"H.R. 127: A New Bill In Congress Would Literally End Your 2nd Amendment Rights Permanently"

"H.R. 127: A New Bill In Congress Would 

Literally End Your 2nd Amendment Rights Permanently"

by Michael Snyder

"If a new bill that has been introduced in Congress eventually becomes law, the 2nd Amendment will still be in the U.S. Constitution, but for all practical purposes the rights that it is supposed to guarantee will be dead and gone. H.R. 127 was submitted on January 4th, and if you have not read it yet you can find the full text right here. It contains a lot of technical language, and so in this article I am going to try to break down what it means very simply. Now that the Democrats control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, there is going to be a major push to ram through some form of gun control legislation. If it is not this bill, it will be another one, so we need to be diligent.

One of the biggest things that H.R. 127 would do is that it would create a national firearms registration system that would literally be accessible by anyone: "HR 127 establishes a federal firearms registration system that will be accessible by federal, state, and local governments, including the military – even the GENERAL PUBLIC! The system will track the make, model, and serial number of all firearms, their owners, the dates they were acquired, and where they are being stored."

So if your neighbor, a co-worker, or someone that just wanted to rob your home wanted to know how you were armed, all they would have to do would be to look it up in the firearms registration system. This bill would also apply retroactively. Within three months, you would have to report to the government where you bought all of your guns, when they were purchased, and where they are currently being stored. Needless to say, if the government knows where all of your guns are being stored, it would make it that much easier to grab them from you at some future date.

H.R. 127 would also require all gun owners to be federally licensed. That would mean that owning a gun would no longer be a right. Instead, it would be reduced to a “privilege” that the government could take away at any time. According to the bill, the licensing procedure would include “a psychological evaluation”: "The licensing requirement mandates that the license applicant undergoes a criminal background check, and then submits to a psychological evaluation to determine whether the person is psychologically unsuited to possess a firearm. Successful licensees must show they have an insurance policy which will cost $800."

I know a lot of guys out there that would definitely not want to go through any sort of a “psychological evaluation” by a government-approved psychologist. And it wouldn’t just be you that would get interviewed. According to the bill, spouses and other family members would be interviewed as well: "For the psychological evaluation, a licensed psychologist will interview individuals’ spouses and at least two other family members or associates to “further determine the state of the mental emotional, and relational stability of the individual in relation to firearms.” Licenses will be denied to individuals hospitalized for issues such as depressive episodes; no duration for license disability is specified, and it does not matter whether the individual sought help voluntarily."

The goal, of course, is to make owning guns as difficult as possible. Democrats figure that if they can put up as many barriers to gun ownership as possible, a lot less people will end up owning them.

Thirdly, this bill would also greatly restrict the type of ammunition that you can own: "Finally, HR 127 also criminalizes the possession of “large-capacity magazines” (those carrying greater than 10 rounds) and “ammunition that is 0.50 caliber or greater.”

I know that all of this sounds utterly ridiculous, but the restrictions in this bill actually sound very, very similar to what Joe Biden has been publicly proposing: "During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden promised a long list of gun control regulations. There is a reason that Michael Bloomberg spent $125 million helping Biden in Florida and something over $600 million nationally in the general election. The agenda includes: classifying many semi-automatic rifles and magazines holding more than 10 bullets as Class 3 weapons (which can require nine months or more for approval and a $200 fee), national gun licensing, “red flag” laws that let judges take away people’s guns without a hearing, background checks on the private transfer of guns, and bans on some semi-automatic firearms that happen to look like military weapons.

Gun control is very high on the list of things that Joe Biden wants to get accomplished during the next four years. So like I said, if it isn’t this bill, it will be another one that is similar. They are coming for your 2nd Amendment, and they aren’t going to stop until they get what they want.

Meanwhile, this is all happening at a time when murder rates all across America are going through the roof: “Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 relative to rates from the previous year,” the report states, calling the 30 percent surge “a large and troubling increase that has no modern precedent.” We have never seen major city murder rates jump by an average of 30 percent in a single year.

Things are getting really crazy out there, and many believe that 2021 will be even worse. For almost a year, there has been civil unrest in our cities on an almost nightly basis. As I write this, civil unrest has erupted in Rochester, New York. We live at a time when rioting, looting, arson and vandalism have become commonplace, and the senseless violence that we have witnessed so far is just the leading edge of the storm.

Millions of Americans can see what is happening to our society and they are quite concerned. 2020 was a record year for gun sales in the United States, and dealers have reported that demand is extremely strong so far in 2021 as well. The Democrats do not like this one bit, and they are going to do their very best to put a stop to it.

