Month: June 2020

Princeton Dumps Woodrow Wilson’s Name Due To “Racist Thinking”

Princeton Dumps Woodrow Wilson’s Name Due To “Racist Thinking”

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 19:00

By Daniel Payne of Just The News

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees announced Saturday that it has voted to strip the Ivy League university’s public policy school of its moniker honoring Woodrow Wilson, claiming the former Democratic president’s racist ideology made him ill-suited as a namesake for the institution.  Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly committed to combating the scourge of racism in all its forms,” the trustees said in a statement on Friday.

Student protests at Princeton in November 2015 called attention to Wilson’s racism, and we responded by forming an ad hoc committee, chaired by Brent Henry ’69, to study Wilson’s legacy at Princeton. The committee recommended valuable reforms to increase Princeton’s inclusivity and recount the University’s history more completely, but it left the names of the School and College intact. Student and alumni interest in those names has persisted, and we revisited them this month as the American nation struggled profoundly with the terrible injustice of racism.

– Excerpted from a statement by the Princeton Board of Trustees

Deleting Wilson’s name at Princeton may be the most high-profile “cancel culture” act to date. The policy school will now be known as “The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.”

Wilson, a progressive Democrat known for his contempt of the U.S. Constitution due to the limits it imposed on the federal government, was a proponent of segregation and allowed much of the federal government’s workings to become racially segregated during his two terms between 1913-1921. Under his executive tenure, the first movie ever screened at the White House was the pro-Ku Klux Klan film “The Birth of a Nation.” 

Wilson was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 and, as a Democrat, served as governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. Wilson, born in Virginia in 1856, spent his early years in the South, including in Georgia and South Carolina.

Though the board stripped Wilson’s name from the highly regarded policy school, the trustees nevertheless argued that “Princeton has a continuing responsibility to remember [Wilson’s] achievements even as we honestly and publicly contend with his failures.”

The trustees also said they would rename the school’s residential Wilson College to “First College” ahead of that residence’s already-scheduled closure in two years. 

A university honor bearing the president’s name – the Woodrow Wilson Award – will remain unchanged, the trustees added, due to that award’s being associated with a gift to the university.

“The award explicitly honors specific and positive aspects of Wilson’s career,” the trustees wrote, “and it, unlike the School or the College, does not require students to identify with the Wilson name in connection with their academic or residential programs.”

* * *

And now that cancel culture has finally sprung within the hallowed halls of America’s top liberal universities, one can argue – if one wasn’t a hypocrite of course – that the time has come to tear down Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Georgetown and pretty much most legacy institutions. The reason: as the following link details, history shows that slavery has helped build most US colleges and universities…

… and none more so than that Ivy Leage pinnacle, Harvard – the first institution of higher learning in America, founded in 1636 – and whose first 150 years of history are defined by slavery and the slave economy, or as APM Reports writes, “Slaves made beds and meals for Harvard presidents.”

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Self-Defense When You’re Violating the Law

From Justice Massa’s unanimous opinion in Gammons v. State, decided Friday:

At his trial for attempted murder and carrying a handgun without a license, Anthony Gammons, Jr. asserted that he acted in self-defense. According to Gammons, he feared for his and his son’s lives when he shot the intoxicated and aggressive Derek Gilbert—testifying that he knew Gilbert had a history of violence and that Gilbert had threatened him—with a gun he acknowledged he was carrying illegally. After the court instructed the jury that he could not assert self-defense if he committed a crime that was “directly and immediately related” to his confrontation with Gilbert, the jury found Gammons guilty.

Indiana’s self-defense statute instructs that “a person is not justified in using force if the person,” among other things, “is committing … a crime.” But because “literal application” of that statute can lead to absurd results, we have held that “there must be an immediate causal connection between the crime and the confrontation.” Mayes v. State (Ind. 2001). Because the jury instruction used here—that a crime and confrontation need only be “related” to defeat self-defense—diluted this causal standard, and because we can’t conclude that this instructional error was harmless, we reverse and remand for a new trial….

According to his testimony, Anthony Gammons, Jr., after going to the movies and paintballing with his ten-year-old son, intended to briefly swing by his incarcerated cousin’s house during a party to make sure nothing was broken. But when he and his son pulled up to the home, Gammons saw a crowd milling about outside, including Derek Gilbert. In the decade they’d been acquainted, Gammons had come to believe that Gilbert liked to get drunk, liked to start fights, and liked to knock out, shoot at, bully, and rob people, including his own friends. And Gammons knew that Gilbert had been previously charged with murder.

So when he stepped out of his car and an intoxicated Gilbert immediately started accosting him, Gammons was put on edge. Despite Gammons openly carrying a handgun and attempts by Gammons and bystanders to calm the situation, Gilbert persisted, squaring up as if to punch Gammons, pulling at his waistband, and asking if Gammons was “casket ready.” Gammons then drew his gun and shot at Gilbert because, as he later avowed at trial, he feared for his life and for that of his son.

But even after he was hit, Gilbert did not relent. Instead, while spinning around, Gilbert continued “aggressing” toward Gammons and reaching in his pants, “like he was grabbing for something.” But as soon as Gammons saw Gilbert “retreat and run away,” he “stopped shooting,” professing that he “was in shock” at how the events had unfolded. After a few moments passed, Gammons calmly walked back to his car and drove off. Although he was struck six times, Gilbert survived.

