Month: December 2017

Facebook Dumps ‘Fake News’ Patrol After Spectacular Backfire

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

Facebook has abandoned it’s fake news ‘fact checkers‘ program to label articles reviewed by Snopes and Politifact as ‘disputed,’ after the program backfired a little over a year after inception.

Te company pointed to a slowdown in news flow, the fact that stories were required to be deemed “false” before earning a “disputed” label, and because many people were instead drawn to clicking on the articles in question…

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg says they are a technology company who doesn’t hire journalists – so, you know, whoops?

Several Facebook employees made a post on Medium detailing the change:

“In December of last year, we launched a series of changes to identify and reduce the spread of false news in News Feed:

  • We made it easier for people to report stories they think are false news
  • We partnered with independent fact-checking organizations that review articles that might be false
  • We reduced the distribution of articles disputed by fact-checkers
  • We launched a collection of features to alert people when fact-checkers have disputed an article, and to let people know if they have shared, or are about to share, false news”

EXCEPT… 

Disputed flags could sometimes backfire: We learned that dispelling misinformation is challenging. Just because something is marked as “false” or “disputed” doesn’t necessarily mean we will be able to change someone’s opinion about its accuracy. In fact, some research suggests that strong language or visualizations (like a bright red flag) can backfire and further entrench someone’s beliefs.

The company will instead offer up alternative stories containing facts that have already been checked.

Perhaps Facebook also realized that Snopes – run by a bunch of degenerates, has a long history of liberal bias? Last year they were dressed down by the Daily Caller in a fascinating Exposé – featuring evidence of Snopes’ liberal bias, several instances of flat out lies, and insight into the individual opinions of the militantly liberal fact checkers who love insulting conservatives.

Let’s also remember that Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson, pictured above to the left of the morbidly obese cat – cheated on wife Barbara Mikkelson with the literal prostitute and Snopes administrator pictured in the frame below; taking her on expensive vacations around the world using (allegedly) embezzled Snopes funds while banging her like a steel drum. He then married her despite the fact that she had a website devoted to being a whore and is “past her time as an adult model.”

Meanwhile, Politifact is riddled with propaganda. They are incredibly biased, funded by a Clinton Foundation donor, and not even close to being qualified to sit on an exclusive panel of Facebook “FAKE NEWS” judges.

Worst. Thought police. Ever.

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Bitcoin In 2018: “There Will Be At Least 4 Crashes Of 40% Or More”

By Nicholas Colas via DataTrekResearch.com,

When you see something titled “Bitcoin 2018 Predictions”, you are probably most interested in just one thing: “Where will it go?” So let’s start there, but then add some other observations on a variety of topics.

#1: We expect bitcoin will trade for between $6,470 and $21,600.

Here’s how we get there:

  • Bitcoin’s primary “real” use case right now is personal asset protection. Yes, that includes money laundering and tax evasion. But it also incorporates the legitimate desire of honest people living in countries with less-than-exemplary rules of law to shield some of their assets.
  • At the moment, the primary instrument used globally for these purposes is the $100 bill. Yes, the European Central Bank also issues high denomination notes. But the gold standard of paper currency is the American C-Note. (Oxymoron intended).
  • While bitcoin doesn’t have the backing of the US government, you can’t forge a bitcoin (and there are likely as many fake $100s in circulation as real ones). Plus, you don’t need a locked aluminum case and a handcuff to transport it. So we’ll call it a draw.
  • There are $1.1 trillion of legitimate $100 bills in circulation, and by the Federal Reserve’s estimate some 80% live offshore.
  • If bitcoin were worth 10% of the $100s in circulation, its value would be $6,470. The math: $110 billion divided by 17 million bitcoins equals $6,470.
  • If bitcoin were worth 33% of all the $100s in circulation, it value would be $21,600. Same math as prior point. Could bitcoin get to 50% of the value of all $100s? Possibly, but that level of adoption likely requires more time.

At the average of the high and low, we get to $14,035. That’s not far off the current trading price, which gives us comfort we’re on the right track with our valuation. The only way it goes substantially higher is if/when someone comes up with a large-scale business that uses bitcoin. That may come in 2018. But for now that scalable use case is asset protection, so that’s how we value bitcoin today.

Bottom line: bitcoin can rally to $22,000 and still be reasonably priced, or plummet to $6,500 and also be correctly valued. We expect to see bitcoin trade for both prices in 2018.

#2 Bitcoin will lose market share to other crypto currencies in 2018.

