Turkey has another trick up its sleeve to up the ante in its current showdown with Washington over blocked F-35 transfers resulting from Ankara’s controversial S-400 deal with Russia.
Erdogan spoke publicly about increasingly strained ties with the US for the first time in almost two weeks Friday. Addressing a ruling AK Party assembly, he said Turkey might have to “reconsider” existing orders for 100 Boeing aircraft, worth $10 billion.
“Even if we’re not getting F-35s, we are buying 100 advanced Boeing aircrafts, the agreement is signed…” Erdogan was quoted as saying by Reuters.
“We are good customers. But if our conflict continues, we will have to reconsider this issue,”he added.
Prior photo President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a 2018 signing ceremony for a new order with Boeing VP Raymond Conner in New York. Image source: IHA
Starting in 2013, Turkish Airlines – the country’s national carrier – announced plans to purchase 75 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft; and in 2018 this was further expanded to include 25 additional Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners, with an expected delivery date by 2023.
The Turkish government owns 49% of Turkish Airlines. Erdogan’s comments came in the context of addressing the F-35 issue, orders of which the US announced last week it would block over newly received S-400 components flown into NATO member Turkey by the Russian military.
“Are you not giving us the F-35s? Okay, then excuse us but we will once again have to take measures on that matter as well and we will turn elsewhere,” Erdogan said in his comments. Previously he had called Washington’s move to blocked the Lockheed F-35 transfer “theft”.
Erdogan said Turkey could reconsider its purchase of Boeing aircraft from the US. Image source: Anadolu Agency
“Even if we’re not getting F-35s, we are buying 100 advanced Boeing aircrafts, the agreement is signed… At the moment, one of the Boeing planes has arrived and we are making the payments, we are good customers,” he said.
“But, if things continue like this, we will have to reconsider this,” he threatened.
Earlier this month Russian defense giant Rostec offered to supply its Su-35 jets to Turkey should Ankara request them; however Turkish officials called the offer “premature” and said there were no new negotiations with Moscow related to jets.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ycNAwg Tyler Durden
Fifteen years and three networks ago, the Veronica Mars theme song—the Dandy Warhols’ “We Used To Be Friends“—referred to the show’s running class-warfare story of a Nancy Drew-ish girl exiled from her high school’s in-group. Now, as the show enters its long-delayed fourth season, the new version (the Warhols have been dumped for Chrissie Hynde) feels more like a greeting to an old pal. Veronica is back, as prickly, vengeful and noirish as ever, and television—or at least streaming services—is a more wonderfully crime-ridden place for it.
In many ways, the now-30ish Veronica (Kristen Bell, these days better known as the slatternly lost soul of NBC’s The Good Place) hasn’t changed. She’s still working at the private detective agency owned by her dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni). Her boyfriend is still the volcanic Logan (Jason Dohring).
And many of Veronica’s cases are still generated by the perpetual warfare between avaricious developers and a grimy underclass that, together, seem to comprise the entire population of Neptune, the little Southern California beach town where she lives. (The first line of the first season of Veronica Mars was her narration: “Welcome to Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.”)
But looking more closely, things are fraying around the edges. Keith Mars has increasingly common memory failures that may be the result of a car crash or, worse yet, the onset of dementia. Logan is now a naval intelligence officer frequently called off on clandestine missions whose long absences dismay him but, worrisomely, not Veronica, whose work on divorce cases has soured her on marriage.
That’s not the only hard spot in her heart. The cynicism Veronica developed at her expulsion from (and ultimately drugging and rape by) her old A-list pals back in high-school has developed into an intense bitterness toward everything and everybody in town. “Neptune didn’t need another private investigator,” she reflects. “It needed an enema.”
Her attitude is hardly helped when the town is wracked by a series of lethal bombings at the height of spring break, the apex of its tourist season. Her firm is immediately hired by an Arab-American congressman who suspects he may have been the chief intended target—and not for reasons of bigotry or politics, but sexual blackmail.
The Mars pursuit of the killer is complicated, though, by other investigators. Among them are a group of true-crime groupies who call themselves Murderheads, led by a bughouse pizza deliveryman (Patton Oswalt, The King Of Queens), who seem interested in altering the evidence to validate their own conspiracy theories.
