Month: July 2019

Robert Mueller’s Testimony Convinced Everyone of Exactly What They Already Believed

Few surprises emerged from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees today, with the combined five hours of hearings proving to be one big exercise in confirmation bias.

Democrats used their questioning of Mueller to highlight his investigation’s discovery of wrongdoing by associates of President Donald Trump. Republicans did their best to emphasize inconsistencies in Mueller’s statements and cast doubt on the competency and integrity of the former FBI director and his investigative team.

Mueller largely gave short, perfunctory “yes” or “no” answers to the questions posed to him. And that’s when he chose to answer questions at all. Mueller repeatedly told the representatives quizzing him that their queries were outside his purview, touched on ongoing investigations, or had already been answered in his report.

Judging by the reaction on Twitter, it was a very disappointing performance:

The one possible bombshell today came from an exchange in the Judiciary Committee hearing between Mueller and Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.). Mueller had answered yes when asked by Lieu if he declined to indict Trump because of an existing Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion stating that a sitting president couldn’t be charged with a crime.

This answer briefly confirmed the notion that Mueller had found evidence of illegal activity committed by the president and was only prevented from indicting him by Justice Department policy.

However, Mueller walked back this answer in his afternoon testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, saying that that OLC opinion prevented him from making any determination, period, of Trump’s culpability in obstructing justice.

“What I wanted to clarify is that we did not make any determination in regard to culpability,” said Mueller in response to a question from Rep. John Ratcliffe (R–Texas).  “We did not start that process.”

These flat or confused responses from Mueller left the elected officials questioning him to do little more than grandstand.

This generally worked to Republicans’ advantage, as their accusations of bias and prosecutorial overreach were met with mild pushback from the Mueller. Democrats’ attempts to get Mueller to state for the cameras all the bad things his report uncovered went over poorly.

In this way, Mueller’s testimony landed in the same way so many scandals and revelations about the Trump administration have, with Democrats just as incensed as ever, and Republicans spinning a narrative of a conspiracy against the president.

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Bill de Blasio Panders To Unions Over Educating Poor Kids

Speaking recently before the country’s largest union, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio came out against the very concept of charter schools.

“I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate,’ our teachers taught us not to. I hate the privatizers, and I want to stop them,” de Blasio said. “Too many Republicans, but also too many Democrats, have been cozy with the charter schools. Let’s be blunt about it: We need to hold our own party accountable, too.”

As head of the nation’s largest school system, de Blasio’s prejudices are also having a direct impact on individual lives. In New York City, 123,000 students out of a public school system of 1.1 million attend charter schools. Unsurprisingly, the mayor’s remarks drew hot fire from the hometown tabloids.

“His anger isn’t aimed at the man in the mirror, who spent $800 million in taxpayer money promising and miserably failing to deliver ‘fast and intense improvement’ in struggling traditional public schools,” snarled the New York Daily News.

The hostility that New York progressives—especially white New York progressives—have against charters is already taking a toll on poor minority kids stuck in failing districts.

The state legislature last month elected not to lift the cap on the number of charters allowed in New York City despite overwhelming demand from parents.

As local political personality and columnist Errol Louis noted, in the 2017-18 school year, about 59 percent of black students attending charters passed the state math test, compared with only 25 percent in regular district schools. The stats for Latino students follow the same pattern.

One charter school in the Bronx recently saw every single one of its eighth-graders earn a perfect score on the state algebra exam, despite being situated in the nation’s poorest congressional district.

Half of kids attending traditional public schools in the same district failed the test.

What used to be a fairly mainstream Democratic idea, championed by the likes of former Pres. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and pre-presidential-campaign Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), has now become something candidates feel like they need to furiously backpedal from. And according to one recent survey, those reformist tendencies are not likely to be seen again from a Democrat any time soon.

De Blasio’s political career has been marked by the extent to which he’s willing to sell out his constituents—in this, case minority kids in failing schools—to advance his own political career. Sadly, that puts him in the mainstream of the modern Democratic Party.

Edited by Mark McDaniel.

Temptation March by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Divider by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

“Pencil, Writing, Close, A.wav” by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

Photo Credits:

Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/Sipa/Newscom

Carter Smith/Polaris/Newscom

Pete Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Rob Bennett/Mayoral Photography Office

Rob Gallbraith/Newscom

Jeff Topping/Polaris/Newscom

Richard Ellis/ZUMA Press/Newscom

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Russia Pledges More Military & Economic Support To Cuba Against “External Threats”

While on a tour of Latin America, and ahead of a BRICS ministerial meeting set for Rio de Janeiro, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Cuba Wednesday, where he pledged continued economic and military support against Cuba’s “external threats”. Talks with Cuban officials also focused heavily on the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, given both countries are staunch allies of President Nicolas Maduro’s government.

