Sort of reminds me of some Fortune 500 Woke companies I’ve frequented in my career.
But, I digress.
QUEENS, NY—In a courageous new episode of Sesame Street, the puppets teach kids about social justice by introducing a new character, Todd– a white male puppet who is blamed for everything wrong in the world.
Minutes into the episode, Todd is introducing himself to the other puppets and a prescriptively diverse cast of guest children, when he is confronted by Grover about Todd’s culpability regarding a distant ancestor who fought for the Confederacy.
Later on, Todd works alongside the puppet Abby Cadabby to stock the shelves of Hooper’s store with Goya beans. His accidental revelation that he gets paid 30% more than her leads to Abby singing a tearful rendition of ‘Workforce Woes.’
The episode’s final sketch portrays Todd selling cookies without the requisite health warning labels, forcing Cookie Monster into obesity and skyrocketing healthcare costs.
In an upcoming 17-part series entitled “R is for Racism”, Todd appears in multiple educational scenarios including a math teacher forcing minority puppets to learn 2 + 2 = 4, an ignorant puppet who thinks some cops might be good, and in a particularly jarring sketch, a shady character teaching kids to face life’s unfairness with hard work, self-sacrifice, and hope for the future.
I had one of those racist math teachers. More than a few math teachers who considered mathematics the only thing worth knowing. They were nuns who took a vow of poverty and no grief from punk Brooklyn kids. I still recall Sister Delores in class smacking around more than a few 13 year old boys who had trouble with respecting authority.
The Civil War was long done when my immigrant grandparents got here with no money and no handouts available to them. They told me they wouldn’t accept a dime anyway.
Metzl begins by taking a baseball bat to the WHO “investigation”, blasting it as a “Study Tour”
Jamie Metzl: I wouldn’t really call what’s happened now an investigation. It’s essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour.
Lesley Stahl: Study tour?
Jamie Metzl: Study tour. Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.
Jamie Metzl: We would have to ask the question, “Well, why in Wuhan?” To quote Humphrey Bogart, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Wuhan?” What Wuhan does have is China’s level four virology institute, with probably the world’s largest collection of bat viruses, including bat coronaviruses.
Lesley Stahl: I had seen that the World Health Organization team only spent 3 hours at the lab.
Jamie Metzl:While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel.
That’s because of the ground rules China set with the WHO, which has never had the authority to make demands or enforce international protocols.
Jamie Metzl: It was agreed first that China would have veto power over – over who even got to be on the mission. Secondly –
Lesley Stahl: And WHO agreed to that.
Jamie Metzl: WHO agreed to that. On top of that, the WHO agreed that in most instances China would do the primary investigation.
And then just share its findings –
Lesley Stahl: No.
Jamie Metzl: – with these international experts. So these international experts weren’t allowed to do their own primary investigation.
Lesley Stahl: Wait. You’re saying that China did the investigation and showed the results to the committee and that was it?
Jamie Metzl: Pretty much that –
Lesley Stahl: Whoa.
On the other side is Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team, and from the EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak’s nonprofit group, routed $600,000 in taxpayer funds to the WIV in form of subgrants as part of a project to study bat-based coronaviruses in China, funding that was terminated by the National Institutes of Health in May 2020.
From the onset of the pandemic, Daszak has denied he has a conflict of interest with the WIV, a claim that Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said in April was a “brazen lie.”
After several minutes of equivocating, Stahl forced Daszak to admit the incontrovertible truth: that the WHO has no real evidence to disprove the lab leak. Essentially, the team is just taking China’s word for it, according to Daszak. What choice did they have?
Peter Daszak: The theory is that somehow that virus got from a bat into one of these wildlife farms. And then the animals were shipped into the market. And they contaminated people while they were handling them, chopping them up, killing them, whatever you do before you cook an animal.
Lesley Stahl: Wild animals?
Peter Daszak: Yeah, these–
Lesley Stahl: Like what?