Even more troublesome: A Mexican cartel godfather whose nephew was killed has dispatched a dreamily ontological buttonman (Clifton Collins Jr., Westworld) to identify the killer and bring back his head, a mission made more circuitous by the gangbanger’s recurrent musing about the undercurrent of determinism in old Elvis Presley records. “There’s no such thing as free will,” he argues to a fellow assassin as “In the Ghetto” echoes from the car radio. “Why are we here? You? Me? The asshole in the trunk?” It’s unclear whether the screams of the kidnap victim on his way to a desert grave suggest agreement or dissent.
The collision of the three investigations amid the continuing wave of bombs produces a satisfying number of plot twists and a startling degree of gory violence—though, as in the original series, Veronica Mars includes a few too many characters and subplots for its own good. (I once attended a press event for the original series where a TV critic began his question by saying, “Veronica Mars is my favorite show where I never know what’s going on…”)
But the plotting has always been secondary in this show. The wit and affection between Veronica and her father, contrasting with their jagged suspicion of the rest of the world, is an arresting experience, particularly with Bell’s singular ability to flash between bleak despair and sunburst joy.
And the writers (led by series creator Rob Thomas and including former basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar, better known for his work on the other side of the camera) have taken full advantage of the fact that Veronica is not 17 but 30, and more importantly is no longer working on a teenybopper network like The CW. Watching Veronica Mars practically requires one device set to the Urban Dictionary, to decipher expressions like WTC or LSC (that one, short for “long swinging cock,” seems to be an invention of the writers’ room) and another to a scatological bartender’s guide for recipes to drinks like Sex on My Face, Cocksucking Cowboy, and Bend Over Shirley.
Even the soundtrack is stuffed with ironic jokes—when’s the last time you heard a Captain and Tennille record on a TV show? And not the one about rodent sex, either.
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Who imagined that in the climactic scene of the blockbuster RussiaGate fantasy, when the curtain was ripped away, the Wizard at the controls would turn out to be… Captain Queeg! We need not rehash all the depressing particulars of Robert Mueller’s six-hour public humiliation in two House committee hearings in order to reach a set of conclusions about the conduct of his rogue investigation and the perfidious report issued in his name.
One is that Robert Mueller could not have run his investigation. There is even reason to question that he was briefed on the day-to-day developments by the people who did run it — since, for instance, he apparently never heard the phrase “Fusion GPS,” that is, the swarm of flying monkeys who delivered the whole shebang’s predicate documents known as the Steele Dossier simultaneously to the FBI, The Washington Post, and The New York Times beginning in 2016. By his testimony Wednesday, Mr. Mueller gives new meaning to the term useful idiot.
The two-year inquisition was run by attorneys Andrew Weissmann and Jeanie Rhee, two arch Hillary Clinton partisans (the latter a lawyer for the Clinton Foundation), leading now to the conclusion that the Mueller Investigation itself was no less a Clinton operation than the Steele Dossier. I wonder if it will become known whether Mrs. Clinton herself was in regular communication with Weissmann and Rhee during these years, or who were the intermediaries between them. Surely federal attorney John Durham has the mojo to seize phone records of the Mueller Team and find out exactly who was checking in with whom.
I, for one, even doubt that the lingering assertion of Russian “interference” in the 2016 election — taken as dictum by too many dupes — has any merit at all. Rather it was just a foggy byproduct of the mighty gaslighting effort by experienced Intel Community specialists working the zealously biased and credulous news media into a lather of bad faith. All of the Russians and “Russian agents” lassoed into narrative appear to have professional connections to either the CIA, the FBI, the US State department, or Mrs. Clinton’s various networks of myrmidons in the DNC, the Obama administration, and Fusion GPS. These relationships were all sedulously ignored by the Special Counsel’s office — and now they can’t be.
Hence, it is easy to imagine that Attorney General Barr and his lead investigator, Mr. Dunham, must now entertain the unappetizing prospect of examining the roles of Mrs. Clinton and the foregoing cast of characters in this melodrama for the purpose of discovering whether this was actually the seditious conspiracy that it appears to have been — with rather horrific possible consequences of grave charges and severe punishments.
In all this long and excruciating public playing-out of dark schemes, Mr. Trump, first candidate and now president, seems to have acted as little more than a tackling dummy for the Mueller Team and its backstage confederates. He tweeted childishly about the deeply partisan composition of the Mueller Team when he should have mounted a forceful legal opposition to the effrontery of their selection in the first place.