“Our policy towards Cuba is that we shall support Cuba’s people not only politically, not only morally, not only by means of developing military technical cooperation but also through encouraging trade and economic projects to help that country’s economy become more resistant to all kinds of external threats,” he said.

FM Lavrov with Cuban diplomat and politician  Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla. Image source: Russian MFA/Foreign Brief

Lavrov met with his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, a month after a Russian warship stopped in Cuba — a mere one hundred miles off the American coast — to build up joint military relations between the two countries. It was at the end of June that the Kalibr missile-armed frigate Admiral Gorshkov entered the port of Havana. 

During that prior exercise Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov grabbed headlines when he slammed US build-up of its weapons systems in Europe by invoking comparisons to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. 

“We could find ourselves in a situation where we have a rocket crisis close not just to the crisis of the 1980s but close to the Caribbean crisis,” Ryabkov had stated at the time while using the standard Russian term for the Cuban missile crisis.

In the days prior to the Wednesday Russian state visit to Cuba, Ryabkov had also called on the international community to free itself from a purely US-controlled international financial system and US dollar dominance. 

“We must protect ourselves from political abuses made with the help of the US dollar and the American banking system,” he said Sunday addressing a ministerial meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Venezuela, according to TASS. “We must turn our dependence in this sphere into independence,” he added.

“Let us be multipolar in the spheres of finance and currency,” he said.

The senior diplomat was specifically addressing US-led sanctions and the tightening economic noose, including a near total oil export blockade, on the Maduro government in Caracas. He also no doubt had in mind the decades long embargo on Cuba which reaches back far into the Cold War.

In April the White House actually increased sanctions on Cuba, including further limiting travel of US citizens to the island and a new cap on remittances “at $1,000 per person every three months” (compared to unlimited remittances allowed for under the Obama administration), among other measures to squeeze the Cuban economy, already severely hurting due to the oil embargo on nearby Venezuela, on which Havana is substantially dependent to meet energy needs.

The Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov weeks ago docked in the port of Havana. Image source: Reuters

The Russian officials’ comments also come after early this year the Maduro regime was stymied in its bid to pull $1.2 billion worth of gold out of the Bank of England, according to a January Bloomberg report. The Bank of England’s (BoE) decision to deny Maduro officials’ withdrawal request was a the height of US coup efforts targeting Maduro.

Specifically top US officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, had lobbied their UK counterparts to help cut off the regime from its overseas assets, as we reported at the time. Washington has further lobbied other international institutions, and especially its Latin American allies, to seize Venezuelan assets and essentially hold them for control of Juan Guaido’s opposition government in exile. 

Deputy FM Ryabkov in his Sunday comments held up the Venezuela situation as an example of “barefaced misappropriation of assets kept at Western banks.”

He described further:

“This is just one of the examples of a wider policy of deliberate instigation of crises to change government, to replace legitimately elected politician with American stooges.”

Despite western capitals virtue-signaling their “rules-based order” approach, Ryabkov said instead, “We think that it is not a rule-based world order, it is rather a foisted and imposed world order.”

Meanwhile, the establishment of the ‘SWIFT-alternative’ Instex – now online as of three weeks ago – constitutes the biggest threat the dollar as a reserve currency to date, especially if Russia follows through on its prior signalling that it could take the bold step of joining.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2McFfB5 Tyler Durden

Media Shames Tom Brady for Cliff Jump With His 6-Year-Old Daughter

Fact: We love talking about celebrities. Fact: We love judging parents. Fact: When you put the two together, it’s like a giant irresistible peanut butter cup.

Thus it was not surprising to hear the Good Morning America crew discussing a clip of New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady jumping off a rocky cliff into the water on a Costa Rica vacation while holding the hand of his six-year-old daughter, who jumped with him. The Today Show did the same, and even came up with a name for the non-incident: The Brady backlash. (Actually, they’ve probably used that ever since deflategate) Anyway, Google “Tom Brady cliff” and you will see so many journalists sucking their thumbs, yours may spontaneously wrinkle in response.

My take? I’m no fan of danger, but I know that with very rare exceptions, most other parents don’t love it, either. They want to help their kids, not hurt, them. That’s my assumption regarding Mr. Brady, too: He would not put his child in danger, so the two were doing this for reasons of their own. Adventure, bravery, bonding—who knows? And who are we to jump in, as it were? Parenting is hard enough without the Greek chorus.