Peter Daszak: They’re a traditional food. Civets, these are like ferrets. There’s also an animal called a ferret badger. Rabbits, which we know can carry the virus. Those animals were coming into the market from farms over 1,000 miles away.
Lesley Stahl: Were you able to test any of the animals found in the Wuhan market for the virus?
Peter Daszak: Well, the China team had done that, and they found a few animals left in freezers. They tested them, they were negative. But the fact that those animals are there is the clue.
Lesley Stahl: But there’s no direct evidence that any of those animals were actually infected with the bat virus?
Peter Daszak: Correct. Now what we’ve gotta do is go to those farms and investigate. Talk to the farmers. Talk to their relatives. Test them. See if there were spikes in virus there first.
Lesley Stahl: So, the team doesn’t actually know if any of the farmers or the truckers were ever infected?
Peter Daszak: No one knows yet. No one’s been there. No one’s asked them. No one’s tested them. That’s to be done.
Hilariously, Daszak said Chinese government “minders” were in the room with the investigators at all times.
Peter Daszak: We met with them. We said, “Do you audit the lab?” And they said, “Annually.” “Did it you audit it after the outbreak?” “Yes.” “Was anything found?” “No.” “Do you test your staff?” “Yes.” No one was–
Lesley Stahl: But you’re just taking their word for it.
Peter Daszak:Well, what else can we do? There’s a limit to what you can do and we went right up to that limit. We asked them tough questions. They weren’t vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable– correct and convincing.
Lesley Stahl: But weren’t the Chinese engaged in a cover-up? They destroyed evidence, they punished scientists who were trying to give evidence on this very question of the origin.
Peter Daszak: Well, that wasn’t our task to find out if China had covered up the origin issue.
Lesley Stahl: No, I know. I’m just saying doesn’t that make you wonder?
Peter Daszak: We didn’t see any evidence of any false reporting or cover-up in the work that we did in China.
Lesley Stahl: Were there Chinese government minders in the room every time you were asking questions?
Peter Daszak:There were Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff in the room throughout our stay. Absolutely. They were there to make sure everything went smoothly from the China side.
Lesley Stahl: Or to make sure they weren’t telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth–
Peter Daszak: You sit in a room with people who are scientists and you know what a scientific statement is and you know what a political statement is. We had no problem distinguishing between the two.
Speaking of political statements…
Geopolitics loomed over the entire inquiry with some tit for tats: Beijing said COVID-19 originated in the U.S.; the Trump administration accused China of a cover-up.
Matt Pottinger: There was a direct order from Beijing to destroy all viral samples — and they didn’t volunteer to share the genetic sequences.
Not long ago, all you needed to to as a company to guarantee success as a financial entity was to somehow associate yourself with electric cars. That’s over. Just take a look at the corrosive erosion taking place across the entire sector. My view is that this collapse has only just started, and I’m not even including the outright frauds you already know and shan’t be repeated here.
Cooper (2021) at least seven genetically independent lineages acquired a mutation at one particular spot on the virus’s infamous spike protein. Spike has a sequence of linked amino acids, and the mutation occurs at position number 677. In the original SARS-CoV-2 this is the amino acid glutamine, abbreviated as Q.
Mutations in at least eight different positions in the spike protein are simultaneously on the rise around the world, appearing in B.1.1.7 and in other major variants of concern known as B.1.351, P.1 and P.3. These variants share combinations of mutations at positions 18, 69–70, 417, 452, 501, 681 and a particularly concerning E484K mutation that evades neutralizing antibodies.
Cooper speculates that the virus is beginning to run out of new, major adaptations.
The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes the virus that causes COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, according to a new interview.
Robert Redfield told CNN on Friday that it was his “opinion” that SARS-CoV-2 — the new coronavirus responsible for killing 2.7 million people globally — did not evolve naturally.
“I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped,” said Redfield, who led the CDC during the height of the pandemic. “Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Researchers believe the deadly and highly transmissible strain of coronavirus behind the global pandemic mutated from a virus that infects animals — namely, bats — to one that sickens humans.