There is essentially a “Civil war” in crypto currency land between competing offerings. That wasn’t really the case until Q4 2017, but we expect more strife next year. The reason: bitcoin is still about 44% of total crypto currency market cap. Backers of other crypto currencies have an outsized incentive to encourage bitcoin holders to switch.

#3 Many major US brokerage firms and asset manager will announce plans to open a crypto desk.

Early adopters of bitcoin and other crypto currencies are an untapped source of profitable new clients for high net worth brokers and asset managers. But in order to access that wealth, these firms will have to offer an exchange mechanism to sell the underlying and diversify these clients’ holdings.

#4 There will be at least 4 crashes of 40% or more.

Bitcoin and crypto currency are hard to value and their economic utility relies on use cases that are not yet built. Of course the volatility we’ve seen will continue.

#5 Coinbase will improve operational quality ahead of an IPO, helping crypto currency adoption rates.

Coinbase (a popular wallet app) closed a Series D round in August of this year. In total, they have raised $225 million and that last round gave them a $1.6 billion valuation. Given the dearth of “Real” crypto currency plays in US equity markets, we expect the company could do an IPO in 2018 at a $5 billion valuation or greater. And since it is VC funded, we expect many investors will be looking for exit sooner rather than later.

The reason why this matters: Coinbase needs to improve its customer experience a lot, and quickly. The system did not work well during the recent bout of volatility. But when it does improve (and it will, if it wants to go public), more investors will feel comfortable buying crypto currencies.

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Demand Tumbles For 5Y Treasuries As Tailing Auction Leads To Highest Yield Since 2011

After yesterday’s ugly, tailing 2-Year auction, it is probably not a big surprise that today’s sale of $34 billion in 5Y Treasurys was just as ugly.

The auction printed at a high yield of 2.245% – the highest since March 2011 – and well above last month’s 2.066% largely thank to the recent Fed rate hike. More troubling is that the auction tailed the When Issued 2.228% by a whopping 1.7bps, the biggest tail going back at least 2 years.

The internals were also lousy, with the Bid to Cover sliding from 2.46 in November to just 2.36, the lowest since June and well below the 6 month average of 2.49. And, just like yesterday’s 2Y auction, the bidside demand tumbled, with Indirects awarded only 58.4% of the final allotment, the lowest since April, and below the 66.8% 6 month average, Directs left with 7.9%, also below the 6 month auction average of 9.7%, leading to the biggest Dealer award since April, at 33.7%, 50% higher than November’s 22.8%, and well above the 6 month average of 23.4%.

What is strange is that today’s ugly auction priced amid a backdrop of a relentless bid for longer-dated paper, and certainly 5Y, and not even the ugly auction did much to unsettle the yield on 5Y paper which had dipped to the lowest in a week ahead of the results, and has barely budged higher after the print.

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New London, Connecticut, Prosecutes Local Artist for Bamboo It Deems a Blight

Carlos Carrion, an artist who lives in New London, Connecticut, has been growing bamboo on his property for 30 years. Only recently has the city deemed it a crime. Depending on whom you ask, the city’s sudden concerns about Carrion’s bamboo patch stem from his failure to maintain it properly or from his outspokenness as a critic of eminent domain abuse and arbitrary land use regulation.

Carrion was an opponent of the misbegotten redevelopment plan that led to the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, which upheld the use of eminent domain to condemn homes that supposedly stood in the way of an economic revival that never materialized. More recently, he has turned his attention to the city’s blight ordinance, which authorizes criminal fines of up to $250 a day as well as civil fines of up to $100 a day.

Carrion defended Maggie Redfern, deputy director of the Connecticut College Arboretum in New London, who was accused of creating blight by designing an “ecological landscape” featuring native plants in her yard. A blight hearing officer sided with Redfern, declaring her yard “exactly the opposite of a ‘neglected or abandoned property.'”

Carrion has had less success defending his bamboo grove, which he says he keeps as a memorial to the Vietnam veteran who gave him the original plants. “I eat it, construct furniture…it’s a home for the birds,” he said at Redfern’s blight hearing. “The bamboo I grow is not invasive. I maintain the plants. It stays within the perimeter of my property, and yet it’s considered to be a blight?”

The city deems the bamboo a blight under Section 302.4 of the New London Property Maintenance Code, which prohibits “all grasses, annual plants and vegetation,” aside from trees, shrubs, and “cultivated flowers and gardens,” that are more than 10 inches high. Because the city says Carrion has failed to comply with the code after repeated warnings, he has been hit with $13,500 in fees and civil penalties, and the cost will climb higher if the criminal prosecution is successful.

