from WeAreChange
Bitcoin Price Rally Near Point of ‘Exhaustion’, Warns Market-Timing Expert
by Mark DeCambre
Market Watch
Tom DeMark says that based on his timing models, the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency is likely to retreat soon.
“Although it appears treacherous to take such a stance, here is what our combined timing models are suggesting about Bitcoin at this time,” he said, pointing to what he described as “pending upside trend exhaustion,” which could play out Thursday or Friday, initiating a downside move for the nascent asset.
The Current Covid-19 Vaccine Roll-Out Doesn’t Make Sense
by Buzz Hollander, MD
Real Clear Science
Against the bleak backdrop of a dismal 2020 and a worsening pandemic, November finally gifted the world some good news: the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines were shockingly effective. We celebrated, a bit. Then the bickering began. How are we to distribute these vaccines? Here in the U.S., we have our experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to give the states guidance on how to distribute these precious vaccines, and they have spoken. Their recommendation to vaccinate health care workers and nursing home residents and staff first is not unreasonable. However, I would argue it is unwise, and will lead to many thousands of unnecessary deaths; and that every state should be engaged in a vigorous conversation as to whether these guidelines should be followed. Allow me to explain.
NYPD Deploys Robot Dog to Catch “Covid Violators”
by Mac Slavo
SHTF Plan
In another giant step toward our totalitarian future, New York City has deployed robotic dogs designed to catch people who violate the draconian COVID-19 restrictions.
According to a report by ABC7 in New York, the New York Police Department (NYPD) is set to receive a new Boston Dynamics robot dog with special features, including an arm to open doors and move objects. “This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers and that’s our goal,” NYPD Technical Assistance Response Unit Inspector (TARU) Frank Digiacomo told ABC7.
[…] “This robot is able to use its artificial intelligence to navigate things, very complex environments,” NYPD TARU’s Deepu John said, according to Activist Post.
Reports Claim “Anti-Trump” SCOTUS Justice Roberts Afraid To Hear Election Fraud Cases Due to Liberal “Riots”
by Kelen McBreen
Info Wars
Multiple sources are claiming Supreme Court Justice John Roberts is an “anti-Trumper” who is actively working to ensure President Trump isn’t re-elected.
A video going viral online shows Arizona State Senator Eddie Farnsworth citing a Supreme Court staffer who allegedly heard SCOTUS judges yelling behind closed doors during a heated argument.
Farnsworth describes a statement made by a “Current staffer for one of the Supreme Court Justices.”
“He said the justices, as they always do, went into a closed room to discuss cases or to debate,” Farnsworth explained. “There are no phones, no computers, no nothing. No one else is in the room except the nine justices. It’s typically very civil.”
We Are Now at the Beginning of a Great Hyperinflation, Plus Gold Chart Projects Surge to $2,600-$3,000
from King World News
We are now at the beginning of a great hyperinflation, plus gold chart projects surge to $2,600-$3,000.
Big Gold Surge Coming
December 17 (King World News) – The 45 year gold chart below is from KWN reader Kevin W:
45 Year Gold Chart Shows Room For Gold To Comfortably Drift Up To The $2,600-$3,000 Zone
Stimulus Talks Set to Enter Weekend as Stumbling Blocks Remain
from Zero Hedge
Stimulus negotiations are set to spill over into the weekend, as Capitol Hill negotiations continue to hit last-minute stumbling blocks over a nearly $1 trillion coronavirus relief package ahead of a Friday deadline, according to Politico. Top congressional aides and White House officials add that if a deal isn’t reached, they will need to pass another short-term (24-48 hour) spending measure to avoid another government shutdown on Friday evening.
While Congressional leaders continue to talk about ‘progress’, they have not publicly announced an impending deal – which, if isn’t announced on Thursday – allowing a day to draft – won’t get passed by the Friday deadline.
“I’m hopeful, and I talked to the speaker this morning. She thinks we’re making real progress,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) in a Thursday morning appearance on MSNBC. “Hopefully, we will get to an agreement today.”
Fed Chair Powell Opens a Big Can of Worms at His Press Conference
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
There was a jaw-dropping exchange between Politico reporter Victoria Guida and Fed Chair Jerome Powell at his press conference yesterday following the two-day meeting of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Powell first acknowledged in his opening statement that “the current economic downturn is the most severe of our lifetimes.” But he then proceeds to tell Guida that the Fed has given no thought at all to what kind of emergency lending it might engage in under the incoming Biden administration. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has kneecapped the Fed’s existing emergency loan facilities by demanding that the Fed return the Treasury’s unused money that is backstopping these facilities as loss-absorbing capital.
The Fed has for years attempted to reassure markets that there will be no surprises from the Fed; that it will be providing lots of forward guidance to Wall Street to assuage any nervous jitters about its actions. And yet this is what Powell tells Guida about the Fed’s future plans for emergency lending facilities:
Corruption, Racketeering and Mass-Manslaughter
by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
I am now getting multiple reports from the field that doctors are being barred by their “medical groups” for which they work from prescribing Ivermectin off-label.
Let me remind you that the law permits any physician to prescribe anything off label if, in their professional opinion it is safe and might work; that is, the balance of benefits and harms is positive for a patient who gives informed consent. In fact about one prescription in five in the United States is written “off-label.”
Every one of these “medical groups” needs to be named and then charged with racketeering and mass-manslaughter.
150,000 counts of manslaughter.
This is federal and I want trials and the death penalty for every one of them. 150,000 dead is fifty Pearl Harbors or 9/11s.
