Tag Archives: Naked Shorts

Apr 23 2021

The Great California Tax Rush – The Exodus Right on Time


Armstrong Economics Blog/The Hunt for Taxes Re-Posted Apr 23, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong, a close friend of my is a major celebrity in Hollywood. They too follow you and are joining the exodus from California. So many people are leaving it is remarkable. It looks like the buyers of these expensive homes are foreigners, mainly Chinese, who want the prestige of Hollywood but are exempt from the income taxes.

Just thought you might want to know.

Thanks for being a light in a new age of darkness.

HC

REPLY: Yes, the press seems to be filled with an endless stream of celebs selling their homes in California. I suppose they are all not leftists, or at least they are leftists only in rhetoric, but for themselves, they are more right. I suppose their destination is Texas or Florida.

What is really fascinating is that the great California Gold Rush (1848–1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The mad rush really began in 1849 and that is when the US began minting California gold into coins. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and overseas. If we look at 1848 and 2020, that is exactly 172 years or (2 x 8.6 = 17.2). The mad rush out of California is precisely in line. In fact, it was 1849 when Californians sought statehood. That was finally granted and California entered the Union as a free, nonslave state by the Compromise of 1850. California became the 31st state on September 9, 1850

Between 1849 and 1853, about 24,000 young Chinese men immigrated to California. Chinese immigrants soon found that many Californians did not welcome them. In 1852, California placed a high monthly tax on all foreign miners. Chinese miners had no choice but to pay this tax if they wanted to mine for gold in California. California has had a history of punishing people they do not like with burdensome taxation. Interestingly, 172 years from their punitive Chinese taxation will be precisely 2024. It does not look very good for California by 2024. They will realize they have lost their best people like “Atlas Shrugged.”

Apr 23 2021

Real Estate into 2023


Armstrong Economics Blog/Real Estate Re-Posted Apr 23, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Marty, at the Orlando WEC, I asked you if your real estate forecasts for residential included condos. I believe you said no. I bought a house when your index elected a monthly bullish reversal in June 2020. Everything seems to have doubled since. Do you think your forecast into 2023 is influenced by the excessive spending of Biden?

Thank you.

KW

ANSWER: Yes, this is the single-family home index. It does not include commercial real estate or condos. It is always a combination of influences. It appears that Biden has provided the straw that broke the back of deflation. Central banks have been engaging in Quantitative Easing since 2008 without success. This has been largely caused by the collapse in confidence in the future. When people fear the future, they save. Increasing the money supply does nothing until the people decide to spend it.

One of the factors that confirmed to me that we would be heading into progressive inflation long-term was the fact that this Residential Index elected a Yearly Bullish Reversal at the end of 2012. That confirmed the long-term trend had changed. However, urban condo and commercial properties were forming a divergence. I assumed that was being caused by the debt and rising taxes in cities. In that regard, I suppose I was only partially correct, for the rest has been the brain-dead response to COVID.

For example, locking people down and causing them to lose jobs has resulted in a sharp rise in violence. Not just mass shootings, but all sorts of conflicts from domestic disputes to outright feuds. Cities, such as Philadelphia and New York, have sections in which the police have totally lost control. It is debatable if they will ever be able to restore civility to these regions. While Fauci claims to ignore the Constitutional violations, his agenda in helping Gates and Schwab is more than simply preparing society for the Great Reset. He is furthering the collapse of urban civility and this trend is part of what is driving this index.

I would expect to see this escalate and if we make a new high on this index and close above last year’s high, single-family homes outside of urban centers will rise sharply into 2023.

Apr 23 2021

Usefulness Exhausted, CDC Reassigns Rod Rosenstein’s Sister “she has since taken leave”


Posted originally on the conservative tree house April 22, 2021 | Sundance | 25 Comments

Interesting notation from Politico regarding the move of Rod Rosenstein’s sister, Nancy Messonnier, out of the CDC executive management coordinating the COVID-19 response.  Messonnier made a big splash in February 2020 when she proclaimed COVID was a looming catastrophe about to overwhelm the nation.

WASHINGTON DC – CDC respiratory disease chief Nancy Messonnier has been reassigned from her position heading the agency’sCovid-19 vaccine task force, according to three people familiar with the move.

Messonnier is being absorbed into an incident management response team headed by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. But the situation remains fluid as CDC restructures teams under Walensky’s leadership.

[…]  three people with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO she has since taken leave from the CDC, and some of them characterized it as an unplanned vacation. Messonnier has not yet responded to a request for comment.  (read more)

The alarming February 2020 message from Dr. Messonnier was quickly picked up by most major news organizations and pushed into all reporting on the issue.  The tone of the alarm was also counter to the message of the Trump administration and HHS Secretary Alex Azar, as outlined in a press conference with leadership from U.S. Health and Human Services.

[NYT LINK]

As you can see, it was the early 2020 statements by Dr. Messonnier and not HHS Secretary Alex Azar that were driving the media narrative.

