Month: March 2019

Facebook Reverses Zero Hedge Ban, Says It Made A “Mistake”

It has been a strange 24 hours.

On Monday, we first learned that for the previous two days, Facebook had banned all Zero Hedge content across its various mediums, as it went against Facebook’s “Community Standards” (which to the best of our knowledge, neither we not anyone else has any idea what they are), a decision which – as we noted yesterday – surprised us for two reasons: not only do we not have an official Facebook account, but Facebook did not approach us even once with a warning or even notification.

While we were in the dark about what had triggered Facebook, or what was the company’s motive, we were humbled and delighted not only with the media coverage this event received, but far more so with the outpouring of support we received from readers and across social media, where Zero Hedge had not been yet banned, like Twitter, where figures from various industries and across the political spectrum voiced support and came to our defense, with many condemning what we felt was an arbitrary decision.

Among those who spoke up were President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., Nigel Farage, Peter Thiel’s liberal foil at Thiel Capital, Eric Weinstein, Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson and many others.

To them, and to everyone else who reached out – either to us or to Facebook, or “said something” in private or on the Interweb – we offer our sincerest gratitude.

And then on Tuesday morning, everything had suddenly returned to normal, and whether due to the unexpectedly widespread support we received, or because Facebook had made a sincere error, the ban was reversed.

While Facebook has yet to contact us directly, they did comment with a Facebook spokesman saying that “This was a mistake with our automation to detect spam and we worked to fix it yesterday.” He added that “we use a combination of human review and automation to enforce our policies around spam and in this case, our automation incorrectly blocked this link. As soon as we identified the issue, we worked quickly to fix it.“

We still have no insight into which article(s) Facebook decided was sufficiently “spammy” to block everyone’s access to our content, or on what basis Facebook’s “automation and human review” had made the decision to quarantine our small website from the rest of Facebook’s 2.3 billion monthly users.

But we are heartened by this development, not so much because it means a rebound in our traffic – as we observed yesterday, we are lucky in that Facebook represents a tiny source of our inbound referral traffic – but because it means nothing changes: we can and will continue as before, with zero adjustments to our writing style, and we will certainly continue with our highly critical coverage of all things Facebook. And best of all: it will be read on Facebook, allowing users of the world’s biggest media company to escape an informational echo chamber, and be presented with contrasting opinions, which even if wrong, will allow countless readers to make more informed opinions than if served with preapproved, uniform, and ideologically palatable content.

And since some may read this as a quasi-official press release, we leave the “about us” part to the money-losing media venture of billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s business empire (funded since day one by the procyclical $25,000/year Bloomberg terminal business), which yesterday described out little adventure as follows: “Since being founded in the depths of the financial crisis, Zero Hedge has built a dedicated following by serving up a mix of hardcore financial analysis and populist political commentary. Both the ‘Tyler Durden’ name and the site’s tagline — “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero” — are borrowed from the anarchic cult classic ’Fight Club.’

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HuRkPA Tyler Durden

The United City-States Of America, Mapped – An Experiment In Redividing The Country

Authored by Nolan Gray via Medium.com,

From ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy to the Four Asian Tigers, city-states have always punched above their weight. They’ve driven culture forward, facilitated global commerce, and charged ahead of their nation-bound peers.

Indeed, cities  – and the metropolitan regions that orbit around them  –  make sense as a political and economic unit. The key services we depend on government to do, from building infrastructure to ensuring public safety, are mostly handled by cities. And contrary to earlier predictions, the forces of globalization and the rise of the information economy have only made cities more important as economic engines and innovation hubs. It’s no surprise, then, that cities — and their mayors — are increasingly finding their voices in a world previously dominated by nations and international entities.

Unfortunately, the way the United States is structured today undermines this trend by privileging states as the key political entity. State boundaries in these modern times are typically arbitrary and often no longer reflect any meaningful political, cultural, or economic reality. Some U.S. cities, both big and small, manage to straddle state borders (think Texarkana or Bristol) while others run right up to the state edge but sharply hug the border (think Cincinnati or St. Louis). And a number of states are inexplicably fragmented because their seat of government is very different from their most populous town (think New York City/Albany and Chicago/Springfield). This often results in excessive fragmentation, unproductive competition, and a near total lack of regional land-use and transportation planning. We all suffer as a result.

Both to satisfy my own curiosity and set out a vision for what a city-oriented United States might look like, I decided to make a map that dispensed with the continental 48 states and instead divvied up the land into 100 city-states.

