Month: November 2020

Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times,

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said there is “still a coup in progress” against President Donald Trump in his first public address since being pardoned by the president.

Flynn, who also served during the Obama administration as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and then as Trump’s national security adviser, warned Americans on Saturday that there is currently an “assault” on our way of life that has been going on since the beginning of Trump’s presidency.

“They’ve upped their game,” Flynn said of certain figures in the Democratic Party, which he said was so “in name only” since its shift “way over on the left.”

“When they lost in 2016, I think that there was a decision to say, ‘We’re not going to allow this to happen again,’” Flynn said of the Democratic Party’s leadership.

He then pointed to the heightened political divisiveness during the entire four years of the Trump presidency, during which time the mainstream media alongside what he described as effectively the “Democratic Socialist Party of America” have been trying to remove Trump from office.

“I mean, I think what we experienced over the last four years—and certainly in the late 2016, early 2017 period—was a very strong effort to unseat a duly elected president,” Flynn said.

He said that Trump, as a non-politician from New York, faced an unprecedented onslaught of political, technological, and also financial pressure early in his tenure to force him to walk away from politics.

“I know there was some sentiment that maybe he’ll just … say, ‘You know what, I don’t need this stuff. I got better things to do,’ and leave.

“Thank God that he didn’t,” Flynn said.

But as Trump remained in office, Flynn said the political establishment and the media continued to go after him “in any way possible,” which played out publicly in “psychological operations” such as Russia probe and House Democrats’ impeachment effort, and more recently the politicization of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic.

Now, Flynn claimed, because the Democratic Party didn’t achieve the result in the vote it needed to secure its candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, in the White House, America is seeing “theft with mail-in ballots” and “theft with this Smartmatic software and Dominion systems.”

“This is still a coup in progress,” he said.

He went further to say that the ideological cousin of America’s far-left political groups, the Chinese Communist Party, has interests in supporting such a coup.

“What we have seen is … over the last probably two decades … is a complete shift in how fast, I believe, that communist China in their long term plan decided to sort of move up their plans to become the sole global superpower on the planet.

“I believe when during the last 2016 election, when they didn’t get the candidate that they needed, and the kind of ideology that they they saw America moving towards, they were not going to allow 2020 to happen,” Flynn said, blaming the foreign-owned software systems used in the election for leaving the country vulnerable to foreign interference.

But he added, with the “hundreds and hundreds” of American patriots across the country coming forward to offer their witness testimony as affidavits to “warriors” on the legal battleground, like Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood, “I believe we’re going to see some momentum changing here.

“There already is an undercurrent of momentum shifting for the president and I believe that at the end of the day, we’re going to find out that he won by a massive landslide and he’ll be inaugurated come this January,” Flynn said, referring to the numerous legal challenges currently pending or being considered by courts in battleground states and the supreme court.

Flynn made headlines in 2017 when he was targeted by the intelligence community for charges of “Russia collusion.”

While he pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017, to one count of lying to the FBI over speaking to then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak during Trump’s 2016 transition period, Flynn later withdrew his plea, saying that it was part of a deal with prosecutors over threats of charges targeting his son. The retired general also accused the government of misconduct related to his case.

His case was used by the media to push the unsubstantiated narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to sway the outcome of the 2016 election.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the Senate Judiciary Committee said on Nov. 10 that the FBI’s motivation for pursuing Flynn was “bogus political persecution and prosecution” by those who disagree “politically with President Trump.”

The nuclear-powered USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and its strike group are in transit to the Persian Gulf where it will oversee the Trump-ordered withdrawal of up to 5,000 American troops from the region in the coming weeks and months. It’s part of Trump’s belated efforts to drastically reduce American presence from Iraq and Afghanistan and to bring the troops home.

The carrier group will provide “defensive capabilities” amid the large-scale logistical operation. While it was deployed prior to the dramatic events of the past days which has seen soaring tensions between Iran, Israel and the US over the high profile assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the deployment comes as both Iran and Israel are on ‘high alert’ and a war-footing.

“This action ensures we have sufficient capability available to respond to any threat and to deter any adversary from acting against our troops during the force reduction,” a weekend Pentagon said statement said.

Over the past week the Islamic Republic’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has stepped up its naval drills in the Strait of Hormuz, believed to be a ‘show of strength’ after widespread reports this month that Trump may be mulling preemptive military action against Iran. 

Tehran has charged that Israel was behind the Friday assassination of Fakhrizadeh in an effort to draw it into a full-blown war, which would also likely draw in the US.

