New satellite images show the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) recently conducted war games to simulate an invasion of Taiwan, reported ThePrint.
The PLAN used Type 071 (NATO reporting name: Yuzhao), an amphibious transport dock, designed to carry 800 fully armed troops, dozens of vehicles and landing crafts, and four helicopters, was used to practice circular deployment with other vessels ahead of a beach assault.
“This formation [circular deploymen] provides safety from shore fire as well as aerial attacks, since most landing ships carry only short-range air defence and close-in weapon systems (CIWS),” said ThePrint.
A Type 072A vessel (NATO reporting name: Yuting II), a landing ship designed to carry 250 fully armed troops ten tanks, four landing craft, a medium helicopter, was used to transport amphibious vehicles near the beach landing. Ahead of the invasion simulation, reconnaissance aircraft surveilled above.
The amphibious exercise used landing craft air cushion vessels to bring troops and vehicles ashore. Some of the first vehicles on land were type-08 amphibious armored vehicles and/or Type 05 amphibious fighting vehicles.
The PLAN’s recent upgrade of landing craft air cushion vessels demonstrates that these hovercraft will be used in future military exercises.
ThePrint said the PLAN also practiced re-embarkation after the landing exercise and regrouping to fine-tune their amphibious warfare tactics.
“The re-embarkation is rarely caught on satellite imagery. This exclusive satellite image displays the process of re-embarkation with five amphibious fighting vehicles lined up in the queue for loading on Type-72 Yukan and Yuting class vessels,” ThePrint said.
China has vigorously criticized any action by Taiwan to acquire Western armament, claiming that the militarization of the Taiwan Strait is damaging the ‘One-China policy,’ which states that Taiwan will eventually be reunified with the mainland.
While China has never ruled out the possibility of invasion and it has continued acquiring the military capability to do so, Taiwan’s air, sea and land forces, conducted a war exercise Thursday to repel an invading army.
Regional tensions have also grown due to China’s territorial claims and aspirations in the South China Sea, something which has prompted Japan to cast aside its postwar pacifism.
With the probability of China taking Taiwan by force is rising, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait is firmly in China’s favor.
With both sides preparing for a cross-strait war, it’s only a matter of time before the powder keg is ignited.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2JMgWtd Tyler Durden
North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un reportedly executed several top officials in March after they failed to reach an agreement with President Trump during a second summit between the two leaders, Bloomberg reports, citing South Korean newspaper Chosun. The officials were reportedly killed by a firing squad in Pyongyang, according to the Mirror.
North Korea’s special envoy to the U.S., Kim Hyok Chol, was executed along with four additional foreign ministry officials involved in the Hanoi, Vietnam, summit.
Chol had been in charge of working-level negotiations for the attempted Hanoi summit in February and had been negotiating with U.S. special representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun.
Kim Yong Chol during happier times
Kim Yong Chol, one of Kim Jong Un’s top deputies, was sentenced to hard labor. Chol was best known as being the official who delivered the “big beautiful letter” to President Trump.
Kim Sung-hye, another negotiator at the talks and Shin Hye-yong, who worked as an interpreter in Hanoi, were also sent to political prison camps. Hye-yong is accused of “undermining the authority of North Korea’s leader” by making a mistake while translating.
Kim Jong Un also reportedly told his sister Kim Yo Jong, who also participated in the summit, “to keep a low profile”.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XgjHGd Tyler Durden
In the Spring of 1986 the Soviet Union was in a slow motion collapse. No one in the US intelligence agencies predicted it, the military was taken completely by surprise and no apologies were ever made for the thirty year, multi-trillion dollar oversight. It’s political and social institutions were Potemkin villages kept alive by little more than inertia yet on the outside everything appeared normal, and if not healthy, at least it seemed monolithic in it’s outward appearance.
The structural rot that had taken hold after the death of Stalin had become the central pillar of Eastern European civilization and the foundation upon which it was built- the blood of tens of millions of murdered citizens- softened the ground further, leading to it’s eventual implosion five short years later. On the 26th of April a failed experiment at a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine initiated a slow and steady series of system failures, leading to a full blown meltdown that forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of inhabitants from the exclusion zone.