As a process-obsessed city planner, I started by listing the top 150 metropolitan statistical areas in the continental United States. This seemed like the natural base for any potential city-states as MSAs reflect economic integration. Next, I mixed in combined statistical areas, which factor together adjacent metro- and micropolitan areas. I cut the list to the top 100 units by population. (Congratulations to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — the smallest unit to make the cut!)

Then came the mapping. I used shapefiles provided by the Census to make “city-state cores” on a single map using GIS, a tool used for map making and spatial analysis. By using more data and selecting certain attributes, I assigned each county to a city-state core. To finish it up, I cleaned up awkward and nonsensical boundaries with some manual adjustment.

The final product was this map, and it led me to several takeaways:

The eastern United States is like medieval Europe.

As of 2010, the population center of the United States is somewhere in the middle of Missouri. It’s been moving westward, needless to say, but also south over time. This mostly jives with this map: The United States east of the Kansas-Missouri line is a dynamic hodgepodge of small, densely populated city-states. The economies and cultures of places like New York and Philadelphia, Charlotte and Greensboro, and Fort Wayne and South Bend will likely always be intimately intermingled. West of this line, excluding California and Texas, the United States is largely underpopulated, with cities like Denver, Omaha, and Boise playing an outsized role — economically and culturally — in their respective regions.

My home state of Kentucky is shattered.

Let’s face it: Kentucky is incoherent as a cultural-political entity. The Louisville metropolitan area and the northern Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati are essentially southern reaches of the Rust Belt. The state’s east and southeast have more in common with West Virginia, including a shared Appalachian heritage. Western and southwestern Kentucky feel much more conventionally Southern. All of this is largely captured by how the state is divided up. Not accidentally, the only purely Kentucky city-state produced — Lexington — captures most of what Kentucky is best known for: University of Kentucky basketball, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken, most of the major bourbon distilleries, the Daniel Boone National Forest, and the state’s famous Bluegrass horse farm region.

Maine and Minnesota are basically already city-states.

Only two city-states capture the entirety of a current U.S. state: Portland, which captures Maine and parts of New Hampshire, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, which captures Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin, South Dakota, and three-quarters of North Dakota. Portland barely made the cut; in an actual fragmentation scenario, I could see most of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine falling under a Boston city-state. Minneapolis-St. Paul, however, makes sense. Its influence sweeps across the northern Midwest, as evidenced in films like Fargo. Some western metro areas in New Mexico and Utah nearly made the cut, but their southern regions were nipped by El Paso and Las Vegas, respectively.

Some states would disappear entirely.

A handful of states in this new map are completely covered by the city-states of their former neighboring states. Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Vermont would all basically be gone. Delaware and Rhode Island both have great cities — Wilmington and Providence — but both would be unambiguously absorbed by their monolithic neighbors — Philadelphia and Boston, respectively. The upper Mountain West as well as New Hampshire and Vermont simply lack large cities.

City-states of tomorrow may boom at any time.

As states like Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota continue to experience explosive population growth, they will inevitably give rise to their own great cities. For all we know, Billings, Fargo, and Sioux Falls could emerge as urban powerhouses in the 21st century, not unlike nearby Minneapolis, Denver, and Salt Lake City did in the 20th century.

An odd oversight in our federal system is that it’s basically impossible for states to split, join, or shift around their borders. Outside of a few weird cases — such as West Virginia — basically all new states have come from newly settled land. As new city-states emerge in places like the Mountain West, how would they be incorporated into this system? Would the arrangement be capped at 100 city-states? Alternatively, could states combine as their economies and development slowly blends, as could very well happen with small city-states like Lancaster, Toledo, and Fresno? It’s a fun thought experiment.

*  *  *

In a time when we aren’t often drawing up new borders for established countries like the U.S., it’s interesting to think “what if.” What might be the political implications of a system like this? At the outset, a system of city-states could help to achieve economies of scale in providing local services like libraries and parks, saving taxpayers money while improving service quality.

But they could also overcome some of the prisoner’s dilemma problems associated with policies like housing, schools, and subsidies. In our current system of municipal fragmentation, it’s easy for NIMBYs (“Not in My Back Yard” campaigns) to block the construction of new housing in prospering areas and keep low- and moderate-income students out of high-quality schools districts. A unified city-state could overcome some of these issues, taking the broader perspective and equitably distributing the burdens and benefits of growth.

A city-state restructuring could also have deep implications for national politics. One of the key takeaways of the 2016 presidential election is the mounting urban-rural political divide, with voters in cities and the countryside growing increasingly disconnected and antagonistic toward one another. (At the bottom of this piece is a map of how the city-states likely would have voted.) Insomuch as a city-state scenario would bundle Americans based on broadly similar economic, social, cultural backgrounds, it could encourage both sides to seriously contend with with the needs and preferences of their neighbors.