Gammons was later charged with attempted murder and carrying a handgun without a license. At his jury trial, Gammons—who conceded that he was carrying the handgun without a license—asserted that he shot Gilbert only in self-defense. Gilbert, however, disputed this explanation, testifying that he did not wantonly confront Gammons. Instead, despite repeatedly acknowledging that his memories of the incident were blurry, Gilbert surmised that the two argued when Gammons confronted him over a woman. After that brief and nonviolent quarrel subsided, Gilbert and Gammons shook hands and went their separate ways. But just as Gilbert thought the encounter was over, Gammons pulled his weapon and shot Gilbert while his back was turned. “I got shot for no reason,” claimed Gilbert.

At the end of his trial, Gammons proposed that the court instruct the jury that he was “justified in using deadly force” if he believed it was “necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to himself and to prevent the commission of the forcible felony battery against himself.” But the trial court, over his objection, slightly tweaked this tendered language and inserted language derived from Indiana Pattern Jury Instruction 10.0300—that “a person may not use force if,” among other things, “he is committing a crime that is directly and immediately related to the confrontation.” After the State emphasized in closing that a person “can’t be doing anything illegal at the time” he claimed he was acting in self-defense, the jury found Gammons guilty of both charges….

By requiring that the crime and confrontation just be joined or linked, neither “connected” nor “related” suggest the element of causation demanded by Mayes. Justice Boehm’s concurrence in Mayes presaged this diminution of the standard, warning that the Court—by rephrasing that “the evidence must show that but for the defendant committing a crime, the confrontation resulting in injury to the victim would not have occurred”—left open circumstances where a “defendant should be free to claim self-defense.” … Read literally, this formulation could foreclose the defense in an instance where a defendant’s crime was tenuously connected with the confrontation, like the defense being unavailable to a defendant who “is illegally gambling and a fight erupts because the victim believes the defendant is cheating[, leading] to the victim’s death.” Since this “but for” test can impede the defense in the same unjust and absurd ways as a literal reading of the statute, we reject that rephrasing and reiterate that self-defense is barred only when there is “an immediate causal connection between the crime and the confrontation.”

And we agree with Gammons that this instructional error could have served as the basis for the jury’s decision to convict. Because Gammons asserted that he fired the shots only until Gilbert retreated, we cannot be sure that the trial’s outcome would have been the same under a proper instruction and presume this error affected the verdict. To be sure, “[f]iring multiple shots undercuts a claim of self-defense” once a defendant disables the purported aggressor. But the account conveyed by Gammons is like that made by a defendant who—after an aggressive and intoxicated driver who almost hit him with his car said “I got something for your ass” and reached for his waistline—grabbed a gun from his van and fired two shots, striking the driver. Hood v. State (Ind. Ct. App. 2007). After the driver continued staggering and allegedly lunged forward, Hood fired four more shots until the driver collapsed. Following Hood’s conviction of voluntary manslaughter at trial, however, our Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial, holding, among other things, that it didn’t “find the fact that six shots were fired to be dispositive” when Hood asserted that the driver was still coming toward him as he fired.

Gammons, like Hood, avers that he kept shooting only because his assailant continued at him after he fired his first shots. And Gammons claims that Gilbert was only struck in the back and buttocks because he spun around while he continued advancing. This account differs from an instance where the defense has been repudiated when evidence showed that a defendant

  • shot a victim who “was either falling down or already on the ground,” and “at least one bullet struck her in the back”;
  • fired three times after a victim raised his hands and said “Do what you got to do”;
  • shot one victim in the chest and then “backed up as he was firing, fatally hitting [another victim] three times,” all while “he stopped, reloaded, and continued firing”;
  • smiled and “brandished a handgun and fired multiple shots at [a victim] as he approached his vehicle”;
  • “chopped and shot [victims] several times, even after they were incapacitated”;
  • shot a victim—after he fell to his hands and knees—a second time;
  • shot a victim—”who was unarmed and on the ground pleading for his life”—multiple times;
  • shot a victim “multiple times in the back” as he asked “‘What’s all the loud talk about?’ and started to get out of the vehicle”;
  • shot a victim after he “went to his knees and put his arms and hands up in a defenseless position”;
  • fired “multiple shots, one of which hit an innocent bystander” after a fight was already over; or
  • “shot first,” and “[t]wenty-three of the thirty-two bullet casings recovered from the scene were linked to” his gun.

Unlike a defendant shooting at an incapacitated or defenseless victim, Gammons maintains that he shot only until Gilbert retreated. Based on his account of the events leading up to the confrontation, we cannot say with certainty that the jury would have convicted Gammons without hearing the erroneous instruction….

We do not pass judgment today on whether Gammons acted in self-defense when he shot Gilbert. That is a question for the jury, which may yet reject this justification. But we cannot categorically bar those jurors from considering the defense when a crime is merely “related to” or “connected to” a confrontation—rather, as we held in Mayes, there must be an immediate causal connection between the two. Because we cannot conclusively determine that the verdict would have been the same absent this instructional error, we reverse and remand for a new trial.

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Self-Defense When You’re Violating the Law

From Justice Massa’s unanimous opinion in Gammons v. State, decided Friday:

At his trial for attempted murder and carrying a handgun without a license, Anthony Gammons, Jr. asserted that he acted in self-defense. According to Gammons, he feared for his and his son’s lives when he shot the intoxicated and aggressive Derek Gilbert—testifying that he knew Gilbert had a history of violence and that Gilbert had threatened him—with a gun he acknowledged he was carrying illegally. After the court instructed the jury that he could not assert self-defense if he committed a crime that was “directly and immediately related” to his confrontation with Gilbert, the jury found Gammons guilty.