Most Americans recall the event as a catastrophic ecological disaster that threatened- at that time- to spread radioactive particles across wide swaths of Europe, poisoning the groundwater that fed the Dnieper River, leading directly to the Black Sea. No one was certain in the aftermath of the extent of the damage, nor of the ability of the Soviet system to respond truthfully to international inquiries. It was assumed throughout the Free and Democratic nations of the West that the USSR was incapable of sharing anything that would reflect poorly on their ability to govern.
The Cold War was still in full force and despite offers from the NATO alliance including the US to render aid, the Soviet Union remained steadfast in it’s commitment to face any political exigency. What happened in Chernobyl, stayed in Chernobyl, except for the radioactivity. That spread out across the Earth like a funeral shroud, unchecked by Marxist dogma.
The United States has entered it’s terminal phase and most of it’s citizens are as blithely unaware of this reality as they were of the impending dissolution of the Soviet system in the late 1980’s. On the surface each one projects it’s hegemony and influence far beyond their limitations through a combination of propaganda and threats. Both systems were thoroughly corrupted, perhaps from their inception, but certainly and absolutely as they neared their nadir, yet both systems affected a nonchalance that soon- very soon, every knee would bend before their majesty and morally superior aspirations.
For the USSR it was based upon the trite concept that everyone should share equally of the labors of others when no such possibility ever existed during mankind’s reign over the Earth. In America it was the equally vapid and hollow claim that all men are created equal when no such thing had ever been so at any time, nor could it ever be possible. To base an entire National mythos on pure sophistry is a guarantee of failure and yet their remains an eternal optimism rooted in these fanciful phrases that distorted and diffused before our eyes.
The elites always managed somehow, regardless of the system and it’s ideals, to rise above equality and find a toehold in a neo-aristocracy, where rather than blood-ties, loyalties were developed in the institutions and secret societies; Ivy League universities, Intelligence agencies, International banking cartels, Media conglomerates and Corporate boardrooms. The differences between the Politburo under Gorbachev and the current Congress are most noticeable in attire and decor rather than in behavior and outcomes.
In America today here is a complete symbiosis between the organs of information- the MSM- and the political parties and their apparatchiks, and it is used solely for the control of the populations and the promotion of The Narrative rather than as a means of explaining the events of the day. Much in the same way that the Soviet Union new organizations Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News) were able to control information to such a degree that the people of the USSR joked that “there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”, the current state of media in America is summed up in the equally derogatory slur. “Fake News”.
The populations are keenly aware that they are being misled, but are powerless- in their minds- to do anything about it. The problem of course isn’t that the populations fail to believe the lies, but that the elites of both systems have chosen falsehoods as their basic premise for rule. Any system predicated upon falsehoods cannot survive the exposure of those lies when reality comes knocking.
The current HBO series Chernobyl is a compelling examination of the personal experiences of those brave, and cowardly citizens and officers of the dying USSR who either rose to the challenge or deliberately impeded the process in the aftermath of the nuclear meltdown. While minor party officials clung desperately to the fiction they had been operating under for their entire lifetime, passing the blame for their failures or deliberately ignoring physical reality in order to keep up appearances of competency, simple soldiers and civilian volunteers freely gave their lives in order to save those of their fellow man.
It is both heart wrenching and exasperating to watch the honorable men and women of the Ukraine work night and day to mitigate a disaster they had no part in causing while those responsible for the faulty engineering and inadequate training sought only to promote themselves by concealing the full scope of the disaster. In this series, whether unintentionally or not, it becomes quite clear what a population can expect when forced to submit to the venal and obsequious for political gain and just how similar our current situation is today.
The unwinding tale of Russian collusion, with all of it’s reeking details rooted in pure fiction, have done nothing to resolve the deeper issues that cause the greatest amount of suffering for the population. It has, in fact, rent the fabric of an already frayed body politic, driving the divide further apart than at any other time since the War Between the States. It is clear that these animosities and resentments are being deliberately stoked by a compliant press in order to sow division so that no one might notice the wholesale plunder of the American people by a small cohort of deeply corrupted and morally bankrupt criminals who care nothing for the country they are employed to serve.
Like their counterparts in the Soviet era they live lives completely detached from the populations they pretend to champion and in fact work tirelessly to strip from them the last vestiges of their God-given rights under the pretext of keeping them safe. They know neither shame nor guilt and their avarice is second only to their venality making them equally corrupt and unrepentant.
