Month: October 2020

Summary:

• BoJo weighs one-month lockdown
• US reports record new cases
• North Dakota worst-hit state
• New cases in Iran fall
• China reports 33 new cases
• Poland reports 21k new cases
• Brazil strikes deal to buy Chinese vaccine

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As countries across Europe continue to step up COVID-19-related restrictions (most recently, Belgium announced what might be the Continent’s most restrictive lockdown  since the start of the second wave), UK Prime Minister Boris  Johnson is reportedly considering a month-long national lockdown across England, which would start next week.

According to British press reports, Johnson will meet with his top advisors and government officials on Saturday to discuss the pros and cons of such an arrangement. The return to restrictions in accordance with the country’s 3-tiered system has already inspired significant public anger, particularly in the Greater Manchester area and other pockets facing Tier 3 – ie the most restrictive – rules.

Hospitalizations have surged across the UK, while deaths have started to creep higher. Though it trails Spain and France in overall cases, the UK is on the verge of crossing the million-case mark. After reporting another 24,418 cases, yesterday, the UK has a total of 992,878.

Across the pond, the situation wasn’t much better. The US reported 99,325 new cases Friday, the most for any country in a single day as infections and hospitalizations surged in the runup to Tuesday’s election. The total number of cases in the country exceeded 9 million. North Dakota continues to show the highest rate per 100,000 residents, though its overall numbers are still relatively low compared to its low population. The state reported 1,357 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Friday, eclipsing the record set one day earlier by 135 cases. Total deaths, meanwhile eclipsed the 500 mark with 13 new deaths reported Friday.

Source: mSightly

As we reported yesterday, the US passed the 9 million case mark yesterday after reporting a record 99,321 new cases, according to Johns Hopkins.

As we head into the weekend, here’s some more news from Saturday morning and overnight:

With the U.S. reporting almost 100,000 new cases on Friday just days ahead of the election, North Dakota led the increase in infections with a 6.8% rise in cases to almost 43,916, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg. Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana and Missouri had the next-biggest increases, ranging from 4.2% to 3.1%. Colorado, Kansas and Wisconsin all showed 2.4% increases. Texas reported the most new deaths at 109 (Source: Bloomberg).

The number of new infections in Iran fell for a second day to 7,820 after reaching a record on Thursday. The Health Ministry reported 386 more deaths from Covid-19 overnight, taking the total to 34,864. The country’s national coronavirus taskforce announced a series of closures across Tehran and two dozen other major cities (Source: Bloomberg).

Greece is taking further steps to contain the spread of the coronavirus after a surge this week saw daily cases surpass 1,000 for the first time since March. The country will be divided into two zones — high risk and under surveillance — with northern Greece and the capital, Athens, and its region in the first category. “We must act now before intensive care units bend under the weight of endangered lives,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said (Source: Bloomberg).

Belgium reported 1,105 patients in intensive care units on Saturday, up 48 from the previous day and near the peak reached during the first wave of the outbreak. The nation of 11 million people, which hosts the European Union’s main institutions and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, announced a lockdown Friday amid fears that its healthcare system could be overwhelmed (Source: Bloomberg).

Infections in Poland increased by 21,897 on Friday, and deaths rose by 280 to 5,631, according to the Health Ministry. More than 500,000 people are in quarantine in the country. The increases come after government employees were ordered to work from home for two weeks, with private companies also encouraged to send staff home (Source: Bloomberg).

Mainland China reports 33 new COVID-19 cases on Oct. 30, up from 25 a day earlier, the country’s national health authority said on Saturday (Source: Nikkei).

A “politically intoxicated” environment makes it difficult to probe the origins of the new coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, says the World Health Organization’s top emergency expert, Mike Ryan (Source: Nikkei) .

Brazil’s government will “of course” buy a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine that is being tested in the country, Vice President Hamilton Mourao said on Friday, in the latest example of him contradicting President Jair Bolsonaro (Source: Nikkei).

With Election Day looming just around the corner, America’s biggest cities and joining America’s biggest social media networks in battening down the hatches in preparation for any unrest that might follow the vote count.

In Midtown Manhattan, the site of some of the worst looting in the country during the worst of the George Floyd riots, Macy’s and other stores are hammering plywood over their doors and windows.