Indiana’s self-defense statute instructs that “a person is not justified in using force if the person,” among other things, “is committing … a crime.” But because “literal application” of that statute can lead to absurd results, we have held that “there must be an immediate causal connection between the crime and the confrontation.” Mayes v. State (Ind. 2001). Because the jury instruction used here—that a crime and confrontation need only be “related” to defeat self-defense—diluted this causal standard, and because we can’t conclude that this instructional error was harmless, we reverse and remand for a new trial….

According to his testimony, Anthony Gammons, Jr., after going to the movies and paintballing with his ten-year-old son, intended to briefly swing by his incarcerated cousin’s house during a party to make sure nothing was broken. But when he and his son pulled up to the home, Gammons saw a crowd milling about outside, including Derek Gilbert. In the decade they’d been acquainted, Gammons had come to believe that Gilbert liked to get drunk, liked to start fights, and liked to knock out, shoot at, bully, and rob people, including his own friends. And Gammons knew that Gilbert had been previously charged with murder.

So when he stepped out of his car and an intoxicated Gilbert immediately started accosting him, Gammons was put on edge. Despite Gammons openly carrying a handgun and attempts by Gammons and bystanders to calm the situation, Gilbert persisted, squaring up as if to punch Gammons, pulling at his waistband, and asking if Gammons was “casket ready.” Gammons then drew his gun and shot at Gilbert because, as he later avowed at trial, he feared for his life and for that of his son.

But even after he was hit, Gilbert did not relent. Instead, while spinning around, Gilbert continued “aggressing” toward Gammons and reaching in his pants, “like he was grabbing for something.” But as soon as Gammons saw Gilbert “retreat and run away,” he “stopped shooting,” professing that he “was in shock” at how the events had unfolded. After a few moments passed, Gammons calmly walked back to his car and drove off. Although he was struck six times, Gilbert survived.

Gammons was later charged with attempted murder and carrying a handgun without a license. At his jury trial, Gammons—who conceded that he was carrying the handgun without a license—asserted that he shot Gilbert only in self-defense. Gilbert, however, disputed this explanation, testifying that he did not wantonly confront Gammons. Instead, despite repeatedly acknowledging that his memories of the incident were blurry, Gilbert surmised that the two argued when Gammons confronted him over a woman. After that brief and nonviolent quarrel subsided, Gilbert and Gammons shook hands and went their separate ways. But just as Gilbert thought the encounter was over, Gammons pulled his weapon and shot Gilbert while his back was turned. “I got shot for no reason,” claimed Gilbert.

At the end of his trial, Gammons proposed that the court instruct the jury that he was “justified in using deadly force” if he believed it was “necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to himself and to prevent the commission of the forcible felony battery against himself.” But the trial court, over his objection, slightly tweaked this tendered language and inserted language derived from Indiana Pattern Jury Instruction 10.0300—that “a person may not use force if,” among other things, “he is committing a crime that is directly and immediately related to the confrontation.” After the State emphasized in closing that a person “can’t be doing anything illegal at the time” he claimed he was acting in self-defense, the jury found Gammons guilty of both charges….

By requiring that the crime and confrontation just be joined or linked, neither “connected” nor “related” suggest the element of causation demanded by Mayes. Justice Boehm’s concurrence in Mayes presaged this diminution of the standard, warning that the Court—by rephrasing that “the evidence must show that but for the defendant committing a crime, the confrontation resulting in injury to the victim would not have occurred”—left open circumstances where a “defendant should be free to claim self-defense.” … Read literally, this formulation could foreclose the defense in an instance where a defendant’s crime was tenuously connected with the confrontation, like the defense being unavailable to a defendant who “is illegally gambling and a fight erupts because the victim believes the defendant is cheating[, leading] to the victim’s death.” Since this “but for” test can impede the defense in the same unjust and absurd ways as a literal reading of the statute, we reject that rephrasing and reiterate that self-defense is barred only when there is “an immediate causal connection between the crime and the confrontation.”

And we agree with Gammons that this instructional error could have served as the basis for the jury’s decision to convict. Because Gammons asserted that he fired the shots only until Gilbert retreated, we cannot be sure that the trial’s outcome would have been the same under a proper instruction and presume this error affected the verdict. To be sure, “[f]iring multiple shots undercuts a claim of self-defense” once a defendant disables the purported aggressor. But the account conveyed by Gammons is like that made by a defendant who—after an aggressive and intoxicated driver who almost hit him with his car said “I got something for your ass” and reached for his waistline—grabbed a gun from his van and fired two shots, striking the driver. Hood v. State (Ind. Ct. App. 2007). After the driver continued staggering and allegedly lunged forward, Hood fired four more shots until the driver collapsed. Following Hood’s conviction of voluntary manslaughter at trial, however, our Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial, holding, among other things, that it didn’t “find the fact that six shots were fired to be dispositive” when Hood asserted that the driver was still coming toward him as he fired.