Please let your friends, family and contacts know about H.R. 127, because an all-out attack on the 2nd Amendment is coming, but at this point most people are not even aware that it is about to happen."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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"Perhaps It Is Better..."

"Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. 

But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants

can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. 

Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."

- Arthur C. Clarke

"Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market"

"Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"The relentless melt-up in stocks offers ample evidence that the market is rock-solid and that any decline is an enormous opportunity to buy the dip. That this has worked splendidly for the past 13 years cannot be denied. This doesn't necessarily guarantee the next 13 years will merely be an extension of the same trend. The market's sources of fragility and brittleness are well cloaked by low-volume melt-ups; these vulnerabilities only become visible in high-volume sell-offs such as 2020's brief mini-crash.

To understand the fragility at the heart of the market, we must return to the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09 and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's explanation of why he and all the other experts failed to understand the market's vulnerabilities and thus failed to forecast the global crash.

"Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise" (Dec. 2013 Foreign Affairs): "The financial crisis that ensued represented an existential crisis for economic forecasting. The conventional method of predicting macroeconomic developments - econometric modeling, the roots of which lie in the work of John Maynard Keynes - had failed when it was needed most, much to the chagrin of economists. In the run-up to the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board's sophisticated forecasting system did not foresee the major risks to the global economy. Nor did the model developed by the International Monetary Fund."

In essence, Greenspan argued that the fancy models did not anticipate or capture human emotions in a financial panic. This is a remarkable confession, given the long study of panics and the wealth of research available on human emotions. Greenspan then moved on to the real issue: liquidity - the bid to buy stocks - disappears:

"They (financial firms) failed to recognize that market liquidity is largely a function of the degree of investors' risk aversion, the most dominant animal spirit that drives financial markets. But when fear-induced market retrenchment set in, that liquidity disappeared overnight, as buyers pulled back. In fact, in many markets, at the height of the crisis of 2008, bids virtually disappeared."

In effect, Greenspan et al. assumed there would always be a pool of buyers willing to buy whatever stocks sellers were unloading. One potential pool of such buyers are those traders who bet on a market decline by selling short - selling shares at the top that they would buy back after a decline, pocketing the difference as profit.

What Greenspan did not acknowledge in his mea culpa was central banks' role in goosing markets so relentlessly that short selling dried up. Why bet on a market decline in a central-bank managed melt-up? Why lose money by betting against managers with trillions at their fingertips? So short interest declines to a negligible backstop against a crash - precisely the situation now as short interest has declined to recent lows: 

The other source of bids is buy the dip traders conditioned by the melt-up to aggressively buy every drop in the market. These buyers may be retail (individual) human speculators or they may be computers programmed to buy the dip. This buy the dip reaction (greed) was on display in 2020's mini-crash, as every plunge was aggressively bought. However, each spike higher was soon sold (fear) and the market promptly fell to new lows.

Many of the buy the dip players are leveraged, meaning that they are using borrowed money (margin debt) to buy more stocks. Should the market drop instead of rebounding, their account will fall below minimum requirements and they will have to add cash or sell stocks. When buy the dip fails, those with margin calls add to the selling.

Most of the trading volume nowadays is generated by computers - called algos because they're programmed to trade based on algorithms that have been tweaked by very smart people and machine learning. The problem with algos is it's difficult to program for black swans or unpredictable rogue-wave monstrous moves. So the prudent programmer takes the computer offline to avoid the risk of the algo making a trading decision in a rare and thus difficult to model crisis that ends up wiping out the financial firm.

This is why liquidity - traders willing to buying stocks at the bid - dries up incredibly fast. Short sellers are such a thin slice of the market now that their buying is little more than a sand castle in a tsunami. Algos programmed to escape a decline by selling pile in while algos programmed to buy the dip quickly reverse and sell when the expected rally fails to materialize. As the rogue wave washes away all the sand castles, the algos are taken offline and liquidity goes to zero.

This is how the price of oil crashed to a negative number in the 2020 mini-crash. The market went bidless, meaning there were no buyers at any price. In Street jargon, trying to buy on the way down is called catching the falling knife: the knife is in free-fall, and buying in at what you guess is the bottom can turn out to be only halfway down the decline. Oops.

This is the consequence of managing markets to only melt up and reversing every decline with trillions in freshly created "money." The market structure has been stripped of actual market dynamics, leaving it exquisitely fragile and brittle. Put another way, this heavily managed market structure is far from equilibrium and extremely prone to instability. All this is hidden behind the curtain, where the managers are furiously pulling levers and pushing buttons to maintain the illusion of stability needed to forecast melt-ups are forever.