Brady put the video out to his millions of fans, so he must’ve known there would be a backlash. Heck, there was a backlash when he simply kissed his son on the mouth. But why not treat his family vacation video like all the other family vacation videos crowding our newsfeeds? Either go with a pleasant, “Wish I was there!” or a silent, “Wow, am I glad I’m not!” Then scroll on.

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Gundlach: Fed Will Be In “Panic Mode” When A Recession Hits

Authored by Robert Huebscher of Advisor Perspectives

If the signs of a recession, like weakness in trucking volume and manufacturing PMIs, prove true, the Fed will be in panic mode, according to Jeffrey Gundlach. The economy will weaken, rates will go up and the Fed will have to “do something,” to protect against a “spiral” of higher rates feeding and slower growth.

Gundlach is the founder and chief investment officer of Los Angeles-based DoubleLine Capital. He spoke to investors via a conference call at 4:15pm on July 23. The focus of his talk was DoubleLine’s fixed-income closed-end funds, DBL and DSL.

Gundlach devoted most of the call to the positioning of DBL and DSL. I will focus on the last 15 minutes of the call, when he took questions from the attendees, with the focus on a possible recession and the direction of interest rates.

Gundlach predicted a “high likelihood” of a recession before 2020 election. The leading economic indicators (LEIs) also point to a weakening economy. As rates rise, so will interest costs incurred by the government, which would translate to further weakness in the private sector. The underlying problem causing the spiral is the large and expanding federal deficit, according to Gundlach.

“We’re starting out before the recession with a huge debt problem,” he said, “that will grow faster in a recession.”

In response, Fed policy has become more “evolutionary,” he said. It has been talking about quantitative easing (QE) as a “normal” policy tool, instead of one whose use is restricted to crises. The Fed is softening people up, he said, so that if rates rise, it will do QE and then emulate the Bank of Japan and other central banks to take rates negative.

A reason rates are so low is that the Fed is “hedging its bets,” Gundlach said. Rates will go up first as the economy weakens and be engineered down. This pre-emptive rate reduction could leave the Fed with nowhere to go, as a recession demands ways to stimulate growth.

“There is a real risk of rising rates,” he said, which would slow economic growth and contribute to a more destructive recession. If a recession comes this year, the yield curve will steepen, he said. Indeed, that steepening has already started.

But there has never been a recession in the post-war period without the LEIs first going negative.

Economic weakness is already evident in metrics such as trucking volume and manufacturing PMIs, which he said are deteriorating but not at “problem levels” yet.

People are focusing on 2-10 year spread being narrow, according to Gundlach, but that is the wrong focus. The 5-30 year spread has been steepening “non-stop” over the last year and a half, he said. The market thinks the Fed will ease, but Gundlach said that thinking will increase the fear of recession.

The market thinks the Fed is trying to be preemptive and get “in front” of a recession, he said.

The 2-10 spread inverts months before a recession, he said, and then it steepens. It already inverted briefly, according to Gundlach.

“What you want to watch out for is the steepening to start,” he said. “It would increase the probability of a recession.”

Let’s turn to Gundlach’s other comments about the global economy and capital markets.

Gundlach refuted a story that appeared in the on-line version of Barron’s and was picked up by Bloomberg. That story reported on a high number of departures from the credit team at DoubleLine. Gundlach said the thrust of the story was completely untrue and that it contained at least a half dozen factual errors. There are 65 members of the credit team, he said, down only slightly over the recent past.

He said his decision to not participate in the most recent Barron’s roundtable was in response to that magazine’s inaccurate reporting and its failure to respond to his requests to correct its errors.

Avoid high-yield bonds, according to Gundlach, which are more sensitive to economic weakness that other bond market sectors. He said that junk market resembles late 2006 early 2007. He recalled that, in late 2006, he said, “It’s okay to dance the risk dance, but you better be dancing near the exits.” Six months later he said to “get out now.”

Investment-grade bond prices have risen more than junk prices, based on the LQD and JNK ETFs. That is a bad sign, he said, and is showing there is more risk than the stock market reflects.

He was asked how negative monetary policy can go before there is a run on a bank. Based on Deutsche Bank, he said, it is “not far from now.”

The dollar has “lots of room to do down,” Gundlach said, because Fed policy will support that movement.

Risk parity strategies have done well this year, he said, because all asset classes are up. Risk parity is a long-only strategy and will do well in a positive market. If you really wanted to be up, he said, you would own gold miners, which are “crushing it.”

