#some sources say that developed 40 thousand years ago and some say like 28

[another-whump-sideblog]

i’m curious, what place/time period was jane born in? (e.g. ancient rome, medieval europe, victorian england, etc)

-🪴

At one point I said she was 30,000 something years old, and someone else pointed out that that would mean she was born in the ice age, so I’m rolling with that lol. It’s either that or she can teleport between universes and I haven’t 100 percent decided yet. Leaving my options open…

[cbhunter494]

Valyrian Translator

So what if you do actually want to learn Dothraki or Valyrian? Of course, the ideal scenario would be to have an actual language exchange with a Dothraki warrior or a nobleman from Essos for Valyrian. High Valyrian is the language of the old Valyrian Freehold which was located on the eastern continent of Essos. Much of Essos was once dominated by the Valyrians for thousands of years, stretching from the Free Cities in the west, to Slaver's Bay in the east. The Valyrians forced the peoples they subjugated to speak in (or at least be able to converse in) their language. After the Doom of.

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High Valyrian is a language originating from Valyria and the Valyrian Freehold. Corrupted dialects known as bastard Valyrian are spoken in the Free Cities(1) and Slaver's Bay.(2)

2High Valyrian

3Bastard Valyrian

History

Some of the oldest remaining ancient texts were written by Andals, Valyrians, Ghiscari, and Asshai'i.(3) After the Old Empire of Ghis was conquered by the Valyrian Freehold in the Ghiscari wars, the Ghiscari began speaking the High Valyrian of their conquerors.(4)

High Valyrian is no longer widely spoken due to the Doom of Valyria,(5) and most Valyrian records were destroyed in the catastrophe.(6) The tongues of the Free Cities have continued to evolve from the original High Valyrian.(5)

Queen Alysanne Targaryen is said to have begun learning how to read from Valyrian scrolls while still at the breast of her mother, Queen Alyssa Velaryon.(7) Alysanne's husband, King Jaehaerys I Targaryen, was fascinated with the Old Valyrian scrolls in the library of Dragonstone.(8)

How to lead jo owen ebook reader. Racallio Ryndoon is said to have spoken a dozen dialects of Valyrian.(9) Lord Alyn Velaryon studied Valyrian treaties about warship design and sea tactics when he visited the Citadel.(9)Larra Rogare, the wife of Prince Viserys Targaryen, was fluent in High Valyrian and the dialects of Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, and Volantis.(10)

Some highborn children of Westeros are still taught Valyrian as a sign of their noble education.(11)(12) Songs(13) and scrolls(14)(15) are still sung and read in High Valyrian, although by 300 AC most Westerosi nobles cannot understand the language.(13)

High Valyrian

Language

The High Valyrian phrase valar morghulis‎(16) is translated as 'all men must die.'(17) A counterpart phrase, valar dohaeris,(18) is translated as 'all men must serve.'(19)

The word dracarys is translated as meaning 'dragonfire.'(20) Obsidian is called 'dragonglass' in the Common Tongue, but 'frozen fire' in High Valyrian.(21)Valonqar is the word for 'little brother.'(22) High Valyrian is the most likely source language for maegi (pronounced differently from 'Maggy'),(23) which means 'wise'.(24)

The Valyrian writing system, or at least a Valyrian writing system, is described as involving glyphs.(25) It was also probably standard practice to write on scrolls, and not in books.(26) The glyphs can also be inscribed, as on an old Valyrian dragon horn, which, when sounded, had 'every line and letter shimmering with white fire.'(27) Valyrian carvings have been found on obelisks.(28)

Valyrian steel is forged with spells, as well as hammers.(29) Some smiths still know them, although not entirely.(30)

Names

House Targaryen came from Valyria and thus most of its members can be considered to have High Valyrian names. These include:

Aegon

Aelor

Aelora

Aelyx

Aemon

Aemond

Aenar

Aenys

Aerea

Aerion(26)

Aeryn

Aerys

Alysanne(31)

Ayrmidon(14)

Baela

Baelon

Baelor

Daella

Daemion

Daemon

Daena

Daenerys(32)

Daenora

Daenys

Daeron

Elaena

Gael

Gaemon

Helaena

Jaehaera

Jaehaerys

Maegelle

Maegon

Maegor

Maekar

Maelys(33)

Naerys

Rhae

Rhaegar

Rhaegel

Rhaella

Rhaelle

Rhaena

Rhaenyra

Rhaenys

Rhalla

Saera

Shaena

Shaera

Vaegon

Vaella

Valarr

Valerion

Visenya

Viserra

Viserys

English To Valyrian Translator

Houses Baratheon, Celtigar, Qoherys, and Velaryon are of Valyrian descent, and thus these names are possibly Valyrian as well.(34)(35)

Velaryon first names include:

Aethan

Corlys

Daenaera

Jacaerys

Laena

Laenor

Lucerys

Monterys

Vaemond

Valaena

Jaenara Belaerys was a Valyrian explorer(36) and Aurion was a would-be emperor.(37)

The Valyrians most likely gave Valyrian names to their dragons, as the dragons Balerion, Meraxes, Vhagar, and Syrax were named after Valyrian gods and goddesses.(38)(39) However, not all dragons of House Targaryen had Valyrian names (e.g., Queen Alysanne Targaryen's dragon, Silverwing(31)).

Eight of the nine Free Cities were founded as colonies of the Valyrian Freehold, and are thus likely to bear Valyrian names as well:

Volantis's satellite towns of Selhorys, Valysar, and Volon Therys likely have Valyrian names as well. It is also probable that Elyria, Mantarys, Oros, Tolos, Tyria, and Velos are Valyrian in name, being cities close to Old Valyria.(40)

Bastard Valyrian

Free Cities

Bastard Valyrian includes the languages of the nine Free Cities.(1) Each of the cities has its own dialect, and each dialect likely has its own separate derived vocabulary. Syrio Forel of Braavos speaks the Common Tongue with a lilting accent.(41) One of the Brave Companions is described as having a thick Myrish accent.(42)

The Free Cities use glyphs to write Valyrian.(43) The Valyrian of the Free Cities is described as sounding 'liquid'.(44)

Slaver Cities

Valyrian Translations Season 4

The Old Empire of Ghis was conquered by the Valyrian Freehold five thousand years ago, and the Ghiscari have since spoken High Valyrian. The Slaver's Bay cities of Yunkai, Meereen, and Astapor have their own versions of bastard Valyrian, which have been influenced mainly by Old Ghiscari, the ancient language of Old Ghis. Like the Free Cities, the people of the Slaver Cities use glyphs to write Valyrian.(2)

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Astapori Valyrian is described as having a 'characteristic growl,' influenced by Ghiscari.(2) The dialect of Yunkai is close enough to that of Astapor to be mutually intelligible.(45)

Valyrian Voice Translator

Yunkai used to be part of the Old Empire of Ghis, and has multiple languages spoken in the city. Mhysa, Maela, Aelalla, Qathei, and Tato are given as words for 'mother', but which tongue fits which word is unknown (excepting the first, which is Ghiscari).(45)

Some slavers speak a mongrel tongue,(46) a blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian.(47)

Characters familiar with High Valyrian

Valyrian Translation

Gerris Drinkwater speaks a halting approximation of High Valyrian.(12)

Haldon Halfmaester(48)

Tyrion Lannister learned to read High Valyrian on his maester's knee.(11)

Quentyn Martell can read and write High Valyrian but has little practice speaking it.(12)

Melisandre is known to pray in High Valyrian, the Common Tongue, and the speech of Asshai.(49)

Missandei(17)

Moqorro can apparently sing in High Valyrian.(50)

Septa Saranella tells Cersei Lannister the meaning of valonqar.(22)

Ser Barristan Selmy has some High Valyrian, though not as much as Daenerys Targaryen.(2)

Arya Stark knows some High Valyrian(51) but the kindly man insists that she improve it.(52)

Catelyn Stark considers the speech of Moreo Tumitis of Tyrosh to be the vulgar Valyrian of the Free Cities.(53)

Sweets is fluent in High Valyrian(54)

Aegon Targaryen is fluent in High Valyrian.(12)

Daenerys Targaryen(2)

Samwell Tarly only has a little High Valyrian.(55)

The closest thing the Windblown have to a company tongue is classic High Valyrian.(56) Their leader, the Tattered Prince, says 'and now we ride' to his men in the language.(56)

Quotes

Each of the Free Cities has its own history and character, and each has come to have its own tongue. These are all corruptions of the original, pure form of High Valyrian, dialects that drift further from their origin with each new century since the Doom befell the Freehold.(5)Download counter strike condition zero full.

Behind the Scenes

According to George R. R. Martin,

Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel(sic), and I don't have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spellings.(57)

David J. Peterson further developed High Valyrian for the television adaptation Game of Thrones.

References

↑ 1.01.1A Game of Thrones, Chapter 11, Daenerys II.

↑ 2.02.12.22.32.4A Storm of Swords, Chapter 23, Daenerys II.

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Ancient History: The Dawn Age.

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Ancient History: The Rise of Valyria.

↑ 5.05.15.2The World of Ice & Fire, The Free Cities.

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Ancient History: Valyria's Children.

↑Fire & Blood, The Year of the Three Brides - 49 AC.

↑Fire & Blood, Birth, Death, and Betrayal Under King Jaehaerys I.

↑ 9.09.1Fire & Blood, Under the Regents - The Voyage of Alyn Oakenfist.

↑Fire & Blood, The Lysene Spring and the End of Regency.

↑ 11.011.1A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 1, Tyrion I.

↑ 12.012.112.212.3A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 6, The Merchant's Man.

↑ 13.013.1A Storm of Swords, Chapter 60, Tyrion VIII.

↑ 14.014.1A Game of Thrones, Chapter 9, Tyrion I.

↑A Feast for Crows, Prologue.

↑A Clash of Kings, Chapter 47, Arya IX.

↑ 17.017.1A Storm of Swords, Chapter 27, Daenerys III.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 6, Arya I.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 34, Cat Of The Canals.

↑A Storm of Swords, Chapter 8, Daenerys I.

↑A Storm of Swords, Chapter 78, Samwell V.

↑ 22.022.1A Feast for Crows, Chapter 39, Cersei IX.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 36, Cersei VIII.

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 72, Daenerys X.

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 3, Daenerys I.

↑ 26.026.1A Clash of Kings, Chapter 6, Jon I.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 19, The Drowned Man.

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Beyond the Free Cities: The Grasslands.

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 1, Bran I.

↑A Storm of Swords, Chapter 32, Tyrion IV.

↑ 31.031.1A Storm of Swords, Chapter 40, Bran III.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 15, Davos II.

↑A Storm of Swords, Chapter 67, Jaime VIII.

↑Citadel. Heraldry: In the area of King's Landing

↑The Citadel. Heraldry: Houses in the Riverlands

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Beyond the Free Cities: Sothoryos.

↑The World of Ice & Fire, Ancient History: The Doom of Valyria.

↑Fire & Blood, Heirs of the Dragon - A Question of Succession.

↑A Clash of Kings, Chapter 12, Daenerys I.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Map of Valyria

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 22, Arya II.

↑A Storm of Swords, Chapter 39, Arya VII.

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 65, Arya V.

↑A Clash of Kings, Chapter 27, Daenerys II.

↑ 45.045.1A Storm of Swords, Chapter 42, Daenerys IV.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 59, The Discarded Knight.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 60, The Spurned Suitor.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 14, Tyrion IV.

↑A Clash of Kings, Chapter 10, Davos I.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 56, The Iron Suitor.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 22, Arya II.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 45, The Blind Girl.

↑A Game of Thrones, Chapter 18, Catelyn IV.

↑A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 47, Tyrion X.

↑A Feast for Crows, Chapter 26, Samwell III.

↑ 56.056.1A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 25, The Windblown.

↑So Spake Martin: Yet More Questions, July 22, 2001

The material on this page is taken from the web page Other languages at Dothraki Wiki that is owned by dothraki.org and may be used for noncommercial purposes.

External Links

Valyrian languages on Wikipedia.

High Valyrian 101: Learn and Pronounce Common Phrases By Katie M. Lucas

Retrieved from 'https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?title=High_Valyrian&oldid=257130'

By Stars Insider of StarsInsider |

Learn Valyrian and other fascinating fictional languages

Valyrian Translate

With numerous fantasy shows gaining more and more popularity, it's no shock that many fans are going the extra mile. For instance, it was reported that over 800,000 people started learning 'Valyrian,' a language spoken by characters on 'Game of Thrones.' Incredible stories like 'Star Wars' and 'Lord of the Rings' also have their own unique languages, which you can start to learn about in this helpful gallery.

High Valyrian To English

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[alexsmitposts]

The Insanity of Sustainability “Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato. This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. They may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans. Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years. All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet. In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words. Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t. We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory. As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.” Sustainability. What does it mean? It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both. Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide. In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992. The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”. In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This is precisely what Bill Gates needs to introduce digital IDs – most likely injected via vaccines, beginning with children from developing countries – i.e. the poor and defenseless are time and again used as guinea pigs. They won’t know what happens to them. First trials are underway in one or several rural schools in Bangladesh – see this and this. These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world. Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies. The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”. See also Michael Moore’s film“Planet of the Humans”. Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity. As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology. To enhance your belief their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed along with their “sustainable” buzz-words. *** The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (take a look at this). *** Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not. Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability. Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018). Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here. These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations. Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights. The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie. Petrol industry - BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable. Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. Yet at least 60% of oil and tar along the sea shore and beaches have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie. BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability. In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced. Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another. Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. Its simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate. Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it. In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6. “Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow. The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility. So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Ontario ‘pulling the emergency brake’ with third COVID-19 lockdown as cases rise (Reuters) The Canadian province of Ontario will enter a limited lockdown for 28 days on Saturday, as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations rise and more dangerous virus variants take hold, the premier said on Thursday. The lockdown for Canada’s most populous province will fall short of enacting a stay-at-home order. Ontario’s third lockdown since the pandemic began will shutter all indoor and outdoor dining, although retailers will remain open with capacity limits. Schools would remain open, Ontario’s education minister said on Twitter.

Starving for more chips in a tech-hungry world (AP) As the U.S. economy rebounds from its pandemic slump, a vital cog is in short supply: the computer chips that power a wide range of products that connect, transport and entertain us in a world increasingly dependent on technology. The shortage has already been rippling through various markets since last summer. It has made it difficult for schools to buy enough laptops for students forced to learn from home, delayed the release of popular products such as the iPhone 12 and created mad scrambles to find the latest video game consoles. But things have been getting even worse in recent weeks, particularly in the auto industry, where factories are shutting down because there aren’t enough chips to finish building vehicles that are starting to look like computers on wheels. The problem was recently compounded by a grounded container ship that blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, choking off chips headed from Asia to Europe. It threatens to leave a big dent in the auto industry, which by some estimates stands to lose $60 billion in sales during the first half of his year. “We have been hit by the perfect storm, and it’s not going away any time soon,” said Baird technology analyst Ted Mortonson.

The U.S. system created the world’s most advanced military. Can it maintain an edge? (Washington Post) As they conduct bombing and surveillance missions around the globe, today’s U.S. military pilots rely on aerial refueling aircraft built as early as 1957, when the Soviet Union dominated American security fears, the average home cost $12,000 and “I Love Lucy” was debuting new episodes. The cost of keeping those aging jets in the air has grown sharply while the military awaits a next-generation refueling plane whose rollout has been repeatedly delayed by design and production issues. The Air Force’s two-decade effort to field a 21st century tanker, one of several premier air systems whose development has been beset with problems, is emblematic of the challenges Pentagon leaders face in seeking to maintain the U.S. military’s shrinking edge over its chief competitor, China. The United States, once the world’s undisputed military superpower, has been struggling for years to efficiently update its arsenal and field new technology in cutting-edge areas such as hypersonics and artificial intelligence, at a time when some senior officials warn that China could be within five years of surpassing the U.S. military. “It’s like the Pentagon is finding itself staring in the rearview mirror in the face of oncoming traffic,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.

The reason many Guatemalans are coming to the border? A profound hunger crisis. (Washington Post) The team of nutritionists looked at 11-month-old Dilcia Cajbon, her ribs visible through her skin, and they knew immediately. “Severe acute malnutrition,” said Stefany Martinez, the leader of the UNICEF team, as the child was lifted onto a scale. Like many in this rural stretch of Guatemala, Dilcia’s family was down to one meal a day. Storms had flooded the nearby palm plantation, the biggest source of local employment. As more and more Central American families arrive at the United States’ southern border, the municipality of Panzós offers a stark illustration of the deepening food crisis that is contributing to the new wave of migration. So far this year, more unaccompanied minors processed by immigration agents are from Guatemala than any other country. Analysts and U.S. officials refer obliquely to “poverty” as an underlying cause of that influx. But often the reason is far more specific: hunger. Guatemala now has the sixth-highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world. The number of acute cases in children, according to one new Guatemalan government study, doubled between 2019 and 2020. The crisis was caused in part by failed harvests linked to climate change, a string of natural disasters and a nearly nonexistent official response.

Venezuelan military offensive sends thousands fleeing (AP) ARAUQUITA, Colombia—A new campaign by the Venezuelan military near the country’s lawless western border is sparking a surge of refugees, with thousands defying the spiking pandemic to pack into makeshift shelters and tent settlements in this Colombian town. The sudden outflow is amplifying a renewed wave of Venezuelan refugees and migrants—the world’s second-largest group of internationally displaced people—from the broken socialist state. Concern is also rising about mounting tensions between the left-wing Venezuelan and right-wing Colombian governments, which are blaming each other for the uptick in violence in Venezuela’s western Apure state. The Venezuelan military launched a campaign two weeks ago against a rogue faction of Colombian guerrillas in this jungle region along the Arauca River. The guerrillas, known as the 10th Front, appear to have run afoul of the government in Caracas, which allegedly has had long-standing profit-sharing and protection deals with other leftist fighters in the area engaged in narco-trafficking and extortion. The Venezuelan government “doesn’t seem to be defending its sovereignty, but protecting its drug-trafficking business,” Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano told Colombian National Radio last week.

Food bank, charities busy in Algarve as pandemic ravages Portugal tourism (Reuters) Carla Lacerda used to earn a good salary selling duty-free goods to holidaymakers arriving at Algarve airport in southern Portugal, but she lost her job last August due to the COVID-19 pandemic and quickly ran out of cash to feed her two kids. The 40-year-old now receives around 500 euros ($587) per month in unemployment benefits, leaving her no option but to join the queue for food donations. Lacerda is one of thousands of people whose lives have been turned upside down by the pandemic, which has ravaged tourism across the sun-drenched Algarve region and left its popular beaches and golf resorts largely deserted. Algarve’s food bank, which has two warehouses in the region, is now helping 29,000 people, almost double the number before the pandemic.

Italy may be in Easter lockdown, but the party’s on at sea (AP) Italy may be in a strict coronavirus lockdown this Easter with travel restricted between regions and new quarantines imposed. But a few miles offshore, guests aboard the MSC Grandiosa cruise ship are shimmying to Latin music on deck and sipping cocktails by the pool. After cruise ships were early sources of highly publicized coronavirus outbreaks, the Grandiosa has tried to chart a course through the pandemic with strict anti-virus protocols approved by Italian authorities that seek to create a “health bubble” on board. Passengers and crew are tested before and during cruises. Mask mandates, temperature checks, contact-tracing wristbands and frequent cleaning of the ship are all designed to prevent outbreaks. Passengers from outside Italy must arrive with negative COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hours of their departures and only residents of Europe’s Schengen countries plus Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria are permitted to book under COVID-19 insurance policies. Passengers welcomed the semblance of normalcy brought on by the freedom to eat in a restaurant or sit poolside without a mask, even if the virus is still a present concern.

Pakistan, India peace move silences deadly Kashmir frontier (AP) The machine guns peeking over parapets of small, sandbagged concrete bunkers and the heavy artillery cannons dug deep into Himalayan Kashmir’s rugged terrain have fallen silent. At least for now. The Line of Control, a highly militarized de facto border that divides the disputed region between the two nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan, and a site of hundreds of deaths, is unusually quiet after the two South Asian neighbors last month agreed to reaffirm their 2003 cease-fire accord. The cease-fire, experts say, could stabilize the lingering conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Kashmiris say the rare move should lead to resolution of the dispute.

Myanmar’s military shuts down Internet (Washington Post) Myanmar’s military government ordered broadband Internet shutdowns Thursday amid ongoing violent suppression of opposition to its ouster of the country’s democratically elected government. The escalation came as the country marked two months since the army’s toppling of the civilian-led government, which has faced widespread public resistance despite the military’s lethal response: More than 500 civilian protesters have been killed and more than 2,000 arrested since Feb. 1, according to local activists. The United Nations’ special envoy for Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, on Wednesday warned that “a bloodbath is imminent” if the international community did not act to quell the violence. Last Saturday marked the bloodiest day since the coup, with troops reportedly killing over 140 protesters in more than 40 locations across the country.

Train derails in eastern Taiwan, killing 48, injuring dozens (AP) A train partially derailed in eastern Taiwan on Friday after being hit by a parked truck that had rolled down a hill onto the track, killing 48 people. With the train still partly in a tunnel, survivors climbed out of windows and walked along the train’s roof to reach safety after the country’s deadliest railway disaster. The crash occurred near the Toroko Gorge scenic area on the first day of a long holiday weekend when many people were hopping trains on Taiwan’s extensive rail system. The train had been carrying more than 400 people.

Egypt expects $1 billion in damages over stuck ship in Suez (AP) Egypt is expecting more than $1 billion in compensation after a cargo ship blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, according to the top canal official. Lt. Gen. Ossama Rabei, head of the canal authority, said that the amount takes into account the salvage operation, costs of stalled traffic, and lost transit fees for the week that the Ever Given had blocked the Suez Canal. “It’s the country’s right,” Rabei said, without specifying who would be responsible for paying the compensation. The massive cargo ship is currently in one of the canal’s holding lakes, where authorities and the ship’s managers say an investigation is ongoing. Rabei said that if an investigation went smoothly and the compensation amount was agreed on, then the ship could travel on without problems. However, if the issue of compensation involved litigation, then the Ever Given and its some $3.5 billion worth of cargo would not be allowed to leave Egypt.

Cellular turnover (Scientific American) A new study published in Nature Medicine takes another shot at the rate of cellular turnover in the human body. Basically, your individual component cells have shorter lifespans than you do as a larger organism. Fat cells last an average of 12 years, a muscle cell lasts 50, blood cells live anywhere from three to 120 days, and the cells lining your gut make it less than a week. On any given day, an estimated 330 billion cells are replaced, so about 1 percent every day. Over the course of 80 to 100 days, about 30 trillion cells will turn over, equivalent to about one “you.”