Carrion’s lawyer, former New London Mayor Daryl Finizio, argues that the bamboo grove does not actually violate the property maintenance code, presumably because it qualifies as a cultivated garden. Carrion says he keeps the plants trimmed back so they do not invade other people’s property, a point the city seems to dispute. According to the city’s complaint, “Carrion’s entire lawn is covered with a thick growth of bamboo, the height of which extends at least 20′, extending above the power lines. The bamboo has also crept into the yard of other homes and was coming into contact with power lines themselves. The bamboo is so thick, it’s nearly impossible to traverse through.”

Impingement on neighbors’ property and entanglement with power lines are legitimate issues that could be addressed by trimming the plants. But the sheer height, breadth, and density of the bamboo seem like purely aesthetic concerns. Whether Carrion’s plants constitute a cultivated garden or a bunch of weeds is in the eye of the beholder.

Finizio suggests Carrion’s prosecution is punishment for his activism. “It seems inexplicable that suddenly Carlos Carrion and his bamboo have become public enemies No. 1 of the City of New London,” he told The Day, a local newspaper. “My client also believes that as an outspoken critic of eminent domain during those public debates in our city, and because of his outspoken involvement in other city blight cases, that he is being targeted in a retributive way by the City of New London.”

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Why Does Blow-Drying Hair in Arizona Require 1,000 Hours of Training?

Using a blow-dryer is not particularly difficult or dangerous. Millions of Americans dry their own hair every morning without widespread reports of singed scalps or accidental electrocutions. Children use them without incident.

But picking up a hair dryer in the state of Arizona and using it to dry someone else’s hair, for money, requires more than 1,000 hours of training and an expensive state-issued license. Blow-drying hair without a license could—incredibly—land you in jail for up to six months.

America is saturated with ridiculous licensing rules that do little to protect public health or safety. They exist mostly as a way to drive-up prices and restrict employment. Cosmetology licensing laws are some of the worst offenders of common sense, and Arizona’s cosmetology licensing laws truly boggle the mind. Doing something as simple as shampooing, drying, and styling hair requires a full-fledged cosmetology license, which includes years of training in hair and skin care, makeup application, and other un-related skills.

Before applying for that license, an applicant would have to graduate from a beauty school, which can cost as much as $15,000 in tuition.

State Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-Scottsdale) says the licensing requirement is particularly troublesome for so-called blow-dry bars—salons that offer nothing more than shampooing and styling of hair, without cutting, coloring, or other more advanced hair care.

She plans to introduce a bill to exempt workers who “dry, style, arrange, curl, hot-iron, or shampoo and condition hair” from the state’s cosmetology licensing law, as long as they do not use chemicals to permanently straighten or curl hair and do not cut hair either.

“When they told me about the scope of their business, you could clearly see that it was an impediment to them hiring, and for someone to be hired, simply to hire them for blowing out hair,” Ugenti-Rita told the East Valley Tribune this week.

That makes a lot of sense, so naturally cosmetology schools are opposed to it.

“Students go to school to get a cosmetology license,” Cathy Koluch, a member of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools and the owner of a salon in Chandler, Ariz., told the East Valley Tribune. “They are learning more than just styling hair, cutting, coloring; they’re learning the health and anatomy side of it.”

That’s exactly the problem. There’s no reason to require all those classes if a prospective salon worker wants to do nothing more than dry and style hair—something he or she would be free to do, legally, for free, at home. Charging for those skills and practicing them in a salon should not trigger onerous training and licensing requirements.

Of course a story about cosmetology licensing would not be complete without hyperbolic statements of the potential harms that could befall customers serviced by unlicensed workers.

“People come into your salon with illnesses,” Koluch says. “They could have an open wound, they could have lice. How are these people going to be trained to handle these situations?”

Anyone with an open wound on their head should probably seek professional care from someone with a different sort of license—the kind that you get after attending medical, rather than beauty, school. An unlicensed professional working in a dry bar is probably going to do the same thing that a licensed cosmetologist with 1,000 hours of training would do: tell you to go to a hospital and have your injury treated.

This sort of hyperbole is par for the course in Arizona. Unlicensed barbers are “a real risk,” Donna Aune, executive director of the Arizona State Board of Cosmetology, told a local television station in Tucson earlier this year when defending the board’s decision to investigate a student who gave free haircuts to homeless people.

