Author: VD

The heat is on

Patreon lays off 30 people:

Creative platform Patreon  has laid off 30 employees, which is 13{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

“It is unclear how long this economic uncertainty will last and therefore, to prepare accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with 13{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of Patreon’s workforce,” a Patreon spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones.”

Several other factors indeed…. Snicker-snack.

CDC’s contaminated coronavirus tests

At a certain point, one has to stop simply attributing to incompetence what was clearly done with evil intent.

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

It’s gradually becoming more apparent that neither China nor the USA was to blame for the pandemic, but rather, Deep State elements in academia, media, the DNC, the CDC, and the State Department. It increasingly appears to have been, like impeachment, a desperate attempt to derail the Trump administration.

And I suspect we all know the reason for the desperation.

Why Trump is a GREAT President

The God-Emperor’s Silent War continues. As Q has repeatedly reminded us, the enemy is absolutely sick.

Four children, one as young as two-months-old old, have been filmed being raped before the videos were distributed to sick paedophiles all over the world. Sixteen people were charged with 728 sexual abuse and child exploitation offences after a two-year investigation by the Australian Federal Police in conjunction with the US Department of Homeland Security.

The children were reportedly related to their abusers, who used the dark web and encryption technologies to send explicit images and videos around the world before they were finally rescued.

AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said the coronavirus lockdown had created a surge in activity on the dark web, including grooming and live-streaming, and warned parents to be hyper aware of what their children are doing online at all times. ‘It is very hard to explain to a society, to people who don’t see the images,’ he told The Australian. ‘These involve images like you’ve never seen before.’

Three of the rescued children were from New South Wales and one from Victoria, while the offenders include five people from Queensland, four from Western Australia, three from Victoria and NSW and one in South Australia.

There were 632 charges related to those from Victoria and 70 to those in NSW, with all 16 charged with contact offending and producing and exchanging child sex material through the internet.

Evidence from the arrests led detectives to believe child pornography was being produced in Australia for distribution around the world.

Notice the involvement of Homeland Security. One sincerely hopes they are actively hunting down the customers.

Immigration banned

At this point, one has to admit that President Trump is beginning to exceed expectations:

Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to ban immigration into the United States amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The president tweeted: ‘In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!’

At least 22 million Americans are now out of work as tough measures to control the coronavirus outbreak wiped out 13.5 percent of the workforce and 10 years of job growth…. Trump’s administration is currently relying on a seldom-used public health law to set aside decades-old national and international immigration laws. 

The USA does not need mass immigration, it needs mass repatriation. And the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus is the direct result of globalization, which must also be reversed. However, the measure should be made permanent, in the mode of the 1921 immigration restrictions.

And the more conspiratorial-minded will no doubt have noticed the reference to “the Invisible Enemy”.

“I’m going to win in a LANDSLIDE!”
– Donald Trump

He’s not wrong. Trumpslide 2020 is coming.

Smells like deflation

Oil prices have gone negative in Canada:

And there it is… May WTI just traded below zero for the first time ever (trading below NEGATIVE $40 per barrel)… There was a small bid right into the settlement at 1430ET leaving the May contract to settle at negative $37.63.

Interesting times, my friends. Very interesting times.

Make them do it

As usual, the big US corporations have learned absolutely nothing from the disruption of the production and supply chains as a result of the coronavirus.

Large US companies operating in China don’t want to move production and supply chains from the country in the near future, even though the coronavirus may force them to adjust their business strategies, a recent survey found.

Around 70 percent of 25 firms with global revenue of over half a billion dollars have no relocation plans, despite the effect the coronavirus outbreak has had on their business, according to a joint poll conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. The results of the March survey, published on Friday, also show that around 40 percent of the respondents would rather keep their long-term supply chain strategy for China unchanged.

While more than half of the firms polled say it’s too early to make any decisions on relocation, only four percent of the companies are planning to shift all production outside China, while 12 percent of the respondents intend to move part of their facilities.

It’s time for President Trump to start imposing massive penalties on US firms manufacturing anything outside the USA, and for Congress to do the same. And any firm that lobbies against the penalties or opposes them in any way should be deemed ineligible for any bailout money or federal funding for its employees.

David Ricardo is dead. Free trade is the most expensive and destructive kind of trade. There is no comparative advantage. And this is why no nation that plans to survive can afford it.

Prestige Ameritech. The North Richland Hills company is America’s No. 1 maker of hospital surgical masks.

During this crisis, you’d think the company would be pushing forward on all cylinders, working 24/7 to manufacture the one commodity that Americans and the rest of the world want so badly.

Nope.

When there’s an outbreak — like last time, with Swine Flu — he gets orders.  He ramps up to fill them.

Then the outbreak passes, and guess where the hospitals go?  Back to China.

This leaves him with capital equipment leases and people. If he doesn’t lay them off he goes out of business.  If he does lay them off he get’s hammered with much higher unemployment insurance premiums, the leases on the equipment he has no use for, and he goes out of business.

The last time he nearly did.

This time, he’s demanding long-term contracts. Good for him.

Guess how many he’s gotten?

I’ll bet you can figure that out.

Corporatism not only isn’t capitalism, it is pure and unadulterated short-term-preferenced evil.