Several years ago I became acquainted with the FedEx driver who serves our region. I recognized his Russian accent and one afternoon while exchanging hellos it was revealed that he had served in a Soviet Airborne unit. I told him that I too was a former paratrooper and as we traded stories it was revealed that we had crossed paths, in October of 1983 on the island of Grenada. My squad had secured the campus in St. Georges and after rescuing several dozen American med school students that had been trapped in their dorm for several days, we moved on the Soviet Embassy to protect the ambassador until transportation could be arranged.
The FedEx driver had been assigned as a guard for the facility and I was on the other side of the fence, rifles pointed in both directions. Both of us traded enough details to assure each other that we’d both been in that same place at that same time, and over time we became fairly good friends. I can say without reservation that the two of us share far more in common than I do with anyone currently serving in Washington D.C. and that he shares the same sentiments about his former country and the politicians who ran things. Soldiers, workers, farmers, citizens, regardless of their homeland are more or less similar in their beliefs and behaviors than the politicians and mandarins who serve them in the citadels of power.
Commoners, the comrade class in the USSR and the Deplorables of flyover country, are the ones who grease the wheels of civilization and keep it functioning. They are more than satisfactory as cannon fodder and as dependents of The State, but in the eyes of the ruling classes they are disposable. In the aftermath of the explosions at Chernobyl nearly three quarters of a million souls were used like donkeys to rid the world of the radioactive debris, to tunnel underneath the core itself to prevent further contamination of the water table and to relocate their fellow citizens, often against their will while the heads of state continued to spin their fantasies of a controlled situation.
And that is our present situation today in America, where our betters have sold us out to foreign interests, undermined our history and culture in order to usher in a utopian fantasy that they neither believe in, nor practice while we suffer in a simmering silence, filled with righteous indignation, on the verge of a meltdown of equal proportions to that of April 26th, 1986.
It would be impossible to predict exactly what set of circumstance will lead us to our own moment of complete and undeniable political collapse, where tanks surround the Capitol rather than the Kremlin, but it approaches, slouching towards Gomorrah. The disaster of Chernobyl may have appeared on the surface to have been a failure of engineering, poor training and scientific ineptitude, but it was more the direct result of a failed political system built on paranoia, rooted in lies, and nursed at the twin teats of corruption and degeneracy.
Our own system is far worse today, having grown to enormous size and influence globally, while practicing callous indifference to it’s own citizenry in every form, and endlessly lashing out with organized violence across the face of the Earth in the name of Freedom and Democracy. The hypocrisy required to maintain such a ideological system has strained what little is left that still holds us together. Whatever triggers our own dissolution is yet to be revealed, but it is coming and when it does there will be a reckoning not unlike the one experienced by the Supreme Soviet that saw it’s entire premise swept away in the blink of an eye while the world turned away, indifferent to the loss.
Chernobyl was an event that never need have happened and at every step along the route to that ecological and political debacle there was room to correct and repair the structural damage that led to its inevitable outcome. And just like today, there was no one left with the moral compass to correct the failures when they were still possible, creating something less than Destiny and more of a reckoning well earned.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KffbUK Tyler Durden
China’s Official May Composite PMI printed modestly lower than April’s at 53.3, with Services at 54.3 (in line with last month and goal-seeked expectations), while Manufacturing (expected to decline into contraction at 49.9) was considerably worse than expected, printing 49.4.
This was below the lowest analyst estimate of 49.5, and close to the lowest level in about a decade.
Under the hood of the manufacturing data, Output growth slowed, New Orders tumbled into contraction (with export orders plunging), inventories rose, employment slipped, and input & output prices contracted. The most affected were Small Enterprises.
The Services data also showed weaker new orders and employment with selling prices slumping into contraction
The drop clearly reflects pressure on the production side of the economy from the escalating trade war (following some pre-tariff stocking-up).
None of this should be a big surprise as much of Asia’s flash PMIs were weak and after spiking on record credit injections in the early part of the year, China’s macro data has collapsed against renewed optimistic expectations…
Looks like we are “gonna need a bigger boat” of cash to keep this red ponzi afloat, which is a problem as the signal from China’s April credit data was also negative. The unexpectedly large fallback in credit raised fresh doubts about whether the economy has found a bottom.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VYliz6 Tyler Durden
The Scripps National Spelling Bee has officially gone corporate.
With the headlines from the “largest ever college admissions scandal” starting to fade, a new type of “Pay to Play” in the field of education is hitting the news: The Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Contestants for the spelling bee used to need to have won a regional championship in order to qualify for the “main event”. Now, the spelling bee has changed to a new model: pony up the cash, and we’ll let you compete even if can’t spell c-r-o-n-y-i-s-m.
