Month: December 2019

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker led at the box office again last week, but while it has helped catalyze a great 2019 for Disney, pretty much everyone else in the movie industry has sputtered and struggled.

The new “Star Wars” film brought in $72 million this weekend, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, easily beating out Sony Corp.’s “Little Women” and “Spies in Disguise,” from Disney’s Fox studio.

But the film’s gross take, which was expected to be as much as $100 million, was down 59% from last week.

But this shouldn’t be much of a surprise: the industry has fallen apart in 2019, with U.S. ticket sales declining 4.6.% from the year prior. 2020 is expected to also be a “challenge”. 

Another film that opened this past weekend, “Little Women”, was expected to gross $18 million but only brought in $16.5 million. The animated “Spies in Disguise” raked in $13.2 million after projections of $11 million. “Uncut Gems”, starring Adam Sandler, expanded to more theaters and brought in $9.6 million, in the middle of its forecasted $8.5 million to $10 million range. 

Recall, just days ago, we reported on movie theater stocks plunging after continued weak ticket sales for Star Wars were announced for the weekend of December 20 to December 22. AMC Entertainment Holdings, Cinemark Holdings Inc., and Cineworld Group Plc all fell in response.

As we noted then, theater stocks have exhibited declines throughout most of the year. 

The movie generated $176 million last weekend weekend, making it the third-largest December debut ever – but it still tracked below estimates of $183 million.

“Hollywood was banking on a strong showing to boost receipts,” Geetha Ranganathan, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote.

“The reception, far below predecessors, may have been partly due to mixed critical reviews.”

North America’s movie theater industry remains in limbo since the emergence of streaming services. A consolidation wave among movie theaters continues despite Hollywood’s softer domestic performance in 2019. Operators have been hunting for additional growth channels, including expansion in Asia.

U.K.-based Cineworld is expected to become North America’s largest movie theater operator as it acquires Canada’s Cineplex in a $1.86 billion deal. 

Netflix has undoubtedly disrupted the industry by releasing its content on television screens and mobile devices instead of at the box office.  Netflix released 371 new movies and TV shows in 2019, over 50 percent more than they did last year, according to data compiled by Variety Insight. 

The movie theater consolidation wave began in 2012 when China’s Dalian Wanda Group purchased AMC Entertainment. 

Authored by Daniel Kolitz via TheNation.com,

The Wizard of OxyContin – where is he now? That nickname, revealed in leaked documents, belonged to an employee of Abbott Laboratories, which partnered with Purdue Pharmaceuticals to sell the drug. Starting in the late 1990s, he and his colleagues canvassed clinics around the country, hard-selling doctors on their flagship product. Purdue wooed doctors taught to distrust pain medications with steaks, vacations, and a stunning range of swag: Oxy-branded clocks, pens, beach hats, even swing music compilations. They were told that, unlike other opioids, OxyContin was addiction-proof; its time-release coating assured a steady, measured dose and would thwart attempts at abuse.

Unmentioned by those reps – but known by their bosses from day one – was the ease with which this coating could be removed. As doctors began prescribing the drug in ever-larger numbers and Oxy’s sales soared into the billions, this glitch would devastate families, ravage towns, and before long spark the worst drug crisis in US history.

Purdue eventually gestured toward fixing this problem, after 14 years of lucrative dithering. In 2010, a few years before its patent was set to expire, the company prolonged it with a new formula. This revamped Oxy was harder to abuse, and while its effectiveness has been debated, rates of prescription drug abuse have declined, aided by “pill mill” raids and stricter prescribing guidelines. But the wreckage that Oxy left behind is still being felt: In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses, the highest number on record. That same year, fentanyl became a household name, surfacing in local news segments, policy-website explainers, and thousands of toxicology reports. When the original Oxy vanished from the streets, many of the people addicted to it turned to heroin—and now it emerged that much of the heroin available in the United States (along with fast-rising quantities of cocaine) was laced with fentanyl. The advantage, for dealers, was price: Fentanyl costs less than heroin and is easier to acquire. It also happens to be 50 times more potent.

