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A College Football Player Lost His Scholarship Because of YouTube Videos. Now He’s Fighting Back.

While technically a nonprofit, the National Collegiate Athletic Association pulls down nearly $1 billion in annual revenues, thanks in large part to multi-million-dollar deals with television networks that want to showcase America’s best college athletes playing football, basketball, and a bunch of other sports.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. The market for televised sports is hotter, and more valuable, than it’s ever been.

But when one of those valuable student-athletes had the nerve to earn a few thousand dollars running a popular YouTube channel—one that gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a college football player—the NCAA told him to give up his videos or give up his scholarship.

Donald De La Haye, the kicker for the University of Central Florida football team until he lost scholarship in July, announced in a video his decision to stop playing football in favor of keeping his YouTube account.

Now he’s ready to take legal action against the university unless his scholarship is restored.(I just move this up here. That’s all I think it needs.)

“It’s really tough,” De La Haye says. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not making money illegally. I’m not selling dope. I’m not kidnapping people or robbing people. I’m not selling my autographs for money. I’m not sitting here getting Nike checks and Nike deals and all these sponsorships. I’m literally filming stuff. I’m sitting here, editing things on my computer for hours and developing my own brand. I put in the work, and I’m not allowed to get any benefits from the work.”

There’s nothing illegal about the videos De La Hoye posts to his “Deestroying” account on YouTube. They feature his daily routines and workouts. Others include funny moments with friends and teammates. And some—like one where he destroyed a flat-screen TV by kicking it off the top floor of a parking garage—are just downright weird and funny.

The videos have gained De La Hoye quite a following. He’s got more than 350,000 subscribers, enough to earn money from the advertisements YouTube allows on high-end accounts. According to SocialBlade.com, a website that assesses the potential value of social media accounts, De La Hoye could earn somewhere between $2,000 and $31,000 a month.

In the video announcing the NCAA’s ultimatum to him, De La Hoye says he was sending some of his YouTube money to his family in Costa Rica, because they have “tons of bills piling up and there’s no way for me to help.”

That didn’t matter to the NCAA, which in July told Central Florida that De La Hoye would be ineligible to play college football unless he stopped making videos about football—though he would have been allowed to make videos about other topics (videos that would likely get fewer views and earn the student-athlete less advertising revenue), the Orlando Sentinel reported at the time.

After De La Hoye decided not to agree to those terms, the football team dismissed him and the university revoked his scholarship. He was given 72 hours to remove himself and all his belongings from university housing. With no where else to turn, he ended up living with a friend and sleeping on a sofa.

The NCAA claimed De La Hoye violated bylaw 12.4.4, which says a student-athlete “may establish his or her own business, provided the student-athlete’s name, photograph, appearance or athletics reputation are not used to promote the business.” Never mind that it’s exactly what the NCAA does when it sells college football to television audiences.

More importantly, De La Hoye has a First Amendment right to record himself and post those videos to YouTube. Attorneys for the Arizona-based Goldwater Foundation and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a pair of free market think tanks, have taken up De La Hoye’s case.

“Freedom of expression is one of our fundamental rights guaranteed through the United States Constitution,” says Robert Henneke, director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Donald did not forfeit his rights to free speech simply because his athletic gifts allow him to pay for his college education through a football scholarship.”

Courts have held that universities may not withhold benefits like scholarships on a basis that violates an individual’s First Amendment rights, Jon Riches, the director of national litigation for the Goldwater Institute, pointed out in a letter sent this week to Central Florida.

The NCAA’s rules limit what student-athletes may do, but the university is solely responsible for issuing and revoking scholarships. That Central Florida would pull a scholarship from a student-athlete who has been an upstanding member of the collegiate community is “an astonishing result,” Riches wrote, “considering universities throughout the country impose far less severe punishments against students who commit actual misconduct.”

In a new video posted this week, De La Hoye said he hopes to open the way for other student-athletes to be allowed to express themselves on social media without fear of losing their scholarships or NCAA eligibility.

“They really put my college career on hold,” he says, “just for exercising my right to free speech.”