In fact, 2018’s winner,14-year-old Karthik Nemmani, was part of a group of kids who lost at regionals but whose parents agreed to pay an entry fee of $750 – on top of paying for their family’s travel and lodging.
The price to play moved from $750 last year to $1500 this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, this year’s spelling bee is the second that includes a pay-to-play option for kids who misspelled a word at the regional spelling bee and didn’t qualify for the finals. More than half of the 562 entrants paid to get into the Spelling Bee this year.
Now, any wealthy family can have their child enter into the competition, regardless of their skill level. The child will obviously need to be a serious competitor in order to enter, but taking out the hierarchy of winning a regional competition is something that has struck a nerve with some parents and educators, including Helaine Olen at the Washington Post, who wrote:
…suggesting that parents pull out their wallets and pay up isn’t exactly an equitable way to solve this sort of problem either. All that does is create yet another unfairness. It allows the parents with means the opportunity to buy their child’s way out of a dilemma, while leaving others who are less well-off out of luck. Surely the Scripps National Spelling Bee — and the rest of us — can do better than that.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YSei8G Tyler Durden
During her livestream last night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have exposed her true self – if recent liberal attacks on the innocent are to be applied – as she unleashed something so awful, so disgusting, so fascist and racist that it likely left many of her viewers triggered and in need of a safe space.
For the safety of young impressionable non-liberals, we have blurred the image to protect the innocent from being drawn into her apparently spiteful ways… As Ashley St.Clair asked, clearly a worried Twitter member, “Why did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez flash a white power symbol on her livestream last night”
In case you are confused, the left has vehemently attacked anyone who dares to unleash such a horrific sign. Here are just some of the latest examples of the idiocy:
In fact, the best part, as we have explained numerous times: the entire thing was fabricated by 4chan users to troll the left, and the symbol has nothing to do with white supremacy. “We must flood twitter and other social media websites with spam, claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy,” reads a Feb. 2017 posting on the popular imageboard.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2QDiOVJ Tyler Durden
Socialism in Venezuela has destroyed so much of the country’s economic wellbeing that even criminals are having a hard time making ends meet. Bullets and weapons have become too expensive for even the most violent out there, plus, there’s just nothing left to steal.
Bullets are expensive at $1 each for the distressed Venezuelan criminal. And with less cash circulating on the street, gang members say robberies just don’t pay like they used to. Imagine that.
According to the Associated Press, criminals are even having a hard time in the nation ripped apart by socialism. Not even breaking the law is helping anymore because most people have nothing left to steal.
“If you empty your clip, you’re shooting off $15,” said El Negrito a “feared street gangster” who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition that he is identified only by his street name and photographed wearing a hoodie and face mask to avoid attracting unwelcome attention. “You lose your pistol or the police take it and you’re throwing away $800.”
After the initial exponential rise in violent crime in the immediate aftermath of socialism’s failure, the crime rate is falling rapidly. Nothing pays anymore in Venezuela, including crime. “These days, nobody is doing well — not honest citizens who produce wealth or the criminals who prey on them,” said El Negrito.
Officials of President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist administration have drawn criticism for not releasing robust crime statistics, but the government on Tuesday gave the AP figures showing a 39 percent drop in homicides over the same three-year period, with 10,598 killings in 2018. The Associated Press
20 years of the socialist revolution launched by the late President Hugo Chávez, who expropriated once-thriving businesses that today produce a fraction of their potential under government management, have caused massive erosion in the way of life in Venezuela.
While assaults are down, other crimes have risen. Reports of theft and pilfering of everything from copper telephone wires to livestock are surging as people seek a way to provide food for themselves. Meanwhile, drug trafficking and illegal gold mining have become default activities for organized crime, or others just looking to survive. Even with the drop in assaults and murder, Venezuela remains a very violent country.
“Venezuela remains one of the most violent countries in the world,” said Dorothy Kronick, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania and has carried out extensive research in Caracas’ slums. “It has wartime levels of violence — but no war.”