It’s interesting to follow the pronouncements of the bit-players in this spectacle, now that Mr. Mueller has inadvertently destroyed the basis of the sacred narrative. Rep. Jerold Nadler turned up yakking with Anderson Cooper on CNN last night, looking every inch like the Mayor of Munchkin Land, bloviating against the supposed imminent Russian takeover of America (read: by witches) and the now-receding fool’s errand of impeachment, which would only further expose the criminal culpability of his own Democratic Party in this sordid misadventure. Mr. Cooper looked deeply pained by the chore, and yet his own professional credibility is on the line after two years of allowing himself to be played like a flugelhorn by the folks who matter in this country, and he contested nothing in Mr. Nadler’s mendacious pratings.
And now a fretful silence will descend around this colossal goddamned mess as the momentum of history shifts against the perpetrators of it, and the true machinery of American justice is brought to bear upon them. The playing-out of Act Three will probably coincide with epic global financial disorder in the months ahead, further obscuring what people and nations can do to arrest the collapse of Modernity and its sidekick Human Progress.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LJ5PCd Tyler Durden
Evidence from the scene of the disastrous drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in Houston on January 28 seems to contradict the official police version of what happened that day, according to an investigation commissioned by the couple’s relatives. The no-knock raid at 7815 Harding Street, which was based on a fraudulent warrant application alleging that heroin was being sold at the house, discovered no evidence of drug dealing.
The Houston Police Department (HPD) said narcotics officers shot 58-year-old Rhogena Nicholas because she tried to take a shotgun from a wounded cop. But after inspecting the house for four days, a forensic expert hired by her family concluded that she “was fatally struck by a bullet from a weapon fired outside the Harding Street Home by a person shooting from a position where the shooter could not have seen Ms. Nicholas at the time she was fatally shot.”
Mike Maloney, a retired supervisory special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, also found that “an unidentified person held a weapon against the inner dining room wall and fired 2 shots into [it] towards the kitchen.” Those two shots may correspond to gunfire recorded on a neighbor’s cellphone video at 5:02 p.m., 47 minutes after Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the narcotics officers arrived at the house.
Acevedo said the first officer through the door broke into the house “shortly before 5 o’clock,” or “about 4:30,” and was “charged immediately by a very large pit bull,” which he killed with a shotgun. Yet Maloney found that the dog was killed near the dining room, 15 feet from the front door.
After the shotgun blast, Acevedo said, Nicholas’ 59-year-old husband, Dennis Tuttle, “came from around the back” and “opened fire” with a .357 Magnum revolver. Police returned fire, and the shootout, during which four officers were struck by bullets, was over in a matter of minutes.
In the cellphone video, which was shot outside the house and was also obtained by state police investigating the incident, an officer can be heard saying “two suspects down” at 5:05 p.m. Nicholas and Tuttle were both pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. Yet the amplified voice of a SWAT officer, ostensibly negotiating with the “suspects,” can be heard on the cellphone video at 6:09 p.m. “Exit the front door with nothing in your hands and listen to the voice instructions,” he says. “I guarantee that no one will hurt you.”
Those revelations are described in a petition filed yesterday in Harris County Probate Court by Michael Doyle, an attorney who represents Nicholas’ mother and brother. Doyle is seeking to depose Capt. Paul Follis, who was in charge of the HPD Narcotics Division at the time of the raid, and Lt. Marsha Todd, another supervisor, along with a designated representative of the city, in preparation for potential litigation. “Given the indications that the City’s story does not line up with the physical facts at the Harding Street Home,” the petition says, “the Nicholas Family believes the Court has more than sufficient basis to order the depositions requested to investigate the wrongful death, civil rights, and other claims arising from the Harding Street Incident.”
Among other things, Doyle wants to ask Follis and Todd about the “supervision and monitoring” of warrant applications and the use of confidential informants. Those are crucial issues in this case, since the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas seems to have been based on a “controlled buy” of “black-tar heroin” that never happened, carried out by a C.I. who does not exist.
According to Acevedo, Officer Gerald Goines lied when he applied for the warrant, and police have been unable to identify the supposed C.I. “The identity of CI’s providing specific information about criminal activities…is required to be documented and readily accessible to police managers,” the petition says. “HPD’s managers knew from the beginning that there was no documented CI significant meeting record in its files supporting the assault on the Harding Street Home.” Doyle notes that oversight practices that “allow officers such as Gerald Goines to simply make up CI’s, or fabricate criminal activity used to justify warrants, would violate the Fourth Amendment.”