Often lost in the early news reports was the fact that fentanyl alone wasn’t killing people; many different kinds of fentanyl were. Since its invention in 1959 by the Belgian chemist and doctor Paul Janssen, fentanyl has seen more than 1,400 analogues: twists on the original formula whose origins and effects vary widely. Carfentanil, for instance—100 times stronger than fentanyl—was until 2018 FDA-approved for use as an elephant tranquilizer. It is here that the opioid crisis intersects with (and amplifies) a newer scourge: NPS, or new psychoactive substances, molecularly tweaked stand-ins for traditional street drugs. The best-known of these is probably K2, or Spice, the ostensible marijuana substitute whose high bears little resemblance to the real thing and whose side effects include blood-clotting, kidney failure, and instant death. But there are hundreds more, and likely thousands in development. Mini-pandemics have erupted across the country, as when, in the course of a single week last year, over 100 people in New Haven overdosed on what was later determined to be AB-FUBINACA, yet another synthetic cannabinoid.

Ben Westhoff, in Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, charts this progression in harrowing detail. We are now dealing, he writes, with “the harshest drug challenge in our history.” His book is one of the first to address what the Centers for Disease Control has called the “third wave” of the opioid crisis: first OxyContin, then heroin, and now fentanyl and its analogues. Earlier accounts of this crisis – Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic or Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America – had in Purdue Pharma the benefit, structural and dramatic, of a villain. More or less everyone can agree that pharmaceutical companies should refrain from wantonly pursuing profit at the expense of public health. Dopesick is rarely a pleasant read, but Macy’s account of Purdue’s first major court battle – which culminated in criminal convictions for three executives and $600 million in fines—provided at least some measure of catharsis.

Westhoff, reporting from the flayed, despairing center of this crisis, can’t offer any comparable relief. Purdue Pharma is now dead, and responsibility has devolved, in this third wave, to thousands of loosely affiliated actors: Dark Web distributors, small-time dealers, chemists whose skills and moral scruples vary widely. Like the cryptocurrencies that mask countless NPS transactions, these networks are decentralized: Members taken down are just as quickly replaced. But there is consolation in clarity, and the achievement of Westhoff’s book is to press this sprawling cast and the forces that gave rise to it into something like a coherent narrative, forming legible patterns out of widespread chaos.

Glassine pouches of confirmed fentanyl are displayed at the Drug Enforcement Administration Northeast Regional Laboratory in New York, 2019. (AFP via Getty / Photo by Don Emmert)

As Westhoff points out, many of the most dangerous NPS were developed under completely legal circumstances, by tenured professors at prestigious universities. These experimental compounds—as well as the steps taken to produce them—were written up in small, peer-reviewed science journals and more or less forgotten, until the underworld began to repurpose these articles as recipes for recreational drugs. David Nichols, the utopian chemist who once dreamed of a drug that would end all war, now finds himself faced with the grief of parents like Eric Brown, whose son Montana overdosed on 251-NBOMe, which was brought into the mainstream through his research.

If Fentanyl, Inc. does have a primary antagonist, it’s the Chinese government. Virtually all of the fentanyls that have flooded the United States in recent years have been manufactured in China, where many NPS are legal, an arrangement that allows legitimate businesses to churn them out on a scale inconceivable to illicit drug makers in North America. This process has been heavily underwritten, as Westhoff demonstrates, by “lucrative tax incentives, subsidies, and direct financial support” from the Chinese government, as part of its breakneck bid to expand the country’s biotechnology sector.

The extent to which Chinese officials are aware of what they’re funding is unclear – some of these companies produce hundreds of products, churning out fentanyls alongside collagen, pesticides, and erectile-dysfunction meds – but the blind eye they’ve turned toward the export of these chemicals has yielded a number of complaints from the United States. The companies, meanwhile, know exactly what they’re doing: Fentanyls and NPS that are legal in China but banned in the US are often shipped in disguise, packaged as dog food or high-gluten wheat flour bread. In addition to an urgent public health crisis, this is an issue of international trade, which means that President Donald Trump seems authentically to care about it. In April, under pressure from his administration, China instituted a blanket ban on the production of all fentanyl variants. The majority of Westhoff’s reporting was conducted before this announcement was made, but, as he argues and as recent developments have borne out, it is “far from clear” if these new regulations have had any impact.

