Month: January 2020

Netflix has been crushing the film industry, as we noted in our piece out just hours ago highlighting the demise of the movie theater industry.

Now, the company may finally start getting its due as an official film studio, too, thanks to its memorable 2019, according to Bloomberg. It started the year by joining the Motion Picture Association of America and then went on to release memorable film hits like “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story”. 

The year also included Eddie Murphy’s “Dolemite Is My Name,” which helped lead to Netflix doubling or tripling the output of most conventional Hollywood studios. Netflix executives are also now saying that the company’s financial targets rely on how well its movies do. 

Scott Stuber, Netflix’s film chief said: “This fall was a nice culmination. I’m very proud of this slate. I can look you in the eye and say we’ve made as good movies this fall as anybody.”

Stuber joined Netflix after working in film for more than 20 years. He was asked to “build a movie studio from scratch” by Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, and that’s exactly what he did. 

Prior to 2019, the company’s slate of films, including names like “The Ridiculous 6”, was mostly forgettable. 

Its one critically acclaimed movie, “Beasts of No Nation”, from 2016, earned no nominations at the Academy Awards. Stuber said: “It was a company built on television — that was first and foremost.”

Now his past collaborators, including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and director Peter Berg are working with him at Netflix. 

At his direction, Netflix has turned into the largest film studio in Hollywood – and it plans on continuing to release 50 to 60 films a year. “Bird Box” and “Murder Mystery” were two other hits, amassing more than 70 million views in their first month on the service. “Six of the 10 most-watched new titles on the service in the U.S. in 2019 were original films,” Bloomberg notes. 

The studio has found a niche in films that Hollywood has abandoned, like adult dramas, romantic comedies and action movies without superheroes. And classic cinema buffs – like Martin Scorsese – have finally embraced Netflix. 

The last piece of the puzzle for Netflix is the Oscars. Last year, Netflix saw 15 nominations, including for best picture, best director, best actress and best screenplay. The Best Picture Oscar eluded the studio. 

But John Sloss, who produced “Green Book,” last year’s winner for best picture, admitted last year to Netflix’s Ted Sarandos that the hard part was over. This means in 2020, Netflix could be read for its first Best Picture Oscar. 

“You did it. You got over the hump,” Sloss told Sarandos.

Authored by Jared Dillian via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

You ever notice…

That some memories tend to be stronger than others?

What sort of things do you remember?

You remember events in your life that had a lot of feelings associated with them.

You remember the death of your pet like it was yesterday. All the nights spent sitting on the couch watching Wheel Of Fortune—it’s just a blur.

Researchers have studied this in rats. They found that rats remembered things better if they experienced a rush of adrenaline.

In those moments with strong memories, it feels like time slows down. Time doesn’t actually slow down—time is linear. But human beings experience time as flexible. Time also speeds up when things are boring.

I’m fond of saying that all of finance, or at least the interesting part, is about human behavior. I find the daily fluctuations of stocks and credit spreads less interesting the older I get. And I think finance is more depraved the older I get. But the human behavior part fascinates me.

Miller’s Planet

The fact that time stretches and compresses isn’t news to anyone who’s traded options.

In the world of options, time and volatility work in opposite directions. As time passes, options decay. As volatility increases, options increase in value. All stuff you learned in class.

But if you think about it, volatility increasing is another way of saying that there’s a lot of s— going on. Things are crazy. Options increase in value—which is really like saying that time is slowing down.

Which is exactly how we experience it. Of all my days trading on Wall Street, what are the times that I remember most? The financial crisis, naturally. There was a lot of adrenaline associated with that.

We all have strong memories of it. And while we experienced it, it seemed like time was slowing down—which was reflected in options prices. They were the highest in recorded history.

Finance is simply human behavior.

If I think back over the last 10 years, what do I remember?

• The European crisis

• The US debt downgrade

• The Ebola scare

• The yuan devaluation

• The vol-splosion

All the crazy times. Nobody remembers the stuff in between. Old-timers like me remember all the way back to 1997 and 1998, with the Asian Financial Crisis and LTCM and the Russian debt default. It’s the accidents that help us mark our time in the markets.