Aune also shows up several times in a 2009 investigation by Tuscon.com about the “dangers” of receiving a manicure or pedicure from an unlicensed professional. And she pops up in this absurd story about a terrible eyebrow waxing accident—in a fully licensed salon, by the way—trying to pin the blame on unlicensed cosmetologists and calling for more state agents to conduct inspections.

When she’s not fear-mongering about the consequences of a bad haircut or investigating acts of goodwill, Aune is ringing up huge travel bills and dining out at the taxpayers’ expense, as the state comptroller reported in a September audit.

Cosmetology boards and lobbyists for beauty schools can justify absurd licensing laws any way they want, but they are, at last, on the defensive. Gov. Greg Ducey has indicated support for licensing reform in Arizona and Ugenti-Rita’s bill would make it easier for entrepreneurs to work in the state by undoing a pointless, punitive licensing measure.

“Requiring blow dry bar stylists to get cosmetology licenses does not protect the public health and safety—after all, people shampoo, blow dry, and style hair in their homes all the time, without any special training,” say Christina Sandefur and Jenna Bentley, of the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, a free market think tank that supports the bill.

“Arizona’s stifling regulations leave blow dry stylists without work,” they wrote in an op-ed this week. “and customers with fewer options at higher prices.”

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Tokyo-Bound Flight U-Turns To LAX To Remove “Unauthorized Person” Due To “Mix Up”

An All Nippon Airways flight en route from Los Angeles to Tokyo was forced to turn around four hours into the eleven hour journey to remove an "unauthorized person" from the flight, angering passengers who were told by the airline that passenger had a ticket for another airline.

A twitter user claiming to have been on board flight ANA 175 said that four people were questioned and detained; "1 Muslim,2 white, and 1 asian lady." 

Police said the massive U-turn was due to a "mix up, and was straightened out," according to ABC7, and that the flight has been rescheduled to depart Wednesday morning. 

Model Christine Teigen was aboard and documented the incident over Twitter. 

Police were interviewing people seated near the mystery passenger, according to Teigen. 

One twitter user said that four passengers were detained: 

Another twitter user claims that passengers had to sign an NDA: 

The plane's recorded flight time was recorded at seven hours and 56 minutes

 

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Fed Cred Dead? From “Definitely Transitory” To “Imperfect Understanding” In One Press Conference

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

When Janet Yellen spoke at her regular press conference following the FOMC decision in September 2017 to begin reducing the Fed’s balance sheet, the Chairman was forced to acknowledge that while the unemployment rate was well below what the central bank’s models view as inflationary it hadn’t yet shown up in the PCE Deflator.

Of course, this was nothing new since policymakers had been expecting accelerating inflation since 2014.

In the interim, they have tried very hard to stretch the meaning of the word “transitory” into utter meaninglessness; as in supposedly non-economic factors are to blame for this consumer price disparity, but once they naturally dissipate all will be as predicted according to their mandate.

That is, actually, exactly what Ms. Yellen said in September, unusually coloring her assessment some details as to those “transitory” issues:

For quite some time, inflation has been running below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run objective. However, we believe this year’s shortfall in inflation primarily reflects developments that are largely unrelated to broader economic conditions. For example, one-off reductions earlier this year in certain categories of prices, such as wireless telephone services, are currently holding down inflation, but these effects should be transitory. Such developments are not uncommon and, as long as inflation expectations remain reasonably well anchored, are not of great concern from a policy perspective because their effects fade away.

Appealing to Verizon’s reluctant embrace of unlimited data plans for cellphone service was more than a little desperate on her part. Even if that was the primary reason for the PCE Deflator’s continued miss, it still didn’t and doesn’t necessarily mean what telecoms were up to was some non-economic trivia.

Over the past few years, consumers have been hit with almost regular (not “residual seasonality”) shocks to incomes that seem to be increasing in intensity as well as duration. These are, in effect, downturns within a downturn; short run drops or contractions inside an already lost decade. Acceleration of cheap might actually be the most logical of outcomes.

Rather than dismiss these continued problems in favor of fanciful bias towards monetary policy, it was of a far more scientific basis to wonder whether the Fed knows anything about inflation.

A lot has changed in official terms between September and December, which is to say in terms of inflation nothing changed. There is as yet no acceleration in the PCE Deflator (or CPI) that isn’t someway connected to oil price effects. In November 2017, the BEA calculates that consumer prices rose by 1.76% year-over-year, up from 1.59% in October as gasoline prices rose 131% (month-over-month, annual rate).