Gammons, like Hood, avers that he kept shooting only because his assailant continued at him after he fired his first shots. And Gammons claims that Gilbert was only struck in the back and buttocks because he spun around while he continued advancing. This account differs from an instance where the defense has been repudiated when evidence showed that a defendant

  • shot a victim who “was either falling down or already on the ground,” and “at least one bullet struck her in the back”;
  • fired three times after a victim raised his hands and said “Do what you got to do”;
  • shot one victim in the chest and then “backed up as he was firing, fatally hitting [another victim] three times,” all while “he stopped, reloaded, and continued firing”;
  • smiled and “brandished a handgun and fired multiple shots at [a victim] as he approached his vehicle”;
  • “chopped and shot [victims] several times, even after they were incapacitated”;
  • shot a victim—after he fell to his hands and knees—a second time;
  • shot a victim—”who was unarmed and on the ground pleading for his life”—multiple times;
  • shot a victim “multiple times in the back” as he asked “‘What’s all the loud talk about?’ and started to get out of the vehicle”;
  • shot a victim after he “went to his knees and put his arms and hands up in a defenseless position”;
  • fired “multiple shots, one of which hit an innocent bystander” after a fight was already over; or
  • “shot first,” and “[t]wenty-three of the thirty-two bullet casings recovered from the scene were linked to” his gun.

Unlike a defendant shooting at an incapacitated or defenseless victim, Gammons maintains that he shot only until Gilbert retreated. Based on his account of the events leading up to the confrontation, we cannot say with certainty that the jury would have convicted Gammons without hearing the erroneous instruction….

We do not pass judgment today on whether Gammons acted in self-defense when he shot Gilbert. That is a question for the jury, which may yet reject this justification. But we cannot categorically bar those jurors from considering the defense when a crime is merely “related to” or “connected to” a confrontation—rather, as we held in Mayes, there must be an immediate causal connection between the two. Because we cannot conclusively determine that the verdict would have been the same absent this instructional error, we reverse and remand for a new trial.

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Texas Realtors Stop Using ‘Master Bedroom’ Over Slavery Connotations

Texas Realtors Stop Using ‘Master Bedroom’ Over Slavery Connotations

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 18:30

White Americans trying to outcompete each other in the wokelympics have found a new word to blacklist eliminate from the public lexicon over its ties to slavery.

According to TMZ, the Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) – which has one black guy in a leadership position – “is no longer using the word “master” to hype bedrooms and bathrooms on its Multiple Listing Service.”

Going forward, they will be referred to as “primary” bedrooms and bathrooms, avoiding insensitive and awkward encounters which HAR claims has been “raised and considered for several years,” according to the report. 

Houston area realtors are still free to use the ‘offending’ term, however, as HAR’s newfound wokeness is just a suggestion.

Given the woke mob’s ability to cancel ‘offensive’ content, concepts and now words, we have a few questions for clarification:

Will Gordon Ramsay change MasterChef to PrimaryChef?

Will the computer industry dispense with ‘master / slave’ to designate relationships between hard drives?

Will the PGA now hold the Primarys tournament?

Will Warner Brothers revise Mad Max so that “Primary Blaster” runs Bartertown?

Will The Last Dragon receive the same revisionism?

Will Metallica re-release Primary of Puppets?

What about:

Masters degrees?

Master cylinders?

Master recordings?

Enjoy the old language while you still can.

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Fundamentals & Reality Are Making Their Presence Felt

Fundamentals & Reality Are Making Their Presence Felt

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 18:00

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

An eventful week in markets and the economy as the month and quarter are coming to a close next week.

The broader market peaked on June 8th on the heels of unprecedented central bank intervention but has since failed to make new highs other than the Nasdaq. Any subsequent efforts by the Fed to stave off any market sell off via the announcement of individual corporate bond buying 2 weeks ago or this week’s announcement to relax the Volcker rule for banks have produced nothing but short lived bounces in markets leading to lower highs and further selling in equities.

Fundamentals and reality are making their presence felt. The reopening of the US economy is hampered by violent spikes in coronavirus infections in some part of the US leading to delayed reopening in some cases raising questions about the veracity of any V shape recovery in the economy as lay off announcements keep mounting globally.

The realization that jobs will not come back to anywhere near February levels may take time to sink in as does perhaps the inconvenient truth that the Fed’s intervention efforts may be hitting a point of diminishing returns.

In this week’s episode of Straight Talk we discuss the market’s technical battle line for control, the state of the banks and their message to markets, the gnawing threats on big cap tech, specifically on Facebook as advertisers are pulling out in droves in the midst of political backlash, the going forward political risk of big cap tech having reached quasi monopoly status in their respective fields, the ongoing threat of the virus resurgence to the V shape recovery narrative, the political risks to markets due the upcoming presidential election and possible impacts of tax policy and much more:

For reference a couple of charts relating to what we discussed in the video above:

$SPX, following peaking June 8th when it tagged a key trend line has now reversed lower and has closed the week below its weekly 5 EMA for the first time since the March lows following the break of the rally trend earlier in the month:

This could be signaling a trend shift. But also note $SPX closed right at its weekly 50MA and just below its daily 200MA:

Note also the consecutive breakouts in volatility since the June 8th peak.

Put in context the horrid action in the banking sector, even this week’s loosening of the Volcker rule lead the resulting bounce to be sold. Worse for banks potentially here is that the chart suggests a potential head and shoulders pattern that could signal much lower prices ahead in context of the 10 year again dropping lower as well:

Since the June peak, $SPX is down 7%, small caps are down over 10% and the banking index is down over 20%. These are sizable moves to the downside and tech is increasingly under threat as well and its strength came on ever weakening internals.