“Our windows at Macy’s Herald Square were previously scheduled to be dark next week in set-up for our annual holiday displays. Out of an abundance of caution, we are implementing additional security measures at several of our stores,” a company spokesman said in a statement reportedly emailed to NBC New York.

Despite the new window dressing, Macy’s says it intends to continue operating during normal business hours (though potential customers might be dissuaded by all the plywood).

NBC also reported that boards were going up at the T-Mobile store in Times Square.

Boards also going up at the T-Mobile store in Times Square #nbc4ny pic.twitter.com/llwuKvS6Kt

— Steven Bognar (@Bogs4NY) October 30, 2020

Boards are also going up in Washington DC and LA, the site of a recent wave of protests following a police shooting of an armed black man.

CNBC’s Eamon Javers shared photos of businesses putting up plywood barriers in downtown Washington DC.

The neighborhood around the White House is preparing for unrest as businesses scrambled to put up boards, fences, chains and other barriers.

One Twitter user shared photos of downtown LA, where, he claimed, “so many businesses boarded up & in the process of boarding up. Same thing happening in Beverly HIlls & Santa Monica in anticipation of election night. All 3 areas hit hard by looters & rioters during the George Floyd unrest.”

We’re beginning to see a pattern here. Many of the neighborhoods around the country resorting to putting up plywood and other fortifications already learned their lesson back in the Spring.

In San Francisco, the city’s tallest building, Salesforce Tower, has covered all of its ground floor windows in plywood, according to tweets from a local journalist.

In Seattle, the area formerly known as “CHAZ/CHOP” isn’t taking any chances.

Further out in the suburbs, strip malls in Bellevue, Wash. apparently aren’t taking any chances.

Finally, business owners in “progressive” Portland aren’t taking any chances.

Good morning from an eerily quiet #Portland, Oregon—one of the major American cities preparing for any scenario in the wake of Tuesday’s #USElection. We’ll be on the ground all week covering the latest developments in #Oregon for @GlobalNational, and all @globalnews platforms. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/i3IjJINinp

— Sarah MacDonald (@smacdonald__) October 30, 2020

One of the many interesting market trends this year is the rising cost of lumber and once-cheap plywood. In addition to terrorizing minority-owned businesses and neighborhoods, looters and rioters are also driving up the cost of building a new home in cities suffering from a desperate shortage of housing stock.

Of course, if the election does end up being contested, we suspect prices for lumber and other materials would soar.

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

Amidst all the posturing, fretting and craziness leading up to the election on Tuesday the thing that jumped out of my Twitter feed was this 2 minute video from PressTV.

Watch it. I’ll wait.

#Iran plans to use #cryptocurrency to evade US sanctions pic.twitter.com/eAZl0nIQWc

— Press TV (@PressTV) October 25, 2020

… Done? Good.

Let’s get started.

This came from Press TV, the Iranian equivalent of the BBC but without so much British Marxism. So, it’s as official as official gets.

Iran will use bitcoin as part of its import settlement system. It will export bitcoins and import things barred to it from the U.S.

Do you really think this policy will stop here?

The video reminds us that Iran has been building this case for the use of bitcoin to evade U.S. sanctions for years. This is a strategic move, not a fly-by-night operation like Venezuela’s Petro.

They could have gone the China or European Union route, push for a Central Bank Digital Currency completely controlled by the government.

You know, the worst possible arrangement, a cryptocurrency run by central bankers, i.e. Ripple.

But that would gain them nothing. Who would use a digital rial when no one wants the current rial?

Instead Iran embraced bitcoin because it had no other choice. The rial has been effectively destroyed by U.S. sanctions and the country is starving for a currency which accretes value to the user rather than steals it.

China and the EU both have pretensions to global power, Iran does not, or at least hasn’t revealed itself to harbor them. Their CBDCs will hit the ground with built-in demand which Iran cannot match nor has the infrastructure to implement.

They are in survival mode here, taking the brunt of the U.S. assault on the forming alliance between it, Russia and China. But it is also a kind of rope-a-dope strategy.

And for that reason bitcoin is the smart choice for the government there to embrace if it has any hope of regaining the confidence of both the people and its trading partners.

Converting bitcoins to dollars on the open market is trivial and something that cannot be tracked by prying Five Eyes.