To illuminate this deadly, improbable cycle—in which drugs developed at American universities are mass-produced in Chinese factories and then sold to North American dealers, occasionally winding up, as party drugs, on the very same campuses whose endowments funded their creation—Westhoff ranges widely, logging time with each link in the chain of production. Eventually, in the book’s intrepid centerpiece, he manages to infiltrate two Chinese chemical manufacturers. At one of them, undercover as a cautious buyer, he encounters a roomful of cheerful twentysomethings blithely Skyping with potential customers to organize deals. It’s an uncanny moment: With fentanyl components swapped for cheap razors or custom-made mattresses, this could be any number of US start-ups, right down to the strained cheer and punishing work hours (though with the further difference that all of these people live together, in a motel adjacent to their office). But the book’s most revealing encounter takes place back home, when Westhoff, still posing as a buyer, is asked via Skype by one of these young sales reps why exactly people buy a chemical called NPP. Westhoff explains that it’s used to make fentanyl.

“I know Fentanyl,” she continued, “but why [do] people use it?”

“It’s highly addictive,” I said.

“Yes, I know it is a bad ,” the saleswoman admitted, “but I still sell it, so sometimes I feel guilt. NPP is not forbidden in China, so we can sell. I sell it, because I want to earn money, earn a living.”

Westhoff lets this exchange stand on its own, but a whole world throbs beneath it. Like many Chinese companies, the one this woman works for—called Yuancheng—began exporting its products to the United States only after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. That development cost millions of Americans their factory jobs and helped speed along the opioid crisis, as thousands of newly unemployed workers started selling their surplus Oxy to make the rent or maintain their own supply. Asked to justify themselves, they might have said something similar. Neither party—the laid-off factory worker selling Oxy out of his foreclosed home; the Yuancheng saleswoman working six-day weeks to keep the room she shares with six coworkers—can really be blamed. That the latter has progressed to killing the former suggests a failure, or an apotheosis, of two miserably enmeshed systems.

Stemming the flow of drugs from China is important, as is working, somehow, to curb the spread of NPS. But this problem isn’t disappearing soon, and there are people who urgently need our help. The relative whiteness of those affected by the opioid crisis has softened the old approach—jail the dealers, jail the addicts, remind young children that drugs are bad—but as Westhoff demonstrates, we have a long way to go. If we are to treat opioid-use disorder as a disease like any other, then here-and-now treatment must be our first priority, and Fentanyl, Inc. closes with a tour of some organizations taking that imperative seriously. Most of them are located outside the United States, a country whose fervent commitment to prolonged and needless suffering largely precludes the safe-injection sites and drug-testing operations that have saved countless lives in Europe. There have been some signs of progress—Westhoff highlights Grand Forks, North Dakota, a small conservative city that has liberalized access to Narcan, clean needles, and medication-assisted treatment—but harm reduction has yet to take hold as a national strategy. Which is unfortunate, because no other strategy works.

A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a scientist responsible for creating the world’s first genetically modified children to a three-year stretch in prison after his experiments elicited a massive backlash over what some described as a blatant abuse of bioethics, according to reports in the Chinese press that were picked up by WSJ.

The court accused Dr. He Jiankui of forging documents to conceal what he was doing from both the patients he recruited for the trial and the doctors who performed the work alongside him. Both Dr. He and two alleged “accomplices” pleaded guilty, according to the court.

“In order to pursue fame and profit, they deliberately violated the relevant national regulations, and crossed the bottom lines of scientific and medical ethics,” the court said.

Dr. He (the son of rice farmers) graduated with a degree in physics in China before getting a doctorate from Rice University in the US. Eventually, he switched to studying biology, which led to his interest in gene-editing technology.

Dr. He

People who knew the doctor said he wanted to make history, and also ameliorate what he saw as an injustice against HIV-positive people in China, who are barred from receiving fertility treatments. It’s believed that the doctor expected a reward from Beijing for helping China reach its goal of becoming a leader in genetic science.

Instead, Dr. He stunned the global scientific community last year when he revealed that he had successfully edited the genes of two twin babies from HIV+ parents. Dr. He said he had engineered the twin girls using a gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9 to be resistant to HIV. The girls were born of a healthy mother and an HIV+ father, which can sometimes lead to the virus being passed down to the children.

He also admitted to creating a third genetically modified baby. Chinese authorities said they will monitor all three children into adulthood.

Unfortunately for Dr. He, the accolades he had anticipated never materialized.

