eye on the thing he’s wanted all along.

And in this case it is to restore the U.S.’s sovereignty from the hands of people who are dead-set on destroying it. And he wants this in the worst way imaginable and, unfortunately, that’s usually exactly how he goes about it.

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Another month, another divergence – the bigger the (record) auction size, the lower the (record low) yield.

Moments ago the Treasury sold $52 billion in 2Y paper, the largest auction notional size on record, following the $50 billion sold in August.

And while the auction size hit a new record high, the yield once again dropped, sliding from 0.155% last month to 0.136% the lowest yield on record, even if it tailed the When Issued 0.134% by 0.2 bps.

Aside from the record low yield, the rest of the metrics were mediocre at best, with the Bid to Cover sliding from 2.782 to 2.421, below the 6-auction average of 2.62.

The internals, likewise, left much to be desired, with Indirects taking down 52.53%, which was both below the 57.63% in August and the recent average of 53.26%. And with Directs taking down 14.06%, in line with recent averages and just above last month’s 13.7%, Dealers were left with 33.4% of the auction, just above the 32.3% last month.

Overall, an average auction… if of course one can call selling $52 billion in 2 year notes at a yield of just 0.136% average.

As doubts about the FDA’s credibility grow as the agency awaits the initial results from the frontrunner’s “Phase 3” trials, the leading vaccine makers are working to further expedite the approval process by streamlining procedures to try and make a determination about whether their vaccine “works or not” within the next month or so.

The issue, as Bloomberg reports, is that the leading vaccine companies are shooting for low targets for the number of confirmed infections among the tens of thousands of patients they’ve recruited for their trials.

Remember, half of the test subjects have been given a vaccine, while the other half haven’t.

Leading candidates will reportedly conduct their first round of analysis after just 32 people have been sickened, with Pfizer and BioNTech giving their joint project a goal of 164 cases before they move ahead with the application for emergency approval.

The companies plan a first look after a mere 32 coronavirus infections have accumulated in their massive 44,000-person trial. That case total could be reached as soon as Sept. 27, according to Airfinity Ltd., a London-based analytics firms tracking vaccine trials.

Pfizer has also given itself four chances to get a preliminary result, before reaching the final goal of 164. Some trial experts say the company appears to be looking for a leg up in a race against frontrunners such as Moderna Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to be first with a vaccine.

“I’ve never seen a trial where there were four interim analyses; that may be the Olympic record,” said Eric Topol, editor-in-chief of Medscape, a website offering clinical information for health-care professionals, and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. “It’s obvious why it is being done: so you can just keep looking at the data to try to win a race.”

The projects will also give reglators several “early looks” at their data so they can decide whether any red flags have emerged that require halting the trial, or – if the data are overwhelmingly positive – call for an early end to the trial.

A wide range of symptoms and severity makes the evaluation of Covid-19 vaccines tricky. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said that to be approved, vaccines should cut the number of symptomatic cases by half. Yet documents released by the drugmakers show each has its own approach to defining which symptoms count, and when to count them.

Big drug studies usually allow a panel of monitors to get an early peek at the data once or twice before the planned end. The panel can stop the trial early if a treatment is judged overwhelmingly effective – or alternatively, a total dud. Four early looks may give Pfizer an “easy route” to making sure it has results soon, said Marie-Paule Kieny, a former World Health Organization official who’s now a research director at the French health-science institute Inserm.

“It seems that there are different levels of stringency,” she said in an interview. “I wouldn’t say that Pfizer-BioNTech comes out as a star of stringency.”

Pfizer says it expects to have conclusive results on whether the vaccine works some time in October. However, they don’t expect vaccinations to start lowing hospitalization rates until at least February.

As experts debate the prudence of moving ahead before dozens, or even hundreds, of cases have been confirmed, Pfizer is countng patients with even extremely mild symptoms like a fever as “symptomatic” to help juice the numbers.

If Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna-NIH or AstraZeneca-Oxford do achieve emergency approval next month, patients in the trial will have had only 2 months of follow ups, and data on long-term affects won’t arise for a long time.

If Pfizer’s vaccine were to receive emergency authorization based on results from October, for example, most patients would have had less than two months of follow-up. At that point, there will be little known about its duration of protection, and its impact on severe disease may not be clear.