U.S. equity investors will be disheartened to hear that he said we are “near the high of the year on the S&P.”

“There is a much greater chance than people appreciate that there will be a negative sign on the stock market performance at some point this year”, Gundlach warned.

But he qualified that comment by saying it was not a high conviction prediction.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Y3md72 Tyler Durden

Media Shames Tom Brady for Cliff Jump With His 6-Year-Old Daughter

Fact: We love talking about celebrities. Fact: We love judging parents. Fact: When you put the two together, it’s like a giant irresistible peanut butter cup.

Thus it was not surprising to hear the Good Morning America crew discussing a clip of New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady jumping off a rocky cliff into the water on a Costa Rica vacation while holding the hand of his six-year-old daughter, who jumped with him. The Today Show did the same, and even came up with a name for the non-incident: The Brady backlash. (Actually, they’ve probably used that ever since deflategate) Anyway, Google “Tom Brady cliff” and you will see so many journalists sucking their thumbs, yours may spontaneously wrinkle in response.

My take? I’m no fan of danger, but I know that with very rare exceptions, most other parents don’t love it, either. They want to help their kids, not hurt, them. That’s my assumption regarding Mr. Brady, too: He would not put his child in danger, so the two were doing this for reasons of their own. Adventure, bravery, bonding—who knows? And who are we to jump in, as it were? Parenting is hard enough without the Greek chorus.

Brady put the video out to his millions of fans, so he must’ve known there would be a backlash. Heck, there was a backlash when he simply kissed his son on the mouth. But why not treat his family vacation video like all the other family vacation videos crowding our newsfeeds? Either go with a pleasant, “Wish I was there!” or a silent, “Wow, am I glad I’m not!” Then scroll on.

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Bioethicist and Life Extension Opponent Daniel Callahan Has Died

Few people can be said to have originated a new field of intellectual endeavor; pioneering bioethicist Daniel Callahan is one of those people. Callahan died yesterday at age 88. In the late 1960s, Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin founded the world’s first bioethics think thank, the Hastings Center.

Callahan was a leftwing thinker whose chief ethical commitment was establishing social and economic equality, particularly with regard to providing equal access to health care. Given his paramount commitment to equality and mine to liberty, our worldviews were bound to clash.

Callahan was a fierce critic of the quest of “perfect health” and efforts to dramatically increase healthy life spans on the grounds that achieving such goals would widen inequality by making some people (the rich) better off than others.

For example, in his 1998 book, False Hopes Callahan complained that “the criteria for normality are constantly raised, keeping in step with medical possibilities. No longer is sixty-five thought to be a reasonable age after which death is not ‘premature.’ No infant mortality rate, however low, is good enough. No ache or pain should go unrelieved if relief is desired. Most important, what would have been accepted as a decent level of health in one generation is unacceptable in the next.”

Callahan evidently believes, I retorted in my review: If it was good enough for granddaddy, it should be good enough for you.

In False Hopes, Callahan added, “If we had exactly and only the same range of technologies as were available twenty or thirty years ago, there would be no problem in equitably allocating resources. We could readily afford that level of medicine and health care.”

In my review, I countered that “it would be even cheaper, of course, if we returned to using rattles and beads as remedies.”

Callahan’s focus on trying to ensure that everyone has equal access to equally bad medicine never flagged.

Over the years, Callahan and I occasionally interacted as fierce, but friendly, antagonists in various bioethical controversies. For example, Callahan and I participated in a panel discussion on “the research imperative” at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s 2006 conference. In a setup article outlining what was at stake in that discussion, I noted that

Callahan despairs that the more healthy life Americans enjoy, the more we want. He inveighs against this “abolition of fatalism,” nostalgically noting, “In the past we reconciled ourselves to aging and death because we could do nothing.” He adds, “It seems to me that the whole trajectory of modern medical research has been basically to treat [death] as if it were an accident. As far as I know, there are no fatal diseases that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) finds acceptable. The NIH is not in favor of immortality, at least officially, but there are no diseases that kill people that it is prepared to tolerate.”

I quipped: Sounds about right to me.

Callahan and I engaged in an online debate at Cato Unbound back in 2007 addressing the question: Do We Need Death?

Callahan’s answer was an emphatic yes. “Nature knew what it was doing when it arranged, through natural selection, to have all of us get old and die,” he argued. “That is the price of species survival and vitality, and it has worked well. I don’t think we humans can invent a better scenario, but we can surely do much harm in trying.” One of his main arguments for applauding the grim reaper was that healthy long-lived oldsters would stand in the way and stymie the progress of the young.