The default cycle begins

Which will mark the post-2008 transition from credit disinflation to actual deflation:

We didn’t really need any more confirmations. In recent weeks, as the US economy came to a screeching halt because of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen banks take over $20 billion in reserves  in anticipation of a looming default wave (a five-fold increase if not nearly enough based on historical precedent), Moody’s predicting that as many as 30{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of Americans with home loans – about 15 million households – could stop paying their mortgages if the U.S. economy remains closed through the summer or beyond, with the number of households that have already stopped paying their loans soaring by 1,496{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} in just six weeks, and even JPMorgan in the process of shutting down its entire net interest margin origination platform, by getting out of new loans and HELOCs and boosting the standards on new loans.

These are all clear signs that a wave of mass defaults has started and is about to break all across America as tens of millions of household suddenly lose their jobs.

2008 is when the post-war debt system finally broke. Since then, the Federal Reserve has frantically been kicking the can of consequences harder and harder, until now, when the can finally didn’t move. All of the various estimates are meaningless, but we can be confident that the current system will be replaced, we simply can’t know what the successor system is going to be as it will largely depend upon how the massive pool of existing bad debts are written off.

UPDATE: For those of you who are, apparently, still too stupid to grasp the obvious, THIS IS WHY USURY WAS HISTORICALLY BANNED IN WESTERN SOCIETIES. Because once the debt cycle starts, it ALWAYS ends this way, sooner or later. The only reason it took this long to go terminal is because, for the first time in history, the entire global economy was turned into collateral supporting the credit inflation.

Zero Paperwork

DC Comics goes around Diamond in an email to comic book stores:

A couple of weeks ago we told you we were working on a solution-focused plan to address the current climate and help us all get back to the business of selling DC comic books, graphic novels, and collectibles in these difficult times, including the exploration of a multi-distributor model that would help to mitigate any further disruption to getting product into the hands of readers. We’d now like to share the details of our plan and next steps for its execution – which took into account your feedback, the market outlook, and the resources available at our disposal.

Current Orders

First, because of the global distribution disruption, all orders placed with Diamond Comic Distributors for in-store dates of 4/1, 4/8, and 4/15 have been cancelled with Diamond. You will need to resubmit orders for DC’s upcoming titles. To that end, instead of simply “lifting and shifting” the same scheduled titles for each of the missed in-store dates, we’ve made changes to the publishing schedule. The new schedule is designed to allow each of you to begin ordering a limited amount of DC product at first, and then ease back into the number of books that represents a normal release schedule from DC when your business can accommodate it.

This tends to indicate further disruption in the establishment comics world even when the lockdowns are lifted, as Bleeding Cool reported yesterday.

Right now, even though Diamond will be returning to comics distribution in a month’s time, we still don’t know if DC Comics will return to Diamond, if other publishers will copy DC’s moves, set up their own rival distributors or join with DCBS and Midtown. Most publishers Bleeding Cool contacted last night were blindsided by DC’s decision and weren’t saying anything right now.

Apparently the comic stores are deeply underwhelmed by DC’s new distribution strategy, which does tend to remind one of Marvel’s failed experiment with Heroes World that led to the establishment of the Diamond monopoly in 1997.

But all this turmoil is of little concern to Arkhaven, which continues to roll without hitch or hesitation thanks to our much-appreciated backers, and is even creating new series and entering new territories. Speaking of which, it’s Monday, so there is a new episode of Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #1, The Street Rules Episode 3: Zero Paperwork, up at Webtoons for your perusal, and, one hopes, enjoyment.

We’re also pleased to show off some of the work of our new Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted colorist, an experienced industry veteran who just joined the Arkhaven team last week. This is the cover of the forthcoming Issue #6, and he’s recoloring the first issue prior to that beginning its appearance on Webtoons. It will appear regularly on Thursdays.

Wet market red herring

BJ Campbell points out the statistical implausibility of the “wet market” theory of the coronavirus, not that anyone with more than half-a-brain ever bought it in the first place:

This thing came from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don’t need evidence gift wrapped by the Chinese to make this case. We just need simple mathematics, and the case is rock solid.

The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.

There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.

But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.

The only real question is who arranged for its release there, as there are only three plausible state parties:  China, the USA, or Israel, and one non-state party, the Deep State. At this point, we have absolutely no way of knowing which of the four are responsible.

Subversion may bankrupt Labour

The recent ascendance of the philosemitic wing of the Labour Party may be very short-lived:

Labour faces multi-millionpound lawsuits over a leaked antisemitism report that could ‘bankrupt’ the party.

Sources close to whistleblowers and complainants whose identities were revealed by the leak say Labour could face a legal bill as high as £8million – effectively putting it out of business.

They say more than 30 individuals, including general secretary Jennie Formby, may sue the party over breach of privacy and for putting their safety at risk. The dire warning came as Labour officials were hastily forced to delete addresses from party membership databases to protect some people now apparently receiving death threats after their identities were made public….

The threat of massive legal bills has sparked panic among senior party figures that they could be personally liable.

I’ve read the report. It’s very damning, although not necessarily in the way one might think. Basically, the report is a put-up job written to support the false narrative being pushed by the (((Blairites))) who recently unseated the Corbynites and took over the party leadership. It turns out that more than HALF of the anti-semitism complaints were filed by a single invididual; the whole thing is little more than an amplified variant on the rabbi painting swastikas on the synagogue.

It appears that the Corbynites have decided that if they’re going to be pushed out of the party, they’re going to leave their successors with nothing but scorched earth. To put it in American terms, it’s as if the John Birch Society burned down the Republican Party instead of permitting the neocons to take it over.