Considering the interests of the issue(s); and considering what lessons we learned over the past four years about the severity of opposition to the Trump administration writ large; and considering the known actions and inherent ideology already identified within the behavior of Mr. Rosenstein; weaponizing the political value of Coronavirus as an economic contagion to undermine President Trump was not easily dismissed….

….After all, there are trillions at stake.

Suspicious cat remains, well, suspicious…

Apr 23 2021

Maricopa County Ballots Arrive For Audit At Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Audit Begins Tomorrow – Livestream Link


Posted originally on the conservative tree house April 22, 2021 | Sundance | 229 Comments

[Full Backstory Here] The physical hand count of the Maricopa county ballots in Arizona will start Friday.  In addition to physical ballot auditing, a physical canvassing of some voters and addresses will take place to match the ballot to the voter.  The pre-selected addresses contain multiple ballot returns, some in the thousands.

Yesterday the tabulation machines were transferred, under custody and with support of sheriffs department, to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum (Arizona Exposition and State Fairgrounds).  The physical ballots arrived today following a similar chain of custody and security transport.

The auditors are trying to be as transparent as possible knowing the outcome, if it turns out as predicted to find significant fraud, will be legally challenged. [Twitter Account Here]  The Auditors have set up a 24/7 livestream of the CCTV system for public review and transparency. [Livestream Link Here]

Here’s the update:

Apr 22 2021

Guilty!


Posted originally on GrrrGraphics.com APR 20, 2021 AT 7:16 PM

Police Officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all charges today. I am not an expert in legal matters, but being convicted of 2nd and 3rd degree murder as well as manslaughter all at once…well, aren’t these mutually exclusive? Why not convict him of assault and battery as well? I thought the three charges were arranged so the jury could pick and choose. They chose all three.

Did the jury convict out of fear? Did cultural Marxism and political correctness trump justice in this case? I think it did. The jury had been doxxed. Perhaps they feared their homes would be burned down. Perhaps they didn’t want resulting mass riots and possible death to weigh on their collective conscience. Maybe they saw the civil case in which the city awarded the family of George Floyd tens of millions of dollars. Usually civil cases come after criminal cases, but the city was eager to assuage the riotous anger. Officer Chauvin got caught in the middle.

I too thought Chauvin was guilty at first. The video was horrific. Yet he was doing a police maneuver taught by the city police department. Floyd resisted arrest and had 4x the toxic limit of Fentanyl in his system, along with other drugs. He had an enlarged heart. He complained he couldn’t breathe while in the squad car. The police officers didn’t know how doped up the very big and muscular Floyd was or how he might be suffering a genuine health emergency.

Then we had Mad Maxine Waters disgracefully yelling for violence if the verdict was not guilty. Biden joined in with Waters in a shameful manner that should at very least cause a mistrial. Instead we got a kangaroo court. Political correctness triumphed over justice.

—Ben Garrison

Apr 22 2021

Fourth Industrial Revolution Failure


Armstrong Economics Blog/AI Computers Re-Posted Apr 22, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: As a programmer and a client of Socrates, I can tell this is not some neural net or deep learning AI program. What you have created goes far beyond that. Do you care to share your design?

HS

ANSWER: No. I fooled around with neural nets back in the 80s. I could see they would never accomplish what was necessary for global analysis. The same was true about Deep Learning. Those are solutions for one-dimensional objectives, in my opinion. IBM spent untold amounts on its Watson. They thought it would be able to cure cancer. It failed.

What makes Socrates unique is that I had to TEACH it how I would analyze. It is not as simple as throwing in all the data and hoping something will create itself, as in neural nets. You can do that with a simple problem like creating an AI program to determine if making a loan will have a higher probability of default or not. You feed in all the past history and sort according to income, purpose, etc. That will work most of the time. However, what happens if there is an economic shock such as shutting down businesses due to COVID? Or perhaps a war emerges. No program created in such a manner will ever be able to forecast those external factors.

Even all the high-frequency trading programs are one-dimensional. The collapse of Archegos Capital is indicative of what happens with a one-dimensional program which inevitably will be used with personal opinion. Even the Long-Term Capital Management collapse was the same problem. They even wrote a book about that – “When Genius Failed.” These one-dimensional programs will work nicely until there is an outside external force that they can not see coming.

To accomplish what Socrates does is far beyond anything you can imagine. The variables are off the charts, and seeing the future even with the arrays involved 72 separate models. We must understand that most AI programs that people write are still very one-dimensional and lack nonlinear concepts.

Unfortunately, 99% of all programs that people claim are Artificial Intelligence are really just expert systems. For example, you could take every disease and list its symptoms. Then you add a query and the program would simply look up the disease based upon the symptom. This would probably be better than seeing most doctors for that is why they always say get a second opinion. This type of program is not AI, for there is no true independent thinking process taking place. Nevertheless, this is what is typically marketed as AI. This has created in and of itself a false impression of what Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Even facial recognition is simply a pattern comparison. Nothing is truly taking place other than a lookup system with a database.

What is online is a small fraction of what Socrates does. We intend to provide a desktop program that will be able to tap into language and voice capabilities. We can deliver voice via the internet, but trying to accept voice input from the client over the internet is a different problem altogether.