Instead, his revelation elicited condemnation from bioethicists and other doctors in China, including the inventors of the gene-editing technology he used. Dr. He was soon fired from his post at Southern University of Science and Technology (based in the southern city of Shenzhen).

And on Monday, he was convicted by a court in Shenzhen of illegally practicing medicine.

Bioethics contend that editing the genes of embryos is a much more sensitive area because those children will eventually grow up and risk passing on the edited genes to the next generation, creating room for unintended consequences to surface decades down the road.

In the US, gene-editing technology has mostly been applied to terminally ill patients who likely won’t pass on the changes to the next generation.

Authored by Emma Fiala via TheMindUnleashed.com,

According to a 36-count grand jury indictment, a Seattle company used a hidden drain to dump a highly-corrosive chemical solution directly into the sewer system.

The King County sewer system eventually reaches the Duwamish Waterway and the Puget Sound.

After “a sensitive sewer flow meter tipped them off to something strange,” agents sent a robot into the sewer to investigate, the Seattle Times reports.

Inside the sewer, the robot’s camera recorded a white stain of unknown origin and, according to a federal indictment handed down earlier this month, federal agents executed a search warrant after real-time monitoring equipment they installed indicated an unusual spike in the water’s pH.

During the search, a portable pump covered in a high-pH liquid and a hidden drain that had never been disclosed were both discovered.

It turns out, both the company’s owner and the manager of the plant, who happen to be cousins, have been lying to regulators since at least 2009, according to the indictment. The scheme was discovered in 2018.

The Seattle Barrel and Cooperage Company collects used 55-gallon industrial drums and resells them after undergoing a reconditioning process that involves washing them in a tank full of highly-corrosive chemical solution. The family-owned company is legally obligated to dispose of the caustic solution properly.

Louie Sanft and John Sanft have both charged with criminal conspiracy as well as 29 counts of violating the Clean Water Act—one for each of the 29 times that investigators documented the waste being discharged into the sewer system in 2018 and 2019—and are expected to appear in court next month.

The century-old company is laying the blame on a former employee whose employment was terminated earlier this year, according to Seattle Barrel’s lawyer, Harold Malkin. That employee hasn’t been named or charged.

Louie Sanft’s lawyer, Angelo Calfo, blames the former employee as well and says that the Justice Department and the EPA both made a “serious error” in charging his client.

Calfo explained:

“Louie had no motive to do this. Company practice and policy was to have the tank water boiled down and evaporated. Any sludge from the tank would be transported for proper disposal. This case is about a former employee who cut corners for his own gain.”

The county began monitoring Seattle Barrel’s activities via “cover monitoring” after a King County Industrial Waste employee observed the plant manager dump an oily substance directly into a sewer. The company was fined $55,250 in 2013 after the county discovered violations of its wastewater discharge permit. After various improvements, the company claimed to be a “zero discharge” facility but, according to the indictment, those improvements didn’t involve the caustic solution that the company has been dumping directly into the sewer system.

Seattle Barrel was also required to pay $30,000 in fines after the Washington Department of Ecology discovered the company was “failing to identify caustic wastewater as a hazardous waste, missing labels on hazardous waste containers and lacking measures to prevent the escape of hazardous liquids.”

U.S. Attorney Brian Moran said:

“At a time when we are searching for strategies to protect Puget Sound and improve water quality for fish and wildlife, we need companies to do their share—not scheme for ways to pollute in private.”

There was a period of about two months when some of the more confused, Fed sycophantic elements, would parrot everything Powell would say regarding the recently launched $60 billion in monthly purchases of T-Bills, and which according to this rather vocal, if always wrong, subsegment of financial experts, did not constitute QE. Perhaps one can’t really blame them: after all, unable to think for themselves, they merely repeated what Powell said, namely that  “growth of our balance sheet for reserve management purposes should in no way be confused with the large-scale asset purchase programs that we deployed after the financial crisis. Neither the recent technical issues nor the purchases of Treasury bills we are contemplating to resolve them should materially affect the stance of monetary policy. In no sense, is this QE.“

As it turned out, it was QE from the perspective of the market, which saw the Fed boosting its balance sheet by $60BN per month, and together with another $20BN or so in TSY and MBS maturity reinvestments, as well as tens of billions in overnight and term repos, and soared roughly around the time the Fed announced “not QE.”