Goines had a history of questionable testimony and affidavits. In February, KHOU, the CBS station in Houston, looked at 109 cases in which he was involved. “In every one of those cases in which he claimed confidential informants observed guns inside,” it reported, “no weapons were ever recovered, according to evidence logs Goines filed with the court.” In the Harding Street case, Goines likewise said his C.I. had seen a gun, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, that was never found. The district attorney’s office has dismissed a bunch of pending cases that Goines handled and is reviewing 1,400 more, along with 800 cases involving Officer Steven Bryant, whom Goines cited in his affidavit as verifying that the “brown powder substance” supposedly purchased from Tuttle was black-tar heroin.
The HPD completed its investigation of the raid in mid-May and handed over its findings to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which is conducting its own investigation. The FBI is also looking into the raid, and on Wednesday two officers who were involved in the early stages of the case testified before a federal grand jury. Those officers, according to Acevedo, responded to a January 8 call in which a woman reported that her daughter was using drugs inside the Harding Street house and described Tuttle and Nicholas as armed and dangerous drug dealers—a description contradicted by their neighbors, who told local news outlets they had never seen any suspicious activity at the house. Acevedo said the call led to the investigation in which Goines, who retired in March and may face criminal charges, fabricated evidence to justify the deadly raid.
According to the petition, Tuttle and Nicholas were taking “an afternoon nap” when the officers broke into their home and killed them. “The City deliberately chose to push out a worldwide story about the Harding Street Incident, based on the flimsiest grounds and even as it was simultaneously compiling more and more evidence internally that undercut its chosen narrative,” the petition says. Acevedo “described a ferocious assault by both Rhogena and her husband on a ‘hero,’ Gerald Goines, while he led Narcotics Squad 15 into a well-known ‘drug house’…Even while police command staff were insisting that the black tar heroin ‘drug house’ allegation justifying Drug Squad 15’s assault on the Harding Street Home was true, HPD was simultaneously confirming internally that it was false.”
The petition says HPD never contacted Nicholas’ family for information about her and her husband after the raid, refused set the record straight after the initial portrayal of the couple was contradicted, and has denied them access to important evidence and records. “Our family’s search for the truth of what happened to Rhogena continues,” her brother, John Nicholas, said in a press release. “We’re pursuing this on our own because the City of Houston is now fighting us. This followed silence from the police chief and mayor. Through our independent investigation, the family is committed to helping protect the community and other families from continuing to face terrible ordeals like this one.”
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Evidence from the scene of the disastrous drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in Houston on January 28 seems to contradict the official police version of what happened that day, according to an investigation commissioned by the couple’s relatives. The no-knock raid at 7815 Harding Street, which was based on a fraudulent warrant application alleging that heroin was being sold at the house, discovered no evidence of drug dealing.
The Houston Police Department (HPD) said narcotics officers shot 58-year-old Rhogena Nicholas because she tried to take a shotgun from a wounded cop. But after inspecting the house for four days, a forensic expert hired by her family concluded that she “was fatally struck by a bullet from a weapon fired outside the Harding Street Home by a person shooting from a position where the shooter could not have seen Ms. Nicholas at the time she was fatally shot.”
Mike Maloney, a retired supervisory special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, also found that “an unidentified person held a weapon against the inner dining room wall and fired 2 shots into [it] towards the kitchen.” Those two shots may correspond to gunfire recorded on a neighbor’s cellphone video at 5:02 p.m., 47 minutes after Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the narcotics officers arrived at the house.
Acevedo said the first officer through the door broke into the house “shortly before 5 o’clock,” or “about 4:30,” and was “charged immediately by a very large pit bull,” which he killed with a shotgun. Yet Maloney found that the dog was killed near the dining room, 15 feet from the front door.
After the shotgun blast, Acevedo said, Nicholas’ 59-year-old husband, Dennis Tuttle, “came from around the back” and “opened fire” with a .357 Magnum revolver. Police returned fire, and the shootout, during which four officers were struck by bullets, was over in a matter of minutes.
In the cellphone video, which was shot outside the house and was also obtained by state police investigating the incident, an officer can be heard saying “two suspects down” at 5:05 p.m. Nicholas and Tuttle were both pronounced dead at 5:15 p.m. Yet the amplified voice of a SWAT officer, ostensibly negotiating with the “suspects,” can be heard on the cellphone video at 6:09 p.m. “Exit the front door with nothing in your hands and listen to the voice instructions,” he says. “I guarantee that no one will hurt you.”