Of course, at this stage, it’s all speculation. How would you have drawn city-state boundaries differently? What do you think would be the political implications?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VTEcr5 Tyler Durden

Father Of The World Wide Web Warns “Perverse Incentives” Have Made The Internet “Dysfunctional”

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee – known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, says that the internet has become a cesspool of “clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation,” which needs to be “changed for the better,” reports CNBC. 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Image via Wikimedia Commons

In a Monday letter marking 30 years since he created a blueprint for the WWW in March 1989, the 63-year-old Oxford/MIT professor outlined three “sources of dysfunction” affecting the internet today; malicious behavior such as state-sponsored hacking and online harassment, “perverse” incentives driving misinformation, and unintended negative consequences such as polarizing, unhealthy conversations. 

“Governments must translate laws and regulations for the digital age,” said Berners-Lee. “They must ensure markets remain competitive, innovative and open.“

Berners-Lee singled out Google and Facebook for rewarding clickbait and misinformation. He has previously knocked the tech giants for exploiting people’s personal data. 

“Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety,” reads the Monday letter. 

Last October, Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web foundation released a new blueprint in order to help put the web back on its original course. Known as the “Contract for the Web,” the plan calls for governments to ensure that everyone can connect to the internet – which is kept “available, all of the time,” and respects people’s “fundamental right to privacy.” It also calls on businesses to make the internet affordable to everyone as well as respect data privacy rights. 

One pillar of the contract is treating the web as a basic right for everyone, an idea that is far from reality today. The World Bank estimates roughly half of the world’s population still does not have access to the internet. In a report published Monday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found more than four in 10 rural households in OECD countries don’t have access to the fast fixed broadband needed to support the Internet of Things, whereas nearly nine in 10 households in urban areas have fast connections. –CNBC

Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair last year that he was “devastated” over what the web had become, and had launched a new online platform and company, Inrupt – described as a “personal online data store,” or pod, where everything from messages, music, contacts or other personal data will be stored in one place overseen by the user instead of an array of platforms and apps run by corporations seeking to profit off personal information. The project seeks “personal empowerment through data” and aims to “take back” the web, according to company statements. 

At MIT Berners-Lee has for years led a team on designing and building a decentralized web platform called ‘Solid’ — which will underlie the Inrupt platform. The Inrupt venture will serve as users’ first access to the new Solid decentralized web:

If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to emerge from Solid.

“I have been imagining this for a very long time,” says Berners-Lee.

As described on the Solid and Inrupt websites the new platform will allow users to have complete control over their information ‘pods’ (an acronym for “personal online data store”) — it is only they who will decide whether outside apps and sites will be granted access to it, and to what extent. 

In short, unlike Facebook or Twitter where all user information ultimately resides in centralized data centers and servers under control of the companies, applications on Inrupt will compete for users based on the services they can offer, and only the users can grant these apps “views” into their data, making personal data instantly portable between similar applications.

“The main enhancement is that the web becomes a collaborative read-write space, passing control from owners of a server, to the users of that system. The Solid specification provides this functionality,” reads the website. 

Asked whether his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit off of controlling user data, Berners-Lee shot back: 

“We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.” 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XXKlUW Tyler Durden

Dick Cheney Argues Foreign Policy With Mike Pence At Leaked “Off the Record” GOP Gathering

What was supposed to be a relaxed conversation between Vice President Pence and former Vice President Dick Cheney quickly turned into a argument over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy at a private gathering last weekend, according to a report from LMTOnline. 

The gathering was a closed-door retreat hosted by the American Enterprise Institute on March 9 in Sea Island, Georgia. At the meeting, Cheney “respectfully but repeatedly” pressed Pence on concerns like President Trump taking a hard line towards NATO and deciding to withdraw troops from Syria “during the middle of a phone call”.

Cheney also said to Pence, “we’re getting into a situation when our friends and allies around the world that we depend upon are going to lack confidence in us,” according to a Washington Post transcript.

The comments from the gathering were supposed to be “off the record”, but a transcript leaked from a person who was “not authorized to share material” from the event. 

“I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan,” the former Vice President continued.

The critique of Pence from former VP Cheney highlights one of the many debates currently ongoing in the GOP party. Many former GOP “hawks”, like Cheney have been at odds with Trump’s engagement of autocrats like Kim Jong Un and his non-interventionist style in the middle easy. 

Pence reportedly “shrugged off most of Cheney’s anxieties” and praised Trump as a “candid and transformational leader.”