Along with a positive test for the coronavirus, Moderna requires most patients to have two or more symptoms to count as a case for judging vaccine efficacy, unless they have a telltale marker like shortness of breath.

Ironically, all of this is coming after Moderna, Pfizer and others released their “blueprints” about the trials to try and ease concerns by being more “transparent”.

This “rush for results” could make it “harder to get clear answers about how well the vaccines work,” one expert told Bloomberg. “We want to know this vaccine has strong efficacy, and that means two things: It works in the majority of people and htat it works to prevent serious infections, not just soar throats.”

These questions simply reinforce the notion, touched on earlier Tuesday by UK PM Boris Johnson, that citizens shouldn’t view the delivery of a vaccine by the end of the year as a foregone conclusion.

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

We are still more than 40 days away from the election, and already we are seeing huge red flags regarding the integrity of the voting process in some states.  No matter who you support, you should want the upcoming election to be fair.  Every American should be able to vote, all of those votes should be counted, and the decision that the American people make should be respected.  Unfortunately, it appears that this is likely to be the most chaotic election in modern American history, and wrangling over what votes should be counted and what votes should not be counted is likely to persist long after election night is over.  In the end, it would not be surprising to see the outcome of the election end up at the Supreme Court, and that is a scenario that none of us should want to see.

Let me give you an example that shows why I am so concerned.  In Pennsylvania, a recent legal decision requires officials to throw out mail-in ballots without counting them if voters do not return them in “secrecy envelopes”…

Philadelphia’s top elections official is warning of electoral chaos in the presidential battleground state if lawmakers there do not remove a provision in Pennsylvania law that, under a days-old court decision, requires counties to throw out mail-in ballots returned without secrecy envelopes.

This is a very big deal, because large numbers of votes could be voided in one of our most important swing states.

According to the Washington Times, it is being estimated that “more than 100,000 mail-in ballots” could potentially be thrown out…

Some 30,000 to 40,000 mail-in ballots could arrive without secrecy envelopes in Philadelphia alone in November’s presidential election, Deeley estimated, and the state Supreme Court’s interpretation of current law forces election officials to throw them out.

Statewide, that could mean throwing out more than 100,000 mail-in ballots in the Nov. 3 presidential election, according to some estimates.

In 2016, President Trump won the state of Pennsylvania by just 44,292 votes.

So eliminating 100,000 votes could potentially swing the outcome from one candidate to the other.

And if the national results are very close, whoever wins Pennsylvania could ultimately determine who wins the White House.

Sadly, this is not the only reason to be deeply concerned about the integrity of the vote in Pennsylvania.  Last week, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decided that the deadline for mail-in ballots will be “the Friday after Election Day”…

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued three rulings on Thursday, extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to the Friday after Election Day, ruled voters could use dropbox to return mail-in ballots, and removed the Green Party’s presidential ticket from the ballot.

So does this mean that countless numbers of voters in the state could potentially cast votes after election day and still have them counted?

I am just imagining a scenario where one party is barely behind in the state on election night and then makes an all-out push to have more people vote by mail on Wednesday and Thursday.  If the party that is in the lead does not match that late push, that could also be something that flips the outcome of the election.

There are so many things that could go wrong, and I believe that we are headed for a giant mess no matter who wins.

Signs of trouble continue to pile up in other states as well.  In Wisconsin, a federal judge just decided that absentee ballots “can be counted up to six days after the Nov. 3 presidential election”…

A federal judge ruled Monday that absentee ballots in battleground Wisconsin can be counted up to six days after the Nov. 3 presidential election as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

The highly anticipated ruling, unless overturned, means that the outcome of the presidential race in Wisconsin might not be known for days after polls close. Under current law, the deadline for returning an absentee ballot to have it counted is 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Wisconsin is another one of the most critical swing states, and so this is very troubling news.

In so many states, we are going to have to wait for a long time after the election before we get final results, and that period of uncertainty is going to be very bad for our nation.

I just have such a bad feeling about what is going to happen in November.  It is being estimated that up to 40 percent of the population will vote by mail, and that number is far, far higher than anything that we have ever seen before.

And we also have millions and millions of people registering to vote without ever having to come face to face with anyone.  In fact, Facebook has announced that they have “already registered 2.5 million Americans to vote”…

Facebook says it has already registered 2.5 million Americans to vote in the upcoming presidential election, with a goal of registering 4 million total before Election Day.