But some believe the virus was somehow released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which is the only lab in China authorized to study the most dangerous known pathogens, according to Axios.
“It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker. … That’s not implying any intentionality,” Redfield said. “It’s my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology.
“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time, that the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission.”
Redfield said usually when a virus jumps from animals to humans, “it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission.” (Emphasis added)
Thinking back to a long time ago, I recall dealing with some rather unsavory people for a time. They were cashing government paychecks, of course, which made the “unsavory” part predictable. Then again, so was I at that time.
Anyway, they were a lot of fun off-duty – most sociopaths are. As long as you regularly remind yourself who you are drinking with, you can have fun AND still maintain some situational awareness.
Besides, I “wasn’t the droid they were looking for.”
I kind of think that’s why the FBI had more of a challenge smearing Carter Page in the “Get Trump Anyway You Can” campaign – Page was a player and he had situational awareness when approached. Page just assumed the DOJ would never set him up.
Silly rabbit.
Seems today, most of the country is really into the sociopath thing – Clinton, Obama, celebrity worship. I continue to be surprised when seemingly intelligent people tell me how wonderful the Obamas are.
We interrupt today’s Caitlin Johnstone article with this breaking news report from the National News Conglomerate. NNC: Obey.
WASHINGTON — One of the nations the United States government has targeted for destruction is guilty of doing a very bad thing that nobody can see, according to sources familiar with the matter.
One senior official who spoke on conditions of anonymity told NNC that while nobody was killed or injured by the bad thing that was done by the bad country, and that the bad thing has in fact had no discernible effect on anything anywhere that everyday Americans would be able to perceive with the naked eye, it was still a very bad thing and will almost certainly require a much more inflated military budget to deal with.
“It’s true that the thing which was done was not bad enough to have hurt any American or to have affected the observable universe in any way that Americans can verify by observation, but it was definitely bad enough to justify strengthening our military presence against the bad country,” the official said. “I hear the Raytheon family has a fine line of surprisingly affordable new products to choose from that would be ideal for our nation’s national security needs.”
Other sources confirmed that the US intelligence community is between “somewhat confident” and “kinda confident” in its assessment that the thing we just reported as verified fact in preceding paragraphs actually occurred.
When another source familiar with the matter was asked if the US government would be providing the public with any evidence that the bad thing had in fact happened and had actually been done by the accused foreign government, the source said “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” the source then added. “Oh wait you’re serious, let me laugh even harder, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
“The evidence is classified,” the source added, anonymously. “It’s secret, invisible evidence.”
Les Overton, a senior fellow at the DC-based policy group American Freedom Democracy for Freedom Institute, told NNC that it is common for US government agencies to make unverifiable claims about invisible misdeeds being perpetrated by nations the US government doesn’t like.
“Sometimes it’s hacking, sometimes it’s paying bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, sometimes it’s election interference, sometimes it’s considering doing a bad thing and then not actually doing it,” Overton said. “Either way we always uncritically report the allegation as a fact unless it’s irrefutably proven false, and even then we just sort of still act like it’s true because we don’t want to be unpatriotic.”
“I mean, if you can’t trust an assertion by an anonymous official from the United States government, what in this world can you trust?” Overton added.
At the start of February, when the dual short squeezes of option gamma and WallStreetBets meme stocks were all the rage, a chart from Goldman indexing non-profitable tech companies was making the rounds across Wall Street desk; it showed the sector’s tremendous ascent since the Fed’s panicked response to the covid crisis, which more than quadrupled the return of this index.
Well, in the past month, things have gotten uglier, and at one point this morning, the index had plunged more than 30% from its February peak (now down 28.8%) after tumbling a whopping 7% yesterday.
Commenting on this furious reversal and the chart above, this morning Rabobank’s Michael Every – who evoked Jaws in his daily post for several other reasons – said “do you know what the graph of that particular market segment is starting to look like to me? A shark’s fin: and if that is indeed the case, we would soon see happy young traders suddenly pulled underwater and tossed around like rag dolls.”