When Social Capital Becomes More Valuable Than Financial Capital
by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
This devaluation of financial wealth–and its transformation to a dangerous liability– will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality.
Financial capital–money–is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace? Continuing this week’s discussion of the idea that that extremes lead to reversions, let’s consider the bedrock presumption of the global economy, which is that money is the most valuable thing in the Universe because the owner of money can buy anything, as everything is for sale. The only question is the price.
Reversion to the mean is a statistical dynamic but it is also a human social dynamic: for example, once the social / financial / political pendulum reaches Gilded Age extremes of wealth/income inequality, the pendulum swings back. The more extreme the inequality, the greater the resulting extreme at the other end of the pendulum swing.
In the heyday of the postwar boom in the early 1960s, finance–banks, lending, mortgages, loans, investment banking, derivatives, futures, FX, all financial market trading, research firms, hedge funds, mutual funds, etc.–was about 5% of the economy. It now exceeds 20% of the economy, and its actual role and impact is much larger than 20%. Finance is now the dominant force in the economy in terms of wealth creation and influence.
Oblivious Biden
by Donald N. Finley
American Thinker
What kind of man must Joe Biden be to accept being illegitimately put into the Oval Office?
We’ve all seen the clips. Nearly every recent Joe Biden public appearance has been an embarrassment. The media called his garbled statements ‘gaffes,’ as if they were innocent, harmless mistakes, but many have suggested far worse age-related cognitive failures. We experienced embarrassment with him, and pitied a man clearly past his prime. What seemed most prominent about Joe Biden, other than his mental decline, was his obsession with one singular goal — to be president of the United States.
He first ran for president in the 1988 presidential election. He didn’t last until the first primary, being forced to drop out when caught in multiple lies about his background, his upbringing, his academic record, and for plagiarizing other politicians. Twenty years later, he ran again in the 2008 presidential election, but dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses, with less than 1% of the vote. He was later chosen as Barack Obama’s running mate.
SCOTUS Rules That Federal Agents Can Be Sued When They Violate Your Rights
Now do qualified immunity.
by Billy Binion
Reason.com
The Supreme Court last week unanimously ruled in Tanzin v. Tanvir that a trio of Muslim men may sue a group of FBI agents who put them on the no-fly list after they refused to spy on their own communities. It’s been hailed as a win for religious liberty, and it is. But the ruling also strikes at something deeper: namely, that the tide may be turning on how we are able to hold public officials accountable when they violate our constitutional rights.
Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, and Naveed Shinwari allege that the FBI harassed them at their workplaces, confiscated their passports, and stripped them of their travel privileges after they declined to act as informants, costing them money on lost airline tickets and squandered job opportunities. They then sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which prevents the government “from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion” and authorizes litigants to pursue “appropriate relief” when such rights are infringed on. Yet while the Department of Homeland Security eventually removed the respondents from the no-fly list, the government countered that the “appropriate relief” referenced in the statute does not allow for monetary damages.
Hunter Biden Was Due ‘Significant’ Pay From China Firm Starting in 2019
by Penka Arsova
LaCorte News
Hunter Biden was expected to start receiving payments from a firm in China that was co-owned by the Bank of China, according to recently unearthed emails.
The story: The details about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign entities come from email exchanges obtained from what is believed to be his laptop that made news before the election. According to the Daily Caller, which reviewed the emails, Biden and another partner of BHR Partners, the Chinese company in which he bought a 10% equity stake, took a capital loan of $150,000 in 2017. The next year, ahead of the loan’s payment deadline, Eric Schwerin, one of Biden’s business partners advised him to extend it.
Governing by Rage and Ridicule
by Simon Black
Sovereign Man
Back in July, Yale University began a critical study on COVID vaccines.
But there was an interesting twist to Yale’s study: scientists weren’t looking at the actual vaccine candidates; instead they were studying how to most effectively convince people to take a vaccine.
One of the things they tested, in fact, was how guilt, embarrassment, and negative social stigma could pressure people into taking a vaccine, even if they have doubts or concerns about it.
In other words, the study examined if shaming people would be an effective way to compel everyone to take a COVID vaccine.
Biden Assembles a Fedora Cabinet
by J. Peder Zane
Real Clear Politics
Andrew Jackson assembled a Kitchen Cabinet to run the government. Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to his fabled Brain Trust and JFK famously recruited the Best and the Brightest. Now comes Joe Biden, whose high-level nominees suggest something that should be called the Fedora Cabinet.
Given their astonishing lack of relevant experience, it appears that Biden put the names of all the people he liked in a hat and then randomly drew them out. How else to explain his selection of Neera Tanden, who is not an economist, to run the Office of Management and Budget?
Or Pete Buttigieg, whose biggest job was mayor of the small city of South Bend, Ind., to be secretary of transportation? Or California Attorney General Xavier Beccera to run the Department of Health and Human Services?
The Teachers Unions Are Keeping the Schools Closed
by Amelia Janaskie
The American Institute for Economic Research
On Monday, December 7th, North Carolina teachers did not show up in their classrooms, but instead logged onto Facebook and posted photographs of themselves dressed in red with the caption, “A show of solidarity with our colleagues.” This gesture was in defiance of the Orange County Superintendent’s call for teachers to return to schools and a way to protest school openings, on the grounds that it was too dangerous for teachers to do their jobs in person because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The local teacher’s union, Orange County Association of Educators, supported the movement in a Facebook post saying, “We have yet to hear sufficient rationale for how teaching from our classrooms helps our students, who can tell when our morale is low and our stress levels are high.”