This move validates the arguments so many in the crypto-community, including myself, have been making against Bitcoin’s detractors, who argue without any justification that if bitcoin were to become important they would just ban it.

How do you ban something you don’t control?

Bitcoin is still ‘illegal’ in Iran just as much as it’s illegal in other places around the world, if not moreso.

And yet? Iran is now openly trading in it.

They will try to keep it from freely circulating. The devil is in the details of what Iran is proposing here. You can mine bitcoin locally and use it to pay for imports but only through the Central Bank.

Of course the government wants to control the flow of bitcoin into and out of the Iranian economy. But this scheme is, like all government attempts at control, meta-stable.

The natural outgrowth of this is bitcoin competing in the open market locally for goods and services, regardless of the legality of it. But this will be a boon for Iran, who can now act as an international clearing house for money the U.S. can’t control.

This is a real-world use case for bitcoins in a world of financial repression and control. It jumps bitcoin from a store of value, where it resides now because of government restrictions on its use through tax policy to a medium of exchange for mediums of exchange.

Iran does this while the IMF is working on a digital SDR — the currency based on its reserves — that will only flow between central banks. This is a clear move to consolidate the financial power of the world in the unelected technocracy.

It’s a small step from here to Iran accepting bitcoins for oil and gas exports, if they aren’t doing so already behind the scenes. And further validates the core values of decentralization and the power of private assets and free markets.

President Trump continues to make the dollar more expensive for people around the world to use. This undermines the dollar’s greatest strength, its universality, liquidity and price.

Only an asset with zero counter-party risk can protect people during the upcoming chaos of The Davos Crowd’s Great Reset, and the global push for financial control.

Watching the monthly closes today we’re seeing bitcoin decoupling from the rest of the financial world. Stocks across the west are down, U.S. treasuries hammered on the long-end of the yield curve.

Oil is signaling the vaunted ‘reflation trade’ is dead closing below $40. The patient just died.

Speaking of patients near their end, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this at yesterday’s presser

Speaker Pelosi: “I feel very confident that Joe Biden will be elected President on Tuesday. Whatever the end count is on the election that occurs on Tuesday, he will be elected, on January 20th he will be inaugurated President.” pic.twitter.com/NNGAeiKSxP

— The Hill (@thehill) October 29, 2020

This is as clear a warning as you can get that no matter how we vote on Tuesday here in the States the outcome of this election will be determined by the people who hold the commanding heights and not us.

Is this really a recipe for continued faith in the current system? How do the costs for using the dollar go down in a world where pols determine elections and not the voters?

While the Dow Jones is headed for a very bearish monthly close

and the dollar is reversing off its lows as well…

Bitcoin is pushing up against the top of its four-year consolidation range to close out October at $13,550. This will be the second highest monthly close in Bitcoin’s history.

And traffic on the network is at an all-time high.

Source: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,6m

The question I have for you now is, “Who’s the more desperate, the fool or the fool who goes his own way?” Iran needs bitcoin far more than bitcoin needs Iran.

Necessity is the mother of innovation. While everyone in power desperately tries to hold onto it the people always flee from chaos to stability.

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The large Jewish community in Nice, France is on edge this weekend following the horrific beheading of an elderly woman and the fatal stabbing of two others at the city’s Notre Dame church on Thursday.

The killer has been identified as 21-year old migrant Brahim Issaoui who recently arrived from Tunisia. The man had shouted “Allahu Akbar” just before police shot him. The man had been carrying a Koran. French President Emmanuel Macron said in the wake of the attack that “France is under attack from Islamist terrorists.” 

“We are being attacked [for] our values: Freedom and the refusal to give in to terrorism,” he added of the second major Islamic terror attack this month. More than two weeks ago teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in a northern Paris suburb after showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his students.

Multiple Middle East countries, including Lebanon and Pakistan witnessed large Muslim protests in front of the French embassies in the countries Friday. Macron is being called “anti-Islamic” as tensions mount in a very similar way to what triggered the Charlie Hebdo killings. The January 7, 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre left 12 people dead after the newspaper published a series of cartoons perceived as mocking the founder of Islam Muhammad.

Recall too that the three day long Charlie Hebdo related violence in 2015 ended when a terrorist held 19 hostages at a Jewish supermarket during a standoff with police. Four Jewish shoppers had been murdered before the standoff was over, as CNN recounts:

Three days of violence began with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had previously published controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. They ended with a siege at a kosher supermarket.