What was supposed to be a chat at AEI’s annual world forum between Pence and Cheney turned into a nearly full blown “academic exercise” with Cheney questioning Pence while the current VP did his best to retort with force. The conversation surprised the conference attendees and caused murmurs in the room throughout the talk. 

After pleasantries were exchanged, Cheney immediately went after Trump, expressing concern about reports that he “supposedly doesn’t spend that much time with the intel people, or doesn’t agree with them, frequently.” He also immediately expressed concern with suspending military activities with South Korea and Trump’s handling of North Korea. 

“I don’t know, that sounded like a New York State real estate deal to me,” Cheney said of Trump’s pursuit of a policy to have the Germans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans pay total cost for U.S. deployments there, plus 50 percent on top of that.

“It’s a lot more complicated than just, ‘Here’s the bottom line. Write the check,'” Cheney continued. 

Pence retorted:

“We’re going to continue [to] train. We’re going to continue to work closely with South Korea. We have a tremendous alliance there. I think there is a tendency by critics of the president and our administration to conflate the demand that our allies live up to their word and their commitments and an erosion in our commitment to the post-World War II order.”

The current VP continued, “But we think it’s possible to demand that your allies do more to provide for the common defense of all of our nations and, at the same time, reaffirm our strong commitment – whether it be to the trans-Atlantic Alliance or to our allies across the Indo-Pacific.”

Cheney again took exception to lack of troop deployments in certain areas and VP Pence finished by assuring the former VP that the Trump administration shared their devotion to defending the country. 

“When the American people elected this president, they elected a president who expressed concern about American deployments around the world,” Pence stated. “And they knew this was going to be a president that came and asked the fundamental questions about – you know, where are we deployed and do we really need to be asking men and women in uniform to be deployed in that part of the world? But, you know, it should come as no surprise to anyone: This President is skeptical of foreign deployments, and only wants American forces where they need to be.”

Pence concluded: “But you can be confident, as one of my favorite hawks, we’re going to continue to stand strong for a strong national defense with President Trump in the White House.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CgPSNw Tyler Durden

Pilots Complained About Boeing 737 Max 8 For Months Before Second Deadly Crash

Several Pilots repeatedly warned federal authorities of safety concerns over the now-grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 for months leading up to the second deadly disaster involving the plane, according to an investigation by the Dallas Morning News. One captain even called the Max 8’s flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient,” according to the report. 

“The fact that this airplane requires such jury-rigging to fly is a red flag. Now we know the systems employed are error-prone — even if the pilots aren’t sure what those systems are, what redundancies are in place and failure modes. I am left to wonder: what else don’t I know?” wrote the captain. 

At least five complaints about the Boeing jet were found in a federal database which pilots routinely use to report aviation incidents without fear of repercussions. 

The complaints are about the safety mechanism cited in preliminary reports for an October plane crash in Indonesia that killed 189. 

The disclosures found by The News reference problems during flights of Boeing 737 Max 8s with an autopilot system during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain altitude. While records show these flights occurred during October and November, information regarding which airlines the pilots were flying for at the time is redacted from the database. –Dallas Morning News

One captain who flies the Max 8 said in November that it was “unconscionable” that Boeing and federal authorities have allowed pilots to fly the plane without adequate training – including a failure to fully disclose how its systems were distinctly different from other planes. 

An FAA spokesman said the reporting system is directly filed to NASA, which serves as an neutral third party in the reporting of grievances. 

“The FAA analyzes these reports along with other safety data gathered through programs the FAA administers directly, including the Aviation Safety Action Program, which includes all of the major airlines including Southwest and American,” said FAA southwest regional spokesman Lynn Lunsford. 

Meanwhile, despite several airlines and foreign countries grounding the Max 8, US regulators have so far declined to follow suit. They have, however, mandated that Boeing upgrade the plane’s software by April. 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs a Senate subcommittee overseeing aviation, called for the grounding of the Max 8 in a Thursday statement. 

“Further investigation may reveal that mechanical issues were not the cause, but until that time, our first priority must be the safety of the flying public,” said Cruz. 

At least 18 carriers — including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, the two largest U.S. carriers flying the 737 Max 8 — have also declined to ground planes, saying they are confident in the safety and “airworthiness” of their fleets. American and Southwest have 24 and 34 of the aircraft in their fleets, respectively. –Dallas Morning News

“The United States should be leading the world in aviation safety,” said Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen. “And yet, because of the lust for profit in the American aviation, we’re still flying planes that dozens of other countries and airlines have now said need to grounded.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HgALHO Tyler Durden

The Problem With “Reparations”

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

As the issue of reparations for victims of slavery rages within the Democratic party, and on cable news stations, we encounter a common problem: virtually no one is addressing the specifics of how such a reparations effort would be administered.