[orbemnews]

Biden, With Powerful Allies and Foes, Targets Climate Change WASHINGTON — As President Biden prepares on Wednesday to open an ambitious effort to confront climate change, powerful and surprising forces are arrayed at his back. Automakers are coming to accept that much higher fuel economy standards are their future; large oil and gas companies have said some curbs on greenhouse pollution lifted by former President Donald J. Trump should be reimposed; shareholders are demanding corporations acknowledge and prepare for a warmer, more volatile future, and a youth movement is driving the Democratic Party to go big to confront the issue. But what may well stand in the president’s way is political intransigence from senators from fossil-fuel states in both parties. An evenly divided Senate has given enormous power to any single senator, and one in particular, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who will lead the Senate Energy Committee and who came to the Senate as a defender of his state’s coal industry. Without doubt, signals from the planet itself are lending urgency to the cause. Last year was the hottest year on record, capping the hottest decade on record. Already, scientists say the irreversible effects of climate change have started to sweep across the globe, from record wildfires in California and Australia to rising sea levels, widespread droughts and stronger storms. “President Biden has called climate change the No. 1 issue facing humanity,” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said. “He understands all too well that meeting this test requires nothing less than a full-scale mobilization of American government, business, and society.” Mr. Biden has already staffed his government with more people concerned with climate change than any other president before him. On his first day in office, he rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change. But during the campaign, he tried to walk a delicate line on fracking for natural gas, saying he would stop it on public lands but not on private property, where most of it takes place. A suite of executive actions planned for Wednesday does include a halt to new oil and gas leases on federal lands and in federal waters, a move that is certain to rile industry. But that would not stop fossil fuel drilling. As of 2019, more than 26 million acres of United States land were already leased to oil and gas companies, and last year the Trump administration, in a rush to exploit natural resources hidden beneath publicly owned lands and waters, leased tens of thousands more. If the administration honors those contracts, millions of publicly owned acres could be opened to fossil fuel extraction in the coming decade. The administration needs to do “much, much more,” said Randi Spivak, who leads the public lands program at the Center for Biological Diversity. Also on Wednesday Mr. Biden is expected to elevate climate change as a national security issue, directing intelligence agencies to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on climate security, and telling the secretary of defense to do a climate risk analysis of the Pentagon’s facilities and installations. He will create a civilian “climate corps” to mobilize people to work in conservation; create a task force to assemble a governmentwide action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and create several new commissions and positions within the government focused on environmental justice and environmentally friendly job creation. The real action will come when Mr. Biden moves forward with plans to reinstate and strengthen Obama-era regulations, repealed by the Trump administration, on the three largest sources of planet-warming greenhouse emissions: vehicles, power plants and methane leaks from oil and gas drilling wells. It may take up to two years to put the new rules in place, and even then, without new legislation from Congress, a future administration could once again simply undo them. Legislation with broad scope will be extremely difficult. Many of the same obstacles that blocked President Barack Obama a decade ago remain. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, will very likely oppose policies that could hurt the coal industry in his state, Kentucky. So will Senator Manchin, who campaigned for his seat with a television advertisement that featured him using a hunting rifle to shoot a climate change bill that Mr. Obama had hoped to pass. In the decade since, he has proudly broken with his party on policies to curb the use of coal. The New Washington Updated  Jan. 26, 2021, 6:15 p.m. ET “I have repeatedly stressed the need for innovation, not elimination,” Senator Manchin said in a statement. “I stand ready to work with the administration on advancing technologies and climate solutions to reduce emissions while still maintaining our energy independence.” Senator Manchin also opposes ending the Senate filibuster. But, to change Senate rules, Democratic leaders would need every Democratic vote. Without Senator Manchin, Mr. Biden would need significant Republican support. “There is wide scope for the executive branch to reinstate what Obama did and go beyond,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. But, he added, “if you want something that will stick, you have to go through Congress.” To Mr. Biden’s advantage, some corporations have turned to friend from foe. Mr. Biden’s team is already drafting new national auto pollution standards — based on a deal reached between the state of California and Ford, Honda, BMW, Volkswagen and Volvo — that would require passenger vehicles to average 51 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2026. The current Trump rules only require fuel economy of about 40 miles per gallon in the same time frame. And just two weeks after Mr. Biden’s electoral victory, General Motors signaled that it, too, was ready to work the new administration. “President-elect Biden recently said, ‘I believe that we can own the 21st century car market again by moving to electric vehicles.’ We at General Motors couldn’t agree more,” wrote Mary Barra, the chief executive of GM, in a letter to leaders of some of the nation’s largest environmental groups. If enacted, a fuel economy rule modeled on the California system could immediately become the nation’s single-largest policy for cutting greenhouse gases. Mr. Biden’s team is also drafting plans to reinstate Obama-era rules on methane, a planet-warming gas over 50 times more potent than carbon dioxide, though it dissipates faster. Last summer, when Mr. Trump rolled back those rules, the oil giants BP and Exxon called instead to tighten them. The new president has also found broad support for rejoining the Paris Agreement, a global accord under which United States pledged to cut greenhouse emissions about 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Rejoining the accord means honoring commitments. Not only must the United States meet its current target (right now it’s about halfway to that goal) but it will soon also be expected set new and more ambitious pledges for eliminating emissions by 2030. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron all issued statements of support for Mr. Biden’s decision to rejoin. So did the United States Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, which once supported a debunked study claiming the Paris Agreement would lead to millions of job loses. “As policy is being developed by the administration, by members of Congress, we want to have a seat at the table,” said Neil Bradley executive vice president and chief policy officer at the chamber of commerce. Other energy industry executives said action by Congress on climate change was long overdue, with many pressing for some kind of tax on oil, gas and carbon emissions to make climate-warming pollution less economical. “Having a clear price signal that says ‘Hey, it’s more cost efficient for you to buy an electric car than another big truck’ is exactly what we want happening, not somebody in government deciding that they’re going to outlaw something,” said Thad Hill, the chief executive of Calpine, a power generating company based in Texas that also supports the Paris Agreement goals. The Democrats’ razor-thin majority is no guarantee of action. In the Senate, Democrats are 10 votes short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster that would almost certainly come with legislation that would replace coal and oil with power sources such as wind, solar and nuclear energy, which do not warm the planet. In a Monday night interview on MSNBC, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, acknowledged how difficult a strong legislative response will be. Instead, he called on Mr. Biden to declare climate change a “a national emergency.” “Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that wouldn’t have to go through — that he could do without legislation,” Senator Schumer said. “Now, Trump used this emergency for a stupid wall, which wasn’t an emergency. But if there ever was an emergency, climate is one.” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, the nation’s largest coal-producing state, fired back, “Schumer wants the president to go it alone and produce more punishing regulations, raise energy costs, and kill even more American jobs.” Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware, chairman of the Environment Committee and one of Mr. Biden’s oldest friends, said he would do what he could to insert climate-friendly policies into larger pieces of legislation. Democrats hope a pandemic recovery bill will include hundreds of billions of dollars for environmentally focused infrastructure, such as Mr. Biden’s plans to build 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations and 1.5 million energy efficient homes and housing units. Senator Carper also said he hoped to revive modest legislation that has in the past received bipartisan support, such as extending tax breaks for renewable power sources, supporting the construction of new nuclear power facilities, and improving energy efficiency in buildings. “You may call it incrementalism,” Mr. Carper said. “But I call it progress.” Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #Allies #Biden #Change #Climate #Foes #Powerful #targets

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ‘It’s a Bucket Brigade on a Five-Alarm Fire.’ Food Banks Struggle to Keep Up With Skyrocketing Demand

In a matter of five months, 47-year-old Aquanna Quarles saw her personal finances implode. In December, she totaled her car. In February, the car she replaced the totaled one with was stolen. And in early March, her kitchen flooded, destroying the food in her cabinets and the small appliances on top of them. Quarles remembers thinking, “Oh my God, like what else could go wrong?”

Then the novel coronavirus began spreading across the United States. In mid-March, the state of Ohio, where Quarles lives, began issuing stay-at-home orders, shuttering shops and businesses, and by the end of the month, the rest of the country had followed suit, pushing millions of Americans out of work. Quarles, who works for a home health care company doing both office work and caring for elderly and disabled individuals, saw her hours—and weekly earnings—cut in half.

In April, for the first time in her life, Quarles felt she had no choice but to lean on a food bank to make ends meet. “This was really my first time ever doing it,” Quarles says of her decision to seek assistance from a food charity. “Because if I don’t need it, I’m not gonna go. You know what I mean? But I needed it.”

On April 21, Quarles lined up in her car with thousands of other Ohioans in the parking lot of Wright State University’s football stadium where Dayton’s Foodbank, Inc. had set up an emergency drive-thru food distribution site. On that day alone, the food bank served 1,381 households and more than 4,500 individuals, according to its chief development officer Lee Lauren Truesdale. After four hours, Quarles returned home with about a couple week’s worth of chicken cutlets, chickpeas, cucumbers, eggs, peach-flavored protein shakes, potatoes, rice and watermelons.

Quarles’s recent hardship has become all too common in recent weeks, as tens of millions of working- and middle-class Americans like her—bartenders and servers, childcare providers and hairdressers and hotel staff—have found themselves suddenly with decreased or eliminated incomes for the foreseeable future. On April 23, new unemployment numbers showed another 4.4 million people filed unemployment claims last week, bringing the total since March 14 to more than 26 million. Though Quarles did not lose her job completely, her reduced hours may make her eligible for partial unemployment insurance. Like millions of Americans, Quarles has faced difficulties accessing that benefit. Though she says she applied for the assistance at the end of March, she hasn’t yet seen the payment hit her bank account.

Stories like Quarles’ underscore the fragility of the American economic landscape. Until recently, the U.S. economy was sailing through the longest expansion on record—trumpeting record-low jobless rates and a bull stock market. But after just five weeks of recession, tens of millions of Americans are suddenly without the most basic necessities, including food and medical care. While incomes have vanished, the trappings of middle class life—car notes, mortgages, rent obligations and utility bills—have continued to pile up, forcing Americans who until very recently had full-time jobs to the brink of true poverty. With nearly 40% of U.S. adults unable to afford an emergency expense of $400, according to a 2019 report by the Federal Reserve, many have turned to food charities for help.

Tech Sgt. Shane Hughes—U.S. Air National Guard. Soldiers unload food at the Dayton Foodbank in Dayton, Ohio, on April 21, 2020.

When Three Square Food Bank of Las Vegas was modeling its new drive-thru food distribution systems several weeks ago, it anticipated between 200 and 250 cars per donation site each day. Instead, its chief operating officer Larry Scott says the organization is seeing up to 1,200 cars each day at some of its sites—in queues that stretch to five miles and longer. At the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, executive director Joe Arthur estimates his nonprofit went from serving 135,000 individuals a month to approximately 175,000. Central Texas Food Bank president and CEO Derrick Chubbs says its Travis County partners saw a 207% spike in clients.

But as new patrons line up for food assistance in record numbers, and old clients become even more reliant on donations, half a dozen major food insecurity nonprofits tell TIME they are experiencing financial and procedural challenges of their own. “All hell broke loose at the first of March,” says Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, the executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, which doles out resources to the state’s individual food organizations, like Truesdale’s.

Since then, she adds, it’s been “a bucket brigade on a five-alarm fire.”

‘That spigot just shut off’

In fatter times, food banks receive donations of shelf-stable items, like peanut butter, pasta, tuna fish, and soup, from wholesalers, manufacturers, restaurants, and grocery chains that over-ordered. But since COVID-19 hit, those businesses have seen their own stores dry up. Manufacturers are prioritizing shipping their products to grocery stores, which can barely keep shelves stocked, as people have begun to eat all of their meals at home.

In Illinois, a spokesperson for the Greater Chicago Food Depository says it received only 1.83 million pounds of donated food from non-government sources last month—a 30% decrease from what it received a year ago, in March 2019. The spokesperson says the figure is lower in part because restaurants and grocers are less able to give, but also because the nonprofit had to focus on accepting “non-perishable foods in this ongoing crisis,” as shelf-stable items last longer, require less handling, and can more easily be transported to the organization’s partner charities.

“When the pandemic hit the supply chain, that spigot just shut off,” says Hamler-Fugitt. She added, “We don’t have enough food in the system to keep up with this demand. We just don’t.”

As the stream of donations have declined, some food charities have been forced to buy pantry items at or near retail prices, which puts many food banks operating on small budgets in a nearly impossible situation. Under normal circumstances, the cost of supplying a food-insecure client with 28 to 30 pounds of groceries would cost Central Texas Food Bank $5 per box, says Chubbs, its CEO. These days, the cost is closer to $30 per box, at a time when the organization anticipates needing demand for about 25,000 boxes a week.

Tech Sgt. Shane Hughes—U.S. Air National Guard. Hundreds of members of the Ohio National Guard were activated March 18, 2020 to support food distribution efforts across Ohio.

But the food banks that have so far managed to avoid paying retail prices are finding that securing shelf-stable items can be challenging too, says Kate Maehr, the executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. That’s partly because manufacturers are not yet keeping up with new demand for pantry staples, and partly because the products they do produce first go to the retail stores. Food banks, she says, are “last in line.”

“If you’re a manufacturer, you’re going to make sure that you are honoring the relationships that you have with retailers and your core business,” Maehr says. “We are getting told by suppliers that we are three weeks, six weeks, and in some instances, 12 weeks out before we can get truckloads of food.”

Some states have increased funding to food charities to help offset these new barriers, but food bank directors say it’s unlikely to cover the difference. Earlier this month, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed an executive order to provide the Ohio Association of Foodbanks a one-time $5 million appropriation on top of the $25 million the charity receives annually. The group estimates it will need $54 million per month if demand continues to grow apace.

In the past, when food banks in one state have been overrun as a result of regional disasters, like flooding or a hurricane, food banks in other parts of the country have been able to supplement staff and food supply, says Elaine Waxman, a food insecurity expert at the Urban Institute. But in this pandemic, the whole country is affected.

“Right now,” she says, “literally it’s like a disaster in all 50 states.”

More need, but fewer volunteers to accommodate it

It’s not just food donations that non-profits are having to do without. It’s staff, too. Under normal circumstances, food pantries rely on volunteers, many of whom are retired or elderly. But since people over 65 have disproportionately severe symptoms from COVID-19, those staffing resources have dried up. As a result, charitable organizations have had to reduce the number of places where food is distributed.

For example, Three Square, the Las Vegas food bank, has had to suspend food distribution at 170 of its 180 partner organizations, while setting up 21 additional drive-thru distribution sites, according to Larry Scott, its chief operating officer. In a month’s time, the number of sites from which locals in the region can collect food decreased by 83%.

Central Texas Food Bank chief Chubbs says his organization has seen a 70% reduction in volunteers. “One of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen here is how do we balance minimizing the risk of the human resources—our staff and our volunteers—and at the same time, meet that growing demand,” he says.

The Dayton, Ohio food bank where Quarles picked up her rations has also tried to limit people of “advanced age” from volunteering, in an effort to protect their health. At the Ohio drive-thru event on Tuesday, a 73-year-old volunteer confided that he was breaking the age rule, but said he felt like he needed to be helping. “I live alone, I self-isolate at home,” he says. “People need help, and that’s when you want to be out here.”

Tech Sgt. Shane Hughes—U.S. Air National Guard. U.S. Army Spc. Rose Minton unpacks pallets of food at Wright State University’s Nutter Center in Fairborn, Ohio, on April 21, 2020.

Some states, including Ohio, Washington state, Michigan, and Kentucky, have deployed the National Guard to fill the void left by these older volunteers. Andrew Lynch, a 33-year-old Sergeant who was present at Dayton’s Foodbank, Inc. on April 21, compared his service this week to his 2011 deployment to Afghanistan. “Being able to give back to the community and provide a service or a product at a time of need is very similar to when we were in Afghanistan or Iraq,” he says. Though the setting is different, he explains, the purpose is still to keep people safe.

‘This is not going to be a crisis that is measured in weeks’

Even as mayors and state governors prepare to reopen their cities and states, food bank executives expect the uptick in demand for their services will continue for many months, if not years. The aftermath of the Great Recession offers a bleak guide. In 2008, 15% of U.S. householders were “food insecure,” meaning they lacked consistent access to enough food for an active life, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It wasn’t until 2018—a decade after the bottom dropped out of the market—that the proportion of food insecure households rebounded to pre-recession levels. There’s reason to think that this recession will have a similarly long tail for those with no financial buffer.

“There are so many people in this community who are one paycheck away from poverty. And they’re going to lose eight paychecks or 10 paychecks. It will take them a long time to come back to a level of financial security and stability that will equate with food security,” says Maehr of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. “This is not going to be a crisis that’s measured in weeks. I fear that this is a crisis that will be measured in months, and possibly years.”

Once stay-at-home orders are lifted and people begin to return to their pre-quarantine lives, Maehr worries that the general public will forget that more than 37 million Americans struggled with hunger before this pandemic even hit U.S. soil. “I am worried about compassion fatigue,” she says. “I am very worried about what happens when the news camera crews leave.”

SNAP doesn’t fill the gap

Food banks are supposed to be a stop gap measure for other safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as food stamps. For every meal provided by Feeding America—a national consortium of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs—SNAP provides 12.

But experts say SNAP is facing shortfalls of its own. Though the program is available to most households with gross monthly incomes at or below 130% of the federal poverty line, the average cost of a meal in 99% of U.S. counties is higher than food stamp benefits allow, according to a 2018 report by the Urban Institute. Monthly, the average recipient is allocated just $127.

The benefits program, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1964, is supposed to cover the cost of meals that provide adequate nutrition. But welfare reform in the mid-1990s placed new limits on eligibility, froze the minimum benefit threshold, and reduced the maximum allotments. Since then, the costs of meals that meet the government’s nutritional guidelines have largely outpaced the amount of funding provided.

Tech Sgt. Shane Hughes—U.S. Air National Guard. A soldier directs traffic during a drive-thru food distribution event at Wright State University’s Nutter Center in Fairborn, Ohio, on April 21, 2020.

Household purchases that may be vital during a viral pandemic—including soap, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper—also can’t be purchased using SNAP, nor can pre-made, protein-rich foods like rotisserie chickens and store-prepared meatloaves.

Still, people are seeking out the assistance in droves. Nearly 12,000 Ohioans signed up for SNAP during the first week of March, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Jobs and Family Services tells TIME. During the second week of April, 29,334 more signed up. The number of Washington state residents who applied for SNAP benefits during the first full week of April 2020 was also more than double what it was the corresponding week last year, a state employee says. And while Nevada received 19,266 new requests for SNAP benefits in March 2019, the volume increased by 43% to 27,465 applications in March 2020, according to a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

But many are running into bureaucratic hurdles getting assistance at all. Generally, recipients have to re-certify they still qualify for SNAP every six to 12 months with corroborating documents such as paystubs and proof of child support. That can be challenging for low-income recipients whose incomes are constantly changing: Gig workers can’t predict how many customers will request meal delivery or rides, bartenders can never be sure their customers will tip fairly, and many low-income workers piece together one-off jobs to get by.

“SNAP is built as if people’s incomes are always stable, but people’s incomes are going up and down all the time,” says Mariana Chilton, director of Drexel University’s Center for Hunger Free Communities, and former co-chair of the Bipartisan National Commission on Hunger. “You have to go through this terrible type of surveillance machine in order to prove that you’re worthy.”

Aquanna Quarles, the 47-year-old Ohio home health care aide who saw her hours halved a few weeks ago, says she made too much money over the last six months to qualify for full SNAP benefits at this point. About a week ago, she received a letter from the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services about her food stamp benefits, she says. “I thought they were gonna be jacking them up a little bit,” she says. “But they lowered them from $194 to $99.”

She’s since received notice that the benefit will go back up. On Wednesday, the USDA announced a 40% increase in food stamp benefits “to ensure that low-income individuals have enough food to feed themselves and their families during this national emergency.” The increase, paired with partial unemployment insurance, should help Quarles get through the crisis, if and when the assistance actually comes through.

Still, Quarles says, she has faith that her luck will soon turn. It just has to. “What I got out of all of this that happened,” she says, “was God is making better for new.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[sciencespies]

What We Can Learn From 1918 Influenza Diaries

https://sciencespies.com/nature/what-we-can-learn-from-1918-influenza-diaries/

What We Can Learn From 1918 Influenza Diaries

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | April 13, 2020, 8 a.m.

When Dorman B.E. Kent, a historian and businessman from Montpelier, Vermont, contracted influenza in fall 1918, he chronicled his symptoms in vivid detail. Writing in his journal, the 42-year-old described waking up with a “high fever,” “an awful headache” and a stomach bug.

“Tried to get Dr. Watson in the morning but he couldn’t come,” Kent added. Instead, the physician advised his patient to place greased cloths and a hot water bottle around his throat and chest.

“Took a seidlitz powder”—similar to Alka-Seltzer—“about 10:00 and threw it up soon so then took two tablespoons of castor oil,” Kent wrote. “Then the movements began and I spent a good part of the time at the seat.”

The Vermont historian’s account, housed at the state’s historical society, is one of countless diaries and letters penned during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people in just 15 months. With historians and organizations urging members of the public to keep journals of their own amid the COVID-19 pandemic, these century-old musings represent not only invaluable historical resources, but sources of inspiration or even diversion.

“History may often appear to our students as something that happens to other people,” writes Civil War historian and high school educator Kevin M. Levin on his blog, “but the present moment offers a unique opportunity for them to create their own historical record.”

Members of the Red Cross Motor Corps, all wearing masks to prevent the further spread of the influenza epidemic, carry a patient on a stretcher into their ambulance, Saint Louis, Missouri, October 1918.

(Photo by PhotoQuest / Getty Images)

The work of a historian often involves poring through pages upon pages of primary source documents like diaries—a fact that puts these researchers in a position to offer helpful advice on how prospective pandemic journalers might want to get started.

First and foremost, suggests Lora Vogt of the National WWI Museum and Memorial, “Just write,” giving yourself the freedom to describe “what you’re actually interested in, whether that’s your emotions, [the] media or whatever it is that you’re watching on Netflix.”

Nancy Bristow, author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds Of The 1918 Influenza Epidemic, advises writers to include specific details that demonstrate how “they fit into the world and … the pandemic itself,” from demographic information to assessment of the virus’ impact in both the public and personal spheres. Examples of relevant topics include the economy; political messaging; level of trust in the government and media; and discussion of “what’s happening in terms of relationships with family and friends, neighbors and colleagues.”

Other considerations include choosing a medium that will ensure the journal’s longevity (try printing out entries written via an electronic journaling app like Day One, Penzu or Journey rather than counting on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms’ staying power, says Vogt) and defying the sense of pressure associated with the need to document life during a “historic moment” by simply writing what comes naturally.

Journaling “shouldn’t be forced,” says Levin. “There are no rules. It’s really a matter of what you take to be important.”

Seattle police officers wearing masks in 1918

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

If all else fails, look to the past: specifically, the nine century-old missives featured below. Though much has changed since 1918, the sentiments shared in writings from this earlier pandemic are likely to resonate with modern readers—and, in doing so, perhaps offer a jumping-off point for those navigating similar situations today.

Many of these journalers opted to dedicate space to seemingly mundane musings: descriptions of the weather, for instance, or gossip shared by friends. That these quotidian topics still manage to hold our attention 100 years later is a testament to the value of writing organically.

State historical societies are among the most prominent record-keepers of everyday people’s journals and correspondence, often undertaking the painstaking tasks of transcribing and digitizing handwritten documents. The quotes featured here—drawn in large part from local organizations’ collections—are reproduced faithfully, with no adjustments for misspelling or modern usage.

Edith Coffin (Colby) Mahoney

From the Massachusetts Historical Society

Between 1906 and 1920, Edith Coffin (Colby) Mahoney of Salem, Massachusetts, kept “three line-a-day diaries” featuring snippets from her busy schedule of socializing, shopping and managing the household. Most entries are fairly repetitive, offering a simple record of what Mahoney did and when, but, on September 22, 1918, she shifted focus to reflect the pandemic sweeping across the United States.

Fair & cold. Pa and Frank here to dinner just back from Jefferson Highlands. Rob played golf with Dr. Ferguson and Mr. Warren. Eugene F. went to the hospital Fri. with Spanish influenza. 1500 cases in Salem. Bradstreet Parker died of it yesterday. 21 yrs old.

September 24, 1918, diary entry

(Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society)

Four days later, Mahoney reported that Eugene had succumbed to influenza. “Several thousand cases in the city with a great shortage of nurses and doctors,” she added. “Theatres, churches, gatherings of everykind stopped.”

Mahoney’s husband, Rob, was scheduled to serve as a pallbearer at Eugene’s September 28 funeral, but came down with the flu himself and landed “in bed all day with high fever, bound up head and aching eye balls.”

By September 29—a “beautiful, mild day,” according to Mahoney—Rob was “very much better,” complaining only of a “husky throat.” The broader picture, however, remained bleak. Another acquaintance, 37-year-old James Tierney, had also died of the flu, and as the journal’s author noted, “Dr says there is no sign of epidemic abating.”

Franklin Martin

From the National Library of Medicine, via research by Nancy Bristow

Patients at a U.S. Army ward in France

(© Corbis via Getty Images)

In January 1919, physician Franklin Martin fell ill while traveling home from a postwar tour of Europe. His record of this experience, written in a journal he kept for his wife, Isabelle, offers a colorful portrait of influenza’s physical toll.

Soon after feeling “chilly all day,” Martin developed a 105-degree fever.

About 12 o’clock I began to feel hot. I was so feverish I was afraid I would ignite the clothing. I had a cough that tore my very innards out when I could not suppress it. It was dark; I surely had pneumonia and I never was so forlorn and uncomfortable in my life. … Then I found that I was breaking into a deluge of perspiration and while I should have been more comfortable I was more miserable than ever.

Added the doctor, “When the light did finally come I was some specimen of misery—couldn’t breathe without an excruciating cough and there was no hope in me.”

Martin’s writing differs from that of many men, says Bristow, in its expression of vulnerability. Typically, the historian explains, men exchanging correspondence with each other are “really making this effort to be very brave, … always apologizing for being sick and finding out how quickly they’ll be back at work, or [saying] that they’re never going to get sick, that they’re not going to be a victim of this.”

The physician’s journal, with its “blow-by-blow [treatment] of what it was like to actually get sick,” represents a “really unusually profound” and “visceral” point of view, according to Bristow.

Violet Harris

Violet Harris was 15 years old when the influenza epidemic struck her hometown of Seattle. Her high school diaries, recounted by grandniece Elizabeth Weise in a recent USA Today article, initially reflect a childlike naivete. On October 15, 1918, for example, Harris gleefully reported:

It was announced in the papers tonight that all churches, shows and schools would be closed until further notice, to prevent Spanish influenza from spreading. Good idea? I’ll say it is! So will every other school kid, I calculate. … The only cloud in my sky is that the [School] Board will add the missed days on to the end of the term.

A Seattle streetcar conductor refuses entry to a commuter who is not wearing a mask in December 1918.