Seventeen people were killed and long-simmering tensions over secularism, Islamism and religious equality erupted into public view.

Protests outside the French Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Protesters turn violent forcing police to use tear-gas shells. No protest against terrorism? pic.twitter.com/sGCJQxhCyQ

— Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) October 30, 2020

And now the Times of Israel reports that synagogues and Jewish schools are temporarily shutting down on fears another attack:

The Jewish community of Nice, France, is keeping its 15 synagogues and three schools closed and increasing security around kosher shops following the killing of three people in a church by a man shouting “God is great” in Arabic.

“We have decided to close all the schools tomorrow,” the chief rabbi of Nice, Franck-Daniel Teboul, told Israel’s Channel 13 Thursday. “The synagogues will also be closed. Kosher shops are on alert.”

“We’re all feeling threatened,” the rabbi said further.

More broadly French citizens living or traveling abroad have also been warned by the government that they could be under threat. 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A security guard who was alerted to the suspicious behavior of Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi 6 minutes before the terrorist blew himself up says he didn’t report Abedi for fear of being branded “racist”.

Kyle Lawler told an inquiry into the incident, which left 22 people dead and more than 800 wounded, many of them children, that he had received training in what to look out for.

Lawler said Abedi was sitting with “group of white people” and was acting “slightly nervous”. The security guard added that he had a “bad feeling” about the terrorist and felt he “did not belong there”.

However, Lawler failed to alert superiors because he was “scared of being wrong and being branded a racist” and thought he would get into trouble for “judging someone by their race”.

As we previously highlighted, another eyewitness to Abedi’s suspicious behavior reported the activity to security guard Mohammad Agha 17 minutes before the bomb was detonated but said he was “fobbed off”.

Both Lawler and Agha failed to properly inform security control.

Another woman interviewed by Sky News in the days after the attack also revealed that she reported a woman who was acting suspiciously and fidgeting with her bag to security but they did nothing.

“She was looking in the direction of where the explosion actually happened and smirking to herself all night,” said the woman, adding that the suspect spoke with a foreign accent.

The eyewitness said she was lectured by security for making the suspect feel “uncomfortable.” The suspect then disappeared minutes before the concert finished.

This is yet another clear example of how political correctness literally kills.

Abedi was a refugee rescued by the Royal Navy from the civil war in Libya in 2014.

“He boarded the HMS Enterprise in Tripoli in August 2014 with his younger brother Hashem and more than 100 other British citizens,” reported the Guardian.

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Sir Sean Connery, the celebrated Scottish actor who will forever be associated with James Bond, the MI6 agent also known as “007” whom he portrayed in 7 films, has died. He was 90

With roguish charm and sophistication, Connery inaugurated the long-running James Bond franchise with 1962’s Dr. No and remained the prototypical “Bond” for decades, even – for many – until this very day.

 

Thomas Sean Connery was born in the Fountainbridge area of Edinburgh on Aug. 25 1930, the son of a Catholic factory worker and a Protestant housekeeper.

As the BBC reports in a lengthy biography published minutes after news of Connery’s death broke, Connery “began life in an Edinburgh tenement and ended it with a villa in Greece, sharing a helicopter pad with the King of the Netherlands.”

“Always hating the Hollywood lifestyle, he preferred to play golf at his homes in Spain, Portugal and the Caribbean, with his second wife, Micheline Roqubrune, an artist he had met in Morocco,” the BBC said.

“He attributed his short fuse and his ‘moodiness’ to his Celtic genes. “My view is that to get anywhere in life you have to be anti-social,” he once said. “Otherwise you’ll end up being devoured.”

But despite these quirks, Connery remains an icon of Scottish culture, and the definitive “Bond”, even as Daniel Craig returns for another film, “No Time To Die”, set to be released next year.

Fun fact: Bond author Ian Fleming initially hated Connery, reviling him as an unrefined and overgrown stuntman, but he he changed his mind after seeing Dr. No and even inserted Scottish heritage into ​Bond’s background in subsequent novels.​

Last night, after a 16-day blackout, Twitter finally relented and released the NY Post’s account from ‘Twitter jail’, punishment for the paper’s work publishing stories about Hunter Biden’s financial dealings in Ukraine and China. Some of the emails clearly contradicted Hunter Biden father’s claims that he had never discussed business with his son.