Who would receive these reparations payments? Who would pay them? How would guilt and victimhood be determined? As is usually the case with American policy debates, this “debate” offers little more than an opportunity for pundits and activists to grandstand on related issues such as poverty and race – while avoiding the central topic at hand. Support or opposition then becomes nothing more than a matter of affirming one’s political loyalties. The actual issue of reparations – and how they’ll be paid out – is mostly ignored.

It is important to remember, however, that there is nothing necessarily problematic about the idea of paying reparations to the victims of a crime. In fact, the idea is essentially pro-private-property because it attempts to repay a victim for property stolen from him or her by another party.

After all, any decent legal system would provide for a victim of kidnapping and forced labor to obtain repayment for the time and labor stolen from him by the kidnapper. As Walter Block writes:

Justified reparations are nothing more and nothing less than the forced return of stolen property — even after a significant amount of time has passed. For example, if my grandfather stole a ring from your grandfather, and then bequeathed it to me through the intermediation of my father, then I am, presently, the illegitimate owner of that piece of jewelry. To take the position that reparations are always and forever unjustified is to give an imprimatur to theft, provided a sufficient time period has elapsed. In the just society, your father would have inherited the ring from his own parent, and then given it to you. It is thus not a violation of property rights, but a logical implication of them, to force me to give over this ill-gotten gain to you.

But here’s the rub: in order to do this with an eye toward justice, one must identify specific victims and specific perpetrators. Potentially, as Block suggests, one could envision a legal case in which the heirs of victims would be paid reparations by the heirs of the perpetrators. But again, we still encounter the problem of identifying specific persons (and heirs) involved. Reparations cannot be paid in the abstract, since, as Chris Calton has noted:

[L]ibertarian ethics are not based on abstract moral claims; they’re based on concretely identifiable property rights. When a violation of a person’s property rights takes place, restitution is the logical means of compensating the victim …

But in the real world [on matters of slavery] such a claim is incredibly difficult to prove. And failure to prove a legitimate property claim means that the currently recognized property title holds. Anything else would be committing a new injustice to give the illusion of correcting an old one.

In light of this, we can see that many of the currently proposed methods of paying out “reparations” are imprecise, vague, and consequently unjust. A program, for example, that forces all taxpayers (whether guilty or not of any relevant crimes) to pay reparations to a specific group of people raises several key problems that must be addressed:

1. What if a taxpayer is descended from people who didn’t even arrive in the country until after emancipation? That is, should a Japanese-American, whose immigrant ancestors arrived in the United States in 1910, be forced to pay reparations? How about descendants of Mexicans who arrived in the US in 1925?

2. What if the taxpayer has some ancestors who lived in the US before emancipation and some who arrived here afterward? Would that person’s “reparation tax bill” be pro-rated to match the fraction of his ancestry that shared antebellum guilt?

3. What if a taxpayer’s ancestors were abolitionists who opposed slavery?

4. What if a taxpayer has no ancestors who owned slaves?

The (Bad) Economics of Collective Guilt

In all of these cases, it’s hard to see how the person paying reparations is in any way actually responsible for the kidnapping, theft, assault, and other crimes perpetrated against actual slaves. Yes, many activists may claim that “everyone” is  — in the vague abstract — “guilty” of slavery because one’s ancestor once bought cheap cotton dungarees in 1858, or once (even unwittingly) worked for a company that sold timbers to ship builders who built slaving ships. These arguments rely on the same twisted logic which would have us believe that people who buy gasoline are somehow morally responsible for the brutality of the Saudi Arabian dictators, or that a teenager who smokes a joint is responsible for terrorism like that perpetrated on 9-11. (Yes, the US government created an ad campaign saying exactly this.)

This everyone-is-guilty claim, in fact, is one invented by the slavedrivers themselves in an attempt to claim that all white Americans — including Northerners — somehow directly benefited from slavery, and thus all abolitionists were hypocrites. It was always a desperate and unconvincing argument, but by putting these claims forward, the slavedrivers of old helped pave the way for the modern-day reparations advocates.

In real life, the people responsible for slavery are only the people who directly owned, sold, or traded in slaves; and the politicians who pushed to preserve, spread, or defend slavery through legislation and the state’s police powers.