And so, as the Fed’s balance sheet exploded by over $400 billion in under four months, a rate of balance sheet expansion that surpassed QE1, QE2 and Qe3…

… stocks blasted off higher roughly at the same time as the Fed’s QE returned, and are now up every single week since the start of the Fed’s QE4 announcement when the Fed’s balance sheet rose, and are down just one week since then: the week when the Fed’s balance sheet shrank.

The result of this unprecedented correlation between the market’s response to the Fed’s actions – and the Fed’s growing balance sheet – has meant that it gradually became impossible to deny that what the Fed is doing is no longer QE. It started with Bank of America in mid-November (as described in “One Bank Finally Admits The Fed’s “NOT QE” Is Indeed QE… And Could Lead To Financial Collapse“), and then after several other banks also joined in, and even Fed fanboy David Zervos admitted on CNBC that the Fed is indeed doing QE, the tipping point finally arrived, and it was no longer blasphemy (or tinfoil hat conspiracy theory) to call out the naked emperor, and overnight none other than Deutsche Bank joined the “truther” chorus, when in a report by the bank’s chief economist Torsten Slok, he writes what we pointed out several weeks back, namely that “since QE4 started in October, a 1% increase in the Fed balance sheet has been associated with a 1% increase in the S&P500, see chart below.” Not that DB has absolutely no qualms about calling what the Fed is doing QE4 for the simple reason that… it is QE4.

The chart in question, which is effectively the same as the one we created above, shows the weekly change in the Fed’s balance sheet and the S&P500 as a scatterplot, and concludes that all it takes to push the S&P higher by 1% is to grow the Fed’s balance sheet by 1%.

And just to underscore this point, the strategist points out that such a finding is “consistent with this new working paper, which finds that QE boosts stock markets even when controlling for improving macro fundamentals.” Which, of course, is hardly rocket science – after all when you inject hundreds of billions into the market in months, and this money can’t enter the economy, it will enter the market. The result: the S&P trading at an all time high in a year in which corporate profits actually decreased and the entire rise in the stock market was due to multiple expansion.

In short: the Kool Aid is flowing, the party is in full force and everyone has to dance, because the Fed will continue to perform QE4 at least until Q2 2020. Which reminds us of what we wrote last week, namely that another big bank, Morgan Stanley, has already seen through the current meltup phase, and predicts the “Melt-Up Lasting Until April, After Which Markets Will “Confront World With No Fed Support“.”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

American journalist H.L. Mencken once observed, “Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” Despite an unending respect for Mencken, this is an occasion in which I found him mistaken, after I violated the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not testify for Republicans.”

Worse yet, I am a recidivist sinner, after testifying as a constitutional expert in both the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings. Like all mortal sins, the violation of the Eleventh Commandment comes with not just eternal but immediate damnation. What is most striking about this commandment is that it does not matter if your testimony is made in good faith. For example, under the Ninth Commandment, you are only guilty if you give false evidence against your neighbor. Under the Eleventh Commandment, it does not matter if your testimony is true or false. A law-fearing academic must not give any testimony for Republicans.

In my recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding President Trump’s impeachment, I opposed the position of my fellow witnesses that the definition of actual crimes is immaterial to their use as the basis for impeachment – and I specifically opposed impeachment articles based on bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations or obstruction of justice. The committee ultimately rejected those articles and adopted the only two articles I felt could be legitimately advanced: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress. Chairman Jerrold Nadler even ended the hearing by quoting my position on abuse of power. Our only disagreement was that I opposed impeachment on this record as incomplete and insufficient for submission to the Senate.

None of that matters under the Eleventh Commandment, however. It is the act of testifying for Republicans that is a sin against the legal academy. Indeed, what followed was a series of false stories attacking not my testimony but me, personally. The falsity of these stories is a warning to any academic who considers straying from the Democratic path.

Turley flipped his testimony from the Clinton impeachment. 

One of the most bizarre false stories was that I testified differently on my views of impeachment during the Clinton and Trump impeachments. Given the 21-year gap, it might not be strange for views to change. However, my views in the two cases were the same.