Core rates that strip out energy prices, such as the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean, continue to undershoot and therefore suggest no momentum and zero upon which to base expectations for acceleration. It’s not nothing that monetary policy has missed its target for sixty-five out of the last sixty-seven months, and ninety of the past 110 months going back to October 2008 and the botched monetary response to Lehman and everything before it.

Because of all that within the realm of inflation, meaning the monetary system, it has been more than fair or reasonable to ask whether economists really know what they are doing. Up until 2016, that was a question you weren’t allowed to consider unless well outside of the mainstream. Since then, more and more policymakers are actually asking of themselves the same idea.

Having failed all throughout 2017, the year almost completely over, Janet Yellen’s final press conference for December, then, was subtly changed from the prior one to at least admit that maybe they really don’t know – trying hard not to make too much of a big deal about it.

We continue to believe that this year’s surprising softness in inflation primarily reflects transitory developments that are largely unrelated to broader economic conditions. As a result, we still expect inflation will move up and stabilize around 2 percent over the next couple of years. Nonetheless, as I’ve noted previously, our understanding of the forces driving inflation is imperfect.

As a final official act, Yellen downgraded from “definitely transitory” to “imperfect understanding.” This matters a great deal, for if their grasp of basic economic factors is this flawed (just an 18% hit rate in nearly 10 years) there’s likely far more gone wrong than just the price effects of unlimited wireless data.

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Growth Narrative Confirmed – Dr.Copper Soars To 3-Year High (There’s Just One Thing)

One thing is for sure, when Dr.Copper's price is falling, the silence from prognosticators is deafening; but when it's rising it is the greatest indication of the global growth narrative the world has ever known. However, there's a hole in that story…

LME Copper prices are up for 9 straight days – the longest wining streak since 2004 – (and 13 of the last 14 days) pushing prcies above $7,200 intraday – the highest since 2014…

 

And given copper's rip higher relative to gold, based on DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach's favorite chart, 10Y yields should be drastically higher to reflect this implied growthiness…

There's just one problem with this whole narrative – it's not a desperate demand pull from rapidly growing economies that is charging prices higher… its a collapse in supply…

As Bloomberg reports, China ordered its top producer to halt output to combat winter pollution…

The advance in 2017 has been backstopped by supply disruptions just as the outlook for global growth improves and investors and miners target potential new uses, including in electric vehicles. The world’s largest producer, Chile’s Codelco, has forecast that prices may test record highs above $10,000, while UBS Group AG’s wealth management unit on Wednesday predicted further gains.

“Supply cuts are set to boost prices in the short term, while further upside beyond $7,200 before the Lunar New Year might be limited,” Pu Honggang, an analyst with ITG Futures Ltd., said from Xiamen, referring to China’s nationwide break that falls in February next year.

 

“It’s still pending that supply will be shrinking to what extent, while domestic demand is very weak at year-end.”

Copper’s latest leg up follows news that Jiangxi Copper Co., China’s largest producer, had been ordered to stop output for at least a week before a further assessment based on local pollution levels. Earlier in the month, the No. 2 smelter, Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group, was asked to make similar cuts.

“Copper stocks are rising as investors are bullish on copper prices amid an improving demand outlook from the U.S. and Europe in particular,” Yang Kunhe, an analyst with Pacific Securities Ltd., said by phone from Beijing.

 

“The production cuts are temporary. A one-week halt won’t cause too big a problem for Jiangxi Copper. Smelters can also adjust by moving forward their annual maintenance.”

And so a surging copper price could be misleading investors, and not everyone is buying its bullish implications…

“Big data shifts this time of year should be taken with a pinch of salt,” Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank A/S in Hellerup, Denmark said via email.

 

“The market is long and in a thin market such news will support a strong end-of-year finish.”

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Sorry Tom Hanks, Steven Speilberg: If Daniel Ellsberg Is a Hero, So Is Edward Snowden

If you need more proof that baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, aren’t quite up to living in the 21st century, look no further than this BBC interview with Tom Hanks, Steven Speilberg, and Meryl Streep, about the new movie The Post, which details the Washington Post brave and precedent-setting commitment to publishing the Pentagon’s secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a.k.a. “The Pentagon Papers.” Despite massive political and legal pressure not to do so, Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham (played by Hanks and Streep), pushed ahead with printing secret documents stolen by Daniel Ellsberg, winning a massive victory for press freedom and almost certainly shortening the Vietnam War.