Perspective

We all perceive things differently. As I just demonstrated, we all perceive time differently.

We also might perceive color differently—we just don’t know. There is no way to know that the red I see is the red you see.

We all have different perspectives, especially when it comes to financial markets. I might find a stock attractive that you find unattractive. Happens all the time.

A lot of financial analysis is searching for some objective truth in the markets. This is what the value people try to do. They try to identify the correct value of a security and then buy it if it’s underpriced.

But there really is no objective truth in finance—just a set of ever-changing perspectives. Some examples:

Target is up over 90%, year to date:

Is Target’s business 90% better? Is it earning 90% more revenue? Of course not—more people find the stock attractive and fewer find it unattractive.

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers is up 48% in the last couple of months:

Again, is their business 50% better? No.

People have created several models to explain stock market behavior. Keynes’s beauty pageant is at the top of the list. I will always catch a beauty pageant if it’s on TV. The goal isn’t picking the most attractive contestant. It’s picking the contestant that the judges will find most attractive. It’s a great exercise.

But I don’t think that’s the right model.

I came up with my own model and gave it to the world on the Bloomberg Opinion page. You can read about it here. But I feel like it’s incomplete, too.

Sentiment also plays a role—big turning points are always at sentiment extremes.

I’m not sure what the answer is—or if there even is an answer. I think about it all the time.  People smarter than me spend even more time thinking about it.

Maybe there is no Grand Unified Theory—maybe there are regimes in the financial markets, and sometimes some things work and sometimes other things work.

Maybe the rules change all the time and there is nothing we can do about it.

I am not even sure buy-and-hold and dollar-cost averaging will work going forward.

And that’s what you learn when you have 20 years of experience—that you actually know nothing.

That said, one thing I do know is that the adrenaline rush reckless traders get throwing money at “hot stocks” is not something to aspire to. It’s much better to even out your odds with a diversified, balanced portfolio and a long-term view.

*  *  *

Jared Dillian is an investment strategist at Mauldin Economics and the editor of The 10 th  Man, a free contrarian investment newsletter. From 2001 to 2008, Jared worked at Lehman Brothers—first as an index arbitrage trader and then as head of the ETF trading desk. During this time, he routinely traded over $1 billion a day in volume.

Today in “why Democrats simply should never be allowed to allocate government capital” news, it it being reported that former inmates at Riker’s Island are now using their government-issued debit cards to buy booze and Juul pods. 

The news comes just days after we reported that inmates were receiving training on how to become Starbucks baristas for “job security” purposes once they are released. 

The debit cards were part of a “soft on crime city initiative” by beta male bleeding heart Mayor Bill de Blasio that provided ex-inmates with two $25 gift cards, according to the NY Post.

JR, an employee at a liquor store near Riker’s Island, has said that her store was refusing to sell to the cardholders. 

The liquor store employee said: “We’ve had more people coming in with the visa things. No, we don’t take that, no gift cards, none of that. People come in here always trying to find a way to pay without really paying.”

City Sliquors, another liquor store along the Riker’s Island bus route, said ex-inmates “didn’t seem to understand why their payment wasn’t accepted”. 

The store’s owner commented: “Usually we don’t accept it because we don’t know where it came from with no chip, it may bounce.”

And even while booze has been difficult to get, tobacco and Juul pods have been easier for the ex-inmates to ascertain. 

Ahmed, a worker at the Plaza Deli Grocery, said: “Yet to see one person use it to buy food.” 

Seeing the rampant success of this program, the city is also planning on setting up ex-inmates with Metrocards and burner phones upon their release. The move comes as a result of de Blasio’s new bail reform law, which is supposed to incentivize inmates to show up for their court appearances. Other incentives being offered – we swear we are not making this up – are winter coats, Steve Madden shoes and Mets tickets.

The programs are being run by city-funded non-profits and will cost about $500,000.

One law enforcement source concluded: “It’s a sad state of affairs when the city bends over backward to reward criminals instead of protecting the victims of their crimes. What’s next? Free limo service back home?”