Those revelations are described in a petition filed yesterday in Harris County Probate Court by Michael Doyle, an attorney who represents Nicholas’ mother and brother. Doyle is seeking to depose Capt. Paul Follis, who was in charge of the HPD Narcotics Division at the time of the raid, and Lt. Marsha Todd, another supervisor, along with a designated representative of the city, in preparation for potential litigation. “Given the indications that the City’s story does not line up with the physical facts at the Harding Street Home,” the petition says, “the Nicholas Family believes the Court has more than sufficient basis to order the depositions requested to investigate the wrongful death, civil rights, and other claims arising from the Harding Street Incident.”
Among other things, Doyle wants to ask Follis and Todd about the “supervision and monitoring” of warrant applications and the use of confidential informants. Those are crucial issues in this case, since the raid that killed Tuttle and Nicholas seems to have been based on a “controlled buy” of “black-tar heroin” that never happened, carried out by a C.I. who does not exist.
According to Acevedo, Officer Gerald Goines lied when he applied for the warrant, and police have been unable to identify the supposed C.I. “The identity of CI’s providing specific information about criminal activities…is required to be documented and readily accessible to police managers,” the petition says. “HPD’s managers knew from the beginning that there was no documented CI significant meeting record in its files supporting the assault on the Harding Street Home.” Doyle notes that oversight practices that “allow officers such as Gerald Goines to simply make up CI’s, or fabricate criminal activity used to justify warrants, would violate the Fourth Amendment.”
Goines had a history of questionable testimony and affidavits. In February, KHOU, the CBS station in Houston, looked at 109 cases in which he was involved. “In every one of those cases in which he claimed confidential informants observed guns inside,” it reported, “no weapons were ever recovered, according to evidence logs Goines filed with the court.” In the Harding Street case, Goines likewise said his C.I. had seen a gun, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, that was never found. The district attorney’s office has dismissed a bunch of pending cases that Goines handled and is reviewing 1,400 more, along with 800 cases involving Officer Steven Bryant, whom Goines cited in his affidavit as verifying that the substance supposedly purchased from Tuttle was black-tar heroin.
The HPD completed its investigation of the raid in mid-May and handed over its findings to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, which is conducting its own investigation. The FBI is also looking into the raid, and on Wednesday two officers who were involved in the early stages of the case testified before a federal grand jury. Those officers, according to Acevedo, responded to a January 8 call in which a woman reported that her daughter was using drugs inside the Harding Street house and described Tuttle and Nicholas as armed and dangerous drug dealers—a description contradicted by their neighbors, who told local news outlets they had never seen any suspicious activity at the house. Acevedo said the call led to the investigation in which Goines, who retired in March and may face criminal charges, fabricated evidence to justify the deadly raid.
According to the petition, Tuttle and Nicholas were taking “an afternoon nap” when the officers broke into their home and killed them. “The City deliberately chose to push out a worldwide story about the Harding Street Incident, based on the flimsiest grounds and even as it was simultaneously compiling more and more evidence internally that undercut its chosen narrative,” the petition says. Acevedo “described a ferocious assault by both Rhogena and her husband on a ‘hero,’ Gerald Goines, while he led Narcotics Squad 15 into a well-known ‘drug house’…Even while police command staff were insisting that the black tar heroin ‘drug house’ allegation justifying Drug Squad 15’s assault on the Harding Street Home was true, HPD was simultaneously confirming internally that it was false.”
The petition says HPD never contacted Nicholas’ family for information about her and her husband after the raid, refused set the record straight after the initial portrayal of the couple was contradicted, and has denied them access to important evidence and records. “Our family’s search for the truth of what happened to Rhogena continues,” her brother, John Nicholas, said in a press release. “We’re pursuing this on our own because the City of Houston is now fighting us. This followed silence from the police chief and mayor. Through our independent investigation, the family is committed to helping protect the community and other families from continuing to face terrible ordeals like this one.”
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It’s tough being an active manager – i.e., an actual human in the world of equity investing – these days: not a week seems to go by without investors pulling money out of actively managed funds and redepositing it into much better performing, and vastly cheaper passive funds, and this week was no exception. According to EPFR, this week saw another $1.3 billion in ETF inflows while mutual funds saw another $8.3 billion redeemed for a total of $7.1 billion in equity outflows (not even the US was spared with $4.4BN in outflows), a relentless trend observed since the Q4 2018 crash, and still a paradox in light of the broader S&P melt up.
And, as BofA’s Michael Hartnett notes, a simple extrapolation of recent trends suggests that the sun is setting not only for the “2 and 20” hedge fund crowd, but virtually every aspect of active management: the past 10 years have seen a record $2.3 trillion allocated to passive equity, while $2.6 trillion flowed out of active equity. This means that a historic inversion is expected to take place in August 2022, or in just over three years time – that’s when the AUM of passive equity funds will surpass active equity.