When someone looks out at the world and sees all manner of suffering and injustice, stretching back for thousands of years and continuing today, he invariably blames such problems on someone else’s hatred, greed, or stupidity. Rarely will someone consider the possibility that his own belief system is the cause of the pain and suffering he sees around him. But in most cases, it is. The root cause of most of society’s ills–the main source of man’s inhumanity to man–is neither malice nor negligence, but a mere superstition–an unquestioned assumption which has been accepted on faith by nearly everyone, of all ages, races, religions, education and income levels. –The Most Dangerous Superstition, book description
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2QAWdZK Tyler Durden
Any fair reading of the public record since 2017 has suggested that the Trump administration, despite inconsistent protestations to the contrary (whether in front of Congress or in the courtroom), has sought to re-insert on the decennial census form in 2020 a question about citizenship status for the express political purpose of undercounting heavily Democratic areas, thereby decreasing these areas’ representation in Congress.
Now comes news, via a court filing Thursday, that a recently deceased GOP gerrymandering specialist not only wrote a 2015 analysis of how Republicans would benefit if political maps were drawn based on voting-age U.S. citizenry rather than overall population, he also helped ghostwrite a 2017 Department of Justice letter to the Commerce Department (which manages the census), requesting the reinstatement of the citizenship question on the highly dubious grounds that it would improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
Thomas Hofeller, who The New York Timesdescribes as having achieved “near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering,” died last August at age 75. His estranged daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, when sorting through dad’s affairs, “came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop.” In a series of implausible-sounding coincidences, she reportedly happened to mention in passing the existence of some gerrymandering-related material on those drives to a lawyer who happened to work for Common Cause, which happened to have an active lawsuit in North Carolina court about gerrymandering.
One thing led to another, and the files have now been presented to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York, who ruled against the administration’s citizenship question in January. That case has been appealed and is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling. It is unclear whether the Hofeller trove will affect the case.
The original purpose of the census, as spelled out in the Constitution, is to count the “Number of free Persons” living in each state for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. The post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution redefined that whole “free Persons” bit: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”
As Matthew J. Franck has explained at National Review, “voting rights are not and never have been the relevant consideration in counting population for congressional representation. Like women in most states before the Nineteenth Amendment, and like minor children even today, the alien is counted because he is represented in Congress, even if he cannot participate in electing members of it.” This has been the governing system ever since, upheld in various ways by the Supreme Court.
Republican immigration restrictionists have been chafing at that legal reality since at least the 1980s. When Sen. David Vitter (R–La.) in 2009 introduced a bill mandating that the census reinsert the citizenship question for the first time since 1950, he was explicit in his aims: “States that have large populations of illegals,” Vitter complained, are being unfairly “rewarded.” That view is shared by many within the Trump administration orbit, most notoriously the populist svengali Steve Bannon and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Hofeller was initially hired in 2015 to provide potential analytical ammo in Evenwel v. Abbott, a case in which two Texas voters attempted to challenge the Lone Star State’s residency-based political apportionment, arguing that the political power of legal citizens was unfairly diluted by the counting of non-legal residents. (The Supreme Court decided unanimously, if narrowly, in 2016 against that argument, with Justice Samuel Alito remarking along the way that “The decennial census required by the Constitution tallies total population.”)
Hofeller concluded in his study that redrawing Texas political boundaries based on voting eligibility “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” But such voter data was not available on a granular basis, he lamented. “Without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire,” Hofeller wrote, “the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable.”
The New York Times picks up the timeline from there:
Roughly 16 months later, as President-elect Trump prepared to take office, Mr. Hofeller urged Mr. Trump’s transition team to consider adding a citizenship question to the census, the transition official responsible for census issues, Mark Neuman, said last year in a deposition in the Manhattan census lawsuit.
Mr. Neuman testified that Mr. Hofeller told him that using citizenship data from the census to enforce the Voting Rights Act would increase Latino political representation — the opposite of what Mr. Hofeller’s study had concluded months earlier.
Court records show that Mr. Neuman, a decades-long friend of Mr. Hofeller’s, later became an informal adviser on census issues to Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. By that summer, a top aide to Mr. Ross was pressing the Justice Department to say that it required detailed data from a census citizenship question to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
It’s worth pausing to reflect on the brazenness here. Hofeller writes up a study showing that redistricting based on voter eligibility—which by the way is unconstitutional—would definitely help Republicans and whites while hurting Democrats and Latinos in high-immigrant states. He then complains that the best compilation of that data—the annual American Community Survey, which asks the citizenship question and is the primary information source used for enforcement of the Voting Rights Act—is not a thorough survey, but a mere sampling of around 3.5 million households nationwide. In order to produce the desired outcome for Republicans, at the expense of Latino households, he writes, you’d need the citizenship question asked by the decennial census.