(Photo by PhotoQuest / Getty Images)

Before long, however, the enormity of the situation sank in. The teenager’s best friend, Rena, became so sick she “could hardly walk.” When Rena recovered, Harris asked her “what it felt like to have the influenza, and she said, ‘Don’t get it.’”

Six weeks after Seattle banned all public gatherings, authorities lifted restrictions, and life returned to a semblance of normal. So, too, did Harris’ tone of witty irreverence. Writing on November 12, she said:

The ban was lifted to-day. No more …. masks. Everything open too. ‘The Romance of Tarzan’ is on at the Coliseum [movie theater] as it was about 6 weeks ago. I’d like to see it awfully. …. School opens this week—Thursday! Did you ever? As if they couldn’t have waited till Monday!

N. Roy Grist

Panoramic view of Fort Devens in 1918

(Courtesy of the Fort Devens Museum)

Fort Devens, a military camp about 40 miles from Boston, was among the sites hardest hit by the 1918 influenza epidemic. On September 1, some 45,000 soldiers waiting to be deployed to France were stationed at the fort; by September 23, according to the New England Historical Society, 10,500 cases of the flu had broken out among this group of military men.

Physician N. Roy Grist described the devastation to his friend Burt in a graphic September 29 letter sent from Devens’ “Surgical Ward No. 16.”

These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves.

On average, wrote the doctor, around 100 patients died each day.

Nurses at Fort Devens in 1918

(Courtesy of the Fort Devens Museum)

Grist’s letter is “a remarkably distinct and accurate description of what it was like to be in the midst of this,” says Bristow. “And then it goes on to talk about how difficult it is to be a doctor, … this sense of not being able to do as much as one might like and how exhausting it all is.”

Toward the end of the letter, Grist notes how much he wishes Burt, a fellow physician, was stationed at Fort Devens with him.

It’s more comfortable when one has a friend about. … I want to find some fellow who will not ‘talk shop’ but there ain’t none, no how. We eat it, sleep it, and dream it, to say nothing of breathing it 16 hours a day. I would be very grateful indeed if you would drop me a line or two once in a while, and I promise you that if you ever get into a fix like this, I will do the same for you.

Clara Wrasse

From the National WWI Museum and Memorial

In September 1918, 18-year-old Clara Wrasse wrote a letter to her future husband, Reid Fields, an American soldier stationed in France. Though her home city of Chicago was in the midst of battling an epidemic, influenza was, at best, a secondary concern for the teenager, who reported:

About four hundred [people] died of it at the Great Lakes … quite a number of people in Chi are suffering with it too. Mother thought that I had it when I wasn’t feeling good, but I am feeling fine now.

Quickly moving on from this mention of disease, Wrasse went on to regale her beau with stories of life in Chicago, which she deemed “to be the same old city, altho there are lots of queer things happening.”

September 25, 1918, letter from Clara Wrasse to Reid Fields

(National World War I Museum and Memorial)

Wrasse is believed to be one of the two women pictured here.

(Courtesy of the National World War I Museum)

Signing off with the lines “hoping you feel as happy as you did when we played Bunco together,” Wrasse added one last postscript: “Any time you haven’t got anything to do, drop me a few lines, as I watch for a letter from you like a cat watches a mouse.”

Vogt of the National World War I Museum cites Wrasse’s letters as some of her favorites in the Kansas City museum’s collections.

“It’s so clear how similar across the ages teenagers are and what interests them,” she says, “and that … they’re kind of wooing each other in these letters in a way that a teenager would.”

Leo Baekeland

From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Leo Baekeland, inventor of the first commercialized plastic

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Inventor Leo Baekeland, creator of the world’s first commercialized plastic, “documented his life prolifically” in diaries, laboratory notebooks, photographs and correspondence, according to the museum’s archives center, which houses 49 boxes of the inventor’s papers.

Baekeland’s fall 1918 journal offers succinct summaries of how the epidemic affected his loved ones. On October 24, he reported that a friend named Albert was sick with influenza; by November 3, Albert and his children were “better and out of bed, but now [his] wife is sick with pneumonia.” On November 10, the inventor simply stated, “Albert’s wife is dead”—a to-the-point message he echoed one week later, when he wrote that his maid, Katie, was “buried this morning.”

Perhaps the most expressive sentiment found among Baekeland’s entries: “From five who had influenza, two deaths!”

Dorman B.E. Kent

From the Vermont Historical Society

Dorman B.E. Kent’s diary

(Courtesy of the Vermont Historical Society)

From the age of 11 to his death at 75 in 1951, Dorman B.E. Kent recorded his life in diaries and letters. These papers—now held by the Vermont Historical Society, where Kent served as a librarian for 11 years—document everything from his childhood chores to his views on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and his sons’ career progress.

Of particular interest is Kent’s fall 1918 diary, which contains vivid descriptions of his own bout with influenza. On September 24, he wrote (as mentioned above):

Awoke at 7:00 [a.m.] sick, sick, sick. Didn’t get up or try to. Had a high fever an awful headache every minute all day and was sick to my stomach also. Tried to get Dr. Watson in the morning but he couldn’t come. Told us instead what to do. Greased cloths with inflamacene all day and put around throat and chest and held a bottle of hot water at throat most of the time. Took a seidlitz powder about 10.00 and threw it up soon so then took two tablespoons of castor oil. Then the movements began and I spent a good part of the time at the seat … There is a tremendous lot of influenza in town.

Kent recovered within a few days, but by the time he was able to resume normal activities, his two sons had come down with the flu. Luckily, all three survived the illness.

In early October, Kent participated in a door-to-door census count of the disease’s toll. Surveying two wards in Montpelier on October 2, he and his fellow volunteers recorded 1,237 sick in bed, 1,876 “either ill or recovered,” and 8 dead in one night. The following day, Kent reported that “25 have died in Barre today & the conditions are getting worse all the while. … Terrible times.”

Donald McKinney Wallace

From the Wright State University Special Collections and Archives

Partially transcribed by Lisa Powell of Dayton Daily News

Donald McKinney Wallace, a farmer from New Carlisle, Ohio, was serving in the U.S. Army when the 1918 pandemic broke out. The soldier’s wartime diary detailed conditions in his unit’s sick bay—and the Army’s response to the crisis. On September 30, Wallace wrote:

Layed in our sick ward all day but am no better, had a fever all day. This evening the Doctor had some beef broth brought down to us which was the first I had eaten since last Fri. Our ward was fenced off from rest of the barrack by hanging blankets over a wire which they stretched clear across the ceiling.

On October 4, the still-ailing farmer added, “Not a bit well yet but anything is better than going over to the hospital. 2 men over there have Spanish Influenza bad and are not expected to live. We washed all windows and floors with creoline solution tonight.”

Donald McKinney Wallace’s September 30, 1918, diary entry

(Wright State University Special Collections and Archives)

Wallace survived his illness (and the war), dying in 1975 at age 78.

Though Wallace’s writings don’t reference the situation in his hometown, Bristow notes that many soldiers expressed concern for their families in correspondence sent from the front.

“You get these letters from soldiers who are so worried about their families at home,” she says, “and it’s not what anyone had expected. Their job was to go off soldiering, and the family would worry about them. And now, suddenly, the tables are turned, and it’s really unsettling.”

Helen Viola Jackson Kent

From Utah State University’s Digital History Collections

When Helen Viola Jackson Kent’s children donated her journals to Utah State University, they offered an apt description of the purpose these papers served. Like many diary writers, Kent used her journal to “reflect her daily life, her comings and goings, her thoughts, her wishes, her joys, and her disappointments.”

On November 1, 1918, the lifelong Utah resident wrote that she “[h]ad a bad head ache all day and did not accomplish much. Felt very uneasy as I found out I was exposed to the ‘flu’ Wed. at the store.”

Armistice Day celebrations inadvertently spread influenza.

(Photo by Topical Press Agency / Getty Images)

Kent escaped the flu, but her husband, Melvin—called “Mell” in her diary—was not so lucky. Still, Melvin managed to make a full recovery, and on November 18, his wife reported:

Mell much better and dressed today. Almost worn out with worry and loss of sleep. So much sickness and death this week, but one great ray of light and hope on the outcome of the war as peace came this past [11th].

Interestingly, Kent also noted that the celebrations held to mark the end of World War I had sparked an inadvertent uptick in illness.

“On account of the rejoicing and celebrating,” she wrote, “this disease of influenza increased everywhere.”

#Nature

[gyrlversion]

Heres What Its Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video

On a busy workday in March, 28-year-old Kate felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. Her colleague wanted to show her a video, so she glanced at his computer and was shocked to see her own face staring back, wincing and moaning. She appeared on-screen to be lying naked on a couch with her legs in the air while a man repeatedly penetrated her.

Kate felt sick. Her co-workers, who’d gathered around to see what was going on, instantly fell silent when they saw the video. It looked real and even identified Kate by name, but she knew it couldn’t be. Beyond the obvious — she’d never done porn — she could tell it wasn’t her body; only the face was hers. It had to be some kind of hoax… but would other people believe it?

“It was horrifying,” Kate, who lives in Texas, told HuffPost. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

The video, which is still online and has tens of thousands of views, is a deepfake — a doctored video created with artificial-intelligence software that can make someone appear to do or say anything. Deepfake algorithms use a dataset of videos and images of an individual to create a virtual model of their face that can be superimposed and manipulated. In Kate’s case, her face was swapped onto a porn actress’ head.

“When it’s Photoshop, it’s a static picture and can be very obvious that it’s not real,” said Kate, who’s been the target of previous misogynistic attacks. “But when it’s your own face reacting and moving, there’s this panic that you have no control over how people use your image.”

At first, deepfake porn almost exclusively featured female celebrities; their television and movie appearances gave video creators plenty of material to work with. But now, as the technology has advanced and become more broadly accessible, ordinary women with even a small selection of public photos or videos of themselves are being targeted too.

HuffPost spoke to six women who have been digitally inserted into porn without their consent. Those quoted here are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy, and are speaking out to call attention to an issue that’s been left to fester in the shadows.

Most public discussion on deepfakes thus far has centered on the potential political problems they could cause in the future, even though they already pose a real threat to women. Lawmakers have fretted about how the videos could hypothetically make a presidential candidate appear to say something defamatory on the eve of next year’s election. Satirical deepfakes of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have recently dominated headlines as warnings of what’s to come.

Meanwhile, as deepfake porn continues to upend women’s lives, there’s been little media coverage, and there still exists no criminal recourse for victims.

“The harm done to women when it comes to this kind of sexual objectification is happening now,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “It’s almost like people have forgotten that this is what this technology really started out as, and the conversation around women has fallen away.”

Deepfakes Are Rooted In Misogyny

Deepfakes have been weaponized against women for as long as they’ve existed. The term “deepfake” was coined in 2017 by an anonymous Reddit user who shared doctored porn videos like the one above, which portrays “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot. Today, major porn websites are filled with deepfakes, despite promises to ban them. (MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and other erotic video sites, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the no-deepfakes policy it announced more than a year ago.)

Other tech platforms have wavered in their approach to deepfakes hosted on their sites, torn between calls to stamp out disinformation and to protect free expression. Inside the federal government, legislators have started to sound the alarm about the videos, and a few have introduced bills to regulate them, such as the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.). But so far, none have resulted in action.

Once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted. It will just be reposted forever. Tina, a victim of nonconsensual deepfake porn

Without any such intervention or effective policies in place, deepfake porn has carved out a comfortable space online — and it’s thriving. In addition to free, easy-to-use deepfake generator apps, there are now photo search engines (which HuffPost won’t name) that allow people to upload pictures of individuals to find porn actresses with similar features for optimal face-swapping results. There are even deepfake porn forums where men make paid requests for professional-looking videos of specific women, and share links to the women’s social media profiles for source imagery. HuffPost has observed requesters seeking porn with female Twitch, YouTube and Instagram influencers, as well as the requesters’ own co-workers, friends and exes.

On one such forum in March, someone asked for a sex video of Tina, a 24-year-old Canadian woman, and dropped a link to her YouTube channel. Four days later, a deepfake popped up that appeared to show her bent over naked on a bed with one man thrusting behind her and another stroking his penis near her head. The video, which is virtually seamless, is still up with thousands of views.

“I was definitely shocked and disturbed,” Tina, who learned of the video when an acquaintance sent her a link, told HuffPost. “It felt really weird and gross to see my face where it shouldn’t be.”

The video poster and claimed creator is a middle-aged man, according to his profile. Tina has no idea who he is. She thought about trying to get the video taken down, but didn’t see a point once she realized it had already been shared to other websites.

“You know how the internet is — once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted,” she said. “It will just be reposted forever.”

Someone makes an anonymous, paid request for deepfake porn of their crush.

It Could Happen To Anyone

Until recently, convincing, deepfake-style video manipulation could only be done by highly skilled editors. Hollywood filmmakers have digitally inserted actors into movies posthumously, for example, which required a considerable amount of footage of the actors’ faces to work with. Now, rapidly advancing technology has democratized this kind of deceptive video-editing practice at women’s expense. We’ve reached a point where even amateurs with relatively few pictures of their target’s face can create deepfake porn on their own.

One self-proclaimed video creator, who describes himself online as a 25-year-old Greek man and “one of the first guys” to make deepfake porn, solicits donations and paid requests on multiple forums. People have watched his videos more than 300,000 times.

Deepfakes are “no different from a photoshop manipulation or artist drawing/rendering,” the man, who did not reveal his name, told HuffPost. Asked if anyone ever requests that he remove the sex videos he uploads, he replied: “There are no takedowns.”

Despite his disregard for women’s privacy, he seems rather concerned with protecting his own: “I’m accepting payments in bitcoin and other crypto currencies (no paypal/credit card due to privacy reasons),” he wrote in one post. In another, he listed his price range as around $15 to $40 per video.

“Women can tell men, ‘I don’t want to date you, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to take my clothes off for you,’ but now men can say, ‘Oh yeah? I’m going to force you to, and if I can’t do it physically, I will do it virtually,’” said Franks. “There’s nothing you can really do to protect yourself except not exist online.”

She’s hopeful that as people become increasingly aware of deepfakes and deepfake porn in particular, they’ll become more skeptical of what they see online.

“The only silver lining, if you can even call it that,” she said, “is that the more people know about this, the more they’ll start to question if [revenge porn videos] are real.”

But deepfakes have also broadened the threat of revenge porn, or nonconsensual porn. A vindictive creep no longer needs nudes or sex tapes of a woman who’s spurned him to leak online. He just needs her Facebook or Instagram photos to deepfake into existing porn. And as these videos get easier to make, they’re also getting harder to recognize.

There’s nothing you can really do to protect yourself except not exist online. Mary Anne Franks, president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative

Like so many women, Amy, a mother and business owner who’s based in Los Angeles, has been harassed in the past with crudely altered images that were disturbing but clearly fake. She’d never heard of deepfakes until she was featured in one that portrays her having sex, and labels her a “slut.” In the comments section, people have commended the anonymous creator for the video’s believability.

“It didn’t get really concerning until the technology and skill level of those putting it together got better — to the point where people might actually believe that was me,” Amy told HuffPost. “If we see a video of something, we take it as fact.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, has been working in recent years to develop machine-learning algorithms that can detect manipulated videos, including deepfakes. Much of the challenge lies in keeping pace with deepfake software as it continues to evolve.

“As the people making these videos get more and more sophisticated with their tools, we’re going to have to get more and more sophisticated with ours,” Edward Delp, a media forensics expert at Purdue University who’s conducting research for DARPA, said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “It’s going to be an arms race.”

Nicolas Ortega

Malicious deepfakes are usually posted anonymously and designed to go viral.

No Real Options For Victims

Maya, a 29-year-old woman who also lives in Los Angeles, wasn’t aware that she’s featured in deepfake porn until HuffPost contacted her last week. She was aghast to learn of the video, which identifies her by name and appears to show her masturbating. But she wasn’t entirely surprised: She’s been receiving a lot of messages lately from strangers requesting sex.

“Being violated in such an intimate way is really a weird feeling,” Maya told HuffPost. “The idea of people sexualizing me makes me feel like I’m being fetishized, receiving unwanted attention, losing respect as a person and no longer safe.”

The unfortunate reality for Maya and other women in her situation is that there’s not much they can do now that the videos are out there. Lawsuits can be extremely expensive, and in order to sue for harassment, impersonation, defamation or even misappropriation of image — which typically only applies for celebrities — you need to know who you’re suing. Like many victims of nonconsensual deepfake porn, Maya has no clue who created or posted the video of her.

And because online intermediaries, including social media giants and deepfake forums, are shielded from liability for third-party content thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, suing the sites that host the video would be pointless too. Platforms can’t get in legal trouble for the things their users post, and aren’t required to remove them. As a result, trying to get abusive content taken offline is often futile.

“As disappointing and sobering as it is, there aren’t a lot of options for victims,” said Carrie Goldberg, an attorney specializing in sexual privacy. Deepfake websites exist “to monetize people’s humiliation,” she added. “It points to the infirmity that Section 230 has caused when there are websites that are so arrogant about their immunity from liability.”

Since malicious deepfakes are usually posted anonymously and designed to go viral, victims��� advocates such as Danielle Citron are urging lawmakers to develop a policy that’s focused not only on punishing the producers, but also the distributors. She and Franks are working together to draft a federal criminal law that would hold platforms accountable for wittingly amplifying hoax videos and enabling them to be spread around.

“If [there are] impersonations or manipulations that do not reflect what we’ve done or said, platforms should — once they figure it out — take it down,” Citron, who’s a law professor at the University of Maryland, said this month at the first congressional hearing on deepfakes. At this stage, she noted, there’s no way to filter the videos from being posted, so platforms should be required to remove them as soon as they’re flagged.

Free speech proponents worry that unless it’s done very carefully, forcing websites to restrict certain content could lead to broader repercussions for online expression.

But as Franks argued, unbridled deepfake porn is already doing just that.

“There’s a massive chilling effect that deepfake pornography has on women’s speech,” she said, “because the way to make yourself safer is to censor yourself.”

Pornhub

Pornhub is still riddled with deepfakes, despite promising to ban them more than a year ago.

Women Are Being Silenced

Investigative journalist Rana Ayyub has experienced firsthand the silencing effect Franks described. Last spring, she was the victim of a targeted disinformation campaign in India that was intended to intimidate and humiliate her.

The abuse began the day after she publicly condemned a political party’s shameful response to the rape of a young girl. Suddenly, screenshots showing a series of defamatory tweets falsely appearing to be from Ayyub began circulating online. She then realized a deepfake porn video featuring her face was spreading across social media like wildfire, alongside her name and phone number. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and Ayyub started getting calls and messages asking for sex.

“It was devastating,” she told HuffPost UK. “The entire country was watching a porn video that claimed to be me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.”

Even now that the video has been debunked as fake, Ayyub will never be able to fully move on. She can’t undo the damage to her reputation, and she’s afraid of drawing more attention to herself on social media.

“I used to be very opinionated; now I’m much more cautious about what I post online. I’ve self-censored quite a bit out of necessity,” she said. “I’m constantly thinking, ‘What if someone does something to me again?’”

Kate, the woman from Texas whose co-worker found deepfake porn of her, has struggled to move forward too. When she contacted her lawyer, he explained that the case would be incredibly difficult to fight because she didn’t know who was behind the video.

With no viable legal options on the table, Kate reluctantly turned to the deepfake forum where the video was posted and asked for it to be removed. The site owner told her she wasn’t the only woman on the page, then stopped replying, Kate said. She felt hopeless.

“It’s grotesque to know that it lives out there and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “These things are so horribly believable, and you desperately want to say, ‘That’s not me!’ But that would just bring more attention to it.”

Like Ayyub, Kate has also started to limit what she shares online for fear that her content could be distorted and used against her without consequence yet again.

“Pornographic deepfakes and revenge porn and all that kind of stuff are only going to make women want to say less,” she said. “As these videos get more prolific and realistic, is this something we’re just going to be expected to accept as the cost of being online?”

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Episode #125: Tom Barton, “The Biggest Problem Investors Have is Things Change…and They Don’t Change”

Episode #125: “The Biggest Problem Investors Have is Things Change…and They Don’t Change”

Guest: Tom Barton. Tom is the Founder, President, and General Partner of White Rock Capital. He helped build the first multibillion-dollar short-selling hedge fund at Feshbach Brothers in the 1980s, where he exposed dozens of stock frauds. Then he became an early-stage investor, going long on health foods and satellite TV. Now he runs White Rock Capital, where much of his focus is on investments in gene-therapy firms.

Date Recorded: 10/04/18

Run-Time: 1:25:50

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Comments or suggestions? Email us Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com or call us to leave a voicemail at 323 834 9159

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Summary: In Episode 125, we welcome famed short-seller and early stage investor, Tom Barton.

We start by going way back, after Tom graduated from Vanderbilt. He walks us through his early career experiences which helped him sharpen his business analysis skills, as well as his operational skills. He developed a great understanding of different industries, yet also what it was like to actually work in them. This was the foundation for the short-selling career that was soon to begin.

In 1983 Tom went to work for a wealthy Dallas family, and in the process met one of the original fraud short-sellers, nicknamed “The Mortician”. Tom knew nothing about stocks at that point, but under the guidance of his new mentor, realized that his analytical skills aligned perfectly with sniffing out short-selling candidates. He reasoned “isn’t it easier to spot something that’s going to fail than be certain on something that’s going to succeed?” He then began digging into the research, and finding slews of fraudulent companies.

What follows is an incredibly entertaining story-after-story of the various frauds Tom sniffed out (and made money on). There was a company claiming it could change the molecular composition of water… one deceiving customers about building-restoration after fires… a biotech claiming it could cure HIV… By the time 1990 rolled around, Tom’s returns were over 80% and he had generated a couple billion dollars.

There’s a great bit in here about “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Stratton Oakmont). Tom is the guy who took them down. Related, the “Wolf” himself snaked an apartment out from underneath Meb a few years ago out here in Manhattan Beach, CA. The guys share a laugh over this.

Eventually the conversation morphs from short-selling to when Tom’s strategy changed to going long. It involves managing money for George Soros, and some of Tom’s early long winners.

This dovetails into how Tom got into biotech, which is where he’s spending lots of time today. Tom tells us about his introduction into gene therapy, then successes with the company Intrexon. He talks us through some small companies he’s been a part of that have already sold for huge paydays…for instance, one purchased by Novartis for $9B.

This is a must-listen for any short-sellers, market historians, private investors, and biotech investors. And Tom’s most memorable trade is a doozy. This one involves buying puts for a hundred and something thousand dollars…which he sold for $13M.

These details and far more in Episode 125.

Links from the Episode:

0:50 – Welcome and introduction to Tom

1:23 – A look at the early part of his career

6:17 – Transition into being a short seller

9:20 – Why shorting was so much easier in the 80’s and 90’s

14:00 – The response to their strategy in the beginning

17:44 – Stand out shorts and the work that went into them

28:27 – Pushback on betting against fraudsters

31:56 – Involvement with Stratton Oakmont (The Wolf of Wall Street)

36:06 – Another short-selling experience with a real estate group

40:00 – Transition to long investing

44:08 – The importance of where you get your ideas

46:57 – Tom’s global investment strategy

52:45 – Tom’s interest in healthcare

1:06:31 – Tom’s look toward the future

1:13:38 – Behavioral underreactions

1:13:44 – From Alchemy To Ipo: The Business Of Biotechnology – Robbins-roth

1:16:56 – Important – find the single best source of information

1:20:50 – Most memorable investment

1:23:42 – Tom’s plan to raise his profile

Transcript of Episode 125:

Welcome Message: Welcome to the “Meb Faber Show” where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth. Join us as we discuss the craft of investing, and uncover new and profitable ideas, all to help you grow wealthier and wiser, better investing starts here.

Disclaimer: Meb Faber is the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on the podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information visit cambriainvestments.com.

Meb: Welcome podcast listeners. Today we have what I expect to be an incredibly entertaining and fun episode for you. Our guest helped build one of the world’s first multibillion-dollar short selling hedge funds at Feshbach Partners in the 1980s, where he got to expose dozens of stock frauds. And then became an early stage investor going along on lots of stocks, and private companies, and health food, and satellite TV’s. Now he runs White Rock Capital family office, where he’s spending a lot of time thinking about biotech. We’re thrilled to have him on the show welcome Tom Barton.

Tom: Thank you, thanks for having me on.

Meb: So Tom, I figured we’d use your career arc as jumping off points to talk about a few different topics that are near and dear to your heart, including short selling, and private investing and everything else. But maybe bring us back to the beginning, I think you are a Vandy guy, I’m actually going to be in Nashville next week. So podcast listeners come on out to Topgolf I’m giving a talk there. But walk us through it. You did your MBA I believe, were you a short seller out of the womb? How did you get into this world?