Of course that was the right thing to do, Hanks tells Sam Asi. But when Asi brings up Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed massive, warrantless, secret surveillance of all sorts of electronic communications among American citizens, Hanks gets tongue-tied. Skip to about the five-minute mark:

After brushing aside the Snowden revelations—”I wasn’t that surprised” that the government was spying, says Hanks—the Oscar winner plays social-media whataboutism. “Facebook makes money off of us based on what we’re interested in,” he says. “Do you think it’s wrong that Google has an algorithm that can essentially you know, say, hey, Sam only likes black suits, so we’re going to start sending you advertisements for black clothing.” When asked whether Snowden is “a traitor or not,” Hanks waves off the question, joking that it’s about his “pay grade.”

Asi makes the point that Hanks, along with Spielberg and the movie’s other star Meryl Streep, were public supporters of Barack Obama, whose secret programs Snowden opposed, and Hillary Clinton, who called Snowden a traitor. He then asks Speilberg why Hollywood was silent during Obama’s unprecedented reliance on the World War I-era Espionage Act. Obama pursued nine prosecutions, compared to just three since the law’s start under Woodrow Wilson. Snowden’s revelations were “different for me,” says Spielberg, because Snowden simply had information about agencies with the capabilities of spying on individuals and infringing on our privacy, while “Daniel Ellsberg was trying to stop the Vietnam War.” Ellsberg was a “hero,” says Spielberg, who refuses to call Snowden by the same term. “I don’t have the same information.” Streep, speaking at the end of the clip, at least grants that it’s good and “valid” that the programs and activities Snowden unmasked are now in public view.

Asi ends his segment by asking whether The Post is actually intended as a defense of a free press or “a warning” to President Trump that, you know, the media took down Richard Nixon, so watch out.

That’s a provocative question precisely because Barack Obama was, in the words of one of the journalists prosecuted by him, “the greatest enemy of press freedom” to hold the Oval Office. Of course Hanks, Spielberg, and Streep are simply representative Hollywood liberals ready to give Democrats a pass regardless of their actual policies. But more important, they are also aging baby boomers who are quick to fetishize outlaw heroes of their youth while throwing shade on younger mavericks. To the extent that they are self-absorbed and morally certain about events from their own past, baby boomers are simply playing to type. Indeed, while promoting Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg reduced World War II to a footnote to the birth of his own generation, calling it the “key, the turning point of the whole century…It was as simple as this: The century either was going to produce the baby boomers or it was not going to produce the baby boomers.”

But such generational solipsism also renders them un-serious, if not next to useless, in a 21st-century in which Millennials now outnumber boomers. Although the circumstances in which Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers will never be repeated exactly, there was nothing unique about what he did, and what’s called for by all men and women of good will. What exactly has changed about the ways in which government, especially the surveillance state, functions since Lyndon Johnson opened up the “credibility gap” and today? In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee, Iran-Contra, the revelations of William Binney, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and others, is there any reason to believe that the federal government is not duplicitous? Not at all, and it’s a shame to see three articulate, thoughtful people stumble on the altar of partisan loyalty when it comes to such a question. If they don’t have enough information on which to evaluate Snowden, that’s on them (read and watch his interview with Reason here).

To his credit, Daniel Ellsberg calls Snowden “a hero of mine.” Speaking to Reason in our December 2017 issue, he said he hopes his legacy is something like this: “I would like others to believe that they have the power—and the obligation, really—as patriots, as human beings, to reveal what they themselves know are unjustified dangers to human existence. And not simply, for reasons of career and promises to superiors, to conceal dangers of that nature. In other words, to be truth tellers.”

As a boomer myself (born near the end, in 1963), I understand that resisting generational and moral nostalgia is no easy thing. The past is past and it’s easier and quieter not to worry so much about the current moment, I suppose. But for those of us who not only want to see the future but participate in it, keeping up is the first business of the day and partisanship should be left off the to-do list altogether. If Ellsberg is a hero (and he is), so too is Snowden and all the others who put their lives on hold in order to rein in powers that dare not show their hands.

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The Growing Excesses of #MeToo: New at Reason

If Marie Antoinette’s excesses launched the French revolution, Harvey Weinstein’s piggishness launched the #MeToo movement.Feminist Movement And like the second, #MeToo might have begun to correct real problems and inequalities, but is now in danger of collapsing into injustice by breeding excesses of its own.

Recently, it took down The Detroit Free Press’ liberal editorial page editor, Stephen Henderson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, for reasons that can charitably be described as flimsy, points out Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. But a movement that throws decent men under the bus will discredit itself because it’ll create more victims than it’ll save. That’s a pity because a responsible reckoning to hold genuine monsters accountable is something that women do indeed need.

View this article.

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