What's going on behind the curtain? Few seem to care. Eventually they will, but like Greenspan in 2013, it will be long after the losses have been wept over."

- https://www.oftwominds.com/

"How They'd Really Like You To Think It Was"

 

"The American Government Is At War With Its Own People"

Tucker Carlson,

"The American Government Is At War With Its Own People"

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"Enemies Of The State Vs. Enemies Of The People"

by Frank Miele 

"I didn’t declare war on the establishment; it declared war on me.

It declared war on me when it supported energy policies that could enrich Saudi Arabia and Russia and would cost me more money at the gas pump or on my power bill.

It declared war on me when it told me my ideas weren’t worthy of debate and discussion or that they were even so dangerous they couldn’t be shared publicly.

It declared war on me when it used the police powers of the FBI and CIA to first spy on a presidential candidate and then worked to undermine the administration of that candidate after he was elected.

It declared war on me when it told me my religious beliefs did not deserve the protection of the First Amendment.

It declared war on me when it told me boys could compete against girls in high school sports and that they could shower together afterwards.

It declared war on me when it offered citizenship to illegal aliens and shipped American jobs to China.

It declared war on me when it mocked the usefulness of a wall on the Mexican border and simultaneously put up a razor-wire fence around the Capitol.

It declared war on me when it tried to defund the police so that millions of Americans would be left defenseless against mobs from Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

It declared war on me when it said America was never great.

It declared war on me when it told my children they are not good enough because they are white.

It declared war on me when it said that defending the Constitution’s rules on federal elections is sedition.

It declared war on me when it told me that I was a domestic terrorist if I didn’t believe the government’s official pronouncements about elections, about free speech, and about right and wrong.

Let’s just say it plainly: The establishment declared war on me and on all conservative Americans when it decided that leftist orthodoxy was more important than the Constitution.

Don’t believe me? Fine, why should you believe a Trump supporter? You’ve been indoctrinated by the national media, Big Tech oligarchs, the Democratic Party, and academic elites to believe without questioning that people like me can’t be trusted. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen instead to John Brennan, the former CIA director under President Obama, who speaks authoritatively for the Deep State:

He said on MSNBC that “the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed, are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

This “guilt by labeling” is the antithesis of fair play or justice. It is a convenient mechanism for the ruling class to herd people into identity clusters so that individual rights can be supplanted by group responsibility. If this reminds you of China’s Cultural Revolution, you are not wrong. The ruling class wants you to conform, confirm and comply. If you step outside the lines, be prepared to be shamed, silenced and ostracized.

A shocking example was provided Wednesday when Douglass Mackey of Delray Beach, Fla., was arrested for creating memes that allegedly misled voters in 2016 to think they could vote by texting instead of by actually going to the polls. This is the equivalent of arresting Sacha Baron Cohen for exposing the gullibility of the rich and famous. The FBI offered no evidence that Mackey actually convinced anyone not to vote, but even if it did, so what? Would you rather live in a country where the FBI is hunting down pranksters - four years after the supposed transgression - or a country where voters are expected to be able to recognize a joke when they see one?

But nothing can be taken for granted any more. The people - and even their representatives and senators - are considered enemies of the state because they hold opinions that don’t meet the standards of Joe Biden or (this is even scarier!) Jake Tapper.

No wonder the people are starting to rise up and rebel against the plutocracy. It’s not “We the Oligarchs” who are the source of power in the Constitution, but “We the People,” yet the ruling establishment has forgotten that. If people like Donald Trump and Douglass Mackey are deemed to be “enemies of the state,” then those who would suppress them and their freedoms must be considered “enemies of the people.”

A house divided against itself cannot long stand, but if there is to be a truce it will not come from submission, but from a recognition that all people are created equal, that they all have certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those words were worth fighting for once. Are they worth fighting for today?

I don’t know, but I do know this: If Americans can’t have liberty, we can’t have America either - at least not one that is distinguishable from China. The time has come to make a choice."

- https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Boston Legal", Alan Shore, "Speech on American Freedom's Decline"

Alan Shore, "Speech on American Freedom's Decline"

"Epic closing argument from ABC's "Boston Legal" that illustrates the erosion of our Constitutional liberties and abusive government. This can no longer be defined as a Republican versus Democrat issue. Both parties are equally responsible, as are we, the electorate, for we continue to vote the same quality of politicians into office over and over."

"Mencken, Where Are You Now That We Need You?"