The Trump administration then claims with a straight face that the primary purpose of restoring that question is to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
While that clumsy lie was smacked down already by Judge Furman (and in these pages by Jacob Sullum), Thursday’s court filing adds a new wrinkle to the mendacity. In a Hofeller document dated Aug. 30, 2017, the Voting Rights Act rationale was spelled out in a paragraph, complete with supporting court decisions. According to the Times, “That paragraph later appeared word for word in a draft letter from the Justice Department to the Census Bureau that sought a citizenship question on the 2020 census.” A later letter clearly drew on Hofeller’s 2015 study, the Times found.
Hofeller is not the only GOP gerrymanderer who attempted to influence Trump’s census. The president’s first pick for deputy director and operational executive of the Census Bureau was Thomas Brunell, author of the 2008 book, Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America. Brunell’s name was later withdrawn after an outcry.
So what’s wrong with the census including a citizenship question, since after all it was included in the “long form” of the questionnaire as recently as 2000? I’ll turn the floor over to Jacob Sullum:
The Constitution requires an “actual enumeration” of each state’s population, without regard to citizenship or immigration status, every 10 years so that representatives can be apportioned correctly. Asking about citizenship, which the main census form has not done since 1950, undermines that goal, since people may worry that the information they provide will be used against them or their relatives—a fear for which there is historical precedent, notwithstanding the government’s promise of confidentiality.
Since 1960 the Census Bureau and the commerce secretary have warned that a citizenship question would aggravate the undercounting of “hard-to-count” groups, including not just unauthorized residents but people who live with them. Last January bureau staff conservatively estimated that adding the question would cause a 5 percent drop in form completion by noncitizen households.
Remarkably, Commerce Secretary Ross has stated on the record that an undercount of the one thing the census was specifically tasked with would nonetheless be worth it in return for all that crucial Voting Rights Act information. “Even if there is some impact on responses … the citizenship data provided to [the Department of Justice] will be more accurate with the question than without it,” Ross wrote in a memo last year, “which is of greater importance than any adverse effect that may result from people violating their legal duty to respond.”
Trump administration officials have repeatedly demonstrated that they are willing to lie in order to depress the counting of immigrant households. We should know in a matter of weeks whether they’ll get away with it.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2EGx8be
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Netflix, in all of its virtue, has signaled that it’s going to ‘rethink its entire investment in Georgia’ over the state’s “heartbeat” abortion bill banning the procedure after a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which occurs at approximately six weeks into pregnancy.
For some reason – and perhaps this is just a simple oversight, the company is ramping up production in Egypt – where abortion is both illegal and punishable by prison, as noted by the Daily Caller‘s Matt M. Miller, citing an article by Variety regarding the new productions.
Netflix is stepping up production in the Middle East with its third and most ambitious Arabic original, titled “Paranormal,” with young Egyptian director Amr Salama (“Sheikh Jackson”) on board as director and showrunner.
…
“Paranormal,” which is expected to shoot in Egypt, is the third Middle Eastern Netflix original series following “Jinn,” a coming-of-age teen drama with supernatural elements that was shot in Jordan and will drop June 13, and “Al Rawabi School for Girls,” a Jordan-set high-school drama produced with a female Arab cast and crew. –Variety
Of note, if any of said “female Arab cast and crew” were to get abortions in Egypt, they’d be subject to prison time (unless two specialists rule that the birth would endanger the life of the mother).
“We are excited to continue our investment in Middle Eastern productions by adapting the highly acclaimed ‘Paranormal’ novels into a thrilling new series,” said Netflix VP of international originals, Kelly Luegenbiehl.