Whether August 2022 is the precise moment when passive surpasses active is debatable, but the trend is clear: as investors continue to pull cash out of equities, they reallocate modestly to passive strategies, while shifting the bulk of their holdings to yield and other fixed income strategist. Indeed, in the past 10 years, some $2.3 trillion has flowed into bonds, and a measly $0.3 trillion into stocks.
Some good news for all those equity managers who are reading the writing on the wall: before an algo or robot takes your job, you may still have a future in the business if you shift from equity to debt; to wit, there have been record bond fund inflows in 2019…
… coinciding with record high bond prices, and central banks once again pushing the narrative of zero/negative rates everywhere.
The transformation of the financial services industry from a human to a robot-led one aside, the question of how stocks can keep rising in the face of these massive outflows from stocks (and to bonds), once again emerges, although as BofA’s CIO Michael Hartnett writes, the puzzle of record equity prices and sustained equity outflows is solved by
US corporate Great Rotation…since 2013 US corporate debt issuance = $10.5tn, stock buybacks = $4.2tn (on pace for record $823bn in 2019);
number of listed US stocks down from 8090 to 4397 past two decades, in sharp contrast to Europe, China & RoW.
And here an interesting observation – if not so much for the human readers out there, who should be considering career outside of finance, as for the robots – while US equities are at all-time highs, the MSCI World ex-US index is still 13% below all-time high, which was hit in 2007. And here, a striking observation from BofA: “If the S&P500 had simply risen in line with global equities since 2009 low it would today be 1433 not above 3000.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YlV4b4 Tyler Durden
It’s a development that has long been evident in continental Europe, and that has now arrived on the shores of the US and UK. It is the somewhat slow but very certain dissolution of long-existing political parties, organizations and groups. That’s what I was seeing during the Robert Mueller clown horror show on Wednesday.
Mueller was not just the Democratic Party’s last hope, he was their identity. He was the anti-Trump. Well, he no longer is, he is not fit to play that role anymore. And there is nobody to take it over who is not going to be highly contested by at least some parts of the party. In other words: it’s falling apart.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s a natural process, parties change as conditions do and if they don’t do it fast enough they disappear. Look at the candidates the Dems have. Can anyone imagine the party, post-Mueller, uniting behind Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris? And then for one of them to beat Donald Trump in 2020?
I was just watching a little clip from Sean Hannity, doing what Trump did last week, which is going after the Squad. Who he said are anti-Israel socialists and, most importantly, the de facto leaders of the party, not Nancy Pelosi. That is a follow-up consequence of Mueller’s tragic defeat, the right can now go on the chase. The Squad is the face of the Dems because Trump and Hannity have made them that.
The upcoming Horowitz and Durham reports on their respective probes into “meddling into the meddling” will target many people in the Democratic Party, US intelligence services, and the media. In that order. Can the Dems survive such a thing? It’s hard to see.
There’s Bernie and the Squad, the declared socialists, who will never be accepted as leaders by a party so evidently predicated upon support for the arms industry. And they in turn can’t credibly support candidates who do. The Democratic Party will never be socialist, they will have to leave the label behind in order to share that message and remain believable.
But without them, what will be left? Joe Biden, or perhaps Hillary silently waiting in the wings? I don’t see it. Not after Mueller, not after two-three years of gambling all on red anti-Trump. At least the Squad have an identity, got to give them that. Whether it will sell in 2019 America is another thing altogether.
I personally think the term socialist is too tainted, on top of being too misinterpreted, for it to be “electable”, but I also understand there are large swaths of the US population who are in dire straits already with a recession on the horizon, but 2020 seems too soon. And I would ditch the term regardless. It’s like painting a target on your back for Trump and Hannity to aim at.
If you remember the 2016 campaign and the clown parade on stage with the likes of Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush glaring at the headlights, you know that the GOP has issues that are very similar to those of the Dems. But Trump came along.
The Dems have no Trump. They do have a DNC that will stifle any candidate they don’t like (Bernie!), though. Just think what they would have done if Trump had run as a Democrat (crazy, but not that crazy).
The UK’s issues are remarkably similar to those of the US. Only, in their case, the socialists have already taken over the left-wing party (if you can call the Dems left-wing). This has led to absolute stagnation. Tony Blair had moved Labour so far to the right (which he and his Blairites call center, because it sounds so much better), that injecting Jeremy Corbyn as leader was just too fast and furious.