"Mencken, Where Are You Now That We Need You?"

"Henry Louis Mencken, The “Sage of Baltimore”, (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial," also gained him attention."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

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'The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.'

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre."

"When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money."

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

"The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought."

"I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy."

- H. L. Mencken

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/2/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/2/21"

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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will

do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

- John Maynard Keynes

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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

Your guide:

Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/2/21:

"New Updates: 

Market, Crypto, Gold, Silver, Fed, Debt, More"

- https://traderschoice.net/

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"The more I see of the monied classes, 

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

CNN Market Data:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

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A comprehensive, essential daily read.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

Feb 1st to Feb 5th, Updated Daily 

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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Daily Job Cuts

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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And now, the End Game...

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Oh yeah...

"Why Silver?"

"Insider Intel: "I work for a bank whose name I won’t disclose.

You fools. You have no idea what you’re doing."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Reddit Rebellion Trigger A Financial Crisis: Prepare Yourself For The Worst!"

"Reddit Rebellion Trigger A Financial Crisis: 

Prepare Yourself For The Worst!"

by Epic Economist

"While the mainstream media is still focusing on who to blame and who to exonerate in the WallStreetBets Reddit Rebellion and the Robinhood Rout narrative, the U.S. financial markets remain severely wounded, but no one seems to have noticed. What is happening is going way beyond the damages done to brokerage firms. In fact, it is much more like a plumbing issue clogging the entire financial system. That's what we're going to analyze today.

As many are still trying to wrap their heads around what is going on in Wall Street right now, the Twitter user @Compound248 has detailed in a thread that there's a major plumbing issue on the financial system, and the Robinhood episode is just one of the many problems disrupting and clogging market operations. He elucidates that Robinhood was just the first but not the only brokerage firm to limit the purchase of GameStop stocks. Institutional prime brokers have also imposed restrictions on their hedge fund clients. In essence, the restrictions have affected retail just as well as institutional players.

That has happened because most brokerage clients and all hedge funds use margin accounts, instead of cash accounts. It's a standard procedure in brokerage firms' sign-up process to put new customers into margin accounts, which are Wall Street's way of denoting lending accounts. In short, in margin accounts, the client does not own any securities, they essentially own a "promise" from their broker. So when a brokerage firm buys stocks, a lot happens behinds the scenes - inside the ugly plumbing of Wall Street. To simply put, since the buyer doesn't know who the seller is, brokers for buyer and seller use a third company that might be OCC (Options Clearing Corporation) or DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) to match and “clear” stock transactions, moving title from selling broker to buying broker while making sure proceeds are moved on time.

Since hedge funds primarily own shares and not money, their performance is inverse to the share price movement, which means that they profit when the stock price declines and lose money when the stocks go up. On backstage, the prime brokers are the ones dealing with plumbing, so they need to find someone who actually owns the stocks with a clean title. The prime broker pays the brokerage firm a daily rate for the borrow and it charges its hedge fund client on a daily basis too.

Putting that into perspective, we have a brokerage firm margin client, namely a retail investor, that believes he owns the shares he bought, but he never actually did. The firm owns the shares, then lends them to a hedge fund prime broker in exchange for daily borrow fees, in that way, creating a debit/credit bond between the firm and the broker. So the prime broker takes those borrowed shares and re-lent them to its client, who sells them to a 4th party. Ultimately, both the firm's client and the 4th party simultaneously "own" the same shares. But, in reality, the 4th party owns the actual shares that the firm client thinks he owns, while DTCC is observing and registering the ownership chain and ensuring cash from purchase and to sale flows through.

The main concern for DTCC is that someone in the middle of this chain hits a problem because if that occurs the problem will spread all the way up to the brokerage firm and down the chain to DTCC itself. And that's where the plumbing metaphor fits. According to the user, "when you flush, a downstream clog causes a mess that backs up into your toilet. Don't handle that clog well and you end up with a mess on your floor. Handle it poorly and you burst a pipe - wastewater seeps into your walls". In simple words, everyone loses and the system enters in a chain reaction and starts to implode. 

The online analyst points out that the GameStop situation is not about online investors vs. hedge funds any more. It is Hedge Fund vs. Hedge Fund. At this point, literally everyone - on the short side and on the long side - is already aware that knows that GameStop, AMC stocks, and all the others inside the lastest market narrative are all shorts, in the long-run.