I just as emphatically answered no. “The highest expression of human nature and dignity is to strive to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution, and our environment,” I countered. “Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century with astonishment that some well-meaning and intelligent people actually wanted to stop biomedical research just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature. Our descendants will look back, I predict, and thank us for making their world of longer, healthier lives possible.”

A towering figure in bioethics, Callahan greatly sharpened the thinking of those who partook in the roiling ethical debates over public policy issues such as access to medical care, organ transplantation, cloning, and life extension.

In his contribution to the Cato Unbound debate, Callahan, then 77 years of age, observed

“And while I hope in my more self-regarding moments that my friends and families will wail and gnash their teeth at my funeral, I doubt at my age they will do so; and I can, so to speak, live with that. I will get old and will die, an ancient story, but not a tragic one.”

I may not gnash my teeth, but I do mourn the passing of this man of integrity.

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Bioethicist and Life Extension Opponent Daniel Callahan Has Died

Few people can be said to have originated a new field of intellectual endeavor; pioneering bioethicist Daniel Callahan is one of those people. Callahan died yesterday at age 88. In the late 1960s, Callahan and psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin founded the world’s first bioethics think thank, the Hastings Center.

Callahan was a leftwing thinker whose chief ethical commitment was establishing social and economic equality, particularly with regard to providing equal access to health care. Given his paramount commitment to equality and mine to liberty, our worldviews were bound to clash.

Callahan was a fierce critic of the quest of “perfect health” and efforts to dramatically increase healthy life spans on the grounds that achieving such goals would widen inequality by making some people (the rich) better off than others.

For example, in his 1998 book, False Hopes Callahan complained that “the criteria for normality are constantly raised, keeping in step with medical possibilities. No longer is sixty-five thought to be a reasonable age after which death is not ‘premature.’ No infant mortality rate, however low, is good enough. No ache or pain should go unrelieved if relief is desired. Most important, what would have been accepted as a decent level of health in one generation is unacceptable in the next.”

Callahan evidently believes, I retorted in my review: If it was good enough for granddaddy, it should be good enough for you.

In False Hopes, Callahan added, “If we had exactly and only the same range of technologies as were available twenty or thirty years ago, there would be no problem in equitably allocating resources. We could readily afford that level of medicine and health care.”

In my review, I countered that “it would be even cheaper, of course, if we returned to using rattles and beads as remedies.”

Callahan’s focus on trying to ensure that everyone has equal access to equally bad medicine never flagged.

Over the years, Callahan and I occasionally interacted as fierce, but friendly, antagonists in various bioethical controversies. For example, Callahan and I participated in a panel discussion on “the research imperative” at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s 2006 conference. In a setup article outlining what was at stake in that discussion, I noted that

Callahan despairs that the more healthy life Americans enjoy, the more we want. He inveighs against this “abolition of fatalism,” nostalgically noting, “In the past we reconciled ourselves to aging and death because we could do nothing.” He adds, “It seems to me that the whole trajectory of modern medical research has been basically to treat [death] as if it were an accident. As far as I know, there are no fatal diseases that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) finds acceptable. The NIH is not in favor of immortality, at least officially, but there are no diseases that kill people that it is prepared to tolerate.”

I quipped: Sounds about right to me.

Callahan and I engaged in an online debate at Cato Unbound back in 2007 addressing the question: Do We Need Death?

Callahan’s answer was an emphatic yes. “Nature knew what it was doing when it arranged, through natural selection, to have all of us get old and die,” he argued. “That is the price of species survival and vitality, and it has worked well. I don’t think we humans can invent a better scenario, but we can surely do much harm in trying.” One of his main arguments for applauding the grim reaper was that healthy long-lived oldsters would stand in the way and stymie the progress of the young.

I just as emphatically answered no. “The highest expression of human nature and dignity is to strive to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution, and our environment,” I countered. “Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century with astonishment that some well-meaning and intelligent people actually wanted to stop biomedical research just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature. Our descendants will look back, I predict, and thank us for making their world of longer, healthier lives possible.”

A towering figure in bioethics, Callahan greatly sharpened the thinking of those who partook in the roiling ethical debates over public policy issues such as access to medical care, organ transplantation, cloning, and life extension.

In his contribution to the Cato Unbound debate, Callahan, then 77 years of age, observed

“And while I hope in my more self-regarding moments that my friends and families will wail and gnash their teeth at my funeral, I doubt at my age they will do so; and I can, so to speak, live with that. I will get old and will die, an ancient story, but not a tragic one.”

I may not gnash my teeth, but I do mourn the passing of this man of integrity.

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