When Schwab boasts about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, he is clueless as to what that would even entail. You will not find even one mainstream media outlet that would dare to write a story that Socrates even exists. The analysis would change everything, for it is not based upon “opinion,” which they love to provide. Additionally, Schwab would block any press on Socrates because it also forecasts that this cabal of his fails in the end. Everything Schwab envisions is still one-dimensional. He has no idea of the complexity of the nonlinear design necessary to really provide a valid methodology for forecasting.

Apr 22 2021

DeSantis Extends Sales Tax Online in Florida for Unemployment


Armstrong Economics Blog/The Hunt for Taxes Re-Posted Apr 22, 2021 by Martin Armstrong

The Democrats are twisting the facts as always by claiming DeSantis is raising taxes on consumers and cutting taxes for business. The bill he just signed is estimated to tax consumers $1 billion a year, with the money first earmarked for the unemployment trust fund, which became depleted because of massive job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses pay taxes that go into the trust fund and, without another source of money, would have faced higher taxes to replenish the fund. But what they do not tell the people is that pushing higher unemployment taxes on business actually means that comes out of your paycheck.

The Democrats just cannot bring themselves to ever tell the truth. While I am not in favor of raising sales taxes on everything I buy online, the net effect is that those with jobs would be paying the tax for those who lost their jobs thanks to lockdowns and COVID. Let’s call this what it really is — a COVID Tax.

Apr 22 2021

U.S. Postal Service Running Covert Surveillance Operation to Monitor Social Media Posts, The Program Sounds Identical to DHS Surveillance Program


Posted originally on the conservative tree house April 21, 2021 | Sundance | 112 Comments

Again it is important to repeat, this type of activity is one long continuum.  The IRS was previously used; federal contractors for the FBI have previously been used, and now the United States Postal Service is running a covert surveillance program against Americans that sounds suspiciously like the prior DHS announcement.

The Yahoo news article is filled with people saying they don’t know why.  But that’s only because they have not been paying attention.  The USPS has the systems in place to record every single package (sender and recipient), of every single piece of mail, sent anywhere at all times.  They have a massive database of information on every single American.

So when you put the USPS statutory authority together with their technical capability, and then consider they operate their own police force… and then tie it together with “DHS Preparing to Use Private Contractors to “Scour Public Data and Social Media” To Compile Dissident Citizens for Watch List and No Fly Lists“…. what is described in the Yahoo article is almost identical to what we previously outlined.

Yahoo –  The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.  (read more)

Now compare that description to what we previously outlined:

Treehouse – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now getting ready to hire public companies, individual contractors outside government, to scour public data and social media in order to provide information for the new “domestic terror watch lists.”  From the description it appears DHS is going to pay “big tech” (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, etc.), via contracts, to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens they deem “dangerous.”  (read more)

The Treehouse citation included the following NBC article.

[…] DHS is planning to expand its relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligence, one of the senior officials said, and also to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans, including travel and commercial data through Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and other DHS components. (read more)

…It’s the same program.

Apr 22 2021

Eric Holder 2.0 – Merrick Garland Announces DOJ Investigation of Minneapolis Police Department to Initiate Another Federal Consent Decree


Posted originally on the conservative tree house April 21, 2021 | Sundance | 95 Comments

The term “JoeBama” is not a meme… It is a REALITY.

Those behind the scene are using the Biden administration as an extension of the third term of Barack Obama.  Same people; same policies; same agenda, and same exact goals.   As a consequence U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is duplicating the exact same policy directives as former DOJ Attorney General Eric Holder.  The people in place are identical; the actions they take are identical; the purpose of their activity is identical.  The DOJ is politically weaponized to achieve ideological goals.

The most recent example of the synergy happens today with AG Garland announcing a DOJ civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis police department.  Cut to the chase, the result of the investigation will be another municipal authority placed under a federal consent decree.  THAT will happen, the investigation to justify the consent decree is a farse.  This is JoeBama and the Chicago team replicating the same process.

“Attorney General Merrick Garland today announced a new investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department and City of Minneapolis for possible pattern and practice unconstitutional actions. This investigation is not related to the already announced investigation into the murder of George Floyd, but is instead examining the entire department for continuous misconduct.”

.

Apr 22 2021

Maricopa County, Arizona, Hand Count Ballot Audit Begins Friday – Tabulation Machines Arrived Today, Ballots Tomorrow, Livestream Security Activated


Posted originally on the conservative tree house April 21, 2021 | Sundance | 149 Comments

[Full Backstory Here] The physical hand count of the Maricopa county ballots in Arizona will start Friday.  Today the tabulation machines were transferred, under custody and with support of sheriffs department, to the Arizona Exposition and State Fairgrounds.  The physical ballots arrive tomorrow following a similar chain of custody and security transport.

The auditors are trying to be as transparent as possible knowing the outcome, if it turns out as predicted to find significant fraud, will be legally challenged. [Twitter Account Here]  The Auditors have even set up a 24/7 livestream of the CCTV system for public review and transparency. [Livestream Link Here]  Here’s the update:

The link to the CCTV system livestream is below: