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...here I am in the absurd position of having to actually say that maybe, just maybe, government death squads are a bad idea. Just ask the people of the Philippines.
President Trump’s new Executive Order on “terrorist” (sic) entry calls on the Department of Homeland Security to “expedite the completion and implementation of a biometric entry-exit tracking system for all travelers to the United States.”
...don't worry, everyone, the wizards of Wall Street are currently positioning themselves for one last melt-up before the whole thing goes down, so there may yet be time to squeeze another few meaningless points out of this stock market rally.
...the effort to biometrically register the population and the transition to cashless economy are intimately related.... the latest word from Davos is India will to skip over card-based cashless payments and go straight to biometric e-payments.
If this ended up being the year of the first North Korean nuclear attack or the rise of a neo-Communist insurgency in the West or an all-out cyberwar between major powers or a fake alien invasion, who would even be surprised at this point? We've lost our sense of normal. There is only chaos.
So trading the first year of the Trump presidency tends to boil down to this: Do you think Trump can perform the miracle he's promising...? If so, then invest away! If not, then you might have another year or two left before the chickens that were hatched by the Fed in 2008 start coming home to roost.
...the good news is that the era of physible guns is already here, and it has made the Second Amendment debate effectively moot. The bad news is that the era of physible guns is here and it has made gun control into a First Amendment debate.
... on a positive note, we can take McFatfood’s woes as a sign that, try as they might with their considerable propaganda resources, the corporate chieftains can’t put their egg McMuffin back together again.
Sadly, I could go on with the worrying tech trends that will be gaining steam in 2017... the technocratic control grid is here and there's nothing we can do about it.
Whatever kind of con is being played here, it's still likely that Trump will be using Beijing as an easy punching bag to mollify his angry, working-class base.
Strangely, though, there is no word yet out of Tel Aviv on whether Israel will be declining the record-setting $38 billion aid package the Obama administration promised earlier this year.
But still, given the off-the-wall craziness we've seen transpire in the 2016 (s)election race so far, can anyone really rule out such an unprecedented turn of events?
The most intriguing possibility, and one that would immediately turn around and bite the Trump administration in the posterior is that it would open up the space for including China in the deal. And a TPP with China as the star signatory would be a very different deal...
But in fact, Henry Kissinger is notable among the unindicted war criminal jetset in having not one, not two, not three, but four separate legal systems with outstanding requests to answer for his participation in various atrocities.
It’s still too early to know how this will play out, or even when an election is likely to be called. Italians could be heading to the polls right away if a snap election is called... As Bloomberg notes on Grillo, this biding of time may be necessary to give the establishment time to rig the election against the Five Star Movement.