Tom: After I graduated from Vanderbilt in the late 70s, the first job I took was in New York City for W.R. Grace. Back then Grace was actually a really great diversified conglomerate. And I worked directly for staff that was right under Peter Grace who was the CEO, chairman, he was basically pretty much a dictator of W.R. Grace. And I did all the confidential work, so if they were gonna acquire anything, divest anything, make any major changes within the company, they would come to our staff. So no, I didn’t get to make any great strategic decisions, but I had to do all the work, and I had to do all the financial work, and the marketing strategic kind of analysis, for literally hundreds of companies.

Because if you looked at Grace back in those days, first of all, they were an industrial company, and they were in things like Cryovac which is the plastic wrap that goes over all the steaks. And they own 90% of so many other markets, and they had dominant shares in industrial natural gas kind of industries. And at that time, you weren’t getting a very big multiple. So they started diversifying. They started buying all these consumer product companies, and restaurant chains, and sporting good stores. Most of these don’t exist anymore or they were sold off, so I had to do all the analysis. So pretty much I worked 19 hours a day for about three years, and kind of learned every industry.

That was like an excellent place to start, excellent place. But during the process, it became very funny because I was reasonably close to Peter Grace, and he said to me one day he said, “Hi Barton” he says, “You’re the only guy who works for me that will come back and tell me how crappy everything is.” And I go I don’t know, I go out there and I look at the stuff. And look I’m pretty young back then I’m like 25, and I go it’s pretty obvious this is like really in a lot of trouble.

He says, “Well this is what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna send you to 20 cities over the next 20 years, and you can clean up our garbage stuff. Every time we have a problem I’m gonna send you to the next place.” And I went home that night, and I went “That does not sound like a good job at all.” So that was pretty much the end of my W.R. Grace days, I just could not… I couldn’t imagine going to 20 cities. You can imagine the cities they would have sent me to also. So I left. I went to Dallas started a firm with another guy it was a manufacturing firm, it turned out we ended up building most of the fixtures for Blockbuster video. If you remember the kind of crazy fixtures they had in there, we just kind of morphed into a very unusual kind of manufacturing business. specialised on that.

Somewhere in the process, a European company came in and bought me out, and I got my first pretty much tall capital. It was a decent amount of money back then, but it’s not huge, but it was certainly enough to let me be independent if I wanted. And after that which is we’re talking a period of… this whole thing from Grace, let’s say 1977 to ’80 then ’80 to ’83. In ’83, I was done with that segment of my life and I knew how to run companies, I knew how to analyse companies.

I understood about balance sheet, P&L, cash flow, but I also understood what it was like to actually be in a plant and have to count inventory and actually collect receivables. So I got this really great combination of understanding all these industries, then actually having to work in one, where I actually had to build a company, make payroll and all those kind of things. So it was a really good combination, and then my whole life changed and I started become a short seller in 1983.

Meb: By the way, do you know that there’s still a Blockbuster video in Alaska? I think there’s only one left I can’t remember why there’s one in Anchorage, but it’s probably like a museum at this point.

Tom: You know, a really good friend of mine back then who I met because of the quality of data we came up with was Alan Abelson, who was editor for “Barron’s”. So I still think he’s the single best writer, and the most accurate guy that I’ve ever dealt with in the press. And he was talking about the collapse of Blockbuster video about 10 years before it finally collapsed. And you know, when Netflix first came out, they’re we’re gonna put them away, It took a long time. But you know, it was a really interesting company and they had a niche, they just didn’t get out of it fast enough.

Meb: We talk a lot about that with the high expensive fee mutual funds long-only world that’s kind of the closet indexers at some point. I think all those are gonna go the way of the Dodo, but we haven’t… don’t know when that’s gonna happen. We often talk about is there gonna be a Blockbuster-Netflix moment with those, or is it just gonna be a generational transfer? I think it’s probably the latter. But anyway off topic all right, so you’ve got some pretty good operational experience and pretty good practical experience analysing companies.

Did you just kind of wake up one day and say you know, I feel grumpy I didn’t have any coffee, I’m gonna start looking into some of these crappy companies and betting on them to go down? What was kind of the transition? What was the next phase?

Tom: Interesting enough when I was younger, I never woke up grumpy, so that was good.

Meb: I wake up grumpy every single day. I crawl out of a coffin, my dog licks me in the face, and I crawl to the coffee machine. I always laugh at people talking about their very intentional mornings where they do a lot of meditation, and I just don’t have that gene. When my genome gets sequenced we’ll find I have the grumpy morning coffee Gene, okay so…

Tom: As you get older it’s gonna get worse, I’ll just tell you that. So in 83, I went to work for a very wealthy Dallas family, and they had all these investments. But they only had one investment that just was printing money every year, it was from a guy that was actually right next door to us. This guy Rusty Rose, and I went over and I met Rusty for the first time, and anyone who’s older will know about Rusty, anyone who’s younger would not. But Rusty was one of the original fraud short sellers and probably the best of all time.

A Stanford Harvard guy, unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, but Rusty was so good at short selling that they actually gave him the name the mortician. And so if Rusty shorted your stock, it was going to go to zero because he didn’t mess with anything that wasn’t like really a fraud. And nothing that you would actually even cover a buck. So I went over and I met Rusty, and I knew nothing about stocks, I knew nothing about Wall Street even though I’d gone to business school. I took out a monetary policy but I didn’t waste any time on the stock market or the like.

So he explained short selling to me and I said, “Wait a minute, my best attribute is to be able to do detailed research, and to find things that are having problems, this seems perfect for me.” And back then, in particular, I felt like the number of businesses that were founded that a larger percentage failed than businesses that succeed and also is it easier to spot something that’s gonna fail than to be certain on something that’s gonna succeed. So I said this is great, I said, if you’ll find ideas, I’ll do all the research for you.

It was just right down my alley where I can make the phone calls, I could do the spreadsheets, I could read all that stuff. I have a really good… probably the best thing about me is common sense. I just have kinda like this fairly simple approach to judgement of good and evil, and I tend to get it right, so it’s just kind of the perfect place. And I just started working next to Rusty. I was in the office next to him, but Rusty would come over and say “We oughta look at this company.” And I would look at it, and I go start making calls, and I could not believe how many companies out there were 100% frauds.

Now you gotta understand this was a unique time in history, and you cannot reproduce… all your listeners, you cannot reproduce this kind of strategy again. This is something that could work in the ’80s in the early ’90s. It cannot work today, you’ll understand why. Because back then it was simple to do a fraud, you could do a fraud… and there were so many companies that were either investment banks like the , D.H. Blair, Stratton Oakmont which I’m sure most your listeners have heard of because of the “Wolf of Wall Street.” We can talk about that, I turned Stratton Oakmont over to the FBI.

But there were companies that would float these IPO’s and the whole businesses were fraud. But that was back in the day, you couldn’t even find stock symbols. I mean literally someone would give me the name of the company, I couldn’t find a stock symbol for two or three days. And it was also… there was nothing online. You couldn’t get 10K’s annual reports, quarterly reports, you couldn’t get any of those. So you had to go to a company like Disclosure, and Disclosure would actually print these documents out to you. So the only way you could ever figure anything out about a company is you’d have to get really get a hard copy read and go through.

So was a very slow process, and there was no overt sense of a public guardian. Like you know, right now someone tries to commit a financial fraud, the public is everywhere and they’re tweeting about it and the whole deal, back then total crickets. And so a guy could launch something, he could run the stock from $2 to $19, nobody even know about it. And we got very, very good at finding those, and it turned out we would find those things because we would start tracking certain investment banking houses, if you wanna call that you know. And those houses were not shy, and you know, the SEC would go in and slap them on the hand and give them a fine.

But the SEC wasn’t really refined in that area of going after frauds, and so the SEC had to actually learn the process of how to do it. And we can talk about that in a second, but the number of frauds that we ran across were enormous. And basically, we never got beat, so we could do 100 shorts, and we would win 100 times. Now, it’s not that we wouldn’t suffer some pain in the process, but we never got beat, we were never short, and also we were not shorting overvalued companies at all.

So just to give you an example back then, there was a company that was called Instant Hot Water, and Instant Hot Water the claims were very, very simple. It doesn’t even matter whether these claims were accurate, but just understand the level of the story here. The claims were that everybody knows that hot water molecules stand up cold water molecules sit down. So this guy claimed that he had an instrument or basically an electrical motor that he could put wires into water, and he could flip a switch and molecules would stand up, so he called it Instant Hot Water. And that was a public company, and that actually traded, well obviously that was just a total fraud.

There’s another company called S. Taylor which was Snooki Taylor which is a company that claimed that you could go down the black sand beaches, and you know, you see the sparkling on the beaches well that’s silica, that’s not gold. But they would tell people it was gold and they drag these things down along the beach. And at the end of capturing black sand, they would throw it around, they’d open up the bottom, and sure enough gold would come out of the bottom. Well, it’s pretty obvious how they did that right, they stuck gold in the bottom.

So the earliest days, the first 200 or 250 or 300, or 400 companies, we did, were all like that. They were just completely made up garbage companies. And it turned out that we got very good at finding them, we got very good at doing the research on them. We actually wrote a book on how to do research on frauds. Now we didn’t publish it. I still have it my office. It was like 200 something pages. So an analyst who come in and figure out how you would actually find a fraud, investigate a fraud and the like. But we got so good at it that we would just find a fraud, we call the SEC. I had several guys at the SEC in Washington, and I would pass these frauds along to them.

I’d give them all the work, and for years they really couldn’t quite figure out what to do with them. But by about 1986, ’87, they started really figuring it out, and so you could present them the data, it was always black and white, and within a fairly short period, they’d go investigate them. And then it would take a little bit longer to close them down. So this became an incredible business. I think I started with a million and in four years, I’d turned it into 15. And I wasn’t really pressing it hard, but it’s just like we were just never gonna get beat.

Meb: And so like the process was you would put on a short say SEC these guys are clearly a bunch of fraudsters. It reminds me of an old phrase my grandmother would use which is using some elbow grease, so actually doing some like hard work meaning and kind of value-added digging around, a little harder today with a disinfectant on the Internet. And so you would put on a short and most of these I assume were terminals. Like they would essentially go to zero or go away, what was then the process? So you did this for a little while, you built up this 15 million capital and did people start to wake up to this at all? What was kind of progress?

Tom: Even in the early days when I really was… I mean I was pretty happy with that kind of result. I then merged in with Feshbach Brothers. Now Feshbach Brothers was still a small firm. It only had about $100 million in capital at the time, but there were three brothers there, and the three brothers were absolutely brilliant, but no formal education at all, zero formal education. They were really, really smart guys. And we started swapping ideas because they knew Rusty Rose, and we just got along really well, and we merged our firms together.

And then we raised a little bit of money. I mean basically, we wouldn’t have to do anything except accept money coming in because our returns were crazy. My return each year was always over 80%. This went for gosh I don’t know, nine years or so something like this. I mean our returns were phenomenal. And by the time we got to 1990, we had a couple billion dollars, and I believe from the data that I’ve read, and I’ve never tried to substantiate it, the entire hedge fund industry was about 10 billion. So at one time, we were 15 to 25% of the entire hedge fund industry, that’s how early we were in the process.

So we built up to a couple hundred people, but it just a completely different time because we had 26 people in the accounting department. We had to write the original software that’s now Advent which is used by almost every hedge fund that does any form of shorting. We had to write that software, we actually wrote that at Feshbach Brothers. And that became what is now Advent which virtually everybody uses. We should’ve kept that company because there was really no way to handle large numbers shorts, large number accounts, and the like.

We helped Merrill set up their short selling box, which basically for your listeners if you short a stock you have to go borrow it. No one really knew how to do that in mass. We helped Merrill Lynch do that. So we were very instrumental in developing the short selling industry into something… well developing into industry and then having systems in place so you could do it in large amounts of dollars. We were early about that.

But I think what then naturally developed besides the fact that we had a large amount of capital, we also were lucky to run… I mean we had the crash in ’87 which I never vote for a crash. But if there’s gonna be a crash it might as well be short, so I would prefer the world not crash, I’d prefer to make it on the long side. So I am never looking for bad things to happen. I remember we were short, I think it was Jet Blue at the time or no, it was Value Jet. And it was a terrible, terrible airline, and they had all kind of maintenance issues, and they were buying planes that were just for $2 million, and it was nothing but trouble.

And I remember the company went away, but they had to have a plane crash in the Everglades, just a sickening feeling to end up making money on people doing poorly. But generally, we weren’t on the Value Jet side were more on just terrible, terrible businesses.

Meb: I think a lot of people listening to this, that’s kind of amazing too you know, the ’80s and ’90s rip-roaring bull market. And to think that in a time when U.S. stocks, in general, were performing so well, that there were still these sort of inefficiencies and frauds out there that you could find opportunities despite the huge headwinds of an upmarket is pretty amazing. Are there any other like kind of stories that come to mind you know, as you guys were doing all this research. Are there any ones that stand out?

Tom: There’s a few that I think are really, really interesting when you start doing frauds of businesses that don’t exist that’s one thing, but when you start doing fraud of businesses that exist, some people might claim that Tesla is a fraud, I don’t think it’s a fraud. But Enron would be an example of a real business, that was a real business that really didn’t exist right. When you start off doing complete scams like Instant Hot Water, and even the very famous ZZZ Best that we turned over to the SEC, which was Barry Minkow, he went to jail. We could talk about that, you know, the Drexel Burnham.

Meb: What was that business? It’s great name.

Tim: Well ZZZZ Best was probably the highest profile fraud back in the ’80s. It was a Drexel Burnham deal, and they basically claimed that they were going to all these buildings and they would do restoration after fires. And what they would actually do is… and they tricked everybody, including Drexel, but they didn’t trick us for one minute, was that they would go out to these buildings that were under construction and rehab and the like, and they would hang up their helmets, their construction helmets and their T-shirts, and they’d bring in the bankers and people like that. And they’d see all their stuff laying around, and then they would leave, and then they would take all their stuff out.

You would think it would be pretty easy to figure out that there weren’t that many big fires. I remember when the MGM caught fire a long time ago in Vegas. That was like a major story. So I remember calling the people at MGM and go your carpet restoration how big was that? Thinking, wow I mean that’s an entire hotel almost. It was like $3 million. These guys were claiming they had carpet restoration business of $10 and $15 million. It was just insane you know, and it was easy to track because you figure out the towns that they were in, then you call the Fire Department, the Fire Department would say there were no fires. But they were fooling Drexel Burnham, and they were fooling the public.

And so the SEC raided them. They ended up… Justice Department went after Barry Minkow who’s gone to jail, come out of jail, gone to jail, come out of jail, I think he still might be in jail. But real businesses like that became very, very interesting. And then my first biotech… wasn’t really biotech it was a pharma business was one in my own backyard in Dallas, which was probably the most fun I ever had on any company. Which was called Carrington Labs. And Carrington Labs claimed in the ’80s that they had a cure for HIV, well basically a cure for AIDS.

None of us even knew what AIDS were, so we had to do all this research to even figure out what AIDS was. And then we had to do a lot of work on Carrington Labs even though they claimed that they were curing AIDS with aloe vera. But I remember the funniest story was they had one doctor in Fort Worth, and he was curing all these people. And I remember calling him and by that time I knew what the symptoms were of AIDS, and saying look, if you had these kinds of symptoms, these symptoms, he would go, “If you had those symptoms you definitely have AIDS.” And it’s like, “I’m curing and all these people of AIDS.”

And so he would ultimately give you names of people that he was curing, and you would go follow these people, and you would find out that they were passing away. So it’s a tragic story, but you’re trying to figure out maybe this company really has a cure for something that is very public… I mean the profile of AIDS back in the ’80s it was so high right. And then you know, ultimately we found these people are passed away, we go back to him go, “Yeah, well these people have passed away.” And he’ll go “Yeah, I cured them, and then they go back and catch it again.”

It was such a joke, but what happened from Carrington Labs is that they were huge money guys, one of the second guys at one of Ross Perot’s companies EDS, second or third guy. I think it was actually the third employee, he was promoting all of this stuff. So you know, they called the SEC on us, and the SEC did nothing because they said they were trying to run a real company. But then there was a huge congressional review, and the congressional review was about us at Feshbach Brothers. And there’s a book out, there’s like about a 400-page book about this congressional review of short sellers, because all short sellers back then had to be criminal, right? I mean we were making up these stories about these great companies.

And I remember… and they asked me to come and testify I would not go, because they had like six companies testifying in front of Congress, and all six of them were complete frauds. But it didn’t matter to Congress. They didn’t have the slightest idea. They just had one congressman who wanted to go after short sellers. And so I remember the funniest thing was they said that me, Tom Barton constantly use the name Joe Barton making calls, and Joe Barton is my partner, he’s also my brother right. And so they wanted to say that I used the name Joe Barton, and we had a congressman in Texas Joe Barton. So they said I was impersonating a congressman. They didn’t even know I had a brother named Joe.

And so Congress is up there talking about how I’m using this name of Joe Barton, and it was really kind of a hilarious thing but they made a big deal out of it. And they were gonna try to go after everybody and bring criminal things, and it basically went away. But Carrington was really funny, and they were just… I don’t know how many of these names you wanna go through? I remember… here’s a very simple one. We were short Home Shopping Network back then, and of course, HSN has survived.

But back then we were very concerned because their inventory numbers were huge. They would carry 90 days and 120 days and 160 days of inventory, and we figured out the inventory that they were carrying wasn’t any good. Because Home Shopping doesn’t carry inventory right. They’re supposed to bring inventory, put it on the air, it goes away. If it doesn’t go away, they put it on the air one more day and then it hopefully goes away. Then they discount it. You don’t carry inventory for Home Shopping Network, but they were carrying 160 days, so obviously they were buying a lot of bad stuff.

And Home Shopping Network almost went away, as a matter of fact, I’m not sure it may have actually filed bankruptcy and come back out, I don’t recall. But this is the level of research… but I’ll give you one more story on the short side and the level of research it took and how we actually use that today. Because this is I think is… it’s an interesting story and I referred to a recently in “Barron’s “interview that we did, but I gave a small snippet. But we’re short of a company Endo-lase, and Endo-lase had a laser that was one of the first medical device lasers, and it was about a million bucks which means only a few hospitals back in the ’80s could even afford a million dollar laser.

And their sales were enormous, but their accounts receivable were over a year. Which you don’t have to be a genius to know there’s some problem there. So we called the company. We said, “Hey your accounts receivable are over a year what’s going on?” It happened to be a New York company right up here on Columbus Circle, and the guy there who… the end of the story is he ended up fleeing the country. He said, “Look, we sell them to the hospitals. It takes them a long time to pay for them, but our cost of capital is so low that lets us sell them, we collect them over a year or two years. It doesn’t really matter, it’s basically financing.” And we said, “Okay,” and hung up and I didn’t believe the story.

So I told my analyst, “Identify every hospital in the United States that can afford a million dollar laser.” There were 200 and something. We called all 200, all of them. We said, “Hey you ever bought this laser?” “Nope, never bought the laser. Nope, never bought the laser. Never bought laser.” So we called the company back up, “Hey 200 hospitals, nobody bought the laser.” “Oh yeah, we sold them to all these hospitals. Come up and you can look at our books.” Okay so I go up and I have a guy go with me because I think that possibly it’s a mob-related deal they’re gonna kill me. And a lot of things we shorted were a mob-related, and we can talk about that briefly in a second.

But when I looked at the books and sure enough their accounts receivable for all these hospitals that we had called. And he said, “See we sold them all.” I made him go back call all the hospitals, and sure enough none of them had bought it. So they were just making it up. I think Arthur Andersen was the auditor back then, for people who remember the name, Arthur Andersen. But it didn’t matter could be an Arthur Andersen, Price Waterhouse, it could have been any of those guys. They were all being taken by these kinds of guys.

So we had to do a lot of work, and so we basically figured out that they were made by Messerschmitt, the German company. We talked to Messerschmitt, we said, “How did the lasers get here?” “The lasers came by boat.” “When do they get here?” “They come here on a Thursday, we ship them so and so, we get them, they’re paying us for the lasers. We really like Endo-lase.” So then we have to call the dock in New Jersey, and we talk to a guy there and he says “Hey these lasers are coming in.” He says “You’re lucky because this laser has its own number. If it’s tennis shoes I cannot tell you what’s coming in and where, but this laser I can tell you exactly when they come in. We get them every Thursday, third Thursday of the month.”

I said, “That’s great.” So we had a private investigator, he went down watched the truck pick up these lasers and they took these lasers, and they’re storing them in his grandmother’s house in the garage. Well, you can imagine now that we have that answer and that story what do you think the SEC is gonna do? Do you think it’s hard to short a stock? Remember there is no uptick rule then, you think it’s hard to short the stock? Do you think you worried about shorting the stock? No. So you just call the SEC and go, “Okay, this is where the lasers are coming in. Go over there the address, open up the garage, that’s where all the lasers are.” And that’s kind of what happened and the guy who ran it, Michael Clinger, he skipped the country and he went to Israel, and he’s had some other run-ins with the law since then.

But this is the kind of work that you’ve gotta do, you just can’t look at the top. You can look at the top and go one-year of accounts receivable, but that’s not the way you’re going to have a certainty of 100% that you got it right. Those are only kind of shorts I do, so I would not be the guy that you’d wanna call on Tesla. I’ll give you an opinion on it, but I’m not the guy that you will call on Tesla.

Meb: Meanwhile that grandma had an amazing garage sale selling lasers to the whole neighbourhood.

Tom: Actually she didn’t collect for him either. I think they were just hauled away and returned.

Meb: So we talked about lasers, it seems like betting against the mob would be kind of a questionable target for your own personal life expectancy. I mean how many times would these companies push back? Would you ever get any threats? Being a short seller is so hard even today where half of the country thinks short selling is un-American. But how often would the companies react kind of aggressively or angrily or anything else, anything come to mind?

Tom: Yeah, first of all, let me tell you what is un-American, promoting companies with stories that are false, whether you’re long or short, that is un-American. Trying to figure out whether people are telling the truth, that’s very American okay. Risking your capital is very American. Very un-American, starting rumours about companies that aren’t true to drive it down or drive it up, very un-American okay. So I just wanna clear that because you can’t put all short sellers in the same category because it’s not fair, it be like putting all people in the same category.

There are terrible short sellers out there that just start rumours and then do these hit and runs, and I punch those guys in the nose okay. I hate those guys, but there are other guys who do really detailed work and they help the market.

Look in the old days these companies that were run by mob contacts you know, New Jersey, New York, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City was huge, Newport Beach, some great parts of the country, West Palm. The places you would expect maybe a little bit more mob involvement, when something went bad they used to beat up each other, they used to go get the guy who do the promote and beat him up. And there were cases we heard about that, where guys were… the big promoter the guy from the SEC would say to me “Yeah he got beat up” and the like.

I never was really that worried about it because to them it’s just… or to guys like the D.H. Blair, it’s a lot better just to go to the next one. They probably made money on it anyway. Okay, let’s go do another one, it’s better than just bringing more and more attention to yourself. So it wasn’t much of a concern, but it became a little bit more concern in the early ’90s, and I had really good security guy. I started bouncing things off him, he was really good. He was Ross Perot’s guy. As you know about Ross Perot, Ross Perot knew something about security, and I would bounce these things off he’d go “Forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it, forget it.” Then I had one. He’d go “No, that’s a real one.”

And so after that I just decided you know, I’d made enough money doing this and also what advantage is there to be public about all this stuff? So I just pretty much went underground and since ’93, I’m almost unheard of. And that’s pretty much the reason, it wasn’t really the threat from them, it was just when you get a certain level of publicity you get a certain issue that goes with it, right. So I just decided the publicity was not that good, but really in the late ’80s in the ’90s, I couldn’t walk anywhere, I could not go to a ski slope without people stopping me, I was that well recognised.

You know, in New York I couldn’t go anywhere, and I had all the speaking engagements and stuff. But you know, the great thing is that’s before Google, so if you go back and Google me you don’t find that much stuff. So you know, I went underground in ’93. Now I’ll tell you this, it’s not really advantageous to business, it’s a lot better to business if you have a high profile because everybody’s calling you seeing deals. Then all of a sudden you go underground that’s not great for business.

Meb: Well, I joked with your earlier that you have probably my favourite website I’ve seen in the past decade which it has I think… it looks kind of like Berkshire. It has like two lines of… all white page with two lines a black type, so my favourite. You know, you mentioned earlier a quick reference to Stratton Oakmont and I think that name will probably ring a bell with a lot of our listeners. Maybe talk to us a little bit about your experience and an involvement with that shop?

Tom: That whole movie “Wolf of Wall Street.” I saw it and I laughed the whole time okay. It’s a very entertaining movie that is not the way the story went at all. I mean the story was very, very simple of a firm that was running stocks up, selling the stock they owned, and instantly the stock collapsing. It was a very simple pump and dump, very similar to what another 20 firms were doing at the time, and it became very obvious after doing a lot of work, a lot of work, similar to the kind of work I’ve described before, that these guys just wouldn’t file 13D so they could own 80% or 90% of the stock. It would look like there was a lot out the float, they could trade it back and forth, and then once you’ve got a stock to a certain level… Actually today it’s called momentum investing when it gets to a certain level then everybody wants to own it, and then they sell and everybody is held holding the bag, right.