So they labeled Corbyn an anti-semite, the most successful and equally empty smear campaign since Julian Assange was called a rapist. Corbyn never adequately responded, so he couldn’t profile himself and now the Blairites are again calling on him to leave. Oh, and he never gave a direct answer to the question of Brexit yes or no either. Pity. Corbyn’s support among the people is massive, but not in the party.
Which is why it’s now up to Boris Johnson to ‘deliver the will of the people’. And apparently the first thing the people want is 20,000 more policemen. Which were fired by the very party he at the time represented first as first mayor of London and then foreign minister, for goodness sake. His very own Tories closed 600 police stations since 2010 and will have to re-open many now.
Some survey must have told him it polled well. Just like polling was an essential part of pushing through Brexit. There’s a very revealing TV movie that came out 6 months ago called Brexit: The Uncivil War, that makes this very clear. The extent to which campaigns these days rely on data gathering and voter targeting will take a while yet to be understood, but they’re a future that is already here. Wikipedia in its description of the film puts it quite well:
After the opening credits, [Dominic] Cummings rejects an offer in 2015 by UKIP MP Douglas Carswell and political strategist Matthew Elliott to lead the Vote Leave campaign due to his contempt for “Westminister politics”, but accepts when Carswell promises Cummings full control.
The next sequences show Cummings outlining the core strategy on a whiteboard of narrow disciplined messaging delivered via algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools. Cummings rejects an approach by Nigel Farage and Arron Banks of Leave.EU to merge their campaigns, as his data shows Farage is an obstacle to winning an overall majority.
[..] In a eureka moment, Cummings refines the core message to “Take Back Control”, thus positioning Vote Leave as the historical status quo, and Remain as the “change” option. Cummings meets and hires Canadian Zack Massingham, co-founder of AggregateIQ, who offers to build a database using social media tools of [3 million] voters who are not on the UK electoral register but are inclined to vote to leave.
[..] In the final stages, high-profile senior Tory MPs Michael Gove and Boris Johnson join the Vote Leave campaign emphasising the need to “Take Back Control”, while Penny Mordaunt is shown on BBC raising concerns over the accession of Turkey. Gove and Johnson are shown as having some reticence over specific Vote Leave claims (e.g. £350 million for NHS, and 70 million potential Turkish emigrants) but are seen to overcome them.
Dominic Cummings, played in the movie by Benedict Cumberbatch, is an independent political adviser who belongs to no party. But guess what? He was the first adviser Boris Johnson hired after his nomination Wednesday. Cummings didn’t want Nigel Farage as the face of Brexit, because he polled poorly. He wanted Boris, because his numbers were better. Not because he didn’t think Boris was a bumbling fool, he did.
And now Cummings is back to finish the job. Far as I can see, that can only mean one thing: elections, and soon (it’s what Cummings does). A no-deal Brexit was voted down, in the same Parliament Boris Johnson now faces, 3 times, or was it 4? There is going to be a lot of opposition. Boris wants Brexit on October 31, and has practically bet his career on it. But there is going to be a lot of opposition.
He can’t have elections before September, because of the summer recess. So perhaps end of September?! But he has Dominic Cummings and his “algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools”. Without which Brexit would never have been voted in. So if you don’t want Brexit, you better come prepared.
Cummings and his techies weren’t -just- sending out mass mails or that kind of stuff. That’s already arcane. They were sending targeted personalized messages to individual voters, by the millions. Algorithms. AI. Tailor made. If you’re the opposition, and you don’t have those tools, then what do you have exactly?
Already thought before it all happened that it was funny that Boris Johnson’s ascension and Robert Mueller’s downfall were scheduled for the same day. There must be a pattern somewhere.
You can find the movie at HBO or Channel 4, I’m sure. Try this link for Channel 4. Seeing that movie, and thinking about the implications of the technology, the whole notion of Russian meddling becomes arcane as well. We just have no idea.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LJYGBN Tyler Durden
Francisco Erwin Galicia says conditions were so bad while he was in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that he was on the brink of signing deportation papers—even though he’s a U.S. citizen born in Dallas.
Galicia was traveling with his younger brother to a college soccer scouting event when CBP picked him up. On their way to the event, they were stopped at a CBP checkpoint. Galicia told the agents that he was a United States citizen and showed them his Texas ID card, his Social Security card, and his birth certificate.