Slavery Suppressed Wages for Many Workers

Moreover, many non-slaves can be shown to have been negatively impacted by slavery because it acted to suppress wages. As historian Kerry Leigh Merritt describes in detail in her book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, wage-earning, non-slaveholding whites in the South — who constituted the overwhelming majority of the population — received far lower wages than they would have had they not been forced to compete with slave labor by a legal system designed to favor the tiny minority of slaveowners. Nor were these effects limited to Southern whites only. The increased profitability of agriculture in the South — thanks to slavery — acted to divert resources from Northern agriculture and industry as well, thus lowering wages for at least some Northern workers. Moreover, capital that poured into the slave plantation could have been used to improve worker productivity through innovation in machinery and other capital. Instead, that investment was diverted away from improving free labor, and devoted to expansion and maintenance of the slave economy. Overall, the presence of slaves suppressed wages nationwide.

The fact that slaveowners and plantation owners indisputably benefited from slavery hardly means that white day laborers benefited as well. Yes, chattel slaves fared far worse than any other group. But that doesn’t mean those day laborers were — to use the modern parlance — “privileged” by the existence of the slave economy. In practice, it significantly lowered their income.

So, once again we are left with the problem of determining who is legally and morally responsible for paying out these reparations in any way connected to identifying truly guilty parties. In practice, it’s nearly impossible, although government being what it is, advocates for reparations are likely to simply demand that all the taxpayers foot the bill to pay one identifiable interest group, whether or not the taxpayers involved can be shown to have any direct involvement in the perpetuation or spread of slavery.

Ultimately, the issue shouldn’t even be regarded as a complicated one. If “reparations” are truly that, then they can only be based on handing over stolen property from the thief to the victim (or their heirs). So long as these specific individuals are not identified, then the policy being discussed has nothing to do with reparations. It’s just a wealth redistribution scheme.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Hi2FmE Tyler Durden

2 Pilots Killed As Chinese Navy Fighter Jet Crashes In South China Sea

A Chinese navy fighter jet crashed Tuesday during a training mission in the southern island province of Hainan, situated in the South China Sea, which killed both pilots, according to the People’s Liberation Army-Navy.

The crash took place in Ledong County in the mountainous and heavily forested tropical province. The cause of the crash was under investigation.

No casualties were reported on the ground, and the Navy didn’t say in a statement published on Weibo what type of plane was involved.

Situated in the South China Sea, Hainan has multiple military installations that have been built up amid China’s flexing of its muscular might in the Pacific, according to the AP.

The incident follows another similar incident in January 2018, when at least 12 crew members died after a PLA Air Force plane, believed to be an electronic reconnaissance aircraft, crashed in Guizhou in the southwest of the country. Between 2016 and 2017, there were at least three accidents involving the Navy’s J-15 “Flying Sharks,” which have been attributed to an ongoing shortage of qualified pilots, according to the South China Morning Post.

Map

According to several military commentators, China’s military expansion program, which includes the building of new aircraft carriers and purchase of new warplanes, has resulted in a serious shortage of qualified pilots. To fill the vacancies, the Chinese military has started a major recruitment drive while bolstering training programs for pilots.

Speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing legislative meeting in Beijing Feng Wei, a PLA pilot from the Western Theatre, said the military was currently intensifying its pilots’ training as increasing amounts of new equipment entered service.

“Personnel quality is the key to everything,” he added.

Video of the crash circulated on Chinese-language social media.

Crash

China

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HzDlYC Tyler Durden

Pence Brokering Deal With GOP To Defeat Democrats On Border Wall

Vice President Mike Pence is in discussions with a group of GOP senators on a deal that could lead to the defeat of a Democratic resolution to overturn President Trump’s emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern US border, according to The Hill.  

The deal? If the GOP defeats the Democratic legislation, Trump will formally agree to rein in his power to declare future national emergencies. 

Killing the resolution on the Republican-controlled Senate floor would spare the president a major embarrassment and avoid him having to issue the first veto of his presidency. 

But there is some skepticism among GOP senators whether Trump will actually go through with it. And the plan is hurt by the fact that a bill to curb the president’s power to declare national emergencies won’t come to the Senate floor until after the March recess. –The Hill

On Thursday, Pence and a group of Republicans met to discuss the legislation to curb Trump’s power. In attendance were Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) – who is sponsoring the proposed legislation, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Rob Portman (R-OH) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN). 

According to Lee’s measure, national emergency declarations would require a Congressional vote to extend beyond 30 days. In order for it to work, Senate Republicans say Trump would have to make a scout’s honor promise to sign Lee’s bill – something the president has yet to agree to do. 

Meanwhile, at least two Republicans say they will continue to support the Democratic resolution to reject the National Emergency; constitutionalist Senator Rand Paul and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. 