Stratton Oakmont was nothing more than that, was just another one that was pumping out crappy deals. We knew about them. We turned it into the SEC. Ultimately had discussions with the FBI over it, and then they were raided and that was it.

It wasn’t any more exciting, sexy, then any other story except somebody decide to do a movie, and if they said, “Well this guy didn’t file with 13D, which means you own more than 5% and he owned 90% and therefore they could control the stock, that aren’t much of a movie right. I saw the movie. I was just in hysterics because you know, I’m not aware any of that stuff happened. Sinking a boat, and crashing a car like that, I’m not aware of any of that.

Meb: You need a little Hollywood to spice it up, there’s actually a personal angle to this with me where I live in Manhattan Beach California. And back in the day when I was in my late 20s, had a couple roommates we were… maybe early 30s can’t remember at this point. We were trying to get a new nice apartment and had put in a bid and the landlord accepted, and then called us back a day or two later and said, “Actually I’m gonna rent out someone else.” We said what are you talking about? He said, “Yes, but I’m renting it out to this guy who his life is gonna be in a movie based on… and he’s gonna be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.” And I said, “Oh my God.” So I lost an apartment to him. He’s been on my doghouse shit-list ever since regardless of the bucket shop he ran. I’m just mad because we lost the apartment.

Tom: I’ll tell you a really funny story, to me it was very funny at the time talking about the mob and stuff. I came to New York. The SEC asked me to come to New York and speak to the district attorney in Manhattan which I was more than happy to do. And I came and I get in a room and he comes in, very recognisable okay, and there are three or four SEC guys there, and they’re very interested in this one particular firm. So I start telling them all about it and they’re all real interested. All of a sudden, the attorney gets up and he goes “I gotta go,” and I go “What do you mean you gotta go? We’re only like 30 minutes into thing?” He goes “Hey we caught a guy at the post office opening up letters and he stole recently four subway tokens, and that’s a felony.”

He actually left this meeting where we’re talking about all these mob guys rigging these stocks to go get a guy who had stolen four subway tokens. I thought at that time boy, I’m not really sure how you rank these in terms of crime, but it was kind of a crazy thing. It’s like I thought… I looked around and said “I don’t think my story is that important but we’re talking about…” subway tokens back then they were probably 25 cents it was like a dollar maybe $2. And they had taken off so that’s my mob thing.

There was another story that was real funny too in a certain sense. It was a company Koger Equity and Koger Property, I think they were the largest class B building owners in the country or certainly one of them. And the guy RR Koger was just really well known in Florida. And we got a call that “Hey you need to look at the transfer of these assets because they’re transferring assets back and forth.” And so what they were doing is you know, real estate prices were starting to fall in Florida, surprising okay. There’s a period that they fall and a period they rise, and what Koger Equity and Koger Property were doing is they were selling properties to each other, but Koger Properties would buy one for 10 million then sell it to Koger Equity for 25. Then Koger Equity would have bought a property for 30 million and sell it back to the property for 50 million.

So they were trading properties back and forth and each time they would make that trade they book a profit right. And the value of their assets would go up. So we figured it out. We turned it into the regulators. They raided the companies, companies went to zero. About a year and a half later, I get a call from an attorney in New York he says, “We would like…” and it became known that I was the one who turned him over. It was either in the press or something of the like, or they got it from the SEC I don’t know. I’m not certain.

So the attorney calls me he says, “We represent RR Koger. We would like to come down and interview you. I said, you do not wanna come down and interview me, he goes “No we do.” I said, “No, you don’t you’re gonna waste my time would be the biggest mistake in your life.” He goes “No, we do,” and so I try to block it about four different times and finally it got scheduled. So I was gonna have to do a deposition in Dallas over these companies that went to zero. So at that time, the attorney that’s gonna represent me was an ex-SEC guy, really great guy, really funny guy Tom Vonstein [SP] was a great guy, and super smart.

So he says, “Okay Barton,” he says,” You know, you gotta be prepared for this.” I said, “I don’t have to be prepared. Let’s just meet with them.” They come down to Dallas, and it was the most amazing thing because when the door opened five attorneys came in, they were all in their late 50s, full silver hair, three-piece suit. It’s 100 degrees in Dallas Texas at the time. These guys looks like the TV show. First guy comes he’s more powerful, then the second guy comes in, and he is more powerful, the third guy comes in, it’s that kind of deal. And they’ve got these briefcases that probably cost $10,000 a piece and they sit down.

I go in, in a t-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, and no socks okay, and I go in and I sit down at the table, and I put my feet up on the table right in front of them okay. And they’re very serious, and I’m laughing with Vonstein and they’re gonna record it, and they’ve got the cameras there, and the stenographer. And incidentally, they had the judge on the line too because they thought that I might become a problem, they were going to use the judge to force me to answer questions about it right.

So we sit there and they go, “Okay, we’re gonna start this thing, judge you ready?��� “Yes, I’m ready.” And roll the cameras and take the notes and they start the thing. And the guy says to me… he goes, “Please state your name,” and I go, “I’m not giving you my damn name. You don’t need my name you know exactly who I am. But I just wanna tell you before we get started…” Now I’ve been doing this 10 years, so I had a reputation okay. I said, “I just wanna tell you before we get started, your client is the number one white collar criminal I’ve ever run up against.” At that point, the lead attorney says, “Hold on just a second please.” And all five of them get out, and all five come back in they go “Mr. Barton thank you for your time that’s the end of the interview.” That was the whole thing And do you know what they were trying to do? They were trying to show that if I could figure it out by looking at public documents, that anyone could figure it out, so therefore it was not a fraud.

Meb: You clearly had this niche, you were successful in finding these frauds. At some point you also started investing on the long side too. I know you were managing money for Soros at some point. Was there a transition? Was it something you just started doing both at the same time?

Tom: No, at the end of literally 1990, short selling in this form and fashion was over. It’s just that so many of these houses that were pushing these frauds were gone. Remember the S&L and the bank crisis came up? We were sure short every S&L that walked because we just were… we were short almost all the banks because they had 10 times their equity in real estate and real estate was all collapsing. And the short businesses I had just described over the last 45 minutes was over, so D.H. Blair was gone. All these slimy brokerage firms were gone. The SEC was on top of it, and literally, we couldn’t find hardly any more of these. They were no more Instant Hot Waters.

And you know finding a Koger Equity, Koger Properties that’s a tough gig okay. It’s tough to do the work on that and find those that are that big. It’s so much easier to find a company that really doesn’t exist, it has a big stock price. So it was over, and in 1990 we had a great year at Feshbach back. In ’91, we did not have a good year because all the shorts were going up. And most of the… not most but a good amount of our money wanted us to stay short and we just couldn’t stay short. And so we actually had liquidations in ’91. And we actually told our clients who said, “Look we’ve gotta go long because we can’t do this anymore. We’re just telling you it’s over. Momentum investing is now hot. If you’re short a company, short squeeze is really important.” They were just starting to list stocks. I’m not sure they were listing there, but people knew what the short interest was.

At some point, they start they started publishing short interest. And so really the source of shorts was gone, so Feshbach Brothers had to completely morph and we were just not going to morph that firm. So my brother Joe and I, we left and we set up our own kind of family office in ’93. However, we didn’t change offices because we were always in Dallas. The Feshbach Brothers had headquarters in Palo Alto. We were always in Dallas, so we didn’t have to do anything but change the name on the door.

I remember walking in and my secretary was there, she’s been with me for 35 years, and I said, “What are we gonna do? What are gonna call the firm?” And she says, “Well you know, how about White Rock Capital because we’re near White Rock Lake?” I go, “That’s great,” and that’s how White Rock Capital got started. It started in ’93, and the first thing we did was we ended up calling a great contact we had at the Soros, and Soros immediately gave us money and so we were off and running in a completely new business. That happened in ’93.

We were forced… I would have never, ever left that niche in the market if the niche was gonna continue, never left it. I also would have never left the niche of shorting S&L’s because every S&L was gonna go to zero okay. But you know, the biggest problem investors have is things change. They have an outlier situation, short selling of frauds, and they’re great at it. And then it changes and they don’t change, now to Chanos… You gotta give Jim Chanos credit because Chanos has been a short seller all his life.

And so Chanos is a go-to guy to write a big check to be short. So Chanos has had a lot of really great years when the market allows it. And then not great years if he’s short only if the market doesn’t allow it right. But you know, to his credit he made a lot of money, and he stayed there, but I was never interested in shorting overpriced stocks. I don’t want to really make a living shorting Tesla. I don’t.

Meb: It’s hard.

Tom: Well it’s not that it’s just hard, but I’m a black and white guy. If I don’t have the answer, I pass. That’s a critical thing. Because if somebody say short IBM, I go I cannot get my arms around IBM. I can’t do it.

Meb: I think that’s a good lesson because so many investors, they wanna have an opinion on everything, and we’re always telling investors say look there’s tens of thousands securities around the world, you don’t have to have an opinion on Tesla or bitcoin or whatever it is. You can just put it in the too hard pile and move on to something that’s a lot simpler and clearer. But investors because of the news flow or just the drama and excitement of a lot of these stories and obviously Tesla, Tesla has it all it’s an exciting story, but we always tell people it’s like you just pass. You don’t have to have an opinion on every single investment.

Tom: Well you know, the other thing is you’ve gotta figure out where you’re gonna get your ideas from. Now we figured out at a early, early stage the best place to get ideas is from retail brokers, not institutional brokers, not Wall Street research, not TV, not the “Wall Street Journal,” great sources, not for us. Why retail broker? Because a retail brokerage generally has as his customer a CEO who runs a real company. So he’s actually got the best sources because he’s probably… some cases you can find a retail broker that has high-net-worth clients, those clients are running businesses. And those businesses by talking to those guys are the very best sources.

So I love when I run across a doctor, and a doctor says to me, “What do you think about so and so?” And I go. “I don’t know, you’re one of the leading oncologists in the world. What do you think about all these companies? They’re oncology gene therapy companies right.” And so almost all of the investors that are out there have access to people that are geniuses and leaders in their field. And so we actually had to train in the earliest days retail brokers to say, “Hey when you’re talking to so and so about their business how about asking them, are there any frauds out there?” And that’s how we started getting a lot of frauds.

And so you don’t have to be an expert on everything, but even more so, you have to decide where you’re gonna get your ideas from and chasing things like Bitcoin or others, These are kind of momentum investors. I don’t know a lot of people that are good at it, some are phenomenal at it. There are some traders that I just am amazed every time, they’ll be the guys who own gold from 200 to 1,600. Or they’ll be the guys who own Bitcoin because they’re really early in the cycle, and they buy it right, and they sell it right. They’re great traders, but I can tell you or your listeners if you have 100 million listeners, they’re going to be 10 of the 100 million that are great traders. The rest of the people have to go based upon detail, based upon business fundamentals, and based upon hopefully being in a market that allows them to win. Some markets will not allow you to win on the upside or downside, there just periods like that right.

Meb: You mentioned how it’s gotten harder in the U.S. and the game has shifted a little bit which, by the way, is I think such a great lesson to investors too where you had so many funds in this past cycle that knocked the ball out of the park in ’08 based on one trade, but after that happened have tried to kind of replicate that. I think it was hard for a lot of people to say okay well that was the one trade and we now gotta move on. It’s not gonna happen again. But I wonder how much of the short selling if there’s gonna be Tom Barton in China, or India, or Brazil, where probably a lot of these shenanigans are still going on, and that kind of value-added research still works in some of these far-flung locales. I don’t know. Have you ever looked beyond offshore at all or you stick mainly to the U.S.?

Tim: Now, Canadian I will short some Canadian companies traded in the U.S. and I had… back in the days when I worked, the Ontario Security Commission could not even talk to the U.S. SEC. And so the SEC would have questions they literally could not ask them. And a lot of work that I did basically helped them write a treaty that allows them to swap data. They literally couldn’t even swap it back in the early days. We were short some things, we’d have to talk to the SEC Ontario Security Exchange, not to get off the subject of your question.

But no, we pretty much have stuck in the U.S. But really, what happened to us was during the process of investigating shorts, we started running across longs, okay. Because remember a lot of our sources are long guys really understand it. You know, not with total 100% frauds, but if you’re going to start doing Koger Equity, Koger Properties you’re gonna start doing even a company like Carrington Labs which it was a real company, it just wasn’t real. And if you’re gonna start doing… Any company there’s some level of fundamentals, you better start talking to the best guy in the field. Because that guy will really lead you in the right places. He’ll have the best contacts.

So in the process of investigating some shorts towards the end of the period, we ran across some really, really brilliant business owners, and that’s how we ended up with one of our first investments which was USSB which became DirecTV. USSB is 90% of what DirecTV ultimately was. They had all the programming and the like, but we were short a company that claimed that they had a satellite TV. It was actually here in New York. We actually visited the demonstration, and while people watching the TV coming on a satellite dish, a guy went upstairs and disconnected the wire from the satellite dish and the picture remained. Which pretty much told us it wasn’t coming from the satellite dish okay.

But in the process of doing the research on it, we ran across a guy who invented basically the eyewitness news trucks, the Uplink Trucks. And then we ran across USSB, and then as a result of that, we’re able to put $50 million in that, which was Soros money, and that became DirecTV. So we started to figure out hey look we can do these things on the long side. But long it’s a lot harder than frauds because frauds are x, y, z. You’ve got the answer you know that they’re sitting in the garage.

Long requires a completely different set of skills, and it requires a completely different set of judgement. And you also have to be willing if you’re gonna do well the long side pretty much at least… well let me put it to you this way. Sitting in the seat I sit, you have to be able to go to a room where 99 people still believe you’re wrong. But the other thing about being a short seller, you go into a room 100 people love it, you hate it, everyone tells you you’re wrong, you walk out you short more, because you have all the data.

So you have to be able to do that on the long side in the early days. Now if you’re trying to buy Apple Computer, you don’t have to be that kind of guy. But remember, I’m a black and white guy, and I like to have a competitive advantage. And I like to be in something that other people haven’t really thought about or at least all the dollars haven’t blown in. So even in USSB, they had tried to raise all this money from guys like ABC, CBS, Disney, I’m just throwing out names okay… NBC, Universal, all these companies, and they’d all looked at the DirecTV concept and said, “It will never work. You’ll never be able to have a picture that’s consistent enough, that’s not interrupted by storms.”

And like every single person passed, and these are people in the industry that are brilliant in their industry. And I looked at it and said, “Well there’s no way it’s not gonna work because you’ve already got the picture, you know how to do this, it’s satellite, bingo.” Actually was an easy exercise once we saw everything they had and the backup of the satellites it’s an easy exercise. So it was even back in the earliest days that I was kind of startled that the experts sometimes would miss it when it’s just sitting right in their face right.

Meb: Well, it’s funny Tom, because you know, the skill set to be short seller you almost have to have something like kind of a skew in your brain. All my good friends that are short sellers they’re brilliant, but you have to be extremely sceptical. And to flip the script to the long, there’s not a lot of investors, they can kind of do both. Because long we had a great comment that I loved, I think it was on the interview we did with Jason Calacanis where he said, “A lot of these ideas for longs if you look at this cycle in particular, and you look at Uber,” he said, “Well no one’s gonna do that because the drivers are obviously gonna rate people, or Airbnb they’re gonna get murdered.”

But then you flip the script in the phrasing that I’d love about looking at longs and these big multi-bagger potential said, what if it did work? In which case, all right what is the potential of this concept and idea? Because a lot of the longs when you’re looking for these 10, 100x baggers, unicorns, whatever that’s really where the potential is. And I think a lot of people… It’s rare to find someone who can do both, look at the short side and be sceptical and then flip the scripts to the long side. Over the past cycle, you’ve also started to get a little bit interested in health care, what was kind of the driving force there? Was a chatting with some of these brokers, where you said, man, there’s a lot of innovation going on biotech? Was it just deal flow? Was your neighbour a biotech guy? What was the interest that brought you into that sector as well?

Tom: You said the right thing when you said is there somebody who got you interested in it. So I’m always a guy trying to find an outlier situation or something that’s new, something I can get a competitive advantage on. Unfortunately, in my career as long as I’ve been around, I just should have bought Google or Apple, the obvious ones right. But my interest level is always something different. It’s like okay yeah, those are gonna work but I’m trying to look for something that’s kind of different more interesting. I don’t know why I’m like that, but I am wired like that okay.

So we did this thing with Soros for about 10 years in 1999 to 2003 and we managed money for other people during that time as well, pretty much still as a family office. And I always had a little hedge fund that I kept together during that period. And from 2003 to 2010, I’ll tell you not really that interesting for us. I mean 2001…2000 was an interesting time right because 2001 everything blew up. But 2003 to 2010 was not the most interesting time, plus I had young kids, they turned out basically to be all American Golf spectacular golfers one at Oklahoma State, at SMU, then my daughter went to Stanford and was and basically an academic all-American there.

And so from 2003 to 2010, I did a lot of kid raising, and I just didn’t find anything that was that interesting. I completely missed the 2008 mortgage collapse even though all my friends were doing it. I just didn’t understand it, I didn’t wanna set up these special accounts. Most these guys would get run over, and I just missed it. And sometimes you’re gonna something that’s obvious. I just went to the Billy Joel concert and I realised everything he wrote that was great… and hopefully, he don’t come back and yell at me for this. But he was about 20 years old by the time he was 60 he’s not writing great stuff anymore.

I think had I seen the mortgage crisis, and I’d been about 15 years younger, I probably would have been all over it, but I completely missed it… So from 2003 to 2010, I’m raising these kids, taking them around the world, playing golf tournaments. But I’m also still investing and the like, and we had some okay years during there. but it just wasn’t an exciting time, it just didn’t happen. In 2010 everything changed for me because I ran across a guy who said, “You need to start looking at gene therapy DNA because now we understand how DNA works, and the science is finally here. And we’re gonna be able to do something with DNA.”

And I just thought it was just totally fascinating, and actually, the guy who introduced me to the most is a guy who runs his crazy company Intrexon. And we should talk about Intrexon. But the guy who runs it, R.J. Kirk is the most brilliant guy I’ve ever met, and he knows every industry as if he’s the guy who invented the industry. And he knows science if he has a Ph D. in whatever it is talking about in science. Whether it is gene therapy, molecular biology, it doesn’t matter. He is a walking encyclopaedia of knowledge, never met a guy like this.

And he explained it to me and of course if you go read Steve Job’s book he says, “That the next great area is a combination of science and technology,” talking about medicine and technology. So now I’m starting to think about this okay, when they discovered radio frequency, there was nothing you could do with radio frequency 50, 60 years ago. And as a matter of fact, how the DNA they discovered, as I recall, three days before I was born back in the 50s. So I’m not a super young guy, three days before. But even though you could understand DNA or any even though you could understand radio frequencies, you didn’t have the technology to do anything with it.

So it took a long time before the iPhone came up from Morse code, took a long time to understand how to use those frequencies. In 2010, it was clear to me that now science and technology are going to work together, they are gonna be able to take DNA, gene therapy, and any other aspect of the human body, and they’re going to be able to manipulate it to cure major diseases. But also to do incredible things in non-health care. And I started looking and every place I looked, it made total sense. So for instance, I used to be national chairman for Major Gifts for cystic fibrosis, and I did that for I don’t know a long time. And fortunately CF raised a lot of money, but everybody knows what causes the CF, but they haven’t been able to correct it.

They’ve got great treatment for these kids that are afflicted, but they don’t have the cure. Well, the cure is to correct the gene, this is what will ultimately happen. And so I started looking at healthcare which I kind of knew, then I started looking at all these industries. And so if you go and you just kind of look at Intrexon, just at the top level… We’re not talking about the stock now, we’re talking about the company okay. If you look at the company, you got a company that has better DNA knowledge than any company on the planet.

But DNA knowledge across 100 different industries, so they’ll be the best at fish, they’ll be the best at the mosquito, they’ll be the best at apples to make sure the apples don’t brown. They’ll be the best at all these other industries because they’re working on them. Where if you go to a Kite or Juno or any of these other couple companies I’m a founder of, we’ll talk about in a second, if you go to theirs you have people that are specialising in CAR T but the guys who are specialising in CAR T, and they’re using gene therapy, you can use that gene therapy or the same DNA knowledge to go impact natural gas and turn it into a solid fuel.

So I looked at this and thought wow, this is going to be the biggest change in our world that we’ve ever seen. And everything that gets done is gonna be disruptive. So I just give you a little example if I come to you and I say, “Meb, I got this idea for a product better than Rogaine. And you know, you grow 25% more hair than Rogaine, and we’ve done these tests and we can show it and would you like to put money in it?” Well if you’ve got half a brain which I know you do, you’d go I’m not putting any money in that thing. I’m not going up against Rogaine. We’ll never get the shelf space, we don’t have the ad dollars blankety blank okay.

Now I come to you and I go, “Hey guess what, we figured out how to cut the gene on and off. And we figured out how to increase and decrease certain proteins, and we figured out how to change hair colour by proteins. And we now, in fact, can, give you a pill and you will grow all your hair back, all of it, and you will keep it. And if you wanted to be its natural colour, you take this pill, if you want it never to change grey, you take this pill.” Now you go, “Really?” The only question you’re asking me is, “Really?’

Meb: No, the question I’m asking you that sounds like you’re describing one of your shorts from the ’80s.

Tom: Well it does.

Meb: It’s a magic pill.

Tim: Yeah, it does okay, except that you and I know for a fact that science is going to figure out how to correct all these human issues. You know for a fact. You just don’t know when it’s gonna happen. So everybody always assumes it’s gonna happen sooner or it’s gonna happen later. And so they say sooner and they go to waste all their money leading edge, bleeding edge, they call that, or they assume it’s gonna happen later and they won’t invest in it. The point is if you can hit the right timing of it and you can start looking for great investments, you can make a lot of money.

So we started to invest in Intrexon, Intrexon-related deals, and in the process, we decided that there were a couple of indications that we could go after that no one else was really going after, and that we could fund and we could turn into real businesses. And so myself and two other guys we had this company called BioLife which became of the AveXis. We funded for $3 million, we went out for a couple million dollars, we got a license from Ohio State. We turned it into a real company, we hired real guys, we did real financing. But we put in $3 million, and we ended up selling it to Novartis this year for 9 billion. And that is for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy.

Now we were up against Biogen, and Biogen’s partner Ionis and Biogen can create SMA but nowhere to level we can. We can do it with an IV. Ultimately with a pill probably, but we can do with an IV. And they have to do it seven lumbar punctures, and they don’t get the same results we do. So by using kind of like our contact base and putting together the right team, we were able to go build a company literally from scratch with no office, no employees. And in six years we sold it for $9 billion. We did it again, we did another company called Agilis and we did the same thing.

Now interesting enough, when we first formed AveXis, we first formed this company, we went to Intrexon and said, “Can you help us develop a drug for SMA?” And they said, “Yes” and we got a license from them. And then we determined within about six months that maybe there was an easier way to go and a faster way to go, and we were not wed to any particular company. And our CEO who’s a really… he’s a real bulldog down Ohio State, and he founded in an interesting way… we can go into if you want. But he founded and we licensed that for almost no money, it was a couple million dollars or maybe its two-and-a-half-million dollars. We paid for it.

And then we hired the right team, and we turned it into a real drug, and we treated 15 kids, and these kids are doing phenomenal. And we’re gonna treat other kids and then Novartis the bought it for 9 billion. But we started out by going to Intrexon. We built another company. There were three other people who started it up. I put the first dollars in it. Those three people are my personal friends, and they started it pretty much on the same way we started AveXis, in that, they went to Intrexon and said, “Do you have any rare orphan disease?”

Rare orphan disease for your listeners is that there aren’t a lot of people who have it, and it’s usually paediatric, so I’m not sure what the definition is. But let’s say 20,000 or 50,000 again, I forget the definition of people in the U.S. will have it. So it’s rare, “Was there another rare disease we could go after?” And Intrexon said, “You should go after FA.” And so we got a license for that, and then we built this company and decided that FA would take us too long. So we found another group in Taiwan, and we licensed a little drug for a central nervous system problem for a couple million dollars again.

And they had five years of data on kids and we took that great data to the FDA, and the FDA approved the drug with no clinical trials in the U.S. And we just sold that company to PTC for… I think their milestone we’re probably a minimum of 500 million, I think it’s closer to a 1.2 billion before royalties. But we started that, and I think we put a total of 20-something million in that. And so we’re constantly beating big pharma. The reason we’re beating big pharma is because we were early. See this is the beauty about being early because now if someone had a gene therapy program that was spectacular, you gotta really find it, and you gotta convinced them to let loose of it, or you’ve gotta convince them that you can build a great business team which our group can do.