I’ve outlined the reasons why the historic rally may have been still nothing but a bear market rally fueled to extremes by unprecedented liquidity injections and why the Fed looks increasingly busted in trying to defend this market without being able to prevent what the banks and bond market are already signaling: We’re staring at the prospect of a protracted downturn.

Markets are a journey and the day to day back and forth may well distract from the bigger picture, hence it is critically important to keep a close watch on the technical charts and evolving macro data. My primary view: There are plenty opportunities to trade the long and the short side as the battle between artificial liquidity interventions and the fundamental/valuation picture rages on in the months to come. But be clear: In June the broader market made a lower high and the path to a full economic recovery does not look anything like a clear V at all while valuations remain at unprecedented levels during a recession.

*  *  *

I’ll be posting a separate Market Video focusing on the latest technical implications later today (For those not already signed up for these videos please see link to register). For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.

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“Disturbing Parallel To HIV”: COVID-19 Can Cause Depletion Of Important Immune Cells, NY Times Admits

“Disturbing Parallel To HIV”: COVID-19 Can Cause Depletion Of Important Immune Cells, NY Times Admits

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 17:30

Once again, it looks as though what was once being peddled as Covid-19 “conspiracy theory” on our site appears to have turned out to have been accurate news reported months before the mainstream media. Go figure.

As far back as February 1, 2020, when the pandemic was only starting to attract attention and the China-influenced mainstream media was politically inclined to minimize the severity of the disease before pulling a sharp U-turn and now going full bore with a narrative of just how dangerous it is to reopen the economy, we published an article referencing an Arxiv pre-print which found that the Covid-19 genome contained “HIV Insertions”, stoking fears that the virus was an artificially created bioweapon.

While the mere suggestion that this virus was man-made – nevermind sharing discrete segments of its genetic structure with HIV – sparked outrage among the well-paid mercenary enforcers of the First Amendment known as “fact-checkers” who are employed by such biased organizations as Twitter and Facebook to stifle any line of inquiry that runs contrary to whatever dominant narrative has been blessed by the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world, it was none other than the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983, that confirmed our suspicions saying that “the virus was man-made.”

We then reported in April that Professor Luc Montagnier, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and added that the Wuhan laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine.

This is the same conclusion we explored months before the mainstream media when we suggested that COVID-19 may have emerged from a lab in Wuhan instead of being man-made. For being early in what is increasingly looking like a very accurate assertion, a Buzzfeed journalist wrote a hit-piece about Zero Hedge that resulted in us being banned from Twitter.

But here we stand, months later. We have since been reinstated on Twitter and the journalist in question has been  fired for plagiarism after BuzzFeed‘s new editor-in-chief, Mark Schoofs, published “A Note To Our Readers” detailing eleven instances where he lifted content from other publications without attribution going back to 2013, including his hit-piece against Zero Hedge.

Our lab origin “conspiracy theory” has gained widespread support and is the focus of several international investigations into the CCP lab. And just this week, we found out that and the HIV link that we first reported on months ago, and followed up on last month, continues to only get stronger.

As the mainstream media desperately plays catch-up, The New York Times released a piece yesterday called “How the Coronavirus Short-Circuits the Immune System” and said that “In a disturbing parallel to H.I.V., the coronavirus can cause a depletion of important immune cells, recent studies found.”

“Now researchers have discovered yet another unpleasant surprise. In many patients hospitalized with the coronavirus, the immune system is threatened by a depletion of certain essential cells, suggesting eerie parallels with H.I.V.,” the article says. 

The assertions could explain why few kids get sick and why a “cocktail” of treatments may be needed to bring the coronavirus under control, similar to how H.I.V. is treated. 

Dr. John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania said that research now points to “very complex immunological signatures of the virus.” The NY Times wrote: 

In May, Dr. Wherry and his colleagues posted online a paper showing a range of immune system defects in severely ill patients, including a loss of virus-fighting T cells in parts of the body.

In a separate study, the investigators identified three patterns of immune defects, and concluded that T cells and B cells, which help orchestrate the immune response, were inactive in roughly 30 percent of the 71 Covid-19 patients they examined. None of the papers have yet been published or peer reviewed.

Researchers in China have reported a similar depletion of T cells in critically ill patients, Dr. Wherry noted. But the emerging data could be difficult to interpret, he said — “like a Rorschach test.”

“It is hard to separate the effects of simply being critically ill and in an I.C.U., which can cause havoc on your immune system,” Wherry continued.

The researchers found that the immune system could actually become impaired because it overreacts to the virus, as happens in sepsis patients. They found that in Covid-19 patients, there was a marked increase in a molecule called IP10, which sends T cells to where they are needed in the body. Patients with coronavirus, as well as SARS and MERS, see a level of IP10 molecules that go up and stay up, which can create “chaotic signaling” in the body. 

Dr. Adrian Hayday, an immunologist at King’s College London said: “It’s like Usain Bolt hearing the starting gun and starting to run. Then someone keeps firing the starting gun over and over. What would he do? He’d stop, confused and disoriented.”

This causes some T-cells, usually prepared to destroy the virus, to become confused and act “abberrantly”. Recovery becomes tougher for those over 40 because the thymus gland, which is responsible for creating new T-cells, becomes less efficient. In kids, the thymus glad works much better. 

An overreaction of the immune system, causing things like a cytokine storm, may also be able to be treated by blocking a molecule called ID6, which helps organize immune cells. 