What this highlights that the losses experienced could potentially trigger the bankruptcy of pretty much everyone inside the chain. "This is quantitative risk management death. You die and go to balance sheet hell," the Twitter user notes. In sum, as risks are building for all parties involved, the current market rally may end not only in a crash but in the worst financial crisis in the entire U.S. history. And considering that there's no end in sight for this battle, the consequences of it will be revealed in the fullness of time."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com

Jeremiah Babe, “Silver Is The Target; Silver Sales Skyrocket; Dollar Collapse Inevitable”

Jeremiah Babe,

“Silver Is The Target; Silver Sales Skyrocket; 

Dollar Collapse Inevitable”

Gregory Mannarino, "Two More Fed. Presidents Now Calling For NUCLEAR DEBT To 'Save Us'"

Gregory Mannarino,

"Two More Fed. Presidents Now 

Calling For NUCLEAR DEBT To 'Save Us'"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "The Calling"

2002, "The Calling"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. 

About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html.

"You May Know..."

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”

"The New Reichstag Fire"

"The New Reichstag Fire"

by Jeff Thomas

"In one instance after another, history proves to be a reliable bellwether as to what will happen in the future. The reason that this is so often true is that, throughout the ages, whilst technology has been ever-changing, human nature remains essentially the same.

In November of 1932, the Nazis had lost considerable ground in Parliament but were still holding on to power, albeit tentatively. With only one-third of the vote and a federal election scheduled for March of 1933, the Nazis faced losing out to the Left-oriented parties. Then, on the night of 27th February 1933, flames erupted from the Reichstag.

The people of Germany were horrified that their parliament building had been burned. A man was immediately arrested who was claimed by the Nazis to be a communist working for the left-wing opposition parties. The German people called for a return to law and order. The Nazis acted swiftly, drawing up the "Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State." The act abolished freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of privacy. It additionally suspended the autonomy of the various German states. The Nazis were re-elected in the March election and, thereafter, would not need to have any concerns over their future rule. Absolute power was quickly created.

So, fast-forward to Washington, D.C., in 2021 and we have an attack on the Capitol Building. Within minutes of the attack, videos were all over the TV media. (Did the attackers conveniently send videos immediately to CNN and MSNBC, incriminating themselves? Seems doubtful.) One report stated that the "hundreds of demonstrators, among them Nazis and white supremacists, who carried out last week’s attempted coup did so under the guise that Trump’s claims of voter fraud and a stolen election were true."

Within the hour, the media rounded up Democrat leaders, who spoke of "an attempted coup" and "an unspeakable assault" and called for "the immediate impeachment of Donald Trump and his removal from office." Further, the same leaders called for the expulsion of Republican lawmakers who "attempted to overturn the election," stating that they "violated the 14th Amendment." The 14th Amendment states that "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress [who has engaged] in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States. And such action against Mister Trump and his supporters in Congress would be entirely justifiable… if the accusations are indeed factual.

And that’s where we run into a bit of a snag. The demands for removal from office are based on two premises: first, that Mister Trump incited an attack on the Capitol Building, which he did not. He called for a protest, but that is all. He was within his rights to do so. Second, that the congressmen who back Mister Trump do so in support of his election fraud case – demanding that it be heard by the courts, which has been denied him. Whether we think of Mister Trump as the populist savior or regard him as a demon is unimportant. The action being called for is not justifiable within the Law.

But as long as we’re at it, we might put aside, for a moment, the vitriolic reporting regarding the attack on the Capitol and examine the videos objectively. Was this indeed an attempted coup – highly armed troops who acted with military precision? Well, no. In fact, the attackers seemed to have been divided into two groups. The first appear to be actual Trump supporters, some wearing silly outfits, wandering aimlessly in the Capitol and taking selfies with Capitol guards. (Not exactly your guerilla strike force.)

The second behaved more like the Antifa groups that were hired to create riots in some forty cities in the US in 2020. This latter group caused minor mayhem in the Capitol, then quickly left, after the videos had been filmed for the benefit of the media.

If we ignore the media rhetoric and study the videos objectively, what we see is, in fact, two entirely different groups entering the Capitol. The first are clearly Trump supporters, who, at worst, acted as vandals, stupidly breaking windows and pinching Mrs. Pelosi’s lectern whilst grinning for photos. Their behavior resembles a drunken frat party gotten out of hand, more so than an insurrection. But should Congress choose to press charges against them, they are legally justified in doing so.

The second group clearly had greater focus and caused a disturbance, damage to property and personal injury. These people, if they can be found, should also answer for their actions, regardless of whether they were paid by one side or the other to perform their little amateur drama.