As far as Georgia is concerned, Netflix says that it will continue production on Georgia-filmed shows such as “Stranger Things” and “Ozark” for now, since the abortion law could be overturned through the court system.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/30YvGKL Tyler Durden
There are lots of theories about what factors drives FX markets: interest rate differentials; real interest rate differentials; central bank actions like QE; real effective exchange rates; ‘fair value’; the fiscal deficit; the current account deficit; capital flows; speculation; sentiment; and technicals. (Add your own if I missed one.) Of course, none of these factors alone ever tells you where a currency is actually going to trade on any given day, and the precise combination of the above that might shifts all the time from currency to currency (almost as if they aren’t actually explanatory at all…)
Think of the USD. Can you think of a currency less deserving of its current strength? True, rates are at 2.50%, but the market is now expecting two cuts this year, and our Fed watcher Philip Marey is talking about five cuts once the Fed gets moving. Think about the vast and rising US fiscal deficit and public-sector debt, and then about the sizeable trade and current-account deficits it always runs. Consider the trade war, which should–in the eyes of some–be choking off capital inflows that hold the USD up. Yet a strong USD, especially vs. EM, continues to be seen this year, as we had expected, and as we continue to expect. That’s true even if we broaden our range of indicators out to consider that US hegemony and USD reserve status perhaps aren’t what they used to be, with ever-more speculation that the day of the Dollar is over.
Yeah, right! While the US’ relative economic, financial, and military strength is obviously less than it once was, the power it still wields through being a vast final demand market for most of the world’s exporters, and through the fundamental financial architecture of the US Dollar system, is enormous. Three news items in the last 24 hours, alongside this year’s trend to date, underline that bullish USD view.
First, we have the US showing Europe who is boss vis-à-vis Iran. Recall that several European states had set up a Special Purpose Vehicle called INSTEX specifically to continue trading with Iran, which is under biting US sanctions, without using either USD or the US SWIFT network. In short, from Washington’s perspective parts of the EU are aiming to deliberately evade US sanctions because they feel it’s more important to sell things to Iran, and buy its oil, than to listen to warnings from the country that provides their main security that Tehran is still trying to build a nuclear weapon that would threaten everyone. So what has the US response been? Predictably, crushing: according to Bloomberg, the US is warning Europe that anyone and everyone involved in using or running INSTEX could be barred from the US financial system if it goes into full operation. Doesn’t that sound like Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi? Only in this case it’s “No Dollars for you!”
Second, we have the story in the South China Morning Post that even a former PBOC advisor Yu Yongding was refused permission to transfer USD20,000 from his own personal account abroad, being told by the teller that he was “too old”. (He’s 65, which one would think is still time enough to spend that much cash.) Again, that sounds like a Dollar Nazi: “No Dollars for you!” Of course, on paper everyone in China can withdraw USD50,000 a year. In reality, nobody can, which sits a little oddly with a purported global reserve currency; indeed, that’s one of the reasons why CNY still actually isn’t one and won’t be one for a very, very long time yet. Why is access to USD being so restrained when China is winning this trade war so comprehensively? Because the underlying reality is that without capital controls, CNY and the financial system would collapse. Furthermore, as I have been repeating for years, the vast expansion in CNY debt is not being matched by an increase in USD, meaning ever fewer people would need to shift just a portion of their savings into USD for the “3 trillion” in FX reserves China somehow magically always has to just disappear. Plus, of course, the trade war makes matters exponentially worse; as I also keep repeating, if China can’t earn USD from the US, this whole paradigm collapses.
Which brings us to our third news item: the same Yu Yongding above speaking at a state think tank is reported as saying on USD/CNY “There’s no big difference between 6.9, 7.1, 7.2…we’ve just been scaring ourselves,” and that there won’t be a problem if CNY goes past 7. Of course, he’s right. There are no combination of fundamentals that say 6.99 is fine and 7.01 is disaster. Yet a much weaker CNY looms eventually when one looks at one of the key factors that all the FX analysis I started with generally ignores: the politics of the fact that this remains a USD world, and we just live in it. If you don’t behave, it is still a case of “No Dollars for you!”
Yes, eventually that aggressive US stance could see the Dollar pushed aside. But the spectrum of power that any replacement would need to provide, and the rapidity with which everyone would have to make the move to generate a network effect, tells me it’s not going to be anything to trade on just yet. Even more so when we see: global manufacturing PMIs stumbling; China slowing; most Asian exports slumping; German unemployment suddenly leaping; Italy about to face a huge fine for widening its budget deficit, bringing the risk of a new Euro crisis; Boris Johnson in court for allegedly lying over Brexit (a precedent that should make all politicians, and not a few journalists, very, very nervous); and the market talking about four rate cuts in Australia (catching up with my own thinking), even if AUD isn’t following for some reason.
When the whole house is falling down, you go to the safe room: and that’s still the US (and CHF and JPY) even if the US is the once shaking the house’s foundations.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Z0Ctlh Tyler Durden