 

Authored by Walter Williams, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Colleges have been around for centuries. College students have also been around for centuries. Yet, college administrators assume that today’s students have needs that were unknown to their predecessors. Those needs include diversity and equity personnel, with massive budgets to accommodate.

According to Minding the Campus, Penn State University’s Office of Vice Provost for Educational Equity employs 66 staff members. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of 93 full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts and coordinators. Amherst College, with a student body of 1,800 students employs 19 diversity people. Top college diversity bureaucrats earn salaries six figures, in some cases approaching $500,000 per year. In the case of the University of Michigan, a quarter (26) of their diversity officers earn annual salaries of more than $100,000. If you add generous fringe benefits and other expenses, you could easily be talking about $13 million a year in diversity costs. The Economist reports that University of California, Berkeley, has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

Diversity officials are a growing part of a college bureaucracy structure that outnumbers faculty by 2 to 2.5 depending on the college. According to “The Campus Diversity Swarm,” an article from Mark Pulliam, a contributing editor at Law and Liberty, which appeared in the City Journal (10/10/2018), diversity people assist in the cultivation of imaginary grievances of an ever-growing number of “oppressed” groups. Pulliam writes:

“The mission of campus diversity officers is self-perpetuating. Affirmative action (i.e., racial and ethnic preferences in admissions) leads to grievance studies. Increased recognition of LGBTQ rights requires ever-greater accommodation by the rest of the student body. Protecting ‘vulnerable’ groups from ‘hate speech’ and ‘microaggressions’ requires speech codes and bias-response teams (staffed by diversocrats). Complaints must be investigated and adjudicated (by diversocrats). Fighting ‘toxic masculinity’ and combating an imaginary epidemic of campus sexual assault necessitate consent protocols, training, and hearing procedures — more work for an always-growing diversocrat cadre. Each newly recognized problem leads to a call for more programs and staffing.”

Campus diversity people have developed their own professional organization — the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. They hold annual conferences — the last one in Philadelphia. The NADOHE has developed standards for professional practice and a political agenda, plus a Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

One wonders just how far spineless college administrators will go when it comes to caving in to the demands of campus snowflakes who have been taught that they must be protected against words, events and deeds that do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded beliefs built on sheer delusion. Generosity demands that we forgive these precious snowflakes and hope that they eventually grow up. The real problem is with people assumed to be grown-ups — college professors and administrators — who serve their self-interest by tolerating and giving aid and comfort to our aberrant youth. Unless the cycle of promoting and nursing imaginary grievances is ended, diversity bureaucracies will take over our colleges and universities, supplanting altogether the goal of higher education.

“Diversity” is the highest goal of students and professors who openly detest those with whom they disagree. These people support the very antithesis of higher education with their withering attacks on free speech. Both in and out of academia, the content of a man’s character is no longer as important as the color of his skin, his sex, his sexual preferences or his political loyalties. That’s a vision that spells tragedy for our nation.

The biggest financial, economic and political event of 2020 will undoubtedly be the US presidential election in November, but even without it, this year is shaping up to especially busy. Below we list the key global events in the upcoming 365 days.

January

• Wednesday, January 1: – Terms of newly appointed ECB Executive Board Members Panetta and Schnabel begin.
• January: US-China – Potential signing of Phase One trade agreement. Following the announcement on December 13 of a Phase One trade agreement, the US and China could finalize and sign the agreement.
• January: Thailand – Readings of the FY2020 budget in Parliament.
• Thursday, January 9: France – Pension reform negotiations. Start of the second round of negotiations between the government and trade unions on the pension reform.
• Tuesday, January 14: United States – Comments due on proposed tariffs on imports from France. The US Trade Representative proposed tariffs on imports from France as part of a Section 301 investigation into France’s digital services tax. Final comments are due on January 14, at which point the USTR could announce a decision on how it is moving forward with the issue.
• Monday, January 20: EU – EU Commission to review EU fiscal framework.
• Monday, January 20-21: Japan – BoJ monetary policy meeting.
• Thursday, January 23: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• Sunday, January 26: Peru — Extraordinary Congressional Election. Peruvians will elect new members of Congress for all 130 congressional seats, whose terms will end in July 2021.
• Wednesday, January 29: United States – FOMC meeting statement.
• Thursday, January 30: UK – BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
• Friday, January 31: UK – Article 50 extension ends under current legislation. On current legislation, the UK’s latest Article 50 extension ends on this date. Given that MPs in the House of Commons have already passed the second reading of PM Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill, we expect domestic ratification of the terms of the UK’s exit from the EU to be completed well in advance of 31 January. On that basis, the UK will have formally left the EU (on the status quo terms embodied in the post-Brexit transition period) as of 1 February.