However, USA Today noted the carrier deployment while coming at a tense time is not responding to any particular threat:

Navy Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the 5th Fleet, said there was no specific threat that led the carrier, its dozens of aircraft and the strike group back to the Persian Gulf. 

Carrier Nimitz Returns to Gulf as Iran Makes Threats https://t.co/6MCAwU6E19

— Military.com (@Militarydotcom) November 29, 2020

Iran has vowed retaliation, but this is likely to come as either a delayed or very limited response, considering the Iranians are also waiting out the clock on the Trump presidency, preferring to deal with Biden after January 20 instead.

Authored by Linnea Johnson via The Organic Prepper blog,

Public schools have had a chance to evaluate student attendance data and have found “missing students” between the Spring and Fall semesters of this school year.  You might ask why they are suddenly so concerned about this fact. Is it because they are concerned about students who are not getting an education? Is it because they feel the need to “protect” those students?

Or, is it because they will lose money without students in attendance? It may be some of each, but the last question could be the primary motivation for state public education departments to do a canvas of attendance over the Fall semester.

And of course, don’t forget indoctrination. That’s a lot more difficult when the kids are being educated outside “the system.”

Why do public education departments care so much? Follow the money.

Public schools receive their funding from a number of sources, most of which comes from the local (44%) and state (48%) property taxes. Federal government (8%) funding is designated to serve disadvantaged populations, including families in poverty, students who have special needs, a student population of English language learners, and teacher quality improvement programs, seen in the form of grants. (Source)

Each state has its own funding formula, but in my state, the money is allocated by the legislature and based upon a number of factors, the largest of which is student enrollment.

Well, as you can imagine, COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on student enrollment and attendance.  Many of the school districts in my state elected to do school entirely online. As a result, some parents have decided to homeschool, others don’t have reliable internet and their children cannot consistently attend online classes, and others may have left the state as their jobs evaporated with the lockdowns.

What drives getting students back into the system?

The NM Public Education Department (PED) wants to know where they’ve gone and wants to woo them back with a program called Engage NM.  Now, this program sounds quite altruistic and is funded through a partnership with NM PED and Graduation Alliance.  Graduation Alliance operates primarily in New Mexico, South Carolina, Arkansas, Kansas, Washington, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, and some school districts in Texas. Its aim is to enroll students who have dropped out of school into their accredited online program. That’s an interesting twist. Why would a public education department promote enrolling its own students in an out-of-state program that is free of charge?

In an article posted on KOAT, the New Mexico Public Education Department reveals, over 12,000 of students enrolled in the spring, have now “gone missing,” and with them the funding they generated.

“We’ve had a chance to cross reference the data when it comes to student rosters,” said NMPED cabinet secretary Ryan Stewart.

PED leaders said there are about 330,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade in New Mexico, but they estimate more than 12,000 have stopped attending class during the pandemic.

“We know that not every family has reported to the Public Education Department or if they’ve taken their student out of the public education setting,” Stewart said.

As part of a program called Engage New Mexico, PED is trying to track down these students to get them back to class in the Spring. PED is partnering with groups like CYFD and the Graduation Alliance.

“Next steps is identifying and supporting these students to make sure they are in the proper educational setting through direct outreach, through cross checking our database of information,” Stewart said.

Through Engage New Mexico, students will get an academic coach, help connecting to resources, and help with a plan to get on track and finish the year strong.

“We’re also looking to leverage our local contacts and our community relationships to find and support these students,” Stewart said.

PED officials said their goal is not to punish students, but to meet their promise to educate every New Mexican child.

How are your tax dollars being spent?

This begs the question, where does Graduation Alliance get its funding? Is there a split of federal and state education dollars between your state public education department and Graduation Alliance? Does your state share your property tax dollars with a private online education entity? Why is Graduation Alliance the approved and free “online education” source?  If Graduation Alliance can be free, why can’t an online curriculum you choose as a homeschooler be free, too?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but perhaps some of you do.

LA County has announced a new three week lockdown that will have all 10 million residents staying home except for ‘essential’ shopping, visiting a doctor or maybe a quick hike at Runyon. COVID-19 infections in California have surged, with LA reporting 4,544 new cases on Friday as residents scrambled to prepare for the new restriction.

The post-Thanksgiving lockdown took effect Friday, and will last until Dec. 20. The hope is that residents will be able to mingle more freely during the Christmas holiday. LA County reported some 4,544 new cases on Friday.

Notably, the new lockdown exempts both protests and religious services, as California liberals have apparently run out of excuses for why protests should be allowed to continue, but not every other type of gathering.

