You really are such a cowardly baby, Bob. You look stupid and weak being too cowardly to say what you mean and hiding behind this idiotic, two year old level insult and your sock puppets. Grow up, comrade. Get some balls.

Fuck you Tiananmen Trump. See, not hard for adults with a spine.
I see you’ve forgotten how much praise Trump lavished on China, how he supported Xi in everything he did, from exterminating Uyghurs to the crackdown on Hong Kong, the expansions in Tibet and the Western Pacific, Trump supported China 100% until his trade talks fell apart….and was paid handsomely by China.

If Biden is Beijing Biden, Trump’s real name must be Wang No Xi.

You just keep reminding us that Trumpists are so unintelligible and moronic that, to say “fuck you” to their president, they chant “let’s go Brendon” and think they’re clever.

True story:

When the total solar eclipse was visible in the western United States, my friend Matt and I watched it in a little town called Detroit, Oregon.

Two years later, it burned to ground.

In mid-June of this year, Matt and I drove through Greenville on the way to our annual camping trip.

Yeah.

Hey, Bob, what town do you live in?

(just kidding!)

Literally every Western he's in should be called "Clint Eastwood Shows Up And Kills The Entire Town"

The entire town: "Hi, we're the entire town!"
Clint Eastwood: "I'm Clint Eastwood."
The entire town: "FUCK!"

Says who though? That's a narrative, fed from the media, tightly controlled by the CCP. Yes, people's lives are in general getting better materially. But people knows they have little freedom to criticize the government in public, but that doesn't mean it's "part of the bargain." There's just no means to disagree with the CCP without risking life & limbs. But those that got treated so badly that they felt there's nothing left to lose? Oh they do "rise up", whether you can hear about it, that's another matter entirely.

Chinese (as a whole people) don't "rise up (at least enough)" beause they see the financial benefit of China's explosive growth, and in general, you won't get into the CCP radar/ire if you're a regular citizen just going on your day. But the vast majority of Chinese knows they're far from catching up to anywhere near the G7/10 standard. So their focus is on that (the financial end), not toppling the CCP. They're more pragmatists than idealists.

Make no mistake, the G7 is ALSO part of the problem by enabling the CCP due of the immense financial gains and just pay lip service to "human right abuses" in China to score domestic points.

The Chinese (and the CCP) saw what happened to the U.S.S.R. and they don't want the "Western world" to "rescue" them. As they know the one thing the Western World does best is Abandonment.

But... but... as the Capitalist says: "where's the money in THAT?"

Notice how the Western health system is designed to not solve health/mental problems and drug companies rarely want to take out the root causes, they mostly treat (i.e. suppress) just enough of your symptoms so you can get whatever problems (and/or some others) you have again down the road. Most pills don't help build your system to fight, just buying you time.

And addressing trauma? forgettabouit! The society-at-large have painted a largely negative imagine to psychologists & mental health professions, and associated victim shaming, most people don't even want to seek help?

just saw the percentage of steam-powered and electric cars...
(#37 @ https://www.boredpanda.com/weird-history-twitter/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic)
...that were being driven by the populace. impressive.

know electric trollies were also a thing, but they were sabotaged by gasoline concerns (killed) because read the history of the one that use to run in our small mid-western town.

anyway...electric vehicles were viable then and if other concerns (like GMC) were kept at bay...100 years later we just might be driving all-electric vehicles (maybe flying them - we were supposed to have those by now).

necessity being the mother of invention, it only makes sense to keep the future (electric cars, solar-power, etc) alive. if the nation doesn't, china (or other visionaries) may capture the solar-driven land speeder market.

[trump is guilty btw. but GOP is GMC in that scenario. will be seen as a big mistake too. maybe 'big carrot' has something to do with it. he is orange.]

Sorry to be the little grey raincloud on this Hate The Hedges party, but you might want to understand the implications of what just happened

Y'know that fund that's getting all attention, Melvin Capital? Yeah, fuck them, right? Fuckin' shorters all shortin' and shit -- they played, they paid!

There's a reason they were bailed out and with all due haste.

Here's the issue: they were VERY good at the shorting game. So good that they actually had to turn away business. They made money like horses makes shit. When clients couldn't get in at Melvin, they went elsewhere. That opened the door to a lot of other firms basically mirroring exactly what MC was doing, which included shorting the fuck outta GME.

Fuck those guys too, right? It's their money, so why should I care?

Let's go back a few year, shall we, to the glorious chapter in finance and economics that was the 2008 Crash. Remember when Paulson lost his shit because he realized that in about 36 hours, the basic system called Western Capitalism was going to shit the bed; the bedroom; the whole house and pretty much every surface above the ocean within a planetary radius? This is sorta like that. Only worse.

