Global News Update: Nov 23, 2014

 – Summing It All Up In 1 Surreal Chart (ZeroHedge):

Because, as financial media keeps propagandizing, it’s all about the fundamentals…

Charts: Bloomberg

– Veteran S&P Futures Trader: “I Am 100% Confident That Central Banks Are Buying S&P Futures” (ZeroHedge):

“This last 1900 point Dow Jones push upwards – and the Ebola events leading into it – it was so orchestrated and heightened at critical points but the ascent and push straight up in price, and sideways nonreaction after was completely unlike anything I’ve seen before.   After going up for a record-breaking amount of time the last five or so years, in a nonlinear exponential mania type of ascent, there should normally be tremendous volatility that follows… After this year and especially this last 1900 point Dow run up in October, and post non-reaction, that I am 100 percent confident that that one buyer is our own Federal Reserve or other central banks with a goal to “stimulate” our economy by directly buying stock index futures.”

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American Epidemic? NYPD cop shoots dead unarmed man ‘without warning’:

– Sell, Sell, Sell…….The Central Bank Madmen Are Raging (David Stockman’s Contra Corner):

The global financial system has come unglued. Everywhere the real world evidence points to cooling growth, faltering investment, slowing trade, vast excess industrial capacity, peak private debt, public fiscal exhaustion, currency wars, intensified politico-military conflict and an unprecedented disconnect between debt-saturated real economies and irrationally exuberant financial markets.

Yet overnight two central banks promised what amounts to more monetary heroin and, presto, the S&P 500 index jerked up to 2070. That is, the robo-traders inflated the PE multiple for S&P’s basket of US-based global companies to a nose bleed 20X their reported LTM earnings.

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– “Down Outright Murder”: A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson (The Intercept)

– In Great Britain, Protecting Pedophile Politicians is a Matter of “National Security” (Liberty Blitzkrieg):

I’ve long written about how the percentage of sociopaths within a group of humans becomes increasingly concentrated the higher you climb within the positions of power in a society, with it being most chronic amongst those who crave political power (see: Humanity is Rising).

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Now we have evidence of yet another case.

The Guardian reports that:

The security services are facing questions over the cover-up of a Westminster paedophile ring as it emerged that files relating to official requests for media blackouts in the early 1980s were destroyed.

Two newspaper executives have told the Observer that their publications were issued with D-notices – warnings not to publish intelligence that might damage national security – when they sought to report on allegations of a powerful group of men engaging in child sex abuse in 1984. One executive said he had been accosted in his office by 15 uniformed and two non-uniformed police over a dossier on Westminster paedophiles passed to him by the former Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle.

Ah, national security. Remember that the next time you are lectured that we need to give up our civil liberties in the name of “national security.” Think about what that really means. It really means the security of the status quo to continue to behave like insane criminals with zero accountability.

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– Contrary To IRS Lies, Some 30,000 Lois Lerner “Forever Lost” Emails Have Been Recovered (ZeroHedge):

It is unclear whether the person in charge of the Lois Lerner “disappeared IRS emails” strategy was also Dr. Gruber, but whoever conceived of the idiotic idea that the fatal failure of a local hard disk means that emails which are stored on at least one server miles away, and subsequently downloaded via POP3, IMAP or some other protocol, have vaporized, clearly also relied on the stupidity (and laziness) of the American people. And like in the case of Obamacare, the lies worked, if only for a short period of time. And because when it comes to lies coming from the very top, there is never just one cockroach, and they always inevitably scatter, the latest headache for a scandal-ridden president is that Lois Lerner’s email, supposedly gone in perpetuity, have mysteriously reappeared, and as the Washington Examiner reports, “up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.”

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– The Plebs Are Revolting – Utah Bill to Shut Off Water to the NSA Moves Forward (Liberty Blitzkrieg):

In the wake of the failure of the U.S. Senate to move forward on the USA Freedom Act, many activists and civil liberties advocates have come to the conclusion that we can’t rely on the feds to do anything decent on the subject. One of the proposed grassroots ways to fight back has been an emphasis on increased use of encryption (recall my pre-Snowden era post, Bitcoin and Kim Dotcom: Why it’s Time to “Encrypt Everything”). Another obvious solution is for people to revolt at the local level. It appears that the citizens of Utah are doing just that.

Wired reports that:

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

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– 3-Star General Who Helped Lead War On Terror: We’ve Lost the Wars In Iraq and Afghanistan (Washington’s Blog):

3-star General Daniel Bolger helped to lead the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The first sentence of his new book – Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars – starts:

I am a United Sates Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.

Yahoo News notes:

Having studied military history, he says he should have known that a U.S.-led counterinsurgency in a country like Afghanistan could never work.

Now, with the rise of the Islamic State, there’s a growing choir urging the U.S. military to lead yet another ground war in Iraq.

“That would be four times biting that poison apple: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and then Iraq again,” he said.