“There clearly are some patients where IL-6 is elevated, and so suppressing it may help. But the core goal should be to restore and resurrect the immune system, not suppress it,” Hayday said. 

Hayday believes an antiviral treatment may make the most sense, given the newfound information: “I have not lost one ounce of my optimism. A vaccine would be great. But with the logistics of its global rollout being so challenging, it’s comforting to think we may not depend on one.”

Recall, we had previously written that the South China Morning Post reported a study by Chinese scientists found that the novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV. Specifically, both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by the immune system to identify invaders, we noted.

The researchers warned that this commonality could mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like HIV.

We wrote in May:

And here is where things gets very messy for the frauds known as “fact-checkers” who – without any actual facts or knowledge – threw up all over our February report that the coronavirus shared genetic material with HIV: while the mainstream media did everything in its power to censor any suggestions that Covid and HIV having genetic similarities (after all who wants to be threatened by an airborne version of AIDS) now it is none other than the South China Morning Post which writes that “earlier studies found the spike protein of the new coronavirus had a structure that allowed it to enter many types of human cells and bind with them. The same structure was also found in HIV, but not in other coronaviruses found in animals such as bats and pangolins.”

At this point, the New York Times and the SCMP appear to have pointed out all the exact same facts – that the coronavirus not only shares genetic material with HIV, but also evades and cripples the immune system in a similar way to HIV – that got the “highly respected” StatNews to accuse Zero Hedge of spreading an “infodemic.”

As we said last month:

“We wonder if StatNews author John Gregory will append his “analysis” now that actual “facts” have emerged showing that it’s not the infodemic we should be afraid of, but the censordemic.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NzZxnp Tyler Durden

Europe On Alert After Unknown Radioactivity Spike Detected Over Baltic Sea

Europe On Alert After Unknown Radioactivity Spike Detected Over Baltic Sea

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 17:00

Almost a year ago Russia admitted to releasing significant amounts of radiation into the air that triggered warning alerts in the region of the far north Arctic Circle port cities of Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk, after a failed weapons test involving a “small-scale nuclear reactor” that killed Russian scientists – which was believed connected to Russia’s hypersonics program. 

We can’t help but recall that incident now with new reports of radiation sensors based in Scandinavia again picking up abnormal radioactivity levels in the air. Perhaps there’s some further failed weapons tests happening somewhere in the region?: 

“Radiation sensors in Stockholm have detected higher-than-usual but still harmless levels of isotopes produced by nuclear fission, probably from somewhere on or near the Baltic Sea, a body running a worldwide network of the sensors said on Friday,” Reuters reports.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) confirmed the higher than normal activity.

Its ultra-sensitive networked sensors set up across Europe and the world are capable of picking up nuclear weapons testing when it occurs anywhere around the globe.

As Reuters reports further, the Stockholm monitoring station “detected 3 isotopes; Cs-134, Cs-137 & Ru-103 associated with Nuclear fission at higher than usual levels,” according to CTBTO chief Lassina Zerbo, who made the announcement on Friday. 

The additional particles were picked up by the sensors last Monday and Tuesday, and confirmed by the nuclear monitoring organization. Zerbo pointed out, however, that it wasn’t at levels harmful for human health.

Russian nuclear plant in Saint Petersburg, AFP via Getty. 

“These are certainly nuclear fission products, most likely from a civil source,” the CTBTO said in a statement. “We are able to indicate the likely region of the source, but it’s outside the CTBTO’s mandate to identify the exact origin.” 

The organization further speculated that the source could have come from anywhere spanning from western Russia to Baltic countries to parts of Scandinavia. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZjAWJb Tyler Durden

Is This The Next Big Short?

Is This The Next Big Short?

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 16:30

As we reported previously, with commercial real estate failing to benefit from the rebound in overall risk over the past 3 months as a result of a tidal wave of retail bankruptcies, CMBX Series 6 – which back in March 2017 was dubbed the “Big Short 2.0” trade due to its substantial exposure to malls which were hurting long before the arrival of the pandemic…

… and especially the BBB- tranche has been stuck in purgatory, and after surging to 75, is back to where it was in mid-April as investors signal that the worst is yet to come for commercial real estate.

Of course, all of this is well-known by now, and it is safe to say that the riskier tranches of CMBX S6 are now fairly priced for even a downside scenario among retail outlets. But what about other CMBX issues, and is there another “Big Short” lurking among the various tranches, especially in the aftermath of the coronavirus shutdowns which will cripple not just retail outlets but everything from restaurants, to multi-family housing (as city renters flee for the suburbs), to offices and hotels.

In our view, the answer to all those seeking the next Big Short is CMBX 9. This is what we wrote +:

… with CMBX 6 now done, keep a close eye on CMBX 9. With its outlier exposure to hotels which have quickly emerged as the most impacted sector from the pandemic, this may well be the next big short.

Fast forward a few weeks, when commercial real estate analytics specialist Trepp seems to agree with us.

As Trepp’s Manus Clancy writes in a blog post on Friday, “the COVID-related volatility over the last three months has resulted in growing interest over CMBX as a way to take positions on US commercial real estate. This week we are back to hone in on CMBX 9.“

Below are some of the reasons why CMBX 9 – which so far is off-limits to the Fed’s blatant bailouts of most, but not all, asset classes – may be the cleanest and safest way to bet on the devastation resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Courtesy of Trepp:

What Makes CMBX 9 Unique?