The thing about short squeezes is that the losses can be infinite, and that's exactly why WallStreetBets did what they did. They knew if they bought and held -- diamond hands -- the stock would have to rise as the shorters had to cover their bets. Melvin Capital and a shit-ton of other, smaller firms had to do that and ran out of liquidity long before GME was even at $50. For every share of stock they shorted, they need to cough up another share at a higher value -- and they HAD to actually have the higher-priced share.

And here's where things get VERY ugly.

Shorting GME was such a sure thing that a huge number of shorts were placed. In fact, more shares of GME were shorted than actually existed. Oops. But hey, SURE THING, BABY and what's the worst that can happen?

Yeeeah, y'see where this is going now?

So these firms, not only are they broke, they don't have the shares, either. They need to come up with shares, pronto, at any price, because contractual obligations are a motherfucker in the finance world. But again, more shorts than there are shares and the people who have the shares, WSB and 4chan's /biz/, aren't letting them go. The longer they hold, the higher the price will go as short after short faces having to cough up the shares they borrowed.

A lot of people are about to lose a LOT of money -- the kinda losses that have so many zeros attached that looking at the number bores the eyes.

Back to 2008: the reason the whole world almost started Mad Max LARPing back then is that a narrow number of highly-important financial institutions were a wee bit thin on liquidity because they were having to pay it out by the boatload. That's bad. What would be better is if risk were more distributed, and how could that little plan POSSIBLY go wrong? Maybe a Black Swan event involving a huge amount of money that needs to be paid out by all of them due to this annoying bird.

That's where we are now, but no one even remotely knows what that figure is going to be. Again, (potentially) infinite losses multiplied by 150% times the number of shares actually available, multiplied by the dogshit risk factor on the loans and the leveraged payouts -- your best case scenario might be a loss of about $500 billion. Someone has to come up with that money, be it the Fed or other banks/investors, but that latter group has to come up with the money themselves, which is generally accomplished by selling profitable holdings. We all know what happens when a lot of people have to sell, right?

I always wanted to live in interesting times, thus proving what an utter fuckwit I am.

I can't imagine any Western country (especially the USA) would give a Chinese such a tour like this.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

*promote Europes attempt to go all renewable, and actually putting up the money to help make it happen. Fingers crossed.

FYI (from youtube comment) "California is already part of a massive regional grid called the Western Interconnection. We buy and sell power with other states all the time. What California has resisted is the idea of joining a Regional Transmission Organization, which as mentioned would be overseen by the federal government, and thus California would lose the ability to regulate some things like the required percent of renewable energy."

I think it was David Letterman who made a comment in reference to something like this about at which point are you not allowed to see her naked in photos?

Western prudishness is weird.

I'm completely certain there are non-pedophile billionaires willing to purchase his demise.

Hell, I can think of at least one lower-middle-class Western Canadian man who'd chip in a $50.

Utter Russian/Ukrainian separatist propaganda bullshit Bob. Not a single letter of truth in how it's presented.

The Burisma investigation began before Biden was hired, and was not being investigated by Shokin before or at the time he was fired for being corrupt himself.

April 18, 2014: Hunter Biden, 44, son of Joe Biden, joins the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. Biden’s directorship attracts attention because Burisma is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a minister under Yanukovych. Zlochevsky and subsidiaries of Burisma had faced accusations of money laundering, fraud and tax evasion. (Zlochevsky and the company have denied the allegations.)

Feb. 10, 2015: Ukraine appoints Viktor Shokin as prosecutor general. Shokin inherits some of the investigations into Zlochevsky and his company. But Vitaliy Kasko, who serves as Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation until he resigned in protest, told Bloomberg in 2019 that, under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma remained dormant. Kasko said the matter was "shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," and Bloomberg reported that documents backed up his account.

Winter 2015-16: Many Western leaders and institutions, as well as Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, view Shokin as corrupt and ineffective for failing to prosecute anybody of significance, and for protecting members of Yanukovych’s and Poroshenko’s circles. A frustrated Biden threatens to withhold $1 billion unless Shokin is fired. (He would later brag that his pressure tactics succeeded.)

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/03/timeline-trump-impeachment-inquiry/


Well son of a bitch....Bob's Russian style cranial rectosis flares up again.

Biden used sanctioned government pressure with international support to publicly route out corruption, Dumb Donald's corruption gets more difficult to ignore daily, and is ALL about personal enrichment, and is done through secretive unsanctioned back channels like his personal attorney who has no business interfering in foreign affairs, then hidden in super top secret servers where they have no business being hidden.

How much money have Trump's children taken from other countries in the last 3 years? All accounts based on their own filings indicate it's hundreds of millions, much through new business dealings created after Trump took office and gifts like dozens of patents from China worth tens of millions.

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