In both hearings, I said a president could be impeached for noncriminal conduct, including abuse of public office. Yet stories on CNN and other outlets objected that, in the Clinton case, I warned Congress, “If you decide that certain acts do not rise to impeachable offenses, you will expand the space for executive conduct.” Somehow this was portrayed as a “flip-flop” since I was arguing against impeachment in the Trump hearings on this record. It doesn’t matter that the Judiciary Committee did precisely what I suggested in dropping the four criminal theories for the articles or going forward with the two I said would be legitimate. I was not arguing against impeaching on the two articles adopted — only that a completed record was absent.

More importantly, the statement in the Clinton case referred to perjury. Democrats argued back then that a president could commit perjury on some subjects, such as sexual relations, and not face impeachment; they argued that an impeachment crime must be tied to the office, not to personal interests. That was ridiculous and would allow a president to kill a lover but not face impeachment. Indeed, the Democratic position would allow a presidential Harvey Weinstein to abuse countless interns and then pressure them to lie to an independent counsel.

Turley thought Justice Sotomayor wasn’t smart enough. 

Perhaps the most vile false story can be traced to a tweet sent out by a University of Baltimore law professor asking, “Does anybody else remember @JonathanTurley appearing on MSNBC to explain that Sonia Sotomayor didn’t have the intellect to serve on the Supreme Court?” I certainly didn’t remember that — because I never said anything like that. No matter: Soon, from MSNBC to liberal websites, the story was all the rage, with titles such as “Jonathan Turley thought Sonia Sotomayor wasn’t smart enough to be on the Supreme Court.”

When then-Judge Sotomayor was nominated, I was asked as a legal commentator to review her opinions and give my view of what that body of work suggested about her potential on the Supreme Court. The issue at the time was whether President Obama was appointing an intellectual counterweight to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. I noted that her opinions were narrow and offered few insights into her potential as an intellectual force on the court. My comments were directed to her opinions, not her intellect. And I was not alone in this conclusion: Adam Liptak in The New York Times noted that her opinions were “narrow” and “reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language.”

In the interview cited by the Baltimore professor, I gave my view of 30 of Sotomayor’s opinions, which did not contain anything particularly deep or profound in judging her possible impact on the court. However, I immediately stated that this is not unique and that other justices have had similarly short, unremarkable appellate opinions yet proved to be profound on the Supreme Court. I expressly compared Sotomayor to Justice John Paul Stevens, whom I have long praised; I also said that Sotomayor could prove to be a truly great justice but that her opinions did not offer any glimpse into how she might emerge in such a role.

In my analysis of Justice Sotomayor’s nomination, I returned to these points and specifically objected to those who said her narrow decisions were evidence of a lack of intellectual depth. I wrote, “This is demonstrably absurd. These opinions are little different from those of [Justices] Alito, Souter, or the limited writings of [Justice] Thomas. Clearly, Sotomayor is quite intelligent. This record is little different from records of Republican nominees who enthralled these same critics.” And I repeatedly stressed that she could prove to be a great nominee in finding voice and depth in her opinions on the court.

Some articles objected that, in an “unprompted” comment, I raised Sotomayor’s gender and race. I did so to praise the selection of the first Latina to the court, a nomination that I said was “rightfully” a point of pride. Moreover, the vast majority of news stories also referenced that historic aspect of her nomination. However, that was separate from the analysis of her opinions and the question of her intellectual legacy. What also was omitted is that, before Sotomayor’s nomination, I wrote a column on intellectual leaders on the courts and pushed for the nomination of Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, a liberal powerhouse.

None of that matters, however, because heresy demands condemnation — whether or not it is based in reality. After all, this is all meant to get people not to seriously consider the flaws in the impeachment, including the proposed articles that ultimately were dropped. So, for any academic tempted to testify for Republicans in an impeachment proceeding, I can only caution that Romans 12:19 may say that “vengeance is mine … sayeth the Lord” – but judgment will be more immediate for anyone who strays from the chosen professorial path.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law for George Washington University and served as the last lead counsel during a Senate impeachment trial. He testified as a witness expert in the House Judiciary Committee hearing during the impeachment inquiry of President Trump.

China’s agriculture ministry said Monday that it had approved two new genetically modified crops for import from the U.S., reported Reuters. 

The announcement comes ahead of a potential Phase 1 trade deal signing between Beijing and Washington next month. The U.S. has long demanded that China imports more genetically modified crops. 