What we witnessed was, in fact, a minor event of vandalism that was exacerbated by the fact that it took place at the Capitol Building. It pales in comparison to the scores of riots in America in 2020, with their burning of vehicles and buildings and even the takeover of public and private real estate. But this incident was immediately made use of to make demands to remove a president and some elected Republican members of Congress from office.

Immediately after the calls for removal, numerous other Republican congressmen hurried to the cameras to state that they in no way support Mister Trump at this point, then stood back to allow the Democrat lynch mob to do their worst.

And so, we look back again to the events after the Reichstag fire. People are shocked and scared. There’s a call for law and order. The Nazis acted swiftly, abolishing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of privacy. The Nazis took full power from that date forward and transformed Germany into a collectivist state. In the US, the playbook has been altered slightly.

The president and others arguing in his favor were silenced by social media. Congressional sympathizers were threatened with expulsion. The conservative media have come under attack. (Freedom of assembly and privacy were already decimated in 2020.) The new regime now has full power and the observer must now ask himself what this will mean to his few remaining "inalienable" rights and whether his treasured Liberty will soon be just a memory."

- internationalman.com

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"Senate Is Playing A Dangerous Game With The 14th Amendment"

The Daily "Near You?"

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom.

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"Humanity Today..."

"Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life."

- Edward O. Wilson

"Taking Out the Shorts"

"Taking Out the Shorts"

By Bill Bonner

"The reason the market is doing what it’s doing is people are sitting at home, getting checks from the government. This “fair share” is a bullshit concept. It’s just a way of attacking wealthy people." – Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman

WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Bloomberg has the big news: "Silver Spikes Past $30 as Retail Investors Swarm Biggest Target".  Silver broke above $30 an ounce as the precious metal took center stage in the retail investor frenzy sweeping through markets. Like the buying stampede in GameStop Corp. and other small-cap stocks that has captivated the financial world in recent weeks, silver’s advance can be traced to Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum. One post last week declared the metal “THE BIGGEST SHORT IN THE WORLD” and encouraged traders to pile into the iShares trust as a way to stick it to big banks."

MarketWatch adds: “Influencing the price of silver will not be as easy as a single small or medium sized single equity. Silver’s market cap is in the range of $1.4 trillion to $1.6 trillion as opposed to GameStop’s $1.5 billion before becoming the target of retail investors, and a large proportion of the market is off-exchange. However, it will be interesting to see the small players’ power and how much further they can push prices,” said Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM."

Game on!

Snow Day: It’s a snow holiday here at the worldwide headquarters of the Diary. We don’t get many of them in Maryland, so each one is precious. Yesterday, it snowed all day. Today, the ground is covered in white, with a frosting of ice.

The farm in winter.

This is not the kind of snow or cold that Midwesterners suffer. God knows what a winter in Wisconsin is like. But here, snow storms are infrequent enough, and usually mild enough. So we are both completely unprepared for them and enjoy them thoroughly. This morning, we sit in front of the kitchen fire. What a delight!

A cozy spot on a cold day.

Last week, a guest (there haven’t been many during Anno Covidius) made the following observation: “I could spend all of my time checking Instagram, Twitter, Facebook… and following the news and the opinions… one leading to another one… It’s endless. And at the end of the day… what do I know? Who’s right? Who’s telling the truth? What is the truth? I’d rather spend the time baking a loaf of bread…”

Elizabeth added: “There’s a report out by a French psychologist that says a child’s IQ depends on how many hours he spends with electronic entertainment. The more time, the dumber he is. It also says that this is the first generation ever with lower IQs than their parents.”

Yesterday, we did nothing to lower our IQ. Instead, we spent much of the weekend cutting firewood and ricking it up in the barn. Then, after the snow began to build up, we put a blade on the back of the tractor to clear the road. Easier said than done… The old tractor – two-wheel drive, with well-worn tires – can’t make it up the hills when there is snow on the road. We have to raise the plow, and then get a running start. With a little luck, we get to the top and can then scrape off the snow on the way back down.

The result of our efforts.

But while the World Wide Web is full of lies, foolishness, and IQ-lowering time wasters… we nevertheless wade in – it’s our mission in life! We will wash the scum off later.

Angry Letter: The most entertaining story last week was the GameStop saga. Just when you thought you understood it, another layer of complexity appeared. But the most interesting part of the story, to us, anyway, was that this caused everyone to lose his sense of humor. Everyone seems to be angry. Today, we explain why.

When we write something that appears to be critical of Donald Trump, we get angry letters. When we write something that makes it appear that we do not appreciate Joe Biden, we get more angry letters. And most often, when we criticize them both, we get angry letters from both sides at once. Maybe we should stop reading the mail.