For one, it’s the only CMBX index backed by 2015 deals. Before the COVID-19 crisis began, the last meaningful hiccup in CMBS lending came in early 2016. In late 2015, volatility in the US equity markets picked up considerably and oil prices fell to under $30 a barrel. The sharp price decline in black gold led investors to fear a wave of forthcoming bankruptcies from energy companies.

That fear led to a sharp repricing of credit in the leveraged loan market and that widening had a gravitational pull on CMBS, dragging spreads wider over the course of two months. That widening in CMBS led to an abrupt pause to CMBS lending leading to a standstill in issuance in Q1 2016.

The 2015 CMBX 9 reference obligations consist of deals issued before any of that drama emerged. (The 2016 oil downturn in CMBS also led to several defaults of hotel and multifamily loans backed by “man-camps” in the shale regions of North Dakota and elsewhere.)

Other Attributes of CMBX 9?

It has the highest concentration of multifamily loans of any CMBX series with 14.7%. (The only other series that is close is CMBX 13 with 14.1%.)

CMBX 9 also has the highest concentration of hotel loans with 16.7%. (CMBX 11 is next with 13.8%.) In terms of protection premiums, CMBX 9 BBB- costs about 725 basis points to insure. That’s well inside of the 925 basis points for CMBX 8 BBB- but wider than the 675 for CMBX 10 BBB-. (Those spread levels are from IHS Markit).

For comparison purposes, CMBX 9 BBB- ended 2019 with a spread of 310 basis points. So there has been about 400 basis points of widening since the beginning of the year.

As of June 2020, 9.8% of the collateral behind CMBX 9 is 30 or more days delinquent. That puts the index slightly ahead of the average CMBS delinquency rate as of June.

Another 6.6% of the loans behind CMBX 9 missed their June payment, but were not yet 30 days late – so there is room for the delinquency rate to move higher over the summer. (Those percentages include defeased loans in the denominator of the calculation.)

The pool of defeased loans totals 4.5% by loan balance. In addition, 23% of the collateral pool is on servicer watchlist and another 5.1% of the collateral pool is with the special servicer.

CMBX Background

For background, CMBX is a set of indexes administered by Markit Partners. There are 13 separate indexes – the first five were launched prior to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

When the markets are functioning, a new series is rolled out every 18 to 24 months by Markit. Each series allows an investor to buy protection (“go short”) or sell protection (“go long”) on a bucket of 25 separate tranches. An investor can go long or short on AAA, AA, A, BBB- or BB.  To buy protection, a buyer pays a fixed premium each month – the premium level is set when the index is launched. If selling protection, the seller is committing to “insuring” the buyer of protection against any bond writedowns.

The price of the index fluctuates up and down – up when the perceived likelihood of losses is low and down when perceived creditworthiness is low. Since the COVID-19 crisis began, prices have been trending lower. The lower down the credit stack, the bigger the price drop.

Within a series – say, CMBX 13 –  the same 25 deals are represented across all ratings classes. (So for the CMBX 13 AAA index, it will be the AAA tranches from 25 deals that serve as “reference obligations.”  For the CMBX 13 BBB-, it will be the BBB- tranches from the same 25 deals.)  All deals that serve as reference obligations are US conduit deals.

For historical reference, for many of the deals used for reference obligations in 2006 and 2007 saw meaningful losses, with some deals seeing losses erase even the AA classes of some deals. (The ABX indexes got most of the attention during the GFC, but those that “shorted” CMBX BBB- from some of the pre-crisis CMBX indexes made out handsomely as well.) In fact, for CMBX 5 BBB-, 22 of the 25 reference tranches suffered 100% losses.

* * *

Finally, for those asking, yes there is a lot of potential downside for CMBX Series 9 BBB-. In fact, if the hotel world suffers a perfect storm of pent up defaults coupled with a second wave of covid which send the hotel industry into another tailspin, the potential downside here could be even greater than for Series 6.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Vlb3Hy Tyler Durden

How The Bottom-Up Bailout Will Impact The Future

How The Bottom-Up Bailout Will Impact The Future

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 16:00

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

The lockdown of the economy by government order is proving to be a blunder of epic proportions.  Coronavirus is still on the loose.  Yet, as a result of the lockdown, the economy’s been destroyed.

Take the housing market, for instance.  According to a report from Black Knight, 4.3 million U.S. borrowers were more than 30 days late on a mortgage payment in May.  What’s more, over 8 percent of all U.S. mortgages were either past due or in foreclosure.

The succession is real simple. 

  • First, the economy was shut down by government order.

  • Second, about 47 million people filed for unemployment claims over a 14-week period. 

  • Third, people stopped paying their mortgage.

Here in the ‘land of fruits and nuts’ the trend is also moving in the wrong direction.  In May, 6.85 percent of California mortgages were estimated to be “non-current.”  This troubled-loan category is composed of mortgages with missed payments plus those formally in the foreclosure process.

When the year started, only 2.1 percent of California mortgages were non-current.  Thus, in just six months, the rate of non-current mortgages has jumped 228 percent.  Nationally, 7.76 percent of mortgages are non-current.

The housing market’s difficulties typify the consequences of an overleveraged economy.  With vast numbers of people up to their eyeballs in debt, all it took was a brief pause in cash flows and the debt structure broke down.  To add insult, this is a government sponsored problem…

What Comes Next?