Because you’re not gonna pick up some money for two-and-a-half million that’s gonna be worth a billion anymore because people are becoming a lot more sophisticated with the opportunities. But if you sat with big pharma three years ago, and you started talking about gene therapy, they had no one in the room who could talk about it, no one. If you talk with big pharma now, everybody in the room is trained in gene therapy. So if you get there early that really helps, so we’ve had two that were just gigantic returns. One is Novartis AveXis our costs was 64 cents, they got sold for $218 in cash. And then I think we’ll probably make 40-times on Agiles or something of the sort. And we have two more that are gonna be equally successful.

Meb: My problem was that I was way too early in gene therapy. I worked in a gene therapy lab in college and was absolutely atrocious at working in a lab. I’d spill viruses everywhere. That’s probably why I ended up in the investment space, but I can remember like it was yesterday reading Watson’s [inaudible 01:06:00] DNA book in college. I was in a Barnes and Noble, which listeners is a physical bookstore. I know most of you only buy books on Amazon now. But I remember finding that book and reading it cover to cover, standing in an aisle in Barnes and Noble for like three hours and becoming fascinated. And the thing for a lot of people is that you knew then even in late ’90s that a lot of the innovation was gonna end up taking 10, 20 years, but you’re finally starting to see a lot of the success, and it’s starting to get pretty exciting.

So as you spend your time like you’ve been doing, shorting, and private longs, and long investments, and VC-backed biotech, what’s kind of… as you look to the future, what do you think you spend most of your time in the coming years at the family office? Is it funding a lot of these innovative health care ideas? Is it something else? What’s on your brain as you look out to 2020s?

Tom: Okay, short, short-term and then a little bit further. Short term that we wanna have this company we’re invested in which will be our best thing BioSpherix I believe which is the original founder Chief Science Office of Celgene. And our BioSpherix has patents on drugs that we believe are significantly better than Celgene’s [inaudible 01:07:15]. And also we bought recently within BioSpherix an AML drug which was just mentioned in “Cell Magazine” where they believe that we actually have a cure for AML. And that would be amazing, and we will know as we treat a patient in probably in January how accurate that is. But I believe we have a company that actually could totally revolutionise Celgene on their [inaudible 00:07:41] which is their largest class of drugs and then offer a cure for AML.

If that’s the case, then this is a $50 billion company and our investment level is low. So we wanna get that to the point where that’s a total business and also a clinical success. The other thing is we’ve been doing a lot of work with another public company Ziopharm which is a totally misunderstood cancer company that trades about $3. Which I believe has the technology to completely jumps any other pharma company out there. I don’t care what anybody says. We can have 1,000 people get on the phone and tell me I’m wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong. And I think that if you’re gonna treat cancer you’ve gotta focus on solid tumours, and you’ve got to focus on fail to deliver, a drug to a patient in a timely basis at a reasonable cost, and that’s what Ziopharm does.

Ziopharm has the ability to do a generic delivery of a drug to a patient as opposed to the other current standard which is to deliver the drug by the use of a virus. So not to make it complicated for your listeners. You don’t wanna use a virus to deliver because it’s very customised to the individual. It’s a million bucks or $500,000 to do it. It’s a long time to develop it. There’s a big waiting list, and it is very dangerous. On the other hand, if you can do a non-bio application, you can go in your doctor’s office and what works for Bill works for Sally. And it can be produced in a low cost, and it isn’t nearly as toxic.

So I think we’ve been working a lot with Ziopharm, and I think that’s going to be… I never recommend to anybody that somebody should buy it, but we own in it and I think Ziopharm is a fabulous opportunity. As far as what we’re going to do in the future, I don’t have the slightest idea, like really at this point, I tell people they go “Well let’s see you did this company and that was that. You did that company and that was that. And biotech you’ve had two huge winners. You’re probably gonna have a third and a fourth. How you’re doing this?” And I kind of go, “Well, I don’t know maybe it’s just judgement, but maybe it’s just a lot of luck, and maybe it’s just being early.” And so I hadn’t figured out if we’re really good or really lucky, but people like to say you can’t do four in a row and just be lucky, right.

We’re gonna continue on this, but I would like to find some other indications that we can have a revolutionary change in a product that obsoletes the other products. So I wanna be the guy even though I’m not doing it, I wanna be the guy that has the Rogaine killer. So a guy takes a pill and grows all his hair back okay. I wanna do that because there’s so many… if you can name it, whether it’s fabric or whether it’s something you eat, or whether something you wear, or anything. If you look around your environment, every single thing in your environment can be improved with better DNA.

So that gives every opportunity. So if you can think about it whether it’s a synthetic leather, or whether it’s a heating fuel, or a fuel that goes in a car, or a cosmetic, or teeth whitener, or any of these other things, these are great opportunities. Let me tell you what is not a great opportunity which I hate relative to the DNA this whole industry. And that is making humans into robots, and this has been a thing which has scared everybody and it scares me today. I’m not gonna get involved in that aspect of going into embryos and making changes.

Now, I’m all for going into and being able to figure out if there are genes that this person is gonna have that are going to cause major diseases and the like, and making those kind of corrections. I am not for going in and deciding that they can be 6’2 instead of 6’8 that they can have an IQ of x, that they can have this or that, because I don’t particularly like that. But there are literally thousands of industry opportunities, and so I’m gonna continue to look for those, and I’m gonna try to get lucky and do some things on the public side.

Look recently… and I’ll tell you what your listeners can look for. Let me go back. We’ve owned some of these companies for five years before they worked, when they worked they were crazy okay. But yes, five years, sometimes of a little agony, and sometimes just how long is this gonna take, and it needs a little bit more money. Even if it’s just a little bit more money. Some of these things take a long time. But if your listeners can understand this, there can be a major change that obsoletes something else. And when that happens, if you can see that in the marketplace even after it’s announced, you can still make a fortune doing it even though you missed the first move.

So we finally bought the other day symbol AMRN, Amarin, and I have a friend who’s owned it for eight years, and it was because it would come out with some results on their drug where they treat about 8,000 patients to find out what it did for heart attacks. Just to make it simple because I know you like to make it simple, and the street thought that it may reduce heart attacks by 10 to 15%, it turned out it was 25%. So the stock was $3, it had a chance to get to about 50 if the results were poor. The results were great. It was $3, this is like a week and a half ago, it’s $20 today, it may be 18 right now okay.

It was $20 this morning. I owned it one day and it took off the next. After it took off, I bought a much, much larger position because they had not priced in, people going “Well I can’t buy stock that goes from 3 to 10,” I’m going yeah you can because it’s not the same company anymore.

Meb: That’s actually an interesting point. I mean I remember there was an old-school biotech book, I wanna say it’s called “From Alchemy To IPO.” And I’d love listeners if you have any updated studies on this, send them in. But there was a study where you basically bought biotech stocks post announcement. Meaning the news already came in but there was a behavioural under-reaction. Meaning it did pop, in this case, it was a huge pop. But even then, the market was underpricing the potential good news. I would love to see an updated study if any listeners have one send something over.

Tom: Well, I’ll tell you this, I would not advise people buying these… any company whether it’s biotech or not where they’re talking about something a year, or two, or three years down the road. Because it’s too damn hard to do it, and you just gotta hope that all of a sudden somebody decides to jam the stock up, and you sit there and you miss a great market right. I mean I’m at fault for owning Ziopharm instead of owning Juno and Kite. But I don’t believe in Juno and Kite even though they got bought out for a fortune, I don’t think they’re gonna work, and I don’t think they’re gonna be long-term businesses. But maybe they are gonna be a long-term businesses, or maybe these big pharmas wanted to buy them because they have a certain level of technology they can morph into another technology. I don’t know what they’re thinking, I didn’t wanna buy them.

So I own Ziopharm that’s been a $4 stock as long as you and I can remember okay. I mean this is a four-year sitting on our hands, but timing is now. And so if I was smarter I would just wait until they had an announcement or two and the stock went to eight or nine and then I could buy it, and I wouldn’t have to think about it. So the great opportunity for your listeners is that when you see these companies have a product transition, it’s not the same company as it was the day before, it’s not. It was a $3 stock because it deserved to be a $3 stock, but you can just look at it this way, if it was $3 and they didn’t know whether you were going to cure cancer, and the next day they cured cancer, it ain’t gonna trade for $3 anymore.

So you know, what generally happens if you do get this lift, and then you get the next opportunity because people can’t pay up when it was three then it’s nine, they can’t do it, okay. But then you find out days later that it was x, y, z, and days later it’s up another two times or three times. Look what happened on AveXis, AveXis had great news. We owned this thing forever. I mean five years before we get bought out. But it goes from a $3 million market cap, to a $4.5 billion market cap. Now here’s the hard part, in one day it went from a 4.5 billion to a 9 in one day. And so you don’t have to be early, but it is nice to buy it right, but you can take the latest data and you can apply it to the price.

Look they screwed up Apple all the time about that. You get all these clowns on TV going well Apple I don’t think this or that. At one time Apple by the time you subtract your cash, what was it three years ago, it’s trading for three times earnings. And people are debating whether it was something you should buy or not. Are you kidding? You know, sometimes you’ve got to look at the latest data, and the opportunity is really ahead of you. So I don’t know, I hope I just continue to be this lucky.

Meb: That’s the best advice. I love that, to all our listeners just get lucky that’s…

Tom: I wanna add one thing because if somebody said, “What is the most important thing you do?” I’ll tell you what it is, and that is this, and I learned this long time ago, it’s a very simple lesson. Was I was shorting stocks and they broke up AT&T. Now if people don’t probably know that it was AT&T then they broke it up into the Southeastern Bell, Southwest Bell, Pacific Bell, they broke it up, right. And when they broke up AT&T into the Bell companies, all these long distance discount carriers popped up. They popped up everywhere and they… all had big market caps and they all claim that they were going to be able to sell long distance discount because they were gonna buy it in bulk and they were gonna sell it out individually. And you’re gonna save all this money.

So they were going to put all the Bell companies out of business, no one would go long distance. I know it’s crazy that people used to pay for long distance calls, but listeners, we used to have to pay for long distance calls okay. So I wanted to short some of these companies because I knew that it wasn’t gonna work. I could not get the answer, no one could get the answer. So for us, that were around back then we know that there was one guy who broke up AT&T and he caught a lot of crap about it the guy was Judge Greene. And Judge Greene solely broke it up and wrote all the opinions on it.

So I’m sitting there going well how am I gonna figure this thing out? And I decide I’m gonna call Judge Greene. I don’t know I was 30-something at the time right. I picked up the phone, find out where he is, call. They switch me to him. He goes, “Hi Judge Greene.” and I’m going, “Hey, I actually got Judge Greene on the phone right.” And I talked to Judge Greene I said, “Explain to me this, can they do this? Can they do this?” “No, they can’t do that.” “Well, this guy said they can do that.” “No, they can’t do that.” “How about this guy?” “No, they can’t do that.”

The point of the matter is I didn’t go to an analyst on Wall Street to get his opinion, I went to the single best guy in the world. Now if you can find a single best guy in the world, which you can always, and they will talk to you, and they will always talk to you, you can always get the answer.

Meb: I think that’s a great piece of advice because most people are… I don’t know if lazy is the right word or scared. But most people will never make that call right because they’ll say… I can’t tell you how many times we chat with people they say “Well I emailed him. He never responded.” I say, “Well pick up the phone. You never know right.” But there’s the old cynical quote thinking about luck. I think it’s like “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Tom: Sometimes you gotta to be willing to call the guy 20 times, and eventually they’ll put you through just to get rid of you, it’s weird.

Meb: You don’t call 200 hospitals, you’ll never find all the lasers in the basement.

Tom: Well, that’s true. Now I have access to those kind of people because I know how to get to them. I can understand why people who have full daytime jobs don’t have access to do it. But what they’ll do is, they’ll sub in other guys experts. So I actually like Jim Cramer, but I don’t invest in his style, but if Jim Cramer’s now my expert, I probably got a problem right. The investing public will find who they think their expert is, who’s easy to get, then they’ll tune in to hopefully if they want the real experts, they’ll just come to your podcast right.

But you know, otherwise, they’re gonna go to CNBC or they’re gonna go to Maria Bartiromo or people that are really smart, but they’re not experts right, they’re just reporters. And they believe well this guy said this and that, can’t do that. You can do it with small amounts of money, but you can’t do it with big amounts of money, and I wouldn’t do with any money. And I think that’s probably the biggest difference between us and anyone else. We will find the single best and keep working until we find that. And not based upon somebody’s opinion, but actually, there’s always one guy who’s a single best.

Meb: Tom, you’ve had a pretty amazing career, different cycles, different investments, different styles. We always start to wind down the interviews asking our guests one question which is… and we may have talked about already, what has been your most memorable investment or trade? Can be anything, it could be good it can be something you had a terrible outcome. What’s the one that really sticks out in your head as just burned, seared into your memory as the most memorable one in your career?

Tom: Well, actually I was on the streets of Florence, Italy at the time it happened. We were following this company which I would prefer not to mention that… and they’ve gotten in a lot of trouble as of the last year or so, and their stock has collapsed. But we always felt like there was no way that insurance companies were going to continue to reimburse for this, we never thought so. Because the pill was no better they were charging like $25,000 a pill, it ultimately turned out to be about 250,000 a year for something that you could take a steroid pack which is $10.

So we kept waiting for the company to have insurance companies drop them because you know, why would insurance companies reimburse for this? Because it’s totally stupid, it was off-label, so in just searching the Internet, one of my analysts call me… no, it was my brother Joe, he called he says “You’re not gonna believe this, Aetna dropped them.” I said, “Aetna dropped them?” He said, “Yeah, Aetna dropped them.” It was an hour left trading in the day. I said, “Well if Aetna dropped them, it’s on the Internet?” They go “Yeah, they put on the Internet,” Aetna did, right. And so we went out and we bought every put we could possibly buy, it was like $70 or $80 at a time. Every single put we could find because this is all we were waiting for.

At the end of the day, I think we put up maybe… all would could buy was like 100-something thousand dollars worth. That’s all we could do, because we’d literally 20 minutes to go. This is like six years ago. The next day, market opened and they said… now news was everywhere that Aetna had dropped them, and stock plummeted, and we sold those puts. And I think we turned it into 13 million. But you know what it was? We were just looking to find out. Now had I been in the U.S. I’d got off more than 100-something thousand dollars worth. I’d figured out how to do it because it was obvious it was gonna get crushed, but it was just a public site.

And I remember my trader at Goldman called me he said, “Barton,” he says “The SEC is gonna be in here, you can’t do that.” I said, “Let them come in. I read it on the Internet. You kidding? It’s on the Internet. It’s on their website.” So to me that the craziest one, and one that I smile about the most today because it was such a pain in the butt. That company, it was such a pain in the butt, but we just kept waiting we just got it right off the Internet and no one had seen it.

Meb: It was like waiting Christmas Eve waiting on that announcement. Tom, this has been a blast, it’s been a lot of fun. If people wanted to and I don’t know if… you don’t really do a lot of public writing or anything else, is there a way for people to track what you’re up to these days or is that impossible?

Tom: So far the best way to track what I’m doing is to listen to your podcast because I don’t really go out and tell stories too much. But I’m gonna lift my profile slightly because even though we have plenty of capital, it seems like we always have more ideas in capital. So I’m not out raising capital but I do talk from time to time to different people. So I thought it would be better at this point to raise my profile just a little bit since I’ve been underground for so long. And I think it’s also gonna help me get some new ideas, so they may see me a little bit more. But you know, generally speaking, we’re pretty private.

Meb: Tom, it’s been a blast thanks for taking the time today.

Tom: Sure, thank you, take care.

Meb: Listeners we’ll post show notes, links to a lot of this fun stuff. Maybe we’ll convince Tom to publish his old short selling book. And it’s been a lot of fun. Well, check out the podcast archives mebfaber.com/podcast. Leave us a review if you like the show if you hate it, let us know. And send and Jeff some questions feedback@themebfabershow.com. Thanks for listening friends and good investing.

Source: https://mebfaber.com/2018/10/10/episode-125-tom-barton-the-biggest-problem-investors-have-is-things-changeand-they-dont-change/

[charly-ra]

10 Marketing Automation Trends That Will Shape 2019

Marketing is increasingly driven by data and technology. Nowhere is that more evident than in marketing automation.

It’s enabled us to do some pretty cool things. Most B2B marketers, for example, have moved beyond the simplest forms of marketing automation. We can send welcome emails and autoresponders in our sleep. We’ve got the email part of marketing automation down.

Now it’s time for B2B marketing automation to shift into multichannel messaging, even personalized, real-time multichannel messaging.

And that’s only one of B2B marketers’ new capabilities. As AI and machine learning gain wider use, marketing automation is set to get increasingly more sophisticated and impressive. It’s both exciting… and a little daunting.

So if you’re ready for the brave new world (or at least 2019’s version of it), here are the B2B marketing automation trends most likely to have the biggest impact. We’ve chosen these trends based on research wherever possible, so while this list may have some opinions in it, it’s mostly based on data. Which seems appropriate, given the state of marketing automation in 2019.

The most successful marketers will be those who manage their data best.

Marketing has become a data wonk’s job. Everything runs on data now – pretty much every trend mentioned here is data-driven: Personalization, Multichannel, Improving the Customer Journey, you name it.

Data management is complex of course. That’s why it’s a challenge, and often mentioned as a primary barrier to marketing automation success (only strategy seems to give marketers as much trouble).

And “data management” is a very general term. To rock marketing automation like we want to, data has to be accurate and formatted correctly so it can be accessed. It has to be current, and you’ll have to figure out a way to keep that data “clean” so no delayed process ends up updating a field with outdated information.

Managing all those data inputs can be tough. And it isn’t going to get any easier. The number of data sources used by most marketing organizations is actually increasing.

Don’t expect this to change all that much in 2019. The real thing to expect is that the marketers who can figure out how to turn their data from a cacophony into a symphony will do better and better.

And while data management is a big job… it can be done. “47% of marketers say they have a completely unified view of customer data sources” according to Salesforce.

You want to be in that half.

More B2B marketers will use multichannel messaging – and use it well.

For years, “marketing automation” has largely meant automated email marketing. More sophisticated B2B marketers moved past that a while ago, but some marketers are still “stuck” in the early phases of marketing automation.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but your prospects and customers don’t just use email. As you know all too well, they’re using social media (often several social platforms) and they’re on your site (we hope). They may even be at an in-person event now and then, and they’re almost always texting.

So expect to see more B2B tools and marketers move toward multichannel communication this year, especially because more marketers are integrating AI and machine learning into their martech.

AI and machine learning have a data-crunching power needed to pull multichannel off. It’s always been nearly impossible for human marketers to manage multichannel campaigns of any size, especially now that customers and prospects basically expect personalization and real-time messaging.

There be more personalized communications, and more personalized customer journeys.

Personalization is no longer a competitive edge – it’s a customer expectation. And yet, only 28% of marketers are “completely satisfied” with their ability to “Create personalized omni-channel customer experiences.”

  If you can get this right, though, the rewards are there: Salesforce reports that “High-performing marketers are 9.7x more likely than underperformers to be completely satisfied with their ability to personalize omni-channel experiences.”

What B2B marketers can do now with marketing automation is truly impressive… and at the same time, to some customers and prospects, we’ve finally achieved what they’ve been expecting for so long: To give them the information that’s relevant and useful to them, and nothing else.

More B2B marketers will implement real-time communication.

You know the cliché: Strike while the iron is hot. Well, it applies to marketing automation in spades, and smart marketers are chasing this capability down.

To give you an idea of how powerful real-time communication can be, consider the difference between response rates for welcome emails that are sent instantly versus welcome emails that are “batched” and sent out a bit later.

The real-time emails get 10X the engagement.

What would your marketing reports look like with 10X engagement? Heck – what would your bonus look like?

Marketing automation will be used more often for the entire customer lifecycle – not just for lead generation.

Marketing automation is great for nurturing leads, but it’s also great for customer retention and increasing customer lifetime value. We’ve known this for a while, but as marketers have had more time to grow into marketing automation, and to use it more confidently throughout their marketing, we’re finally seeing the full lifecycle use show up.

40% of marketers in a recent survey said that “prospect/customer re-engagement” is one of the most effective tactics for optimizing marketing automation.

If your current marketing automation program is only “sort of” profitable, an automated re-engagement program could be an easy way to move it into the black. Re-engagement programs are generally the low hanging fruit of marketing programs: They can generate strong results with just a little bit of work.

All you’d need to do to set up a marketing automation re-engagement “program” is to:

Ask your IT department (or your own marketing software, in some cases) when customers/clients tend to dis-engage.

Have a copywriter write you a series of re-engagement emails.

Get the emails designed and set up.

Start testing.

The opportunity for re-engagement emails is particularly ripe. Only 10% of marketers are sending re-activation emails according to a recent survey.

Lead quality will continue to beat lead quantity.

The shift to lead quality over lead quantity has been going on for a while now. It’s a sign of how marketing automation is becoming more effective.

Of course, lead quality can mean many things. It can refer to whether leads are Sales qualified, how long leads take to mature into sales, and the value of leads. Those are all more granular measurements of the same trend: Better leads are better than more leads.

Sales will welcome this, for sure. They’ve spent too much time already following up on weak leads. Actually, the quality of leads (however you measure them) could be an excellent metric for tracking that elusive Sales and marketing integration.

Marketers will use marketing automation as a way to improve the customer journey/experience.

Pop quiz: What’s the single most effective way to optimize marketing automation?

According to the marketers (mostly B2B) who responded to Ascend2’s survey about marketing automation, the answer is: Customer experience mapping.

This actually makes enormous sense. In a way, marketing automation – sending pre-defined messages to people who take particular actions – is a way to shape their experience with your company. All those drip email campaigns… that’s a way to guide a customer’s experience with you.

Marketing automation is customer experience optimization.

And as you know, optimizing the customer experience is one of the single best ways to be an awesome marketer, build an awesome company, and have customers/clients who rave about you to thousands of other likely customers.

That’s why it’s been called the ultimate competitive advantage. A survey from PwC found that:

“Forty-three percent of customers would pay for a greater convenience, and 42 percent would pay for a friendlier, welcoming experience, according to the survey. Furthermore, 65 percent believe that a positive experience with a business is more influential than great advertising.”

Another survey found that “80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.”

Thinking of marketing automation as an extension of optimizing customer experience could be a great way to get more budget for it. A lot of CEOs get the benefits of improving the customer experience – they know how it can affect practically every aspect of a business. And so, framing marketing automation as one way to improve customer experience could get them onboard with projects that they might otherwise have been cool about.

Strategy may continue to be a sticking point.

It’s the classic story: Marketers get attracted to cool technology, but don’t have enough of a strategy set up to really make the most of it.

Developing a marketing automation strategy should happen after you’ve defined your personas and mapped their customer journeys. Customer journey mapping will never be perfect – customers and prospects don’t move in a linear path, and they definitely don’t all do it in the same way.

But take a deep breath, accept that your customer journey plans won’t be perfect, and build your marketing automation system from there.

It will evolve the longer you use it and test it. But you have to start somewhere, and starting with a “good enough” customer journey map is far better than just diving in and starting to implement marketing automation in a little corner of your business here and there.

Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to grow.

Honestly, B2B marketing automation is probably using more machine learning than true artificial intelligence. The classic definition of AI is that it can fool a human into thinking the AI is another human; most chatbots can’t do that (yet).

But machine learning is definitely in play. The definition of machine learning is “using data to answer questions” according to Google. As mentioned above, marketing performance basically runs on data now – who wouldn’t want to use machine learning to get the data to start answering questions? That seems to be exactly what we all need.

And because marketers’ adoption of AI grew by 44% from 2017 to 2018, expect 2019 to see at least that much growth in “AI” (or machine learning).

Voice search will become the next new messaging channel for messages sent via marketing automation.

B2B marketers get such a bad rap for being behind on trends. But 32% of us are already optimizing for voice-activated personal assistants.

This is going to accelerate in 2019, and it is absolutely going to affect marketing automation. Even now, Alexa can read emails.

So… have you listened to how your automated emails sound when read? Have you looked into what your company’s customer experience is like via voice for your automated messages? Some of your competitors are already doing this.

Closing Thoughts

Marketing automation reminds me more and more of the advertising automation going on in pay per click and social media advertising. Marketers are increasingly able to sit back from routine operations (like bid edits or sending updates about a new blog post) and are moving more into data analysis and customer experience.

Having these powerful tools to work with is fantastic. It lets us do truly cool things. But the tools are really only as good as the people who use them.

Marketing automation can work really well, but it’s not magic. Even the most robust marketing automation platforms still need smart people to set them up and optimize them.

from http://bit.ly/2QWiFes

[newstfionline]

Taliban, Collecting Bills for Afghan Utilities, Tap New Revenue Sources

By Mujib Mashal and Najim Rahim, NY Times, Jan. 28, 2017

KABUL, Afghanistan--The Afghan government faces a peculiar problem in at least two major provinces: It provides precious electricity, some of it imported at costly rates from neighboring countries, but Taliban militants collect most of the bills.