But what shocked us last week was that readers are angry about the stock market, too. On Thursday, we tried to explain – as best we could – what had happened with GameStop. The story was dazzling, multi-layered, and fast-moving. To us, it was just an illustration of how crazy things get when you distribute fake money. People start doing funny things with it – including playing high-stakes games in the stock market. But instead of appreciating the lark of it, people got mad – even at us!

Here’s one letter: "Bill, your arrogance is mind-bending. These kids didn’t invent the squeeze. The stock market has always been a gaming platform. The house lost! The status quo got its a** handed to it on a platter. Now, everyone is whining to his lobbyists and congressman to further rig the game in the house’s favor. These kids are sick of being left out of the “inside info,” “IPOs,” etc. The game is changing and these kids are smart enough to understand their power is only in their numbers."

Hardly had the sting eased when we realized that everyone was choosing sides. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, bless her heart, was making a federal case of it: "This is a serious matter. Committee investigators should examine any retail services freezing stock purchases in the course of potential investigations – especially those allowing sales, but freezing purchases."

And here’s Politico: "The spectacular rise of GameStop’s stock from a surge of buying by small investors has rattled both markets and Washington, with some lawmakers demanding that regulators step in and others threatening action against brokers that suddenly kneecapped retail traders on Thursday."

Crying Foul: Yes, as the story developed, it became something of a cause célèbre for the young Reddit traders… and an embarrassment to the trading platform that hosted them – Robinhood. In order to protect its clients, or so it said, (including perhaps its biggest clients – the Wall Street firms that fund it), it stopped taking buy orders on GameStop on Thursday.

The Reddit crew found this exceedingly unfair. Robinhood seemed to be protecting Wall Street and not the little traders. (More likely, it was protecting itself from a huge blow-up that would have put it out of business.) Meanwhile, the hedge funds that had shorted the GameStop stock were crying foul because it appeared that the price was being manipulated by these callow traders who were out to destroy them (see Cooperman, above).

Lost Their Shorts: And of course, everyone was already mad at the wicked Wall Street short-sellers. These companies earn their keep by identifying stocks that they think are overvalued. Sometimes, they can’t help but tell the world what a great opportunity they’ve found… and occasionally, are instrumental in causing the very price collapse they predict. (A smarter person would make a witty comment about how they exploit the Heisenberg Principle, but we can’t quite figure out how it works. Besides, it’s a snow holiday.)

The shorts borrow the stocks and sell them, hoping that the price will go down when they have to “cover” by buying back the stocks they borrowed. Of course, they don’t actually “borrow” anything. Instead, they receive money for selling shares they don’t own and have a contractual obligation to pay the money back based on the future value of the stock. The lower the share price goes, the less they have to pay back.

So naturally, they are keen to see in the newspapers that the Federal Trade Commission has just seized their target’s bank account and the CEO has been arrested for sex with a minor. (The most “activist” of the short-sellers are probably not above arranging a blind date.)

By the end of the week, the shorts had suffered billions in losses on GameStop. And the players who were “long” – such as discussions website Reddit standouts Roaring Kitty and DeepF**kingValue – were in the chips.

Apparently, Roaring Kitty was recently fired from MassMutual insurance company. According to the chatter on the World Wide Web, his bets on the video game seller have netted him some $33 million, which is not bad for a 34-year-old unemployed guy. And by Friday, word on the street was that not only had some of the hedge funds lost billions… at least one of them decided to get out of short-selling altogether. Citron Research, for example, announced that it “will no longer publish short report.” All good fun.

Hate the Rich: But why so much anger? You already know, don’t you, Dear Reader? Rolling Stone magazine explained: "Take a look at the last 15 years of American economic history. In 2007, a housing bubble burst and led to a financial crisis that threatened to take down massive financial firms. The government rushed to inject public funding into those private companies on the grounds that if megabanks failed, the fallout would be devastating for everyone. That’s true, but it’s also true that it’s devastating to lose a house you were told you could afford, or to get laid off, or to see your retirement savings wiped out. And all of that happened to a lot of people in the Great Recession, but no such emergency help was extended to them. The banks were “too big to fail,” but individuals weren’t, and many of them did.

The post-recession recovery saw the rich again do far better than anyone else. The main economic intervention during that time came in 2017, when Trump and the GOP massively slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy — and then got around to some meager tax perks for workers. A few years later, Covid-19 threw us into another global economic crisis. Congress and the Federal Reserve found astonishing amounts of money for banks, airlines, and other big companies that needed cash fast. For most people, help (so far) has come in the form of a temporary bump in unemployment benefits and two skinny stimulus checks over the course of a year."