Of course, this won’t be the first time “happy young traders are pulled underwater”, nor the first time that unprofitable companies explode higher only to crash immediately after. While many current traders won’t remember, and many may not even have been alive, an almost identical pattern presented itself in the run up to the bursting of the dot com bubble.
There are other reasons why the current market is “evoking memories of the dot-com crash” as Bloomberg notes this morning. One among them is the growing revulsion to the sector that in many ways defined 2020 – the FAANG names, which at one point last year account for a quarter of all market cap.
As Bloomberg’s Elena Popina writes in the daily Taking Stock colimn, “when the hegemony of the FAANG stocks cracked in September, it was a welcome reprieve for investors who watched a handful of names rule the market all year. Now it’s March, and the streak of under-performance by stocks with megacap bias is becoming historic.”
She refers to an equal-weight version of the S&P 500, which has outperformed its cap-weighted peer for seven months. That’s notable because it has now topped the streak after the financial crisis to become the longest stretch since the dot-com bust, indicating the buildup of a huge anti-megacap bias within the market. Said otherwise, a gauge of mega-cap stocks from Alphabet to Facebook and Netflix has trailed the S&P 500 Index for five out of seven months, as the value reversal kicked in and growth stocks have been left in the dust.
“Mega-cap tech, which dominates the market-cap-weighted index, is not looking as rosy in a post-pandemic world as we shift our consumption from screens to services,” said Max Gokhman, head of asset allocation at Pacific Life Fund Advisors.
While it’s true that things have changed dramatically for tech stocks since the popping of the Internet bubble some 20 years ago, one thing stays the same: the group’s sensitivity to rising rates which has gotten even bigger. We have repeatedly shown this with a chart demonstrating the “duration” of the growth sector, and just how exposed the hedge fund community is to risk from higher interest rates (i.e. duration).
So going back to the bursting of the dot com bubble, Bloomberg reminds us that in the seven months from late 2001 through April 2002, the under-performance of the cap-weighted S&P 500 Index coincided with rising 10-year yields, which traded north of the 5% mark in the spring of 2002. A similar pattern happened in late 2009-early 2010, when a cap-weighted S&P 500 Index trailed its equal-weighted peer as yields went up.
“The difference this time around is that rates are likely to continue to climb over the long term,” said Matt Maley, chief strategist at Miller Tabak + Co. “In 2002 & 2009, they rolled back over after a couple of months.”
Actually no, Matt, the difference this time is that unlike 2002 and 2009, the Fed is now openly protecting stocks and defending even the dumbest equity investors, which is why Powell’s job (and that of his replacement in 2022) will be fascinating: how does the Fed achieve its two true mandates of runaway inflation (remember: no rate hikes until 2024) while avoiding a full blown crash in the tech sector.
I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office, that’s how it came about,” Biden continued. “It was when President Bush had said, ‘I’ve looked in his eyes and saw his soul.’ I said, ‘I looked in your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.’ He looked back and he said, ‘We understand each other.’ ” — ABC News, Joe Biden with George Stephanopoulos on V. Putin of Russia
Somehow, I don’t think Joe Biden understood what he thought Vladimir Putin understood about what they mutually understood. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mr. Putin understood Joe Biden to be the most pathetic blustering schlemiel he’d ever encountered on the international scene. But that must have been before Mr. B was installed in the White House by powers and persons unseen because it’s evident now that his handlers do not allow him to talk to foreign leaders, not even on the phone. Ms. Harris does that.
The alleged president went on to tell Mr. Stephanopoulos that Mr. Putin was “a killer” who would “soon pay a price” for interfering in the 2020 election. In turn, Mr. Putin promptly called the Russian ambassador back home “for consultations,” which is generally what happens when one country makes warlike noises to another country.
Mr. Putin added a tantalizing taunt days later, saying. “I’ve just thought of this now. I want to propose to President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that we do it basically live, as it’s called. Without any delays and directly in an open, direct discussion. It seems to me that would be interesting for the people of Russia and for the people of the United States. I don’t want to put this off for long. I want to go to the taiga this weekend to relax a little,” Mr. Putin went on. “So, we could do it tomorrow or Monday. We are ready at any time convenient for the American side.”