“No, I think Congress should allocate the money and that’s a very strong belief. It’s also in the Constitution,” said Paul. 

Among the half-dozen or so other Republicans who are thought to support the Democratic resolution are Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) – both of whom say they’ve made up their minds but have yet to announce their decisions. 

“Other potential defectors include Portman, Toomey, Alexander and Sens. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.),” according to The Hill. 

Tillis, on the other hand, told colleagues during a Tuesday lunch that while he thought Trump was within his power to declare a national emergency for $3.6 billion in additional wall funding, and he disagrees with the use of that power, he might be willing to change his mind and support the Pence proposal if Trump offers assurances that he would support future reform of the National Emergencies Act of 1976. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) plans to vote against the Democratic disapproval resolution – and has predicted that it will get between 50 and 60 votes, which is enough to pass with a simple majority. 

“It will probably get over 50 but less than 60, I think,” said Graham. 

Republicans control 53 seats so the disapproval resolution will pass if four or more Republicans vote for it. All Democrats are expected to support it.  

Paul, who has announced his support for the resolution, said the White House and GOP leaders are stepping up their pressure effort to keep Republicans in line. 

“They’re being beaten upright, so if you see anybody that’s got blood dripping out of their ear, they may be changing,” Paul joked. 

He said there is still “a significant number” of Republicans willing to vote for the disapproval resolution but added “there are a lot of people being bruised and beleaguered. We’ll see.” –The Hill

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Democratic disapproval resolution is the only matter expected to go to vote on Thursday. 

“Right now, that’s the only thing that’s going to be voted on,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) after a lunchtime meeting with colleagues. 

Because Lee wouldn’t be able to get his bill to the floor before the March recess – scheduled to begin Friday, any plan to trade votes on Thursday’s resolution will need to wait a few weeks. 

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“Times Have Changed”: Alabama Schools Training Staff To Treat Opioid Overdoses

Alabama educators are embarking on a new program to treat overdosing students amid the nation’s growing opioid epidemic, according to the BBC.

“Times have changed. Kids are getting things out of their parents’ cabinets. They don’t have to go out on the street, and they don’t know what they are taking,” says Shelby County school nursing supervisor Jan Cibulski. 

The new program will include teachers, coaches and administrators as opposed to only school nurses. 

Until the start of the year, the state – like most others – recommended school nurses administer the treatment, but now they are widening the training to other teaching staff, as the opioid epidemic spirals nationwide.

The medication – naloxone – is being included in schools’ standard emergency kits, alongside defibrillators and allergy-remedying Epipens.

For US teaching staff, the training could become another standard procedure, like shooting drills. Florida is considering a similar initiative. –BBC

The first training courses – held at a Career Technical Educational Center (CTEC) high school in Alabama’s Shelby County – will include an instructional video and life-sized dummies. 

If a student appears to be overdosing, administrators are instructed to call 911 and perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, before pressing an Evzio auto-injector the size of a cigarette packet against the patient’s outer thigh through their clothes for five seconds. 

It takes approximately one minute for the active ingredient – naloxone hydrochloride (a.k.a. Narcan) – to bind to opioid receptors in the brain – preventing the brain from flooding with dopamine. 

The pocket-sized injector is pressed against the patient’s leg like a rubber stamp (via BBC)

Evzio.com

Once a student has been injected with Evzio, educators are trained to expect them to pop up, confused and agitated. 

How big is the problem?

While no child has officially overdosed in an Alabama school, administrators say it’s only a matter of time. In 2015 the state prescribed the most opioids for pain relief according to the CDC – while the BBC reports that the state is said to have more opioid prescriptions than people. 

The non-mandatory scheme is available to every high school in the state. The costs are covered by a grant via the state’s department of public health.

Jennifer Ventress – nurse administrator for the state’s department of education – says there has been a “tremendous interest”, and around 21 local education agencies have signed up since the scheme was first unveiled in January.

If funding can be secured, it will be offered to elementary schools, too.

Amy Mason, a principal at Madison County Elementary School in Gurley, a tiny town in the state’s north, says she would definitely be interested. Her school takes pupils aged up to 13.

She had a wake-up call in 2015, when some of the older students were rushed to hospital after taking prescription drugs in the classroom. They did not overdose and the drug – Lyrica – was not classed as an opioid, but she says it was a career first for her and a sign of a widening problem. “The more training, the better it is for all involved,” she says. –BBC

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said that he was initially hesitant to back the training program, as he worried it would lead to more drug use. 

“I was talking to one of the doctors about that, and he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I can’t help them if they’re dead'” said Marshall in an interview with WAAY-TV. “That was an eye-opener for me.”