February

• Early February: Singapore – Budget statement.
• Monday, February 3: United States – Iowa Democratic Caucus. First contest for the Democratic nomination for President. Although Iowa is a relatively small state and awards only 1% of delegates, candidates’ performance in the contest in the past has affected the direction and outcome of campaigns.
• Tuesday, February 11: United States – New Hampshire Democratic Primary. Second contest for the Democratic nomination for President. Although New Hampshire is a relatively small state and awards < 1% of delegates, candidates' performance in the contest in the past has affected the direction and outcome of campaigns.

March

• Early March: China – The National People’s Congress. The annual NPC is scheduled to start early March and is likely to last around 2 weeks. A key thing to watch will be Premier Li’s annual government report, which will include official economic targets for 2020, including GDP growth, CPI inflation and fiscal deficits (although those targets were set during closed-door policy meetings in the preceding December, they are not publicly announced until the NPC). The report will also set the broad tone of economic policy direction for the rest of the year. Main government officials will also hold press conferences on the sidelines, giving further color on their policy plans.
• Monday, March 2: Israel – General elections. These elections will be the third in less than a year after coalition talks failed following the general elections on April 9 and September 17, 2019. Opinion polls suggest that the different blocs and parties are likely to maintain roughly the same share of seats they have in the Knesset, implying that the stalemate could continue. While political uncertainty appears likely to remain high, we think that the impact of that uncertainty on Israeli asset prices will be relatively limited and short-lived.
• Tuesday, March 3: United States – Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. Fourteen states hold contests for the Democratic nomination for President, awarding 1/3 of all delegates. With the addition of California (which awards 10% of all delegates) to Super Tuesday this year, far more delegates will have been pledged by this date compared to in 2016.
• Thursday, March 12: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• Sunday, March 15-16: UK – BoE Governor Carney last day in office. BoE Governor Bailey first day in office.
• Wednesday, March 18: United States – FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
• Thursday, March 26-27: EU – European Council.
• Thursday, March 26: UK – BoE MPC meeting.

April

• Wednesday, April 15: Korea: Parliamentary elections.
• Sunday, April 26: Chile – Constitutional Referendum. Chileans will vote on two questions. First, on whether they want a new constitution. Second, on whether the new constitution should be drafted by either a “Constitutional Convention” (composed of members elected exclusively for the Convention) or a “Mixed Constitutional Convention” (composed of 50% newly elected members and 50% currently sitting members of Congress).
• Monday, April 27-28: Japan – BoJ monetary policy meeting.
• Wednesday, April 29: United States – FOMC meeting statement.
• Thursday, April 30: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.

May

• May: Australia – Federal budget released.
• Thursday, May 7: UK – BoE MPC meeting.
• Sunday, May 10: Poland – Presidential elections. While the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) retained its parliamentary majority following the elections in autumn 2019, it nevertheless lost its senate majority. If the current incumbent PiS candidate, President Andrzej Duda, is not re-elected, it could further limit the PiS ability to pass legislation, as its parliamentary majority is insufficient to override presidential vetoes.

June

• First half of 2020: United States – Federal Reserve reports on framework review. Federal Reserve policymakers plan to report findings from their review of monetary policy strategy, tools, and communication “during the first half of 2020.”
• June: EU-UK – EU-UK Summit.
• Thursday, June 4: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• June 10-12: G7 summit in the United States.
• Wednesday, June 10: United States – FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
• June 18-19: EU – European Council.
• Thursday, June 18: UK – BoE MPC meeting.