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Celebrate Prohibition Repeal Day—If Your State Will Let You: New at Reason

drinking beerFood (and booze) policy expert Baylen Linnekin takes note of next week’s Repeal Day, the anniversary of the end of constitutionally mandated alcohol prohibition in the United States:

Next week will mark the 84th anniversary of the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed alcohol Prohibition. The repeal of Prohibition is worth celebrating, even if the Twenty First Amendment was (and remains) a deeply flawed vehicle.

The chief flaw with the Amendment is, as I wrote earlier this year, that it “simply shifted much of the power to prohibit and incessantly regulate alcohol from the federal government to the states.”

States have truly made the most of their teetotalitarian authority for decades, to the detriment of both alcohol producers and—much more so—consumers.

View this article.

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Senate Republicans Just Took a Big Step Towards Permanently Overhauling the Tax Code

Senate Republicans just passed a major rewrite of the tax code on a party line vote, with only one GOP dissent. The vote puts Republicans significantly closer to permanently altering the shape of the U.S. tax code, which has long been a priority for party leadership.

If the legislation becomes law, it would be the first major rewrite of the tax code since the Reagan administration. The bill would substantially cut the corporate tax rate, which analysts say would help spur economic growth and make America more competitive internationally. At the same time, passage of the bill also represents a significant abdication of the GOP’s promises to legislate transparently and not increase the deficit.

A separate version of the bill has already passed in the House last month. The two pieces of legislation are now expected to advance to a conference committee where House and Senate negotiators will attempt to work out the differences, after which the two chambers will have to vote again. Alternatively, the House could simply pass the Senate bill unchanged.

The bill was in flux until the last minute, with significant objections coming from a group of senators who said they were concerned about the bill’s effect on the deficit. Under President Obama, Republicans frequently criticized Democrats for failing to read or provide sufficient time to debate major legislation.

But as of late Friday afternoon, after Republicans secured commitments to vote for the bill, final legislative text had not been published. When the final text of the legislation did appear late in the evening, it was covered in handwritten notes and alterations.

The Senate version is projected to increase the deficit by a little more than $1.4 trillion over the next decade. Republicans backing the bill have insisted that the plan will make up the revenue by spurring additional economic growth, but they have not produced official analysis reaching the same conclusion. Although Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin repeatedly promised that the administration would provide a dynamic analysis, no such report has been released.

Independent analyses have found that some of that decline in revenue would be made up by increased economic growth. A Joint Committee on Taxation Report released yesterday estimated that even with dynamic effects the bill would still increase the deficit by about $1 trillion; more favorable estimates have put the effect on the deficit closer to $400 billion.

Throughout the week, there were reports that the bill would address worries about the deficit with the inclusion of a “trigger” mechanism that would automatically raise taxes if yearly economic growth projections fell short. But that plan fell through last night after the Senate parliamentarian told GOP leadership that it wouldn’t be allowed under the reconciliation process that Republicans relied on to pass the bill with a simple majority.

One of the senators who objected to the bill on fiscal responsibility grounds was Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). But on Friday he announced his support for the bill after securing the elimination of an expensing provision and a promise from party leadership to enact permanent protections to recipients of the DACA immigration program that started under President Obama.

The Senate bill makes major changes to both individual and corporate taxation. It permanently slashes the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 20 percent, alters the way that businesses can expense new equipment, and reduces taxes on income earned by pass-through businesses, a tax structure in which corporate profits are taxed as individual income. Those changes could create an incentive for many businesses to restructure as pass-throughs as a form of tax arbitrage, which is what happened when the state of Kansas attempted a similar change. An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that the Kansas provision encourage tax avoidance but not economic growth.

The bill also cuts individual tax rates, nearly doubles the standard deduction, gets rid of the personal exemption, expands the child tax credit, and eliminates or caps several major tax code deductions, including the state and local tax deduction. It modifies, but unlike the House plan does not repeal, the alternative minimum tax, which disallows some deductions by high earners. Over the next decade, filers at all income levels would see a tax cut.

However, unlike the corporate tax reduction, which is permanent, the individual rate reductions are phased out by 2026, creating a major policy cliff, and nearly guaranteeing high-stakes legislative showdowns. The sunset was designed largely to ensure that the bill conformed with Senate budget rules, which require that legislation passed via the reconciliation process not increase the deficit after a decade. Republican leaders have argued that Congress is not likely to let those tax cuts expire. That, in turn, would result in a significant long-term deficit increase.