In a blog post in advance of National Voter Registration Day on Tuesday, the social-media giant touted its combined registration figures from Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, extrapolating from conversion rates from several states.

Seriously?

We all know that Facebook has millions of fake profiles.  In fact, I get friend requests from fake profiles constantly.

So who decided that it would be okay for them to register “millions of people” to vote?

And the way that some states are aggressively promoting mail-in voting is making a lot of people really upset.  One of my readers that intends to vote in person told me that in the past five weeks “my wife and I have received three requests each for mail in ballots!”

Another one of my readers has been very confused by the forms that she has been getting in the mail, because they make it seem like voting by mail is not optional…

“A few weeks ago I got a form in the mail about voting by mail. Days later I asked a neighbor about it because I want to vote in person and they said that we can vote in person. In today’s mail I received a letter from my secretary of state asking me why I had not begun the process yet. It doesn’t say that it’s optional, they are just leading us to believe it’s the only way we are going to be allowed to vote.”

This enormous push for mail-in votes is going to create an unprecedented mess, and the outcome of the presidential election is likely to be contested no matter who is ahead on election night.

Needless to say, a contested outcome is likely to spark even more civil unrest, and that won’t be good for our country at all.

This is such a critical moment for America, and the voice of every American should be respected.

But if the integrity of our voting process is compromised, that could result in someone winning the election that the American people did not choose, and that is something that none of us should want.

A powerful blast in south Lebanon caused temporary panic after it was heard and felt for miles away on Tuesday.

Images and video of the explosion spread across social media Tuesday, with initial conflicting reports saying it was either the result of an Israeli attack, or a gas station that went up in flames. 

Video of Explosion in South #Lebanon at this hour, in town of Ayn Qana.

Early reports indicating gas station but now pointing to #Hezbollah weapons depot: pic.twitter.com/geE35SfOC8

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) September 22, 2020

Hours after, Al Jazeera and other regional media confirmed the site was an arms depot belonging to Hezbollah. The Shia paramilitary group which routinely exchanges fire along the border with Israel claimed a “technical error” was behind detonating the facility, which reportedly contained mines.

“Lebanon’s official news agency, NNA, said the explosion took place in the southern village Ein Qana, about 50km (30 miles) south of the capital Beirut,” Al Jazeera reports.

WATCH: A Hezbollah weapon warehouse just exploded in Southern Lebanon.

They claimed it was a gas station. Yeah right. Even Lebanese people don’t buy these lies. #Hezbollah #Lebanon pic.twitter.com/0bSVsJtp41

— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) September 22, 2020

Lebanon is still on edge after seven weeks ago a massive amount of stored ammonium nitrate detonated at the Beirut Port, killing hundreds and wounding many thousands. Al Jazeera details further of the latest incident: 

Hezbollah’s media office told Al Jazeera the explosion was caused by a “technical error” at their arms depot, which sent a huge column of black smoke into the sky…

“This explosion was at a house that stored weapons – result of technical error. No one was killed or injured. The building belonged to a Hezbollah affiliated de-mining association,” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said.

However, there are currently conflicting casualty reports, with some local media saying there have been injuries and possibly deaths.

#BREAKING

South #Lebanon explosion in Ain Qana was at a #Hezbollah arms depot, caused by technical error.

At least 4 dead.

pic.twitter.com/FRDZjhuu8l

— #RebuildBeirut (@LebaneseProblem) September 22, 2020

Hezbollah has been accused of blocking journalists and even state security officials’ access to the site in the aftermath.

There are also accusations and rising anger that it appears Hezbollah was storing weapons in the center of a busy residential area.

The blast aftermath looks to have caused significant and widespread damage in the village:

Large #explosion today at Ein Qana in South #Lebanon, south-east of Sidon. Significant amount of damage visible. Cause unknown. pic.twitter.com/iWAb8DJBcy

— Donatella Rovera (@DRovera) September 22, 2020

The entire country also is used to closely watching events in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, especially along the tense border given a history of conflict with Israel. 

The population is still outraged and is seeking answers from authorities over their severe mismanagement of dangerous materials which had been stored at the port for years. A series of smaller blasts and fires have further fueled outrage in the streets.