According to Reuters, the new crops approved for import were Corteva AgriScience’s DAS-81419-2 soybean and 55-1 papaya, developed by the USDA and Hawaii University.

“This further expands channels for imports of U.S. agricultural products, and helps pave the way for buying more U.S. soybeans,” said Li Qiang, chief analyst with Shanghai J.C. Intelligence Co. Ltd.

Reuters also said China renewed import licenses for ten other genetically modified crops, including BASF developed T25 corn, A5547-127 soybean, T45 canola, Oxy-235 canola, and Ms8Rf3 canola.

Bayer-owned Monsanto Far East Ltd’s MON89788 soybean, 15985 cotton, and H7-1 beet were also reapproved for import, along with DuPont subsidiary Pioneer’s 305423 soybean and 305423×GTS40-3-2 soybean.

With the signing of the Phase 1 trade deal expected next month, China’s Customs Administration reported last week that inbound agriculture shipments from the U.S. more than doubled to 2.6 million tons, the highest since March 2018, and up from about 1.1 million tons in October.

While China is unlikely to order less soybean from either Brazil or Argentina any time soon as the two nations have emerged as the two key supply chain alternatives to the U.S., the continued push to reopen the U.S. market to Chinese importers comes as China food inflation is soaring. 

Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

If you thought you can’t top the stupidity we experienced in 2019, brace yourself for 2020 because it’s going to be a pronoun-fueled weather cult pinko freakshow. But it won’t be all amusing antics – the left hates us and its ugly mask is coming off, revealing the even uglier fascist visage lurking beneath. If you listen to them, and if you aren’t an insufferable goo goo wimp who refuses to hear them, you will know that they intend to silence you, even imprison you, and deprive you of the ability to participate in your own governance. So, if you want to live as a free man or woman – if they have their way, they’ll destroy you for recognizing that unalterable binary – best be ready. 

Be motivated to engage in the cultural melee. 

Vote. 

And buy guns and ammo. As my favorite literary creation famously says, no one has ever regretted being too well armed.

With that in mind, here are my predictions for 2020:

10. Trump Will Be Impeached…Yawn: Poor, flailing Nancy Pelosi will eventually transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, thereby actually impeaching the President. Now, whether Pelosi’s current antics constitute “impeachment” or not is irrelevant, except denying it due to her gamesmanship is fun because it owns the libs. No one cares, and to the limited extent we normal people do, this alleged impeachment is a badge of honor for the President. Her fringe-driven delay tactics make the Dems look dumber, and eventually she will send it to the Senate where Cocaine Mitch will kill it. Sure, some of the useless GOP caucus will make noises about how this clusterfark must be taken seriously because principles and honor and stuff. Saps. They just better take seriously that we in the base will electorally eviscerate them if they vote to convict. Maybe Mitt the Gimp will vote for it because he’s weak and stupid. Maybe Senator Iglookowski (RINO-AK) will too. But in the end, Trump will triumph and yet again humiliate his opponents.

9. The Economy Will Stay Strong, Disappointing Democrats: The party of the workin’ man is already in mourning because the Trump economy has finally brought some prosperity back to the workin’ man instead of concentrating wealth among the globalist liberal gentry that Obama served. The media will cheerlead for a recession; the Democrats will try to ignore the new Roaring 20s, but America’s success will remain a nightmare for liberals during 2020.

8. Virginia Will Declare War on Its Citizens: The liberals recently elected as moderates in the Old Dominion will reveal their true colors as they attempt to crush dissent wherever voters were stupid enough to elect them. The Virginia left will not back down – it will attempt to criminalize vast numbers of citizens and bend them to its will using violence and legal terrorism if need be. This will provoke a counterreaction that will make it clear to moderates that electing liberals means voting for conflict, not just center-left business as usual like with old school Democrats. Look for it to get ugly. They think they can break our will, and they will learn they can’t. This will energize conservatives across the country.

7. Replacing Justice Ginsburg: She’s had a good run but the opponent conservatives tend to most respect for being tough is playing a losing game against statistics. It is not to wish ill upon her to say that time is not on her side; in 2020, it is very, very likely Donald Trump will be replacing her. Count on the Murder Turtle not to buy into an interpretation of the Garland Rule that ties his hands – it’s confirmation time. The Democrats will go even nuttier than usual, but too bad. Just get ready for future Justice Amy Coney Barrett to have to explain that, yes, she likes beer, and no, she didn’t run a rape gang in elementary school.