However, all public and private gatherings with individuals outside of one’s own corona-pod will be banned. The new mandate also lowers the headcount allowed in essential retail, non-essential retail, personal care facilities, libraries, outdoor gyms, museums, aquariums, recreational facilities and other businesses.

LA County’s SJW health director Barbara Ferrer told KTLA “we know we are asking a lot from so many who have been sacrificing for months on end and we hope that L.A. County residents continue following Public Health safety measures that we know can slow the spread.”

Some residents complained that the new rules didn’t make sense.

I am totally in favor of a strict lockdown to get LA County covid numbers down but the new safer at home orders don’t make any sense. I can’t spend time with the two safe people in my quaranpod to maintain my mental health but I can mix with strangers at any indoor business?

— Screaming In My Heart (@melmeldaffodil) November 29, 2020

But Ferrer warned that “acting with collective urgency right now is essential if we want to put a stop to this surge…please remain home as much as possible and do not gather with others not in your household for the next three weeks.”

Schools and day camps are also required to close if they have more than three COVID-19 cases, while gatherings at playgrounds, card rooms and outdoor dining restaurants have been banned. Anyone participating in outdoor activity must wear a mask and must be part of the same household. This, despite the large body of evidence suggesting that wearing masks outdoors has no impact on one’s vulnerability to COVID-19.

It usually takes around 2-3 weeks for new restrictions to start translating through to lower case numbers. Considering that it’s the biggest county in the state, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that LA County has the most cases and the most deaths.

Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

The composition of the US dollar, including what it is backed by, has been replaced many times throughout America’s history. And another replacement is currently underway, warns monetary expert Mike Maloney.

After President Nixon fully severed its ties to gold, our government leaders have increasingly relied on expanding the currency supply to paper over (quite literally) today’s problems at the expense of the dollar’s purchasing power tomorrow.

As Mike explains in his excellent video series Hidden Secrets Of Money, such willful debasement of the currency by furtive and shortsighted politicians is nothing new. Over thousands of years, since the Romans intentionally progressively shrank the silver content of their coins, history is replete with such examples.

And now 2020 has arrived. The Federal Reserve’s response to the pandemic-induced economic slowdown has unleashed more ‘thin air’ creation of new dollars than ever seen at any prior moment in history:

And the leading developed countries of the world are now discussing the need for a Great Reset, in which it’s being proposed that new national cryptocurrencies (perhaps laying the groundwork towards a ‘one world currency’) replace the current existing fiat versions.

Using the lens of monetary history, Mike sees all this as simply a modern spin on the same cycles the world has seen before. Politicians will deform and abuse the currency for their own immediate needs until the system collapses, and a new, more sound alternative emerges from the ashes.

Which is why he remains so confident that gold will strengthen dramatically in the coming macro environment, despite being in a short-lived corrective phase at the moment. In fact, he sees today’s weakness as an excellent accumulation opportunity for both current holders as well as those new to owning precious metals.

And that’s why Mike agrees that now, more than ever, is the time to partner with a financial advisor who understands the risks in play, can craft an appropriate portfolio strategy for you given your needs, and apply sound risk management protection where appropriate:

Anyone interested in scheduling a free consultation and portfolio review with Mike Preston and John Llodra and their team at New Harbor Financial can do so by clicking here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio still doesn’t have a plan for reopening NYC’s schools, but that’s not going to stop him from sending hundreds of thousands of elementary school students back into the classrooms starting early next month.

While Middle Schools and High Schools will remain closed, elementary schools will reopen immediately, the mayor reportedly told the NYT.

De Blasio also promised to ‘overhaul’ how the city manages schools during the pandemic, suggesting that more students would be returning to classrooms, while remote learning would start to be abandoned.

The city’s 3% 7-day positivity rate threshold for ending in-person learning will be ditched in favor of allowing parents to decide whether they want their children in classrooms for 5 days a week.

Children in pre-K and elementary school can return to classrooms beginning Dec. 7, while students with other more complex disabilities will start Dec. 10. Evidence has shown that elementary school students and students with disabilities can return to the classroom without causing much, if any, spread.

De Blasio’s decision to close schools for the second time just 8 weeks after reopening them became a flash point in a broader debate about whether closing public schools does more harm to society than good, especially after Europe made schools a priority.

Sunday’s announcement reflects a stark departure from the city’s original approach to managing the schools during the outbreak, especially by offering a plan to return students to classroom-based learning and away from ‘hybrid’ approaches.

The mayor’s new blueprint represents the city’s second shot at reopening, after the first attempt was plagued by problems and his threshold to close schools was roundly criticized by everyone from local health officials to parents.