If the government cuts off power, it will further anger a population that is already disenchanted. If it does not, the revenue from the power will continue to provide more income to an already emboldened Taliban.

The Taliban, fighting the Afghan government and a large international military coalition, have long tapped into Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade and illegal mining, in addition to the streams of donations they receive from supporters abroad, mainly in the Persian Gulf states.

But as they have taken over increasingly large areas in the past two years, they have found new ways of diversifying and collecting revenue, according to interviews with officials, Taliban commanders and local residents.

The diversification of the revenue collection system, in the face of a central government largely dependent on Western donations and hobbled by corruption, has raised fears that the balance of the war could tilt even further in the year ahead, and that the insurgency is becoming more entrenched and acting as a shadow government in parts of the countryside.

“What it suggests, essentially, is that the group is becoming more efficient in systematically taxing the areas they either control or have a lot of influence on,” said Timor Sharan, senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group, a research institute. “Efficiency of taxation is quite significant in terms of sustaining the group for a long time.”

In addition to collecting electricity bills from thousands of homes in provinces such as Kunduz and Helmand, the insurgents levy taxes on potato harvests, flour mills, teachers’ salaries, marriage ceremonies, and fuel and vegetable trucks crossing their checkpoints.

At the same time, the Taliban continue to pursue their original sources of funding. The United Nations, in a recent report, said narcotics, illegal mining and external donations remained major income streams, with the drug economy bringing in up to $400 million in 2016.

But the United Nations report also spoke of the group’s diversification efforts.

“Analysis of Taliban revenue sources suggests that they remain highly diverse, with various income streams that enable the Taliban to quickly substitute for declining asset streams,” the report said.

Mr. Sharan said the increased revenue collection was largely due to a restructuring of the insurgency spearheaded by its former leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who was seen more as a businessman heavily involved in the drug trade than a conventional Taliban ideologue. Part of the reason for the change was an expected decline in external funding amid growing competition for resources from other militant groups like the Islamic State.

“Mansour, in his restructuring, gave more autonomy to the local Taliban groups and tasked them with finding more locally driven revenues and securing their funding at the local level,” Mr. Sharan said.

The Taliban have also been hit by a dwindling number of major NATO military contracts and development projects from which they could take a cut.

Western and Afghan officials say the greater fund-raising autonomy for local commanders is also a consequence of chaos within the Taliban leadership and infighting over resources after an American drone strike killed Mullah Mansour in May.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said the group relied on a variety of resources, including Islamic taxes and offerings from farmers and local residents, donations from traders abroad and from Islamic countries, and booty captured from Afghan forces. He acknowledged that in their areas of control in places like Kunduz and Helmand, the Taliban collected the electricity bills.

At first glance, each strand of Taliban revenue might seem insignificant. But for an insurgency numbering about 30,000 men, who operate in small groups, it is a substantial sum.

The head of the power department in Kunduz Province, Hamidullah, said the Taliban were collecting electricity payments from close to 14,000 homes in the province, possibly as much as $200,000 for every two-month cycle.

Haji Ayoub, an elder from Boz Qandahari village, north of Kunduz city, said that two months ago, the Taliban had stopped government electricity workers and taken the bills they delivered by bicycle. Then, they started calling people to come to the local mosque and pay.

Mr. Ayoub said he owed the government about $200, for electricity used at his home and a flour mill he ran before it went bankrupt.

“The Taliban representative took the money,” Mr. Ayoub said. “He didn’t sign or stamp the bill. He just tore half of it and gave me back the other half and wrote something in his notebook.”

He added, “I said, ‘At least put your signature on the bill so I can bring it to the government to show that I have paid,’ but he didn’t.”

In Helmand Province, members of the provincial council said most of the territory was controlled by the Taliban, who collected bills in places they held where there was electricity.

“We cannot switch off the electricity in Taliban areas, because then they create big problems for electrical poles along the way to cities like Kandahar and Lashkargah,” said Nasrullah Qani, the power department’s director in Helmand.

Residents in Helmand said the collection of electricity charges differed by district. In Kajaki district, the Taliban collect a fee once a year, from $60 to $150 depending on usage. In other areas, it is monthly.

“For each electric bulb you use, they charge you $2 a month,” said Haji Ziaudin, a shopkeeper in Musa Qala district.

The Taliban have a multitude of ways to make money and to finance their local groups.

In the northeastern province of Badakhshan, a study last year found that the Taliban made as much as $6 million a year from illegal lapis lazuli mining. Then, there are taxes: up to $20 a year on water mills in their areas of control, and from $40 to $70 a year from electric mills. And one sheep per every 40 owned by farmers.

Just south of Kabul, the Taliban set up checkpoints, taxing vehicles transporting vegetables, according to residents. New York Times journalists saw copies of receipts the Taliban provided to drivers for vehicles they taxed.

In the western province of Ghor, farmers described paying taxes in cash and kind. Abdul Qayoum, 47, a potato farmer in Pasaband district, said he paid taxes to the Taliban twice a season, and two months ago had handed over about 220 pounds of potatoes.

“The reason we give tax to the Taliban is because we have to take our vegetables to the Dahane Jamal bazaar, which is the main market for us, and it is controlled by the Taliban,” Mr. Qayoum said.

Sakhidad, 48, another resident of Pasaband, described how the Taliban had moved from an arbitrary system of collection, to a more ordered one enforced with strictness and fear.

When the Taliban first took over the district three years ago, Mr. Sakhidad said in an interview last year, all those who had worked for the government had to pay a fine. Then, they imposed a regular 10 percent tax on harvests.

Reached over the phone again recently, Mr. Sakhidad said that he continued to pay taxes to the Taliban and that he had given the new commander in the village $60 in taxes two months ago--a large sum for a farmer.

But he said he was relieved that the former Taliban commander in his village, Mullah Gul Agha, had been replaced. In one of his final acts, he said, Mullah Gul Agha pulled out his pistol and shot and killed a man who had protested paying his taxes, saying he had already paid one of the commander’s associates, Mr. Sakhidad said.

“They force people to pay the taxes--it is not voluntary.”

[goldeagleprice]

The Rate of Discovery of National Bank Notes

By Peter Huntoon

Lee Lofthus’ important article “Are there more nationals to find?” in the December 2012 Bank Note Reporter ignited interest in what remains in the weeds. His calculations indicated that depending on how you cook the numbers, between 10 and 25 percent of the outstanding nationals based on Treasury estimates had been reported in the National Currency Foundation census by 2012. He was basing that estimate on the fact that 245,919 notes had been recorded in the census as of August 2012. The obvious implication is that there are hundreds of thousands more out in the weeds waiting to come in.

Figure 1. This exceptional Iowa discovery from a previously unreported Iowa bank came in a couple of years ago and has now lodged at the Higgins Museum. The bank was chartered June 28, 1877, and liquidated December 31, 1886, to be succeeded by Bank of Hamburg. Only Series of 1875 $5s were issued by the bank.

As of July 2018, the National Currency Foundation census stood at 410,000 notes, up 164,000 from August 2012. This is a significant increase of 40 percent. But the fact is that the caretakers of the NCF census have been overwhelmed and have been unable to cope with recording the huge volume of previously unreported material crowding into the market, particularly the major auctions. Furthermore, many of the networks of state providers of data on new finds have fallen apart, so the 164,000 new additions represent a serious undercount of the actual unreported notes that otherwise have appeared since 2012.

Even so, the incredible current sample of 410,000 reveals the landscape of what is known. The fact is that the vast majority of missed reports consist of common material that few people pay much attention to as it goes by. In contrast, the rare material tends to win appreciably more notice, so is preferentially logged in.

I’ve been recording Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and large-size territorial nationals since the late 1960s. I began archiving this data at the end of each year beginning in 1989, thus creating a snapshot of how those censuses have grown yearly since then.

I first published these findings in the January 2014 BNR in an article entitled, “Is eBay a source for virgin nationals?” My data revealed two things: First, as of 2013, the rate at which newly discovered notes were being recorded hadn’t varied between 1989 and 2013. Second, the advent of eBay had no effect on the rate at which newly-found nationals came onto our market.

Another four years have passed, and the newer data still reveal that the rate of discovery hasn’t changed at all. Both points are worth developing.

The rates that my censuses are growing average 1.2 Alaska, 12 Arizona, 23.5 New Mexico, 24.5 Wyoming and 14 large size territorials notes per year. The population of banks contributing these numbers are three for Alaska, 27 for Arizona, 63 for New Mexico, 61 for Wyoming, and 605 large size territorial issuers.

You will see that the data for the respective censuses plot as virtually straight lines over the 28 years of record on the graph that accompanies this article. If there had been a systematic change in rates – that is, something causing more or fewer notes to appear each year – the lines would bend respectively up or down.

Figure 2. Arkansas collectors were happy to see this discovery recently in a Stack’s Bowers sale from the previously unreported Hoatio bank, which lasted 15-1/2 years with a minimal circulation of $6,250.

In July of this year, I attended the Higgins Museum seminar in Okoboji, Iowa, where Steve Sweeney gave a presentation entitled, “The Iowa census, evolving and maturing.” He and James Ehrhardt have been doggedly maintaining the Iowa national bank note census for years and presented their findings in “Iowa National Bank Notes,” a 236-page book and subsequent 45-page supplement that were published by the Higgins Foundation in 2006 and 2016, respectively.

Theirs is one of the finest state censuses in existence because they have had fantastic cooperation from the Iowa collectors who not only share their own data but record notes that they see.

There were 496 issuing banks in Iowa. Steve pointed out that the Iowa census built by John Hickman stood at just under 6,000 notes in 1995. Sweeney was able to advise his network of contributors that the total had broken the 10,000 mark in July 2004. The cutoff date for their book was June 30, 2006, and by that date the total had grown to 11,058. The cutoff date for their supplement was March 21, 2016, with a total then of 13,503. As of July 30, 2018, the number was 14,014.

Their experience is identical to mine; specifically, their census has grown linearly at an average rate of 250 notes per year since they have been working on it.

Send Sweeney data from Iowa finds at xcp2@msn.com.

Another stellar state census is one maintained by William Herzog for Michigan, again aided by a cadre of dedicated Michigan collector/contributors. They are dealing with the issuances from 278 banks. Building on the original Hickman/Kelly census, which stood at 9,861 on January 23, 2007, Herzog has now recorded 13,263 notes. He has been adding an average of 322 notes per year from 2003 to 2017, but he cautions that the rate has declined during the past three years. Bill’s annual totals exhibit larger swings than mine. Some of the spikes represent recordings from long-held unvetted collections that came onto the market in those years.

Bill’s annual yield of new reports is significantly larger than that of Ehrhardt and Sweeney’s because the percentage of big-city banks in Michigan is far greater than in Iowa, even though there were 44% fewer banks there.

Figure 3. Great notes such as this number 1 Orlando brown back are still leaking out of the hands of bankers’ families. This was found recently between the pages of a Joy family genealogy and consigned to Bonhams by the great-grandson of the Orlando bank president. It was reported note 410,847 when entered into the National Currency Foundation census on July 23, 2018. The census has come a long way.

Send Herzog Michigan finds at wmherz@aol.com.

The lack of an eBay effect was a surprise. It seemed intuitive that opening up that avenue to the unwashed would cause a flood of new material to come onto our market. It just didn’t happen.

eBay was founded on Labor Day in 1995. If eBay was bringing more new material to our market, the lines on my graph should have started to bend upward after 1995 and continued onward with a steeper trajectory. They don’t.

No one will deny that eBay plays an important role in our marketplace. My data simply reveal that it hasn’t created a significant influx of virgin material from the weeds.

What I can say is that the existing numismatic market draws virgin nationals to it simply by virtue of being the market for such material. Once released from the weeds – however that occurs – the material heads our way regardless of the path it takes, and we get to see it. That is the classic operation of any market, and our market is alive, well, and well known.

eBay has caused a tectonic reorganization of the numismatic market in that all sorts of sellers flock to eBay to market their wares because they are assured of reaching a wide audience and most likely will realize a fair price. Furthermore, owing to the excellent exposure that eBay provides, uninformed sellers do not find themselves at a disadvantage for lack of knowledge about what they are offering, because their material will find its level in that competitive space.

eBay saves casual sellers the hassle of having to research what they are selling beyond finding the right niche in which to list it. Thus, eBay gives people the opportunity to cut out the middlemen in the form of the hometown coin dealers and vest pocket dealers. The result is that such middlemen have become an endangered species.

Figure 4. Notes from unreported 1929-only issuing banks occasionally come in. This Big Spring, Texas, example offered in a March 2018 Knight sale is long overdue from a bank that issued 10,619 of them.

The reality is that eBay has caused a reorganization of how material is marketed, but it hasn’t altered the net supply or caused virgin material to come onto market at a faster rate. The fact is, the material that used to reside in coin shops or appear on bourse floors is the same material that is now available on eBay.

A similar reorganization of our market occurred with the entry of auction firms offering currency beginning in the mid-1970s. In contrast, the numismatic marketplace I knew in the 1960s consisted of a plethora of independent sellers of every imaginable stripe. That model has been almost totally supplanted by auction firms such as Heritage, Knight, Stack’s-Bowers, eBay, and smaller firms. The vest pocket dealers of yore have morphed into runners for the major auction houses.

The corporate types figured it out and have insinuated themselves into our game so they can skim a percentage of the flow. This transformation has been as radical as the demise of mom and pop cafes and emergence of the McDonald’s. Like it or not, the corporate types created a more efficient marketplace. Theirs is the utilities model. The idea is to put a meter on the flow and get rich by taking a percentage of it, regardless of whether the source provider or end user profits or loses.

If you track your favorite notes, you will see a fluid flow of them as they slosh back and forth between collectors, brick and mortar dealers, vest pocket dealers, and the auction firms. Many notes are now getting rotated through eBay and the auction firms or vice versa as the same seller tests the effectiveness of either option to maximize his yield.

My finger on the pulse of things leads me to conclude that the velocity of the transactions – how frequently the same item sells – seems to be increasing. The lifetime of benchmark collections seems to be shortening, so the turnover of significant collections is more frequent.

The bottom line, though, is that people who have numismatic material for sale bring it to our market because ours is the market. They simply use whatever form of the marketplace appeals to them at the moment, but it is the same material no matter where it shows up. This holds for previously reported material as well as new discoveries from the weeds.

The mix of new material that I record is about the same as in the past. Roughly the same percentage consists of stellar material: previously unreported banks, number 1 notes, notes with incredible grade, etc.

The bulk of the new material is, of course, material that already is considered very common in our marketplace.

One fact that you can bank on is that there is no shortage of incredible finds yet lurking in the weeds. We haven’t seen the spigot turn down. The real risk is that today’s rarities will become tomorrow’s scarcities. Today’s scarcities may well turn into tomorrow’s fairly available notes.

At issue is the following conundrum. Are the notes scarcer than the collectors, or are the collectors scarcer than the notes? National bank notes are notoriously fickle to handle and own. The primary goal of our community should be to grow itself so that collectively we can keep soaking up the new material that is coming our way, because it is coming!

Cautions are in order about the data I am presenting here. My plots are linear. The implication is that the rate of discovery of new material has been constant over the last 28 years.

There are other serious mathematically gifted thinkers in our game who have worked this issue, most notably Don Kelly and Bob Liddell. Both have developed good mathematical models to predict the future behavior of our censuses.

Both have devised what are called exponential decay algorithms that assume that the yield from some finite supply must decrease as the size of that finite supply diminishes. In nuclear physics, this type of decay model yields the half-life rule that describes the decay of radioactive elements into stable elements. I believe in this type of behavior as did John Hickman, who was the father of the nationwide national bank note census.

However, if this type of mathematics operated in my censuses, the lines on the graphs should begin to bend downward and eventually become flat. Surprising to me and to my other census-taking colleagues, they don’t. At least not yet.

The reality is that everyone – Hickman, Kelly, Liddell, and yours truly – seriously underestimated the number of nationals that would eventually come into our market. The discoveries left all of our predictions in the dust years to decades ago!

When I wrote my book on Territorials in 1985, the census of large-size territorials stood at about 600 notes. I boldly estimated that ultimately there would be 900 of them. We tore past that number in 2000, and now we know of 1,144, and the conveyor belt is still delivering. So much for a brilliant forecast!

Eventually, some decay function has to take over. We just haven’t detected its effect yet.

I track rare material, and this gives me a significant leg up over the census takers for the larger states. The generally higher prices for the material I track give that material higher visibility. Specifically, it is more likely to appear in auctions and ads, so I get to see it. Of course, a percentage of it goes under my radar. The result is that even my censuses are undercounts. This doesn’t particularly eat away at me because, as collections turn over, the items I missed will reveal themselves. The takeaway, though, is that even the best censuses are undercounts.

I have been at a disadvantage during the past decade in that I am no longer collecting, so I am not foraging bourse floors. My data reveals that I’m not missing much, mostly thanks to the good works of friends and dealers who feed eBay, auction, and in-stock hits of interest to me.

I used to have an excellent network of fellow collectors of the material I track, and that network kept me current on material that they saw or obtained that I might have otherwise missed. However, those networks have largely withered in every area I track because my collaborators have sold their collections, so they no longer are feeding data to me.

If you are collecting in any of the areas I track, let me know so I can network with you. It is a mutual back-scratch that will keep both of us energized. You can reach me via email at peterhuntoon@outlook.com.

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[republicstandard]

Everything You Were Taught about Slavery is a Lie

“While slavery was common to all civilizations, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it — Western civilization.”-Thomas Sowell

The American educational system barely teaches history anymore outside of the two defining moments in world history—American slavery and the march to Black Civil Rights, and the Holocaust. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fact that most of the marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge that fateful day on March 7th, 1965 in Selma, Alabama and again on the 9th were actually paid to do so—$100 a head (and you thought it was just George Soros who rented protesters!). Slavery, the defining characteristic of antebellum American society and the sole cause of the Civil War, was unique to the country, and a moral stain, like the Holocaust in Germany, so deep that it can never be washed away but for the entire nation to cease to exist, at least according to the history textbooks and the general Cult-Marx zeitgeist.

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Yet most serious historians agree that approximately two-thirds of all Whites came to the colonies in some form of bondage. Over one million Europeans were held as slaves from the 1530s through the 1780s in Africa, and hundreds of thousands were kept as slaves by the Ottomans in Eastern Europe and Asia. (John Smith, for instance, had been a slave of the Ottomans before he obtained freedom and helped colonize Virginia.) In 1650, more English were enslaved in Africa than Africans enslaved in English colonies. Even as late as the early nineteenth century, United States citizens were enslaved in North Africa. Of the Africans who arrived in the New World, no more than 6 percent went to the Northern Hemisphere—virtually all of them went to South America. That trade was controlled almost exclusively by Jews. The Dutch West India Company, for example, was heavily financed by Jews, and a number of Jews relocated to Brazil to conduct business transactions there, chief among them the trafficking of slaves.

Slavery was practiced in the Americas before Columbus arrived. Many tribes would cut off a slave’s foot so they could not escape. Slavery, indeed, has been a fixture of human life since humans began to organize into sedentary societies (and probably before). It was really only the moral agonizing of European Christians over its existence that slavery was finally abolished in most parts of the globe. Slave-owning, as it was practiced in the United States, was not limited to only Whites, either. As Barbara Krauthamer helpfully points out in her book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South:

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes’ removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free Black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended.

About 28% of free Blacks owned Black slaves compared to roughly 1.4% of White owners of Black slaves according to the 1860 US Census. The first legal slave owner in the United States was a Black man named Anthony Johnson. Quoting Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free Black people have owned slaves “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery,” at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a Black man, John Castor, for life. And for a time, free Black people could even “own” the services of White indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free Blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 Black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious Black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler “regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade,” Halliburton wrote.

The Chinese were importing slaves from Africa over one thousand years ago. Exempt from the recency bias by dint of the fact that they’re not White and that it does not align with the present ideology, Saudi Arabia and Yemen only outlawed slavery in 1962. Slavery is still common practice across the African continent from the open-air slave auctions in Libya to the enslavement by Muslims of Christian slaves in countries such as Mali and Mauritania. Qatar is literally building their World Cup stadium with slave labor.

Islamic slavery was historically extremely brutal. Most of the slaves (approximately 80%) sent east died, and the male slaves were castrated. As Dr. Bill Warner informs:

The relationship between Blacks and slavery is ironic. A standard approach of Islam to Blacks is that Christianity is the religion of the White man and Islam is the natural religion of the Black man. They add that Mohammed’s second convert was a Black slave, Bilal, who was Mohammed’s companion and the first muezzin (the man who calls to prayer)… Mohammed had many Black slaves in his household. One of his slaves was a Black man called, Anjasha. Mohammed owned Black slaves. It is that simple. His favorite wife, the child Aisha, had a Black slave. But to be fair to Mohammed, he was not a racist about slavery. He enslaved Arabs, Africans, and Greeks. Islam enslaves all kafirs, independent of race… Mohammed used his robe to shield Aisha, so she could watch Black slaves perform a martial arts routine in the mosque. The Hadith tells of a prophecy about a Black man bringing evil to Islam. Black men were prophesized to destroy the Kabah. But when Muslims preach to Blacks they only say that Islam’s first muezzin was a Black man. They don’t tell the rest of the story.

Warner continues:

The criticism of Whites because of their being involved in slavery is standard fare in the media and the universities. Try to find a university that even teaches about the killing of 120,000,000 Africans for Muslims to profit from the 24,000,000 slaves. Blacks define themselves on the basis of slavery. They will not go beyond the White, Christian version of slavery. There is only one theory of history in the Black community—the West African Limited Edition version of history. Blacks will not admit the broad scope of slave history. Hindu slavery? It never happened. White and European slavery? It never happened. Slavery on the East coast of Africa? It never happened. A massive slave trade through the Sahara into North Africa? It never happened. Black, eunuchs at the Medina mosque? It never happened. This incomplete history of slavery is what the taxpayer funds in the state universities. How can Black leaders ignore Islam’s sacred violence in Africa? Why aren’t the Black columnists, writers, professors, or ministers speaking out? They are ignorant and in total denial. They are the molested children of Islam. Blacks are dhimmis and serve Islam with their silence. There is a deep fear of Islam that makes them overlook and placate Islam. Arabs are the masters of Blacks. One thing Whites and Blacks have in common is that their ancestors were enslaved by Islam, and both are too ignorant to know it.

It’s not just the Muslims who’ve been instrumental in the global enslavement and subjugation of Blacks and Whites alike; Jews have been active in the slave trade for millennia, from the Orient to the Occident. Using their massive fortunes accrued from usury during the Middle Ages, Jews were able to purchase an astounding 78% of all Trans-Atlantic slave trading vessels. Over 75% of Jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves. Approximately 40% of all Jewish households in the United States owned at least one slave. The first slave owner in North America—Anthony Johnson—used a Jewish merchant named Samuel Goldsmith as corroborating testimony; thus, the institution of slavery in what would become the United States was legally enshrined on behalf of a Black man (Johnson) and a Jewish man (Goldsmith).

David Levy Yulee, the first Jew elected to the US Senate, was a plantation owner and slaveholder. Judah P. Benjamin, the second Jew elected to the US Senate, was also a wealthy plantation owner and slaveholder—and was one of the principal actors behind the actor John Wilkes Boothe’s assassination of President Lincoln; fearing prosecution, Benjamin was sponsored by Jewish Lord Rothschild to flee to the UK where he became a barrister and eventually Queen’s Counsel in 1872 while the Jewish Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was in office. John Wilkes Boothe’s father, by the way, was Jewish. Monsanto was founded by John Francis Queeny, husband of Olga Monsanto, who was the daughter of Emmanuel Monsanto, a descendant of one of the South’s largest slave-trading families. The vast majority of the land-swindles of the newly-freed slaves that went on after the Civil War were committed by Jews; most of the carpet-baggers unfairly maligned as “Yankees” were also—and often the same—Jews. The KKK was originally founded to combat this exploitation but quickly lost its way and began terrorizing Blacks.

The institution of slavery in the United States is certainly an important part of our history and was one of the primary sources of tension between the North and the South—but it was far from the only one. Further, the claim that Blacks “built this country” through their labor as slaves is empirically false. The true impact of African slavery on the construction of America is negligible. Not even the profits of slavery had any real hand in the developing of the nation, as less than 1% of the total capital invested during the period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810 came from slave traders. Slavery was not particularly central to the American experience past the period of White indentured servitude and de facto slavery, though Black slavery did form part of the Jewish “portfolio” of assets, which also came to include bootlegging during Prohibition, various snake oil products, and as the 20th century progressed the virtually complete domination of media and entertainment as well as financial capital.