“We still use terminology about letting people hit the bottom, we have to change that. We don’t have the luxury of waiting. And there may be many bottoms, not just one,” said Selina Mason – a board member with drug awareness group Not One More Alabama. 

As the mother of a son with addiction problems, Mason said “I carry naloxone in my backpack. If a loved one is an opioid addict, you need to have it in your home, in your car, in your purse.” 

The US surgeon general gave the same advice last year, instructing at-risk Americans of carrying naloxone. The FDA is also considering a similar recommendation. 

Naloxone also comes as a nasal spray

Florida, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would supply naloxone to schools. Introduced by state lawmaker Jason Pizzo (D), the bill remains under consideration. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VTEPkq Tyler Durden

The Market Knows, But Isn’t Talking

Submitted by Nicholas Colas of DataTrek Research

Optimism that the US and China will come to a “good” (growth-enabling) trade deal is virtually invisible across every capital market save US equities. Strange, but the data is clear enough on that point. Fed Funds Futures don’t believe such a deal is coming; nor does the Treasury yield curve. In the end, however, President Trump knows a strong 2020 US economy helps his reelection chances. And markets (equity markets, at least) know that he knows that.

* * *

“Prices lead fundamentals” is as close to a guiding principal as we have at DataTrek. Capital markets aren’t perfect indicators of the future, but ignoring their signals is a sure path to getting run over. We are reminded of Churchill’s quip about democracy: “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Market prices are horrible predictors, except for “all the other forms” one might use.

Make no mistake: US equity prices don’t feel great as we make the sprint to the end of Q1 2019. For example:

  • The S&P 500 tried to get through 2800 earlier this month, but failed and now sits at 2743.

  • While we are not technicians by training or predilection, it is easy enough to see that the S&P topped out at 2800 no less than 3 other times in the recent past: October 16/17, November 7/8, and December 3 (falling short by 9 points, but close enough). Failing a 4th time earlier this month is a bad sign.

  • Last week’s 2.2% decline was the first real pullback of 2019, stoking our fears that much of 2019’s rally was just reversion to the mean after late 2018’s tax loss selling.

  • One year returns for the S&P 500 are basically zero (0.15%), which is better than EAFE non-US developed economy or Emerging Market equities (-9.9%/-14.5%) but still disappointing given last year’s +20% earnings growth and largely complacent rate environment.

When you cast an eye to near-future fundamentals and other market indicators, that uninspiring price action looks pretty well synced up with reality:

  • Not to be a broken record on the topic, but analysts’ earnings estimates continue to decline for 2019, heavily focused on the first half. Q1 estimates now forecast a 3.4% decline to last year and Q2 numbers will likely be negative in another week or two. FactSet is showing analysts’ consensus of just 0.2% growth there.

  • The latest FactSet Earnings Insight report out on Friday (link below) shows the source of the worst weakness in corporate earnings: S&P 500 companies with +50% of their revenues from non-US sources. Analysts who follow these firms expect to see 11.4% declines in earnings for Q1 2019 versus that 3.4% mean decline from the prior point. Credit a stronger dollar and softer international markets.

  • Over the last month Fed Funds Futures have zeroed in on their default scenario: the US central bank will be forced to hold off on raising rates through at least January 2020 because of weak US and global growth. Odds that the Fed will have to cut rates by then are now 25%, the same as flipping heads twice in a row. Entirely possible, in other words.

  • The difference between 2 and 10 year Treasuries has remained eerily quiet since December, banging around between 11 and 21 basis points. You know the drill here. Declining numbers (especially below 50 basis points) are the countdown clock to recession; rising numbers signal future economic growth. We haven’t seen this indicator hover just above zero so long since 1999, which is obviously not a positive sign.

“Ah, but once the US and China sign a trade deal global growth will reaccelerate, 2020 will be better, and all will be forgiven” is the strongest bull case at the moment. And that’s fair enough, as far as it goes. The hard thing about that logic is that it is only really visible in US equities. A stronger dollar is hurting Emerging Markets and the European economy is doing worse than anticipated, so any optimism about a “Trade Deal Rebound” is clouded by these other factors. And that rosy trade deal scenario is entirely missing from both bond and Fed Funds Futures markets, as noted above.

In the end, the US equity market’s optimism comes down to one point: President Trump would like to be re-elected and he knows a strong US economy would be immensely helpful to achieve that goal. US-China trade is the only lever at his disposal substantial enough to move the needle now that the House is in Democratic hands. Further, time is running short to assure that a resolution will filter through to the real economy and boost American labor markets/consumer confidence into Election Day 2020.

Source: FactSet

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