Now, instead of using a specific metric to close schools, the city will closely monitor the number of classrooms and schools that close because of multiple confirmed cases. The mayor has long insisted that the entire public school system should reopen, and that every student, from kindergarten through 12th grade, should have the option of learning in person. But it doesn’t look like the new system will work that way.

Instead, NYC schools will operate more like other school systems, with primarily younger and less risky students receiving in person education while older more mature students who are better equipped to handle remote learning can stick with that.

 

Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,

The Chinese Communist government is stepping up its PR campaign to try and convince the world that the coronavirus did not originate in the Chinese city of Wuhan a year ago, but was brought to China from elsewhere.

Their efforts have been, at the very least creative.

Their latest gambit is to promote the story that the coronavirus traveled to China via frozen food imports – a nearly impossible feat, say epidemiologists. The communist propagandists have pointed the finger at Italy, India, and on “many continents” before the poor Chinese became victims of the coronavirus. They see China as a double victim; unwitting patients who got sick from a virus that arrived from elsewhere and then unfairly blamed for starting it.

It probably works with the Chinese masses, but with few others.

Guardian:

“Wuhan was where the coronavirus was first detected but it was not where it originated,” it quoted Zeng Guang, formerly a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying. A foreign ministry spokesman, asked about state media reports that the virus originated outside China, said only that it was important to distinguish between where Covid-19 was first detected and where it crossed the species barrier to infect humans.

“Although China was the first to report cases, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the virus originated in China,” Zhao Lijian told a briefing. “Origin tracing is an ongoing process that may involve multiple countries and regions.”

This isn’t necessarily false, but China has been resisting that kind of investigation for months. Now all of a sudden they want to cooperate with the rest of the world?

It’s just more PR flak because if investigators ever got close to the truth, China would find a way to shut it down quickly.

Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

The WHO has recently announced a full-blown investigation into the origins of the coronavirus with a blue-ribbon panel of experts heading up the project.

South China Morning Post:

The 10-person team includes public health experts, animal health specialists and virus hunters from Japan, Qatar, Germany, Vietnam, Russia, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States.

They will work alongside Chinese scientists on a set of investigations into how the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged and spilled over into humans, triggering a pandemic that has now claimed over 1.4 million lives.

Most importantly, the international team will include cutting edge scientists who study the emergence of diseases as they travel from animals to humans.

It includes several researchers who have focused on the animal and environmental roles of disease emergence – Ken Maeda of Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Vietnamese scientist Hung Nguyen, co-leader of the Animal and Human Health Programme at the International Livestock Research Institute, and virus hunter Fabian Leendertz of Germany’s Robert Koch Institut. Among them is also disease ecologist Peter Daszak, known for his research into Sars-like bat coronaviruses in southeastern China and president of US group EcoHealth Alliance. Daszak is also heading a separate task force looking into the virus origins under The Lancet scientific journal’s Covid-19 Commission.

This will be the key that unlocks the mystery of the coronavirus’s origins. The question is, will China let them get that far? After fighting for a year to shift blame for the virus origins to everyone but themselves, I find it difficult to believe that the Chinese communists will suddenly develop an interest in getting to the bottom of the coronavirus detective story. They have too much invested in lying about its origins to give up now.

Expect this team of experts to eventually give up in disgust at China’s stonewalling.

After relentlessly climbing from its March $4,900 lows, Bitcoin finally saw a modest selloff last week after rising 285% from its lows and 160% since the start of the year prompting even establishment banks such as Deutsche Bank to include it in its grouping of key asset categories…

… leading to the now traditional kneejerk response from bitcoin haters such a Nouriel Roubini, who took a bizarre 12-tweet “victory lap” late Thursday as if bitcoin dropping 20% from just shy of its $20K all time high somehow validates his forecast…

So on Thanksgiving don’t be a headless Turkey fool/sucker being duped by manipulative whales, crooks, scammers, carnival barkers, front-running criminal exchanges that just want to steal your savings/ wealth. Stay away from the cesspool of 1000s of worthless shitcoins. 12/12

— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) November 26, 2020

… which recall is that bitcoin would “crash to zero” (from his February 2018 CNBC appearance), or that it is a “stinking cesspoll that is in meltdown“, when it suffered a similar drop in October of that year, and just generally emerging from the woodwork every time there is a drop in bitcoin as per this tweet.

