Tag Archives: patrick byrne

Patrick Byrne: Walk Past The Barking Dogs…Or Lose

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The former CEO of Overstock.com, more notorious as the publisher of the Deep Capture website, advises the right to be Shaolin Monks:

“The other side will try to provoke us, but we are like Shaolin monks: We “walk on past the barking dogs” (as my martial arts master taught me). As he put it to me so many decades ago:  “When a dog barks at you, you don’t feel a need to bark back at it, or to run over and kick the dog: you walk past the barking dog.” Similarly, in the days ahead as we patriotic Americans gather publicly to make our positions known, when the Goon-Left shows up we do not get in screaming matches with them, we do not let our tempers rise.  We let them bark all they want while we maintain our discipline, poise, and calmness. That is how we show the American people who we are, and who the Goons really are. It is how we win.

Of course, if and only if the dogs actually attack, not just bark but attack,  at that point you have the right of all free men and women to defend yourselves, with whatever minimum of force lets you resolve the situation safely. Just remember, however, the Goons think they win if they can make you go violent in front of the TV cameras. And they are right, they will win….. unless you have shown such a preponderance of control that no reasonable observer could question that they were the aggressors, and you were exercising your right to self-defence.”

How I wish I could agree with Mr. Byrne.

But I cannot.

The truth is most of the conservatives at the Capitol protest did indeed behave like Shaolin monks, as the New York Post reporter’s footage that I posted earlier demonstrates.

A few let loose, but only AFTER the police lobbed smoke bombs, tasered them, and used pepper spray….and after various agents provocateurs instigated brawls and vandalized the building, albeit on a much smaller scale than anything America witnessed through the last two years of inner cities on fire.

The problem is not that the right was tricked into breaking the law.

The problem is they did not break the law….at least, not at first.

It is not trespass if you are invited into a building. The guards let people in and did nothing to discourage what was going on.

Watching from across the world, I believed the guards were sympathetic and eager to let people in.

Point two. Even if they had not been invited in, I would not see anything wrong in people entering the house of the people, something they do routinely during tours.

How much more so during an existential crisis of the republic?

It is the will of the people, tempered by the constitution of the nation, that hallows the halls of government. The Representatives are interlopers if they do not represent the people and the Senators are only hired guns if they do not represent the constitution.

When the people’s will is thwarted for evil ends and the constitution cast aside like a used rag then the halls of government are no longer hallowed but cursed; no more Mount Sinai, but a golden calf consecrated to Libido Dominandi.

That is my first point. Conservatives were a. not really doing anything very bad and b. were quite justified in whatever they did do by the egregious behavior of their targets.

My second argument with Mr. Byrne is that agents provocateurs can act without any assistance from the ordinary citizen.

By this I mean that provocateurs and those they provoke can both be stage managed. Anyone could have a social media account opened in their name and a dozen MAGA rants posted therein. Within the totalitarian spy state in which we live, faking an online persona and then foisting it on some innocent is child’s play. A Shaolin monk, killed by an agent provocateur, can be reborn on the internet as a vile pedophile rapist, on the strength of very little but online rumor. Once that label has taken hold, posthumous rehabilitation is impossible. Once reputation is gone, then who are the good guys and who are the bad? In short, for a man who engaged the media in such hand- to- hand combat and had his own Wikipedia biography targeted, Mr. Byrne seems to have forgotten that it is not who you are, but who people think you are.

To recap my argument, not only does Mr. Byrne, one,  regurgitate the assumptions behind the mainstream narrative about January 6, two,  his advice fails to account for how Shaolin monks avoid being recast as their opposite through the media.

To elaborate. There would have been no Mahatma without Margaret Bourke White and the reverential international press that followed with her. In today’s media ethos, the Mahatma would only be Mohandas, a big- eared, toothless lecher, a pedophile rapist and Luddite, a coward and traitor intent on giving India to Pakistan. Indeed, that is how Gandhi is seen, now that the hagiographers have been succeeded by the debunkers.

My third argument contra Byrne is that violence is only a loser’s game if it is sporadic and individual. Not otherwise.

It goes without saying that John Q Public should not be stocking up on ammo and rifles in the hope of taking out his state representative. In the age of Pegasus, unmanned drones, and AI bots, he is likely to end up in a psychiatric hospital or dead.

However, the idea that wearing buttons and going about our business is going to put an end to the rot is laughable. The boot will not lift from our necks until we join hands and throw it off from us. Concerted public ACTION, not slogans is what will win the day.

Militias could indeed be a part of that action, but not in the way most people think.

I suggest citizen patrols that show up wherever BLM or Antifa threaten people, their homes and businesses. That would be a real start.

But actual physical violence is the smaller part of the problem..

It is the media distortion of reality that is the bigger part.

So another project of resistance should be to target journalists who are especially mendacious about conservatives. We should give them the same relentless public exposure and censure they give others. We could list their failed predictions, their past plagiarisms, their padded resumes, their personal and business fiascos in little biographies that could be inserted below any commentary of theirs wherever it appears and we could do this relentlessly.

Neither of these courses of action is going to win us good press on the left. And that is the final issue I have with Mr. Byrne’s criticism. It is stuck at the level of optics.