New Target: When the money goes, everything goes. You can quote us on that. And as things have been going, the fake money system cheats the young, the poor, and the middle classes, while enriching the top 10%, the insiders, the Establishment, and the elite. Few people understand what is really going on. But feelings of resentment and unfairness don’t need airtight logic to sustain them. And as the going gets worse, anger is bound to express itself in even more peculiar ways.

The Federal Reserve is still monetizing every cockamamie scheme to come down the pike. And now, the crowd of Reddit vigilantes is said to be targeting the silver shorts. How will it turn out? Stay tuned…"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"The Game is On"

"The Game is On"

by Jim Kunstler

"The hijinks playing out in financial markets instruct us that politics finally comes back to the soundness of our economic arrangements, no matter how far out into the asteroid belt of psychopathic ideology the nation veers. For instance, we’re about to find out how little race-and-gender hustling actually matters to the common good of this land. After their successful prank with GameStop, the subreddit vigilantes are aiming to send the price of silver to the silvery moon now, and, in the process, drive hedge-fund privateers and bankster short-sellers into insolvency, even if it wrecks the financial system.

Do you doubt that the system, led by the clueless and feckless Federal Reserve, was already beating a path to financial suicide? Two decades of trying to paper over America’s broken business model with money-from-nowhere, and failure of the authorities to regulate the games being played around that, switched off the price-discovery mechanism of markets. Does that sound abstruse? I’ll explain. Price-discovery is the main function of markets: to send correct signals as to the true price of everything, soybeans, iron ore, stocks, what-have-you, and, most importantly, the exact price of money itself, borrowed over a period of time: that is, term interest rates, meaning the cost of debt.

The price of silver (and of gold, too) have been among the most manipulated, suppressed, and perverted for many years because the rising price against paper currencies would signal the falling value of money, which would inform the people that their standard-of-living is falling — and nothing stirs up political anger like that. So, the regulatory authorities looked the other way when their cronies in big banks such as J.P. Morgan played games to suppress precious metal prices with a revolving short-selling scheme that regularly knocked down the price to discourage buyers from investing in precious metals.

It’s been fifty years since precious metals enjoyed any official peg with the US dollar, but for five thousand years previously gold and silver were money itself and paper currencies became mere representations of that money. That relationship ended in 1971 when President Nixon closed the “window” that allowed foreign countries to redeem gold in exchange for dollars they accumulated from the commercial trade of goods - and, our dollar being the world’s supreme reserve currency, the rest of the world’s currencies followed.

Despite all efforts since then by banking authorities to denigrate the value and the role of gold and silver in financial affairs, the “barbarous relics” retained a persistent influence in men’s minds because of their intrinsic qualities. These were: the vested energy they represented from mining and refining, their physical durability, portability, and divisibility, their freedom from counterparty obligations, and, especially in modern times, their vital usefulness in electronics and other industrial applications. The latter quality is greatly reinforced by the powerful wish to transition from a fossil fuel economy to an alt-energy economy of solar cells and wind turbines - a wish that probably won’t come true.

And so, as promised by the subreddit vigilantes, the silver price was up around $3 or ten percent in overnight trading going into the week’s Monday open. It looks like they mean bidness. And that could mean many things. The most obvious is a very conscious effort to punish the high hats of Wall Street for years of lawless game-playing that made them ultra-rich and left everybody else in the country impoverished. Some of the vigilantes frankly express the desire to wreck the degenerate banking system altogether, a great purge of evil to restore something like God-fearing accountability, moving toward a fresh and honest re-start of markets and banking. I’m not convinced that we would get any such orderly re-start in the sense that global banking could be reconstructed along pre-2020 lines.

Rather, wrecking the banks in a daisy-chain of shattered obligations would be an express ticket to the Palookaville of neo-medievalism I’ve been warning about, and probably in a sharp, disorderly, violent, and deadly episode of losing everything that has made us civilized. In any case, the country has already prepped itself for some kind of spectacular failure with all the social mind-f**kery of the past four years that eventuated with the empty shell of Joe Biden in the White House, and millions of his supporters swept into an epic hysteria of manufactured moral outrage over pseudo-realities initiated by academic racketeers and then weaponized by our politicians. But the game is on, whether you like it or not. This may be a last opportunity to get your minds right before you lose your country and your future."

- https://kunstler.com/

"How It Really Feels Now, For Far Too Many"

"Never, Never..."

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”

- Arundhati Roy