6. Trans Fascism Backlash: Normal people are getting tired of being told they have to lie and say there are 631 sexes, and they are tired of militant jerks wanting boys hanging out in their girls’ locker room, and they are getting sick of boys winning girls’ sports championships. J.K. Rowling, who is otherwise a leftist doofus, recently survived social media cancelation for telling the truth that sex is real. The rest of us will be roused to action – people were trying to be polite, but now it’s all too stupid and obnoxious to tolerate. There is a big difference between being kind and not adding to the pain of people with real issues, and with being forced by drag bullies and their allies to publicly affirm what everyone knows is false. Look for more and more people, prominent and not prominent, to be told that they must agree that men can get pregnant and that women can have penises, and to answer, “No.”

5. Pardon This: We will see the President pardon the victims of Deep State vendettas designed to overturn the election of 2016. General Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort will all be cleared, probably right after the election. Which is good, because we will need the cells for…

4. Durham’s Indictments: The investigation into the soft coup is going to turn up wrongdoing that the entrenched leftist bureaucracy can’t shove under the rug anymore. John Durham telegraphed his righteous retribution when he publicly rejected IG Horowitz’s pathetic shrug over the Deep State’s shenanigans. We’re going to see some folks finally held to account. Not all of them – not Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, not that Looming Doofus Comey, but others. It’s an important first step in defeating the cancer on our government that is having these Democrat partisans in positions of power in the bureaucracy.

3. Foreign Policy Success: With the National Security Council under the properly low-key and sober guidance of Robert O’Brien (I know him – great guy and perfect for this job), America will continue to rebuild its strength, wind down open-ended military commitments, force allies to do their part, and avoid unnecessary conflicts. Iran will continue to destabilize, but we will not go to war – we will neuter the mullahs economically and let the Persian people deal with their oppressors. China has some strengths but many weaknesses – we will exploit those and build a trade relationship based on reciprocity instead of American submission. NATO countries will reluctantly fork over their dues, and our relationship with the UK will become even more special now that it is free of the EU’s yoke. Foreigners finally understand – America will use every element of its power to defend American interests, so behave. Also, we will get the Space Force going (long overdue) and move toward a 355-ship Navy (very long overdue). Finally, look for a promotion for America’s most effective diplomat (and future GOP presidential contender) Richard Grenell.

2. Democrats Will Lose the House: They took the House back promising to be pragmatic do-gooders who would work across party lines to do the people’s business blah blah blah blah blah. It was all garbage. The ones that weren’t actively defiling hotel room furniture via naked hair brushing grossness with underlings were obediently obeying Pelosi’s commands. “Impeach? Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am.” And what were they doing that was useful to their voters? Nothing – America’s biggest problem is not that Democrats have too little control.

1. Trump Will Get Reelected: There are a number of reasons, many recited above. But the most important is that God looks out for the United States. Oh, and the Dems will nominate Biden, who will choose Sitting Bolshevik as his VP (He’s gotta choose a girl and Willie Brown’s Ex is out for dissing him and he can’t choose Amy Tantrum Gal Klobuchar because he needs to nail down the Dem’s commie wing). A fake Indian and a fake competent leader – great combo. Once nominated, Gropey J will continue to commit gaffes, only his slobbering media buddies won’t be able to keep hiding them. Plus, there’s the Lil’ Crackpipe factor. Hoover Biden, the nominee’s Snortunate Son, will have another crack issue, or another paternity suit, or maybe both – which the garbage media will tell us is none of our business and is not important. But it is. In the end, Trump will improve on his 2016 Electoral College numbers and win the popular vote too, at which point the liberals will turn against the entire concept of voting.

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I also predict that my newest novel Collapse will continue to be an Amazon bestseller, and that there will be another action-packed, hilarious novel coming next year once I finish my traditional non-fiction book for Regnery that is also due out in 2020. Go ahead and use that gift card you got at Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa to get the other entries in the series, People’s Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. Remember, every time you read one of my books, the Never Trump weenies who called them “appalling” sob and rend their sissy bow ties.