Do you suppose Vladimir Putin is having some sport with Mr. Biden, this lightweight even among US politicians, with brain-rot to boot? Pretty soon, the president’s handlers will have to forbid him to open his pie-hole in public altogether. No more one-on-one interviews even with slow-pitch party shills like Mr. Stephanopoulos. They’ll just wheel him into the rose garden periodically like a cigar store Indian for proof-of-life demonstrations and leave the management of the nation… to others.
And how’s that going after a couple of months? Apparently, economic collapse is not enough for the party in charge of things now. They’re strangely compelled to seek every possible opportunity to insult the public’s intelligence while destroying what’s left of American culture. Case in point out of Nancy Pelosi’s Congress: HR1, the so-called “For the People Act,” institutionalizing ballot fraud in US elections. The law would make permanent the Covid-19 emergency mail-in voting system, over-riding whatever each state’s election law says — which makes the act appear patently unconstitutional — plus permitting same-day motor-voter registration of any live body, citizen or not, plus removing all voter ID requirements, and much more to ensure the country is never again threatened by a fair election.
Next up: HR5, the so-called “Equality Act,” institutionalizing the notion that categories of “male” and “female” are mere cultural constructs and must in no way be allowed to order any cultural activity from school to work to leisure. The bill was initially conceived to harden into law President Obama’s EO expanding the Department of Education’s Title IX rules on school sports — which eventuated in “trans women” disrupting girls’ sports. Now, men pretending to be women (and vice-versa) will be allowed to disrupt everything else in American life, especially the civil courts, with frivolous lawsuits.
Also in the pipeline: HR6, the so-called “American Dream and Promise Act,” and its Senate companion, S264, the plain “Dream Act,” that will grant permanent residency and then citizenship to currently “undocumented” people who snuck into the USA as children. The dreams and promises have already been delivered, even before the final passage of any new act, with an unprecedented flood of unaccompanied migrant children crashing the border, as well as a surge of adults fleeing Mexico and Central America. Apparently, the thinking in Washington these days is that we don’t have enough poor people in America, that their lives are not difficult enough. The message couldn’t be clearer to millions outside the United States: by all means, cross the border and we will do nothing about it. And so, with the border reduced to just another cultural construct, Mr. Biden himself took the extraordinary action of telling them on TV, “Don’t Come!” I guess that’ll do the trick.
Do you have any idea how pissed-off a clear majority of the American public will be after a few more months of this?
According to media reports, there has been a mass shooting. As of now, it is unclear how bad the mass shooting is, or whether anyone should care about it– since authorities have not yet released the skin colors of the perpetrator and the victims.
“It’s possible this could be a horrific mass shooting we will talk about for years to come,” said one news anchor. “On the other hand, it may just be a run-of-the-mill mass shooting that we’ll forget by tomorrow since it doesn’t fit the narrative we are trying to sell right now. For the time being, please be sure to assume this shooting confirms all your most horrific biases about the state of our country. Stay tuned for more details– unless we decide you don’t really need to hear more details.”
Already, social media is buzzing with speculation and anger, confirming everything everyone already knew about how horrible the groups of people who they think are so horrible really are.
“Not surprised,” said one American. “This is America– the country where the exact people I hate are as horrible as I thought they were.”
The media has assured they will probably just hold off on reporting further details until the preferred narrative has had time to run its course.
UPDATE 5 PM ET:
The suspect in the Monday afternoon Boulder, Colorado supermarket shooting which left 10 dead is 21-year-old Ahmad Al-Issa from Arvada, Colorado, so expect this not to be classified as terrorism, and the motive to remain unclear for some time.
And, of course, the racism-white supremacy-Trump thread is done.
Though we’re sure Rachel Maddow and CNN will fill in the blanks.
Econophysics2020 