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We now find ourselves in the present age, where Whites remain unfairly scapegoated for a marginal practice in the United States but a practice that was nevertheless ubiquitous in human history; until Whites not only abolished it in their own lands, but also committed significant resources to curb its practice in other parts of the world and set up colonies for freed slaves. The independent state of Vermont was the first country in modern history to explicitly outlaw slavery in its constitution in the year 1777. Slavery was, however, banned far earlier in Ireland (500 AD, but returned in around 800 AD), the Republic of Venice (960), Iceland (1117, though it returned from 1490 to 1894), Korcula (in modern Croatia, 1214), Bologna (1256), Norway (1274), Sweden and Finland (1335), Poland (1347), the Republic of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia, 1416), and Lithuania (1588). It was banned in France proper in 1315 by Louis X but continued in the south of the country for centuries after, and in France’s overseas territories until 1794, with a resumption in 1802 before a complete abolishment in 1818. Several Chinese emperors temporarily banned slavery, and Japan did so in 1590 as well (though they retained it as a punishment for criminals), but only Europeans framed the abolition of slavery in moral terms. Their repayment is that they now bear almost the entire blame for not only slavery but conquests and subjugations the world over as if people never knew war or conquest or slavery before the 16th century. This preposterous assertion is another discussion, but suffice it to say that the slavery narrative as it pertains to Western civilization exists solely as anti-White propaganda, as yet another distortion of history—one that is undergirded with a number of elaborate falsehoods—for the grievance mongers to hammer Whites with.

The truth, however, shall set us free.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2QuTWz0 via IFTTT

[stephaniefchase]

Bajan Newscap 4/16/2017

Good Morning #realdreamchasers! Here is your daily news cap for Sunday 16th 2017. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Sunday Sun Nation Newspaper (SS).

DLP “LATE” SHOW – Political scientists have questioned the “lateness” of the governing Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in finalising its slate of candidates for the next general election but differ on the impact. Last Thursday the DLP announced that it had replaced Patrick Todd in the City, Kenny Best in St Michael East, and St Michael South East’s Patrick Tannis with Nicholas Alleyne and Henderson Williams and Rodney Grant, respectively. Peter Wickham, the director of Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), said that the lateness of the selection exercise was an indication that the DLP believed that it would be victorious in the next election. “The manner in which the Democratic Labour Party went about making those changes, the timing and everything,” he said. (SS)

BWA SOUTH COAST PUMPS SOON READY – Those severe problems that plagued the South Coast Sewerage Project last year should be solved by month-end. The Barbados Water Authority (BWA) has almost completed the overhaul of its wastewater treatment and sewerage systems, as specially imported replacement pumps get set to go online at the South Coast Sewerage Treatment Plant at Graeme Hall, Christ Church. “Four new pumps are expected to replace the failing machines at the plant, the BWA’s Wastewater Division manager, Patricia Inniss, told the SUNDAY SUN. The special equipment was sourced and manufactured in Sweden, after numerous problems plagued the South Coast project late last year, leading to effluent flowing in the streets of Worthing, Christ Church, which led to water quality issues on the Worthing Beach, and its subsequent closure for four days. In addition, the tourism sector was also affected, with a number of visitors leaving their places of accommodation. (SS)

SACRIFICES TO FIX ECONOMI WOES – Barbadians need to look to their own resources inside the country for solutions to the country’s economic, social and financial woes. That bit of advice from Bishop Peter Fenty, the Barbadian who is the top black clergyman in Canada’s Anglican Church. His comments were made against a backdrop of Good Friday and Easter observances, the holiest period on the global Christian calendar. Bishop Fenty said the current economic situation required some tough decisions and there was no doubt the country had what was needed to return to a path of economic and social prosperity. “I do believe that in Barbados we have, right there on the island, the persons and the resources to turn around the economy, to make some difficult decisions. (SS)

MASSIAH TO LEAVE ST. JOSEPH RECTORY – Retired Anglican Priest Errington Massiah is making preparations to vacate the St Joseph Rectory after 32 years of residence there. The long-standing priest at St Joseph Anglican Church, who retired last year, told the SUNDAY SUN that he may be out of the rectory by the end of this week. However, he denied reports that the diocese had written him about vacating the Horse Hill, St Joseph rectory, which is a stone’s throw away from the parish church, which was closed and deconsecrated some years ago because of structural damage. “That ain’t true,” said Massiah, when informed about reports that the church had written him about his continued occupation of the residence, even though he had retired last year. (SS)

FREE VILLAGE LOSES APPEAL - The ancestral history of the first free village in Barbados has lost its value to some in the community. And after last night’s Apology concert, some residents are wondering what’s next? The story goes that the enslaved Blacks of Mount Wilton, who did not take part in the Bussa rebellion of 1816, were willed money from the plantation owner for their “good conduct”. It is said that after Emancipation in 1838, the ex-slaves used their inheritance to purchase fertile land in Rock Hall, St Thomas, which became the first free village in the island. With the ownership of land, these former slaves qualified for the right to adult suffrage. In 2005, a monument to represent the rich history of the area was unveiled by Member of Parliament for St Thomas, Cynthia Forde. The then Barbados Labour Party government was embarking on a tourism project which they hoped would bring needed recognition to the Freedom Village and empower residents. (SS)

THOUSANDS MARCH DEMANDING TRUMP RELEASE TAXES – Tens of thousands of people marched through midtown Manhattan and dozens of U.S. cities on Saturday to demand that President Donald Trump release his tax returns and to dispute his claim that the public does not care about the issue. Organisers of “Tax March” in more than 150 cities across the country and beyond wanted to call attention to Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax history, as his White House predecessors have done for more than 40 years. The marches coincide with the traditional April 15 deadline for U.S. federal tax returns, though the filing date was pushed backed two days this year. There were no reports of violence or arrests, in contrast to a clash between Trump supporters and opponents that erupted at a rally in Berkeley, California, where nine people were arrested. Two of the biggest tax marches took place in New York and Los Angeles, with each drawing about 5 000 people, according to estimates by Reuters reporters. No official estimates were immediately available. In Manhattan, a good-natured crowd rallied at Bryant Park before marching up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. Among the marchers was an oversized inflatable rooster, sporting an angry expression and a sweeping metallic orange hairdo meant to resemble Trump’s signature style. In Washington, more than 1 500 protesters gathered on the front lawn of the U.S. Capitol, where members of Congress addressed the crowd before it marched to the Lincoln Memorial. He described Trump’s refusal to release his taxes as being “like a teenager trying to hide a lousy report card”. As a candidate and as president, Trump has refused to release his tax returns, citing an ongoing audit by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has said that Trump can release his tax returns even while under audit. The White House could not be reached immediately for comment on the marches. (SS)

MUM: WHY DID MY SON DIE IN POLICE CELL: Angela Best closes her eyes and tries to talk, but has to pause for a moment to hold back the tears.  Then she becomes angry, refusing to believe that her first-born son would have done the unthinkable, and taken his own life. Best, 63, is calling on the authorities to explain the circumstances surrounding the death of Corey Best in police custody at the Oistins Police Station last Thursday. Police say the 34-year-old used his jeans to hang himself inside a holding cell. (SS)

SHARAZ OBRIAN PATEL WANTED BY THE POLICE – Police continue to seek the public’s assistance in locating 30-year-old Sharaz Obrian Patel, alias “Dappa”, who is wanted in connection with serious criminal matters. Patel’s last known address is Upper Wavell Avenue, Black Rock, St Michael. He is about five foot three inches in height, slim build and brown in complexion. He has an average nose and lips and brown eyes. He also has a tattoo on his left forearm with the words “Out Law”. The police say Patel is considered to be armed and dangerous and should not be approached by the public. Patel is advised that he can present himself to the Black Rock Police Station accompanied by an attorney-at-law of his choice. Anyone knowing his whereabouts is being asked to contact the nearest police station. The police are also reminding the public that it is a serious offence to harbour or assist wanted persons and anyone caught committing this offence can be prosecuted. (BT)

WANTED MAN SHAMAR WELCH CAPTURED - Wanted man Shamar Renaldo Welch has been captured. Welch, 28, who is also known as “Sammy”, of Rochester Road, Grazettes, St Michael, was apprehended by police today at Yearwood Land, Black Rock, St Micheal. The police say he is currently assisting them with investigations. Police Public Relations Officer acting Inspector Roland Cobbler has thanked the public and the media for their assistance.  (BT)

DOMINICAN HELD WITH 128 ROUNDS OF AMMUNITION - Police have arrested and charged 62-year-old Dominican national Pat Thomas with unlawful possession of 128 rounds of ammunition. On Thursday, April 13, Thomas, who is also a US citizen, arrived at the Grantley Adams International Airport on a flighted from the United States. During a search of his luggage, customs officers discovered the ammunition concealed in two pairs of socks. Thomas appeared before Magistrate Douglas Fredericks in the District ‘A’ Court today and was remanded to prison to reappear in the District ‘B’ Court on April 19. (BT)

ANOTHER TOUGH DAY EXPECTED AT CARIFTA GAMES - It will be a second tough day of track and field action for Barbados at the 46th Flow CARIFTA Games at the Ergilio Hato Stadium (SDK) in Willemstad on Sunday. The highlights will be in the 200 and 800 metres and 400 metres hurdles where Barbados will be aiming to add to their four medals on Saturday's opening day. Aaron Worrell will have four more events in the Octathlon, starting with the 110-metre hurdles, followed by the high jump, javelin throw and 1500 metres. In the field events, debutante Shanice Huston will compete in the Under-18 girls’ discus; Jonathan Miller in the Under-18 Boys’ triple jump; Shonita Brome and Akayla Morris in the Under-18 girls’ long jump and Enrique Babb in the Under-18 Boys’ shot put. On the track, Matthew Clarke and the United States-based Tai Brown will represent Barbados in the Under-Boys’ 200 metres while Jaquone Hoyte and Kentoine Browne will race in the Under-20 Boys’ 200 metres. Jonathan Jones and Rio Williams will contest the Under-20 Boys’ 800 metres with Roneldo Rock flying the Barbados’ flag in the Under-18 Boys’ 800 metres. Brome and Hannah Connell are entered for Barbados in the Under-18 Girls’ 400-metre hurdles while Tiana Bowen will be seeking a second medal in the Under-20 Girls’ 400-metre hurdles after her silver medal in the flat 400. Last year’s defending champion Rasheeme Griffith goes after a second consecutive gold medal in the Under-18 Boys’ 400-metre hurdles. Also representing Barbados in this event will be Nathan Fergusson, who took the silver medal last year behind Griffith. Rivaldo Leacock will also be hoping to bid farewell to the CARIFTA Games with a gold-medal run in the Under-20 Boys’ 400-metre hurdles. Barbados will be fielding only the Under-18 Boys’ 4x100-metre relay team with the quartet likely to be selected from Matthew Clarke, Darian Clarke, Tramaine Smith, Tai Brown and Fergusson. (SS)

GREAVES TON RESCUES PRIDE – An impressive unbeaten century by Justin Greaves orchestrated a remarkable recovery that lifted Barbados Pride to 297 for six yesterday on the opening day of the tenth-round Digicel Regional 4-Day Tournament match against the Jamaica Scorpions at Kensington Oval. Greaves recorded his maiden first-class century ten minutes before the close of play when he pulled a delivery from left-arm spinner Dennis Bulli to deep mid-wicket for a single. By stumps he was not out on 104 off 182 deliveries in 215 minutes with eight boundaries.  Greaves and fellow all-rounder Kenroy Williams (82) set the foundation for a productive opening day for the home side after they were forced to bat first. Their century stand lifted Barbados from an uncomfortable 65 for four prior to lunch and 98 for five less than half-hour into the afternoon session. (SS)

MARIJUANA CONCEALED AMONG BABY ITEMS - A 20-year-old man has been arrested and charged with possession of cannabis, possession with intent to supply cannabis and trafficking of cannabis. On April 13, Reshawn Shamar Best of Pilgrim Lane, Christ Church, visited the Seawell Air Services Bond to clear a shipment consigned to him. On inspection of the shipment by customs officers, five transparent packages containing cannabis were discovered concealed among baby items. The matter was reported to the police and Best was subsequently arrested and charged. He appeared before Magistrate Douglas Fredericks in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today and was granted bail in the sum of $5000 with one surety. He has been booked to reappear in the District ‘B’ Court on April 20. (BT)

STUART: DO MORE TO PUSH FESTIVAL – In the face of waning support for the FLOW Oistins Fish Festival, Prime Minister Freundel Stuart has called for greater involvement in the 40-year-old event. The Prime Minister made the plea yesterday during his feature address at the opening ceremony of the 40th Oistins Fish Festival, following remarks by MP for the area John Boyce in which he spoke to the noted challenges the festival faced in terms of sponsorship. Improvements are in line for the area, Stuart revealed. While praising the popular venue, he said there were many much-needed plans to better assist the physical development of the area. He explained that coming out of a recently held town hall meeting on the Physical Development Plan were plans to create a waterfront pedestrian route from Enterprise beach to Welches beach and create a transport terminal on the land side of Highway 7. (SS)

EASTER DELIGHTS – Easter eggs still attract children in droves. Businesses in Bridgetown were examples of that most of last week, as Barbadians started piling up on the colourful treats for their kids. (SS)

RESIDENTS GIVE BACK THROUGH KITE FLYING - The Dying arts of kite-making and kite-flying have prompted young St Philip residents to start a new annual tradition of making and helping to fly kites for community children. For the second year, old school friends John Jones and Akeem Mason will be coordinating the distribution of kites to children across the island. “When I brought the idea to John, I realised he was thinking the same thing,” Mason, 25, said. “We just want to bring back the excitement of making kites and flying them.” Tomorrow, Easter Monday, the Kite Flying Extravaganza and Giveback will be held in King George V Memorial Park. It is expected to host children of all ages. (SS)

That’s all for today folks. There are 259 days left in the year Shalom! #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #bajannewscaps #newscapsbystephaniefchase

[goldeagleprice]

The Rate of Discovery of National Bank Notes

By Peter Huntoon

Lee Lofthus’ important article “Are there more nationals to find?” in the December 2012 Bank Note Reporter ignited interest in what remains in the weeds. His calculations indicated that depending on how you cook the numbers, between 10 and 25 percent of the outstanding nationals based on Treasury estimates had been reported in the National Currency Foundation census by 2012. He was basing that estimate on the fact that 245,919 notes had been recorded in the census as of August 2012. The obvious implication is that there are hundreds of thousands more out in the weeds waiting to come in.

Figure 1. This exceptional Iowa discovery from a previously unreported Iowa bank came in a couple of years ago and has now lodged at the Higgins Museum. The bank was chartered June 28, 1877, and liquidated December 31, 1886, to be succeeded by Bank of Hamburg. Only Series of 1875 $5s were issued by the bank.

As of July 2018, the National Currency Foundation census stood at 410,000 notes, up 164,000 from August 2012. This is a significant increase of 40 percent. But the fact is that the caretakers of the NCF census have been overwhelmed and have been unable to cope with recording the huge volume of previously unreported material crowding into the market, particularly the major auctions. Furthermore, many of the networks of state providers of data on new finds have fallen apart, so the 164,000 new additions represent a serious undercount of the actual unreported notes that otherwise have appeared since 2012.

Even so, the incredible current sample of 410,000 reveals the landscape of what is known. The fact is that the vast majority of missed reports consist of common material that few people pay much attention to as it goes by. In contrast, the rare material tends to win appreciably more notice, so is preferentially logged in.

I’ve been recording Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and large-size territorial nationals since the late 1960s. I began archiving this data at the end of each year beginning in 1989, thus creating a snapshot of how those censuses have grown yearly since then.

I first published these findings in the January 2014 BNR in an article entitled, “Is eBay a source for virgin nationals?” My data revealed two things: First, as of 2013, the rate at which newly discovered notes were being recorded hadn’t varied between 1989 and 2013. Second, the advent of eBay had no effect on the rate at which newly-found nationals came onto our market.

Another four years have passed, and the newer data still reveal that the rate of discovery hasn’t changed at all. Both points are worth developing.

The rates that my censuses are growing average 1.2 Alaska, 12 Arizona, 23.5 New Mexico, 24.5 Wyoming and 14 large size territorials notes per year. The population of banks contributing these numbers are three for Alaska, 27 for Arizona, 63 for New Mexico, 61 for Wyoming, and 605 large size territorial issuers.

You will see that the data for the respective censuses plot as virtually straight lines over the 28 years of record on the graph that accompanies this article. If there had been a systematic change in rates – that is, something causing more or fewer notes to appear each year – the lines would bend respectively up or down.

Figure 2. Arkansas collectors were happy to see this discovery recently in a Stack’s Bowers sale from the previously unreported Hoatio bank, which lasted 15-1/2 years with a minimal circulation of $6,250.

In July of this year, I attended the Higgins Museum seminar in Okoboji, Iowa, where Steve Sweeney gave a presentation entitled, “The Iowa census, evolving and maturing.” He and James Ehrhardt have been doggedly maintaining the Iowa national bank note census for years and presented their findings in “Iowa National Bank Notes,” a 236-page book and subsequent 45-page supplement that were published by the Higgins Foundation in 2006 and 2016, respectively.

Theirs is one of the finest state censuses in existence because they have had fantastic cooperation from the Iowa collectors who not only share their own data but record notes that they see.

There were 496 issuing banks in Iowa. Steve pointed out that the Iowa census built by John Hickman stood at just under 6,000 notes in 1995. Sweeney was able to advise his network of contributors that the total had broken the 10,000 mark in July 2004. The cutoff date for their book was June 30, 2006, and by that date the total had grown to 11,058. The cutoff date for their supplement was March 21, 2016, with a total then of 13,503. As of July 30, 2018, the number was 14,014.

Their experience is identical to mine; specifically, their census has grown linearly at an average rate of 250 notes per year since they have been working on it.

Send Sweeney data from Iowa finds at xcp2@msn.com.

Another stellar state census is one maintained by William Herzog for Michigan, again aided by a cadre of dedicated Michigan collector/contributors. They are dealing with the issuances from 278 banks. Building on the original Hickman/Kelly census, which stood at 9,861 on January 23, 2007, Herzog has now recorded 13,263 notes. He has been adding an average of 322 notes per year from 2003 to 2017, but he cautions that the rate has declined during the past three years. Bill’s annual totals exhibit larger swings than mine. Some of the spikes represent recordings from long-held unvetted collections that came onto the market in those years.

Bill’s annual yield of new reports is significantly larger than that of Ehrhardt and Sweeney’s because the percentage of big-city banks in Michigan is far greater than in Iowa, even though there were 44% fewer banks there.

Figure 3. Great notes such as this number 1 Orlando brown back are still leaking out of the hands of bankers’ families. This was found recently between the pages of a Joy family genealogy and consigned to Bonhams by the great-grandson of the Orlando bank president. It was reported note 410,847 when entered into the National Currency Foundation census on July 23, 2018. The census has come a long way.

Send Herzog Michigan finds at wmherz@aol.com.

The lack of an eBay effect was a surprise. It seemed intuitive that opening up that avenue to the unwashed would cause a flood of new material to come onto our market. It just didn’t happen.

eBay was founded on Labor Day in 1995. If eBay was bringing more new material to our market, the lines on my graph should have started to bend upward after 1995 and continued onward with a steeper trajectory. They don’t.

No one will deny that eBay plays an important role in our marketplace. My data simply reveal that it hasn’t created a significant influx of virgin material from the weeds.

What I can say is that the existing numismatic market draws virgin nationals to it simply by virtue of being the market for such material. Once released from the weeds – however that occurs – the material heads our way regardless of the path it takes, and we get to see it. That is the classic operation of any market, and our market is alive, well, and well known.

eBay has caused a tectonic reorganization of the numismatic market in that all sorts of sellers flock to eBay to market their wares because they are assured of reaching a wide audience and most likely will realize a fair price. Furthermore, owing to the excellent exposure that eBay provides, uninformed sellers do not find themselves at a disadvantage for lack of knowledge about what they are offering, because their material will find its level in that competitive space.

eBay saves casual sellers the hassle of having to research what they are selling beyond finding the right niche in which to list it. Thus, eBay gives people the opportunity to cut out the middlemen in the form of the hometown coin dealers and vest pocket dealers. The result is that such middlemen have become an endangered species.

Figure 4. Notes from unreported 1929-only issuing banks occasionally come in. This Big Spring, Texas, example offered in a March 2018 Knight sale is long overdue from a bank that issued 10,619 of them.

The reality is that eBay has caused a reorganization of how material is marketed, but it hasn’t altered the net supply or caused virgin material to come onto market at a faster rate. The fact is, the material that used to reside in coin shops or appear on bourse floors is the same material that is now available on eBay.

A similar reorganization of our market occurred with the entry of auction firms offering currency beginning in the mid-1970s. In contrast, the numismatic marketplace I knew in the 1960s consisted of a plethora of independent sellers of every imaginable stripe. That model has been almost totally supplanted by auction firms such as Heritage, Knight, Stack’s-Bowers, eBay, and smaller firms. The vest pocket dealers of yore have morphed into runners for the major auction houses.

The corporate types figured it out and have insinuated themselves into our game so they can skim a percentage of the flow. This transformation has been as radical as the demise of mom and pop cafes and emergence of the McDonald’s. Like it or not, the corporate types created a more efficient marketplace. Theirs is the utilities model. The idea is to put a meter on the flow and get rich by taking a percentage of it, regardless of whether the source provider or end user profits or loses.

If you track your favorite notes, you will see a fluid flow of them as they slosh back and forth between collectors, brick and mortar dealers, vest pocket dealers, and the auction firms. Many notes are now getting rotated through eBay and the auction firms or vice versa as the same seller tests the effectiveness of either option to maximize his yield.

My finger on the pulse of things leads me to conclude that the velocity of the transactions – how frequently the same item sells – seems to be increasing. The lifetime of benchmark collections seems to be shortening, so the turnover of significant collections is more frequent.

The bottom line, though, is that people who have numismatic material for sale bring it to our market because ours is the market. They simply use whatever form of the marketplace appeals to them at the moment, but it is the same material no matter where it shows up. This holds for previously reported material as well as new discoveries from the weeds.

The mix of new material that I record is about the same as in the past. Roughly the same percentage consists of stellar material: previously unreported banks, number 1 notes, notes with incredible grade, etc.

The bulk of the new material is, of course, material that already is considered very common in our marketplace.

One fact that you can bank on is that there is no shortage of incredible finds yet lurking in the weeds. We haven’t seen the spigot turn down. The real risk is that today’s rarities will become tomorrow’s scarcities. Today’s scarcities may well turn into tomorrow’s fairly available notes.

At issue is the following conundrum. Are the notes scarcer than the collectors, or are the collectors scarcer than the notes? National bank notes are notoriously fickle to handle and own. The primary goal of our community should be to grow itself so that collectively we can keep soaking up the new material that is coming our way, because it is coming!

Cautions are in order about the data I am presenting here. My plots are linear. The implication is that the rate of discovery of new material has been constant over the last 28 years.

There are other serious mathematically gifted thinkers in our game who have worked this issue, most notably Don Kelly and Bob Liddell. Both have developed good mathematical models to predict the future behavior of our censuses.

Both have devised what are called exponential decay algorithms that assume that the yield from some finite supply must decrease as the size of that finite supply diminishes. In nuclear physics, this type of decay model yields the half-life rule that describes the decay of radioactive elements into stable elements. I believe in this type of behavior as did John Hickman, who was the father of the nationwide national bank note census.

However, if this type of mathematics operated in my censuses, the lines on the graphs should begin to bend downward and eventually become flat. Surprising to me and to my other census-taking colleagues, they don’t. At least not yet.

The reality is that everyone – Hickman, Kelly, Liddell, and yours truly – seriously underestimated the number of nationals that would eventually come into our market. The discoveries left all of our predictions in the dust years to decades ago!

When I wrote my book on Territorials in 1985, the census of large-size territorials stood at about 600 notes. I boldly estimated that ultimately there would be 900 of them. We tore past that number in 2000, and now we know of 1,144, and the conveyor belt is still delivering. So much for a brilliant forecast!

Eventually, some decay function has to take over. We just haven’t detected its effect yet.

I track rare material, and this gives me a significant leg up over the census takers for the larger states. The generally higher prices for the material I track give that material higher visibility. Specifically, it is more likely to appear in auctions and ads, so I get to see it. Of course, a percentage of it goes under my radar. The result is that even my censuses are undercounts. This doesn’t particularly eat away at me because, as collections turn over, the items I missed will reveal themselves. The takeaway, though, is that even the best censuses are undercounts.

I have been at a disadvantage during the past decade in that I am no longer collecting, so I am not foraging bourse floors. My data reveals that I’m not missing much, mostly thanks to the good works of friends and dealers who feed eBay, auction, and in-stock hits of interest to me.

I used to have an excellent network of fellow collectors of the material I track, and that network kept me current on material that they saw or obtained that I might have otherwise missed. However, those networks have largely withered in every area I track because my collaborators have sold their collections, so they no longer are feeding data to me.

If you are collecting in any of the areas I track, let me know so I can network with you. It is a mutual back-scratch that will keep both of us energized. You can reach me via email at peterhuntoon@outlook.com.

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