Through the wheelings and dealings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government sponsored enterprises, lenders have an endless demand for mortgages.  Fannie and Freddie buy up the mortgages from lenders and either hold them in their portfolios or package them up into mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

If you recall, Fannie and Freddie were given a several hundred billion dollar bailout during the 2008-09 financial crisis.  Now, just over a decade later, the fermentations of another bailout are brewing.  The CARES Act was merely the warm up.

As noted above, mortgage payment fundamentals have rapidly turned negative.  Over the next several months the progression will advance from late and missed payments to mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

Without question, there will be another monster bailout.  But this bailout is bigger than just Fannie and Freddie or even the big banks.  This bailout is about a futile attempt to paper over American homelessness and poverty.  But what comes next?

Almost no one has considered the consequences of another monster bailout.  Will it be inflationary?  What will it do to the economy?  What will it do to the stock market?  How will it influence the price of gold or the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note?

These questions are not met with obvious answers.  We’ve been contemplating them for years without coming to any satisfying conclusions.  The best we can do is draw from the past, consider what’s different about the present, and make interpolations and guesses about impacts to the future.

Using this methodology, we offer the following ruminations…

How the Bottom Up Bailout Will Impact the Future

The 2008-09 mortgage bailout marked the start of a major bull market in U.S. stocks.  This was partly because the Fed pushed the federal funds rate to zero and swapped cash for the trash toxic assets of securitized mortgage debt.  This flooded the financial system with liquidity.

The future is now approaching.  But what will the future bring?  Namely, what type of bailout will the Fed, in concert with the Treasury, deliver?  Will it be another top down bailout similar to 2008-09?  Or will it be something entirely different?

We contend that it will be something dramatically different.  This time around it’s no longer politically expedient for only the government sponsored enterprises and the big banks to get a bailout.  The people are on to the Fed’s money games and demand a bailout too.

By this, the bailout will be from the bottom up.  The Treasury will provide cash stimulus check payments – or directly credit bank accounts – to renters and homeowners so they can share in the spoils of a bailout.

Fannie and Freddie already have CARES Act programs to help those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic…including a moratorium on foreclosure and eviction until at least August 21, 2020.  What you may not know is that this moratorium date has already been extended twice.  Perhaps it’ll continue to be extended until ample government stimulus checks are beings sent out to the American populace on a monthly basis.

Our guess is that this sort of bottom up bailout will be less bullish for stocks.  Though it will have a much more dramatic effect on consumer price inflation.  In other words, the dollar will lose purchasing power against real goods and services.  And eventually it’ll buckle, along with American living standards.

Moreover, the fantasyland world where the government pays everyone’s rent and mortgage, along with free school, free drugs, and free food, will be less sublime than what’s advertised. 

Countless governments have tried throughout the ages.  Without fail, these pursuits of miracles and purple fairy dust solutions always end in tears.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YDNGet Tyler Durden

More Adults Than Ever Live With Parents Or Grandparents

More Adults Than Ever Live With Parents Or Grandparents

Tyler Durden

Sat, 06/27/2020 – 15:30

An absolutely shocking, new report via Zillow this month estimates 2.7 million adults moved in with a parent or grandparent in March and April as virus pandemic lockdowns crushed the economy. 

The Zillow analysis shows 32 million adults lived with a parent or grandparent as of April, or about 10% of the entire population lives in their parent’s basement, the highest on record. 

Many of those who moved back home in March and April, 2.2 million, were jobless millennials:  

Employment and living situations among this young age group are generally the most in flux even in normal times, and the added uncertainty of the pandemic and future employment prospects makes this group even vulnerable to volatile swings in job and housing markets. Normally, the living arrangements of the 18-25 age group is quite seasonal (because of college terms and/or seasonal work), with a smaller share living at home in the spring months than in the summer months: Typically, 53%-to-55% of these adults live at home in April, compared to 55%-to-57% in July. But this April, that share surged as high as 61%, an unprecedented level.

But while students returning home after the nationwide closure of college campuses this spring is undoubtedly driving some of this surge, young adults were overwhelmingly driven back home by the major labor market swing in the wake of COVID-19. The number of employed young adults (aged 18-25) fell by more than 25%, or 5.9 million, in March and April. Roughly 60% of these workers that became unemployed in these months continued to look for employment, but more than 2 million were officially counted as no longer in the labor force. And while recently unemployed young people moved back home at roughly the same rate as usual (about 60% of them typically live with parents) the total number of them is bigger than ever. 

Its not just newly jobless young Americans that are moving back home. Before the pandemic, almost half (46.5%) of employed young adults already lived in a parent’s home; by this April, the share had risen to 49%. Those who ceased looking for work altogether or were not in the labor force already, including a large number of students, were even more likely to move back home, adding another million-plus young adults to the ranks of homeward-bound movers. – Zillow 

The great migration home, more precisely, to their parent’s basement, has been a major headache for landlords who now face lost rent. Zillow said Gen Zers who returned home in March and April represent lost rental income of $726 million a month. 

The New York Times used Zillow data to show rental market losses by geographic area due to folks moving back home during the pandemic. 

The trend of broke millennials moving home began well before the pandemic but has since been supercharged by the economic crash. 

Over the years – we’ve noted the growing population of basement-dwelling millennials: 

With no economic recovery in sight, maybe not until 2023 – expect more adults to move back home. This will have severe impacts on the economy – as consumption will slow – and the rental industry will flounder. The socio-economic collapse of this country will lead to years of slow growth and high unemployment. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3eGhqNp Tyler Durden