On the contrary, it was later revealed, Joe Biden was “the big man”, a “Godfather”-like figure overseeing the business dealings of his son, and his brother, Jim Biden, from a relatively safe distance. As former Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski affirmed, the Bidens saw Hunter’s dealings abroad as part and parcel of the family business. “They were putting the Biden name on the line,” Bobulinski said.

For the last two weeks, big tech and their allies in the mainstream media have been dreaming up every excuse imaginable to continue censoring the Hunter Biden stories. Meanwhile, a network of conservative blogs led by a new Chinese news site called G-News have released an unceasing stream of pornographic images purporting to show Hunter Biden using drugs and engaging in sexual acts.

But after Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai were dragged in front of a Senate Committee this week and mercilessly pounded by Ted Cruz, followed by a historic selloff in Twitter shares on Friday, it seems the entire mainstream media ecosystem has finally run out of excuses, and just like that, Hunter Biden and the issue of foreign corruption exposing the former VP to international blackmail is back on the table.

In a video report, ABC New’ Tom Llamas confronts Biden in person and lobs several hardball questions about the Hunter Biden scandal. Did Joe Biden allow his son to earn millions in shady deals in foreign countries.

“It’s a question we tried to ask repeatedly…but kept getting blocked.”

The questions were about deals involving Hunter Biden in countries where his father was “working as America’s top diplomat”.

Delving deeper into the backstory than any mainstream media report we’ve seen, ABC explains how Joe Biden was dispatched to Kiev to fight the “cancer of corruption” as civil war broke out.

But then something strange happened: “just three weeks later, a Ukrainian national gas company, Burisma, which had been accused of corruption, promotes Hunter Biden to its board, and paid his firm millions of dollars a year.”

Llamas pointed out that the younger Biden had just been discharged from the Navy reserves for testing positive for cocaine, and that although he had sat on corporate boards before, he had no experience in the natural gas business.

Watch the full report below:

Woah ABC pic.twitter.com/dSetIbGcQF

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 31, 2020

It’s difficult to understate what ABC News has done here: With one five-minute segment, they have broken the mainstream media blackout on the Hunter Biden story, with just days to go before the election.

Will ABC News be the James Comey of 2020? We’ll have to wait and see.

Taking a page out of Beijing’s playbook, the tiny Central European nation of Slovakia, which was one of the last countries in Europe to confirm its first COVID-19 case thanks to early efforts to stop travel to the small country of 5.5 million, is rolling out a campaign to test all of its residents.

Using cheap antibody tests, the state is using a two-stage process, encouraged by turnout of more than 90% at a pilot testing drive last weekend, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic.

The PM  is pushing the idea as an alternative to reimposing the measures.

“We will save hundreds of lives,” he said this week.

Slovakia’s approach is interesting because it in effect makes it the first country to embrace an alternative to lockdowns and new ‘quasi-lockdowns’ like those being introduced in France, the UK and Germany. While most testing uses expensive and time-consuming PCR kits, Slovakia will rely on cheaper antibody tests that can be administered anywhere. The EU’s members will be closing watching the ‘experiment’, as the bloc’s executive commission has pledged to spend €100 million ($117 million) to allow member states to purchase the rapid tests, which produce results in 15 minutes.

Anybody who doesn’t take part in the program must provide their own proof of a negative test if they want to move around within their communities.

The two-day testing program will begin on Saturday at 0700 local time and be repeated one week later.

During the pilot test last week, 4% of the 5,600 tested came back positive.

Still, the plan is facing obstacles that could make it impossible to test everybody. The government is lacking in medical personnel, despite offering a last-minute bonus for any new volunteers to man the testing stations.

“It’s clear that hundreds of thousands of people won’t be able to get a test,” she said Friday in Bratislava. “I’ve asked the premier to carry out the tests where handling of samples is arranged. But I’ve also asked him to review the curfew rules and not punish those” without a test.

Some of the prime ministers’ political opponents have criticized him, saying the testing effort is an attempt to shore up his flagging popularity: “This isn’t an expert operation, but a political operation,” said the head of the country’s medical chamber.

But even if some Slovakians slip through the cracks, it could be an effective way to demonstrate an alternative to continuing with restrictions and mask mandates.