July

• By July: France – Submission of pension reform to the Parliament.
• Wednesday, July 1: UK – Deadline to request an extension to the transition period under current legislation. Under the terms of the existing Withdrawal Agreement, the UK must request any extension of the transition period (for up to one or two years, beyond December 2020) by 1 July.
• Monday, July 13-16: United States – Democratic National Convention. The Democratic National Convention takes place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Party will officially nominate its candidate for President.
• Tuesday, July 14-15: Japan – BoJ monetary policy meeting.
• Thursday, July 16: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• July 24 – August 9: Japan – Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
• Wednesday, July 29: United States – FOMC meeting statement.

August

• Thursday, August 6: UK – BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
• Monday, August 24-27: United States – Republican National Convention. The Republican National Convention takes place in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Party will officially nominate its candidate for President.
• September
• Thursday, September 10: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• Wednesday, September 16: United States – FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
• Thursday, September 17: UK: BoE MPC meeting.
• Tuesday, September 29: United States – First Presidential debate. Commission on Presidential Debates hosts first of three scheduled debates between the Republican and Democratic candidates for President.

October

• Thursday, October 1: United States – FY2021 begins.
• Sunday, October 11: Lithuania – Parliamentary elections, first round.
• Thursday, October 15: EU – Deadline Draft Budgetary Plans 2021.
• Thursday, October 15-16: EU – European Council.
• Sunday, October 25: Chile – Constitutional Convention Election. If the majority votes in favor of a new constitution on the April 26 referendum, members of the constitutional convention will be elected alongside municipal and regional elections on October 25.
• Wednesday, October 28-29: Japan – BoJ monetary policy meeting.
• Thursday, October 29: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.

November

• Tuesday, November 3: United States – Election Day. Voters elect the President, House of Representatives, 35 senators as well as state and local officials.
• Thursday, November 5: UK – BoE MPC meeting (and monetary policy report).
• Thursday, November 5: United States – FOMC meeting statement.
• Sunday, November 15: EU – National Draft Budgetary Plans 2021.
• By November 21: New Zealand – Latest date for election. Election is due by November 21 at the latest. Neither major party has announced their key policy platforms, and polling suggests the race is likely to be tight.
• November 21-22: G20 summit in Saudi Arabia.
• November (provisional): Romania – Legislative Elections. Romania is scheduled to go to the polls in late 2020, provided that the Parliament is not dissolved earlier. The latest polling data projects the current ruling party (PNL) to be in lead at around 40% and on an upward trajectory, with the former ruling party and main contender’s (PSD) share bottoming out at 20%.

December

• Thursday, December 10: EU – ECB Governing Council meeting.
• Thursday, December 10-11: European Council.
• Wednesday, December 16: United States – FOMC meeting statement (and Summary of Economic Projections).
• Thursday, December 17: UK – BoE MPC meeting.
• Thursday, December 31: UK – Brexit transition period ends. If the UK has not sought an extension of the transition period beyond December 2020, the status quo terms of the UK’s initial post-Brexit arrangements come to an end on this date.

Source: Goldman Sachs

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,.

Start over in the new year. Also, start over at any other time during the rest of the year, whenever you want, as often as you like. Time is an illusion anyway.

I cannot assure you that things will get better in the ’20s. I can’t assure you that they’ll get worse, either. What I can absolutely guarantee is that things are going to keep getting weirder and weirder. At this point in time the only reliable pattern is the disintegration of patterns.

The mainstream worldview isn’t mainstream because it is more fact-based, logical, or makes better arguments than other potential worldviews, it’s mainstream because vast fortunes are poured into keeping it mainstream.

“Why do those people hate us?”
“We destroyed their country.”
“We should leave the Middle East then.”
“We can’t”
“Why not?”
“Israel.”
“What about it?”
“Those other countries hate it.”
“Why?”
“It destroyed the country it was built on top of.”
“Well maybe we and Israel should leave, then?”
“Nazi.”