It wasn’t good enough.
TheDallas Morning News reports that the problem could have stemmed from an old visa that Galicia’s mother obtained for him when he was a minor, which said that he had been born in Mexico. Whatever the case, Galicia wound up in CBP custody for more than three weeks.
His younger brother, who is not a U.S. citizen, self-deported to Mexico, where he could make their family aware of the situation.
Galicia lost 26 pounds during his 23 days in custody, and he says he was not allowed to shower during his time there. He told the News that he was kept in a holding area with 60 other men, where they were forced to sleep on the floors with only aluminum-foil blankets for bedding.
“It was inhumane how they treated us,” Galicia told the News. “It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there.”
CBP agents toldThe New York Times that they had been sounding the alarm for some time about conditions in the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas—where hundreds of migrant children were being held—as well other facilities in the El Paso area, where conditions have been deteriorating.
“Since late May, two contracted doctors working at the Santa Teresa and El Paso stations, where illegal immigrants are held following arrest,walked outwhile on the job because of the conditions,” the WashingtonExaminerreported recently.
CBP was also reportedly holding 900 people at an El Paso facility that was meant to hold only 125. One cell, meant for 12 people, was holding 76. A cell meant for eight people instead held 41, while 155 people were housed in a cell meant for 35.
Galicia was finally released from CPB custody on Tuesday.
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Francisco Erwin Galicia says conditions were so bad while he was in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that he was on the brink of signing deportation papers—even though he’s a U.S. citizen born in Dallas.
Galicia was traveling with his younger brother to a college soccer scouting event when CBP picked him up. On their way to the event, they were stopped at a CBP checkpoint. Galicia told the agents that he was a United States citizen and showed them his Texas ID card, his Social Security card, and his birth certificate.
It wasn’t good enough.
TheDallas Morning News reports that the problem could have stemmed from an old visa that Galicia’s mother obtained for him when he was a minor, which said that he had been born in Mexico. Whatever the case, Galicia wound up in CBP custody for more than three weeks.
His younger brother, who is not a U.S. citizen, self-deported to Mexico, where he could make their family aware of the situation.
Galicia lost 26 pounds during his 23 days in custody, and he says he was not allowed to shower during his time there. He told the News that he was kept in a holding area with 60 other men, where they were forced to sleep on the floors with only aluminum-foil blankets for bedding.
“It was inhumane how they treated us,” Galicia told the News. “It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there.”
CBP agents toldThe New York Times that they had been sounding the alarm for some time about conditions in the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas—where hundreds of migrant children were being held—as well other facilities in the El Paso area, where conditions have been deteriorating.
“Since late May, two contracted doctors working at the Santa Teresa and El Paso stations, where illegal immigrants are held following arrest,walked outwhile on the job because of the conditions,” the WashingtonExaminerreported recently.
CBP was also reportedly holding 900 people at an El Paso facility that was meant to hold only 125. One cell, meant for 12 people, was holding 76. A cell meant for eight people instead held 41, while 155 people were housed in a cell meant for 35.
Galicia was finally released from CPB custody on Tuesday.
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Accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s Gratitude America Ltd. foundation somehow kept getting stock allocations in more than 40 underwritten offerings by Morgan Stanley, according to Barron’s.
Morgan Stanley led all of the offerings in question and was the sole underwriter on a dozen of them. They included IPOs of Roku and secondary offerings from companies like Tribune Media and Go Daddy.
Epstein plead guilty in 2008 to soliciting child prostitutes and recently claimed assets of more than $500 million. Of that, he claimed $113 million in equities. Despite pleading not guilty, he has not been granted bail.
This year, Deutsche Bank dropped Epstein as a client of its private wealth division after he brought his money there in 2013. This followed having his money with JP Morgan Chase for years. But after the Miami Herald ran a series of articles last year about the plea deal Epstein took in 2008, the bank decided to end its relationship with Epstein.
That’s not to say that Deutsche Bank probably couldn’t use the wealth management business back at a time like this. But we digress…
Epstein’s foundation got a cut in numerous deals, including US Foods Holding and Norwegian Cruise Line holdings. Morgan Stanley acted as lead underwriter for both offerings. The foundation also got shares in Chinese delivery company ZTO Express.
Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Epstein’s foundation began in 2017 with just $9 million in assets.
A Deutsche Bank spokesperson said: “Deutsche Bank is closely examining any business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and we are absolutely committed to cooperating with all relevant authorities.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32OD64p Tyler Durden