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– With A Hard-Landing Imminent, China Reminds Residents It Is Illegal To Jump Off Tops Of Buildings (ZeroHedge):

“The situation has become so bad… that a middle-aged investor, fearing that a local developer wouldn’t be able to make his promised interest payments, threatened to commit suicide in dramatic fashion last summer. After hearing similar stories of desperation, city officials reminded residents that it is illegal to jump off the tops of buildings.”

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– Obama’s Path To ‘Amnesty’ (In 1 Cartoon) (ZeroHedge):

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– This Is How Russia Does The (Dry) Ice Bucket Challenge (ZeroHedge):

As The West shows its fortitude (and apparent philanthropy) with mere 32-degree Fahrenheit ice-bucket-challenges, Russian chemistry professor Yury Zhdanov goes 290-degrees better…

Nikolay Novosyolov, founder of a science popularization project, poured a bucket of liquid nitrogen, which temperature was minus 322 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 197 Celcuis), as part of the #IceBucketChallenge campaign, taking the world’s social media charity craze to a whole new level.

Crazy…

 

– Western sanctions are aimed at regime change in Russia – Lavrov (RT):

The ultimate goal of the anti-Russian sanctions imposed by some Western nations is to stir public protests and oust the government, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“Western leaders publicly state that the sanctions must hurt [Russia’s] economy and stir up public protests. The West doesn’t want to change Russia’s policies. They want a regime change. Practically nobody denies that,” he told a leading think-tank in Moscow.

Lavrov said that the tensions between Russia and the West had been brewing for years before the Ukrainian crisis, adding that now the Europeans had decided to go for all-or-nothing and play chicken with Russia. But at least the positions have been made clear, Lavrov said.

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– Police pepper sprays protest in Germany as activists storm new EU central bank HQ (PHOTOS, VIDEO) (RT):

German police used pepper spray and clashed with anti-EU protesters, who stormed and vandalized the new European Central Bank building, which is under construction now in central Frankfurt.

Calling themselves Blockupy, thousands of activists gathered in the city center on Saturday and marched to the goal of their protest, the new ECB office, which is to be inaugurated next March.

The cost of the new office is almost 1.3 billion euros and this fact has caused a lot of criticism while the policy of austerity is applied all over Europe.

“While our colleagues, friends and comrades in Southern Europe continue to rebel against the depletion and impoverishment policies of the Troika, the ECB moves into its new palace,” Blockupy website says. “Blockupy moves on to the road. We will make our own move to the new building and give back to the ECB the garbage – in and with many moving boxes – that should have been thrown into the dustbin of history: racist and sexist division, impoverishment, privatization of public funds and goods and wars to secure resources.”

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– On The Looming Wall Of Chinese Defaults, Restructuring Firm Warns “You Know It’s Coming” (ZeroHedge):

The news this week of China’s largest corporate bankruptcy – Haixin Iron & Steel Group – amid crashing iron ore and steel prices was followed by analysts noting it “will be followed by others,” as the major flaw of producers of iron ore, the most traded commodity after oil, is they tend to be “over-bullish.” Distressed debt funds are starting to circle in preparation for what they expect to be a bloodbath as Bloomberg reports, bad debts in China are well underestimated because authorities persist in propping up weak companies and bailing out local investors, according to DAC Management, “we’ve yet to see it because if you look at corporate defaults, they keep getting covered by the government. At some point, they can’t cover every single one.” Most worryingly though, as KPMG points out, “when you see restructuring advisers getting hired by SOEs… you know it’s coming.”

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– When the Rustlers Wear Badges (Lew Rockwell)

– Five seniors die in Georgia care center after receiving flu shot – report (Natural News):

Healthcare workers at Hope Assisted Living & Memory Care Center in Dacula, Georgia, whose identities have not been made known as of this writing, have informed Health Impact News that on November 7, 2014, five residents of the center received flu vaccinations, only to die one week later.

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– Video – Mexico’s Colima Volcano Erupts (Ice Age Now)

– 24 Pictures That Perfectly Capture How Insane The Snow Is Near Buffalo, New York (BuzzFeed)

– Now the UK is set to feel the chill (Ice Age Now):

Winter to arrive with below-freezing icy blast,

reads the headline in The Telegraph.

Temperatures will drop to 19F (-4C) in some areas of the country next week as winter arrives.

Temperatures on Sunday night are expected to plummet to 26F (-3C) in rural areas of Northern Scotland and there may be snow showers on the mountains and widespread frost.

The cooler temperatures will continue on Monday, with overnight temperatures in the North down to 30F (-1C).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/11246224/Winter-to-arrive-with-below-freezing-icy-blast.html

– “Serfdom is the New Normal” – Talkin’ Oligarch Blues with Perpetual Assets (Liberty Blitzkrieg):

“Oligarchs like protecting themselves from peasants…”

– Gus Demos of Perpetual Assets

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Because nothing says “living The American Dream” like looting an abandoned Doritos truck in the middle of a Buffalo, NY snow storm…

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Once a market leader among Western 24-hour news channels, CNN has now become infamous for its slipshod mislabeling of maps across the world. This week the network hit a new low, transforming a synagogue into a mosque.

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