Optics is certainly important. Very important. But that doesn’t mean we give up certain options. It means we get smart about our options. It is certainly a bad idea to get caught on camera beating up a leftist goon [and here, I definitely mean a goon, not just some social justice warrior who gets on your nerves.]

The remedy is not to give up beating up on the goons.

It is to make sure the cameras are switched off when you take off your gloves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Cohen To Leave Trading, Says Vanity Fair

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Well, well, well. It looks like Patrick Byrne, Judd Bagley, Mark Mitchell and the rest of the estimable team at Deep Capture are having more than some effect.

Not only have the Germans and Austrians banned naked short- selling, Vanity Fair, our least favorite low-class, high-gloss magazine of the DC twitterati, tells us that Steve Cohen is closing up shop as a trader. Sith Lord Cohen doesn’t like the spotlight, it seems.  Maybe he remembers all too well what he was up to in the 1980s……even if Reuters wants to keep it buried.

Vanity Fair:

In the July issue of Vanity Fair, legendary hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen tells special correspondent Bryan Burrough that he might be ready to walk away from active trading. How big would that be? Well, says Burrough, it’s “a little like saying that God is ready to walk away from Earth.” In this video, Burrough takes the measure of Cohen’s controversial careeer—and offers his theory on why the reclusive banker granted the second in-depth interview of his 30-year career to Vanity Fair.

Obama’s Man In China – Jon Huntsman Jr.

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I’ve been thinking that any real change in the US..or anywhere else… will only come from outside politics, from business, or from technology, or from a cultural trend (such as, off-grid living) or from a spiritual movement. But occasionally, I wonder if some politician could actually push things in a new direction, make some kind of real difference.

Recently, some people have been touting a GOP  dark horse who´s joined Team Obama. That’s former Utah governor and current Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman Junior, who even struck some writer at the Washington Post as a potential ‘next big thing.’ Continue reading →

Mark to “Markit” Manipulation

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From Deep Capture:

“Another line of inquiry has not been pursued, however, though it is of equal, and perhaps greater, significance. That line of inquiry concerns the way in which the prices of credit default swaps effect [sic] the perceived value of all forms of debt — corporate bonds, commercial mortgages, home mortgages, and collateralized debt obligations — and as a result, the ability of hedge funds manipulators to use credit default swaps to enhance their bear raids on public companies.

If short sellers can manipulate the price of credit default swaps, they can disrupt those companies whose debt is insured by the credit default swaps whose prices are manipulated.  The game plan runs as follows: find a company that relies on a layer of debt that is both permanent, and which rolls over frequently (most financial firms fit this description). Short sell that company’s stock. Then manipulate the price of the CDS upwards, preferably into a spike, as you spread the news of the skyrocketing CDS price (perhaps with the cooperation of compliant journalists at, say, CNBC).

Because the CDS is, in essence, an insurance policy on the debt of the company, the spiking CDS pricing will cause the company’s lenders to panic and cut off access to credit. As this happens, the company’s stock will nosedive, thereby cutting off access to equity capital. Thus suddenly deprived of credit and equity, the firm collapses, and the hedge fund collects on its short bets.

Moreover, credit default swap prices are the primary inputs for important indices (such as the CMBX and the ABX) measuring the movement of the overall market for commercial and home mortgages.  In the months leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, short sellers pointed to these indices in order to argue  that investment banks – most notably Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers – had overvalued the mortgage debt and property on their books. Meanwhile, several hedge funds made billions in profits betting that those indexes would drop.

It should therefore be a matter of some concern that credit default swap “prices” and the indexes derived from them are determined almost entirely by a little company with zero transparency and, it appears probable, a high exposure to influence from market manipulators. The company is called Markit Group, and there is every reason to believe that its CDS-driven indices (the CMBX, the ABX, and several others) are inaccurate, while the credit default swap “prices” that they publish  and which rock the market are in fact  nowhere close to the prices at which credit default swaps actually trade.

Last year, the media reported that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had sent subpoenas to Markit Group as part of an investigation into possible manipulation of credit default swap prices by short sellers. This investigation, like Mr. Cuomo’s other investigations into market manipulation, have yielded no prosecutions.

The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating Markit Group for anti-trust violations. This investigation (which is reportedly focused on how Markit Group packages and sells its information) seems to acknowledge that Market Group has near-monopolistic control of information about credit default swap prices. However, if the press reports are correct, the DOJ has not considered the possible appeal of this monopolistic control to market manipulation.

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My Comment

This isn’t the first time that Markit has been fingered.  Pam Martens wrote a detailed piece last year at Counterpunch called “How Wall Street Blew Itself Up” that blew Markit´s cover.

Now I´ve always suspected the indices (including Libor) are manipulated.  The fundamental problem in our markets is corruption..and that´s directly related to size and monopoly. That´s why you do need certain kinds of  “level playing field” or procedural types of regulation (not substantive regulation) to take care of the problem. I think this should also take care of Olagues’ caveat. The Deep Capture team isn’t confining its investigation to simply naked shortselling in the technical sense, but is expanding its work to the entire range of strategies involved in rigging the markets – insider trading, short-selling of all kinds, and the manipulation of indices. (Correction: I am referring to uncovered short sales, where there is no intent to deliver)