The empire’s overall strategy toward Iran seems to be to crowd the area with an increasingly intrusive military presence, then react disproportionately in “self defense” when anything happens. It’s like an older sibling’s “I’m not touching you” car ride teasing, but with an entire region.

Not hearing any urgent concerns about that horrible horrifying epidemic of antisemitism that was pervading the Labour Party anymore. I guess they all stopped being antisemites all of a sudden.

“You defend Assad!” No I don’t, idiot. I attack the US-centralized empire for pouring billions and billions of dollars into actual terrorist groups in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. I don’t play defense, I play offense.

I’m still tripping on how the latest WikiLeaks drops are getting literally zero mainstream media coverage, and yet people on the internet still get mad at me for writing about them. Even one indie blogger talking about these authentic documents is unacceptable to some people.

Everyone involved in getting the OPCW leaks out did the right thing but the MSM. The inspectors did the right thing, the whistleblowers did the right thing, WikiLeaks did the right thing… then the media refused to report it and gave control of the narrative to fucking Bellingcat. The facts are right there online right now, staring us all right in the face, but because coverage is being suppressed and the conversation controlled, I have people in my social media notifications at this very moment regurgitating old establishment Syria narratives as gospel truth.

Imagine living in Nazi Germany and only ever talking about Jim Crow laws in the American south. That’s what it’s like when people who live in the US-centralized empire focus on the alleged misdeeds of non-aligned nations.

Our entire society is mentally ill. What our mentally ill society labels “mental illness” is actually just a small slice of the broader mental illness spectrum — those who are impaired in their ability to participate in the consensus mass delusions shared by the rest of society.

Sometimes I can only stop and stare slack-jawed at all the extreme hate and vitriol that gets directed at anti-imperialists online. I mean, you’ll get called all sorts of names, get called evil and a monster, for advocating peace. PEACE! Really shows you the power of propaganda.

Mentally mute the narrative soundtrack about Obama changing things after Bush and Trump presenting a radical deviation from all US norms, and what you see is a government continuing along pretty much the exact same trajectory with only cosmetic changes between administrations. World minus narrative is night-and-day different from world plus narrative.

Wars aren’t good vs evil; usually they’re geostrategic agenda vs geostrategic agenda. But Hollywood always portrays war as good vs evil, which is why empire apologists always bleat “You’re saying Dictator X is a Good Guy!” whenever you oppose interventionism in X targeted nation. Without that conditioning by professional storytellers, it would never occur to us to try and find the “good guys” in the chaos of a military conflict. We’re trained to think there must be a Good Guy and a Bad Guy, and that if a side isn’t one then they’re the other.

Capitalism is literally a game. It’s based on completely made-up rules with a completely made-up points system just like any other game. The only difference between this game and the others is this one gets taken so seriously that losing can kill you in real life.

Arguably the only people who actually truly understand the highly unscientific and completely made-up field of economics are those who manipulate the economy for their own benefit. And they only understand it because they’re the ones authoring its self-fulfilling prophecies.

Sometimes it’s funny to think about how humanity fought two world wars for basically no reason. World War 2 sprung directly from the effects of World War 1, and hardly anybody can give a coherent explanation for why World War 1 happened. Certainly nobody can justify why World War 1 was necessary. Our species fought two world wars (or arguably one world war with a long intermission to grow more troops) for no justifiable reason at all.

Keep paying close attention to Syria. I know they’re saying “Assad won” and there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the world, but the battle for narrative control over Syria is hotter than ever and we’re going to see even more information emerge to discredit the imperial press.

“I hope those folks in Hong Kong and Iran obtain democracy like we westerners have. Lemme log off this search engine algorithmically stacked toward billionaire CIA-tied media and ponder whether I want Donald Trump or Joe Biden to continue the wars and oligarchic exploitation.”

It can be fun to debate political and ideological solutions to humanity’s problems. Also, it’s worth noting that every one of those problems would disappear very quickly if we all just stopped taking our own mental chatter so seriously.