In due time Bitcoin will get close to zero. The bubble has already burst and crash as in 6 months Bitcoin has lost almost 80% of its value, from 20K to close to 6k. Another 90% down eventuall still to come. Whales are dumping their shit-bitcoin & suckers bagholders already wiped https://t.co/VMWVclCgsh

— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) June 13, 2018

Incidentally anyone who bought bitcoin in February of 2018 when it was supposed to “crash to zero” is up 150%, outperforming the S&P 4-fold. Then again, by now the market has learned to take Roubini’s “hot” takes – which only emerge during sharp bitcoin and gold selloffs – with all the “seriousness” they merit. After all, this is the same Doctor Doom who in 2009 infamously said that “all the gold bugs who say gold is going to go to $1,500, $2,000, they’re just speaking nonsense. Yeah, it can go above $1,000, but it can’t move up 20-30 percent unless we end up in a world of inflation or another depression.”

“all the gold bugs who say gold is going to go to $1,500, $2,000, they’re just speaking nonsense. Yeah, it can go above $1,000, but it can’t move up 20-30 percent unless we end up in a world of inflation or another depression”

– Roubini, Oct 2009https://t.co/coa6MfZ3pO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 26, 2020

Guess we must be living in a world of inflation or another depression… contrary to what Keynesians such as Roubini would like us to believe.

Roubini’s dime-a-dozen opinions and meltdowns aside, what really matters is when someone puts their crypto money where their mouth is. Examples of this include the publicly traded business-intel firm MicroStrategy, which on August 11 poured all $250 million of its planned inflation-hedging funds into the digital currency. Its stock is up 120% since then.

Another example is when Jack Dorsey’s “other” company, Square, said in October it bought 4,709 bitcoins, worth approximately $50 million, about 1% of Square’s total assets. “Square believes that cryptocurrency is an instrument of economic empowerment and provides a way for the world to participate in a global monetary system, which aligns with the company’s purpose,” the company said in a release. Square founder Jack Dorsey has been a advocate of the digital currency, saying in 2018 the cryptocurrency will eventually become the world’s “single currency.” However the founder of Twitter said it could take a long as a decade.

Or it may take far less than that, especially after PayPal announced a few weeks later that it had enabled crypto transactions for all its clients, sparking the latest leg higher in bitcoin.

Which begs the question: whereas in 2017 it was all the rage to pivot to “blockchain”, we wonder how long before every public company converts some (or all) of its cash and equivalents into bitcoin similar to MicrosStrategy and Square, in hopes of reaping a quick surge in its stock price. And tangentially with that, how long before established asset managers do the same?

This morning we get an answer when Guggenheim Partners, one of the world’s biggest fixed income asset managers, jumped on the bitcoin bandwagon when it announced – appropriately enough one day after Roubini’s bitcoin meltdown – that it was reserving the right for its $5.3 billion Macro Opportunities Fund, which aims for total return via fixed income and other debt and equity securities, to invest in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, whose shares are solely invested in Bitcoin, and track the digital asset’s price less fees and expenses.

“The Guggenheim Macro Opportunities Fund may seek investment exposure to Bitcoin indirectly through investing up to 10% of its net asset value in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust,” the firm said in a Friday filing ; in other words Guggenheim can (and probably will) allocate up to $530MM to bitcoin.

Guggenheim’s announcement means that its CIO Scott Minerd joins such legendary traders as Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller, who have already said they’ve put money into the digital asset. More importantly he ensures that laughably clueless hacks, who have zero comprehension of how money or markets operate, will be busy bashing bitcoin for years to come as the cryptocurrency hits $100,000 then $1 million and so on.

Guggenheim’s filing, which describes cryptocurrencies as “digital assets designed to act as a medium of exchange,” also lists a wide variety of risks. Those include prices that “can be highly volatile,” regulatory changes, a crisis of confidence in the Bitcoin network, a change in user preference to competing cryptocurrencies, and trading on “largely unregulated” exchanges that may be more exposed to fraud and failure than regulated, established bourses for other asset classes.

In other words, nothing new for anyone who has been long the cryptocurrency over the past few years, and certainly nothing new for regular readers who bought bitcoin as per our advice back in September 2015 when it was trading just over $200.

What is surprising is that Guggenheim is – for now – sticking only to the Grayscale ETF as a source of crypto exposure: “Except for its investment in GBTC, the Fund will not invest, directly or indirectly, in cryptocurrencies.”

We expect that will change soon: after all in the past few weeks, bitcoin futures’ open interest surpassed gold’s for the first time ever…

… as the investing public increasingly turns to crypto as an alternative to the tsunami of fiat currency debasement and ahead of the central banks’ launch of digital currencies some time in 2022.