*  *  *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Rudy Giuliani is not only willing to testify in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, he wants to “do demonstrations” in order to outline what he described as a “series of criminal acts” involving “the highest levels of the Obama administration,“ adding that Democrats Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will go down in history like Joe McCarthy when people “calm down and watch this carefully.”

“What I learned is the corruption in Ukraine is vast, it’s extensive, it highly involves the Democratic party – not just in 2016 but for many years,” the former New York City mayor said at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. 

“When the full scope of what happens in Ukraine comes out, there are going to be a lot of Americans who participated in the corruption,” adding “The Bidens took millions of dollars laundered out of Ukraine, and the only reason they’re getting away with it is because you and the press protect them…”

When asked what he discovered, Rudy replied “I’m not going to tell you what I found out until I have a proper forum… but it’s devastating,” adding “We will figure out the right forum.”

“This is expanding, it will turn out to be a series of criminal acts. It will involve the highest levels of the Obama administration. It’s the reason the Democratic party is in panic.”

“I would testify, I would do demonstrations, I’d give lectures, I’d give summations. Or, I do what I do best, I try the case,” adding, with a smile, “I’d love to try the case.”

“If you give me the case, I will prosecute it as a racketeering case. Which I kind of invented anyway.”

(Relevant part begins at 3:15)

Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

New U.S. Census data shows that Illinois’ population fell again in 2019, making this the sixth year in a row Illinois has shrunk.

Here are the key facts you need to know:

1. Illinois’ population fell by 51,000 in 2019, the 2nd-most in the nation.

Only New York lost more people than Illinois in 2019.

Illinois also had the third-worst loss as a percentage of population. Only West Virginia and Alaska lost more in percentage terms.

Overall, Illinois shrunk the most of any state in the nation between 2010 and 2019. There are now 170,000 fewer people in Illinois today than in 2010.

2. Illinois has lost population six years in a row.

Cumulatively, the state has lost 223,000 people since 2014. That’s the equivalent of losing the entire city of Aurora.

Only West Virginia and Connecticut have also lost population for six years or more.

3. Illinois netted a loss of nearly 105,000 residents to domestic out-migration in 2019. 

A key reason for Illinois’ loss in population is its continuous stream of residents leaving the state. Illinois lost a net of 105,000 residents to other states in 2019.

4. Illinois has one of the worst rates of domestic out-migration.

Illinois’ domestic migration losses are some of the nation’s worst. When measured per 1,000 people, Illinois lost over 8 people to out-migration in 2019, the 4th-highest in the nation. 

And as the list below shows, none of Illinois’ neighbors come close to those losses. Michigan lost 2.4 people per 1,000 residents. Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin were almost flat. And Indiana actually had positive net migration.

5. Illinois’ neighbors are gaining population.

Bad weather – the favorite excuse of those who deny Illinois’ population problems – is not to blame for the state’s ills.

All of Illinois’ neighboring states gained population in 2019. In fact, Indiana gained nearly 37,000 people last year – 2/3rds of what Illinois lost.

Overall, Illinois has lost about 1.3 percent of its population since 2010. And while Illinois has shrunk six years in a row, none of its neighbors have shrunk even once in that time period.

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Illinois politicians seem to have no plan to stem the state’s population losses. There’s no talk of an amendment to the pension protection clause nor are there plans to address the drivers of Illinois’ second-highest-in-the-nation property taxes. 

Instead, their only plan is a for of a multi-billion dollar progressive tax hike – something that will only chase even more people out.

Read more about Illinois and its many crises:

• Illinois’ demographic collapse: fewer immigrants, fewer babies and fleeing residents

• New Laws 2020: Illinois laws that take effect January 1

• Illinois enacting a progressive tax is like Sears attempting a turnaround by hiking prices

• This One Chart From Moody’s Illustrates Chicago’s Fiscal Plight

• Pritzker, don’t blame Wirepoints. Math diminishes your ‘monumental’ claims, not us.

• Moody’s shows Illinois is nation’s extreme outlier when it comes to pension debts

• It’s not just property taxes Illinoisans should be worried about. It’s home values, too.