Among the biggest changes in the Senate bill is the elimination of the tax penalty associated with Obamacare’s individual mandate, which could have significant effects on the stability of the exchanges, which have already seen high premiums and insurer drop outs, and thus on the number of people in the country with health insurance. The House bill did not eliminate the mandate, but repeal is likely to remain a part of whatever the two chambers negotiate in conference.

Eliminating the mandate lowers the deficit by about $340 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as a result of about 13 million fewer people signing up for Medicaid and subsidized coverage in the exchanges. The savings help offset the budgetary effects of the bill’s tax reductions. Some Republicans, however, have argued that the CBO’s estimate attributes too much coverage to the mandate, which would mean that the deficit reduction is also too high as well.

Under the Obama administration, Republicans frequently criticized the president for high deficits and allowing the national debt to increase. Throughout the year, GOP leadership promised that the bill’s budgetary effects would be fully offset by eliminating loopholes and deductions. That didn’t happen.

The bill could still change in conference, but between the effects of repealing the mandate and the expiration of the individual tax cuts, it is probable that the final legislation will end up increasing the deficit far more than most estimates suggest.

So while it represents a significant legislative victory for the GOP, and the advancement of several longtime policy goals, it is also one that confirms that for the Republican party, fiscal responsibility was never more than a politically convenient pretense.

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Paul Craig Roberts: “Can’t You See War On The Horizon?”

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

According to news reports in the British press, Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed Russia’s industries to prepare themselves to be able to make a quick switch to war production.

Clearly, the Russian government would not make such an announcement unless it was convinced that the prospect of war with the West was real.

For some time I have emphasized in my columns that the consequence of years of hostile actions taken by Washington and its European vassals against Russia was leading to war.

It is easy to understand that the massive US military/security complex needs a convincing enemy in order to justify its enormous budget, that the crazed neoconservatives put their fantasy ideology of US world hegemony above the life of the planet, and that Hillary and the Democratic National Committee will do anything to overturn Trump’s presidential victory.

However, it is difficult to understand why the European political leaders are willing to put their countries at risk for Washington’s benefit.

Yet, they do.

For example, on November 13 UK PM Theresa May said that Russia was a threat to international security and was interfering in European elections and hacking European governments. There is no more evidence for these claims than there is for “Russiagate.” Yet the allegations continue and multiply. Now the European Union is organizing former provinces of the Soviet Union—Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—into an “Eastern Partnership” with the European Union.

In other words, the West is openly organizing former provinces of Moscow against Russia, declared by Prime Minister May to be a “hostile state.” Russia knows that there is no basis for the allegations against Russia and regards them as identical to the false allegations against Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad in order to justify military attacks on Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Having convinced Russia that she is being set up for attack, Russia is preparing for war.

Think about this for a moment. The world is being driven to Armageddon simply because a greedy and corrupt US military/security complex needs an enemy to justify its huge budget, because Hillary and the DNC cannot accept a political defeat, and because the neoconservatives have an ideology of American Supremacy. What’s the difference between the detested White Supremacy and the American Supremacy that President Obama himself endorsed? Why is white supremacy terrible and American supremacy God’s gift to the “exceptional” and “indispensable” country?

The Russian government has openly shared its concern that Russia is being set up for military attack. As I, if not CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, have reported, the deputy commander of the Russian military’s Operation Command stated publicly the concern that Washington is preparing a surprise nuclear attack against Russia. President Putin recently called attention to Washington’s collection of Russian DNA for a US Air Force weapons lab, which implies development of a Russian-specific bio-weapon. On many occasions Russia has called attention to US and NATO bases on its borders despite previous assurances from US administrations that no such thing would ever happen.

We have to ask ourselves why it is not the top item of public and political discussion that Washington has convinced Russia, a premier nuclear and military power, that Russia is going to be attacked. Instead, we hear of football players who kneel for the national anthem, fake news about Russiagate, a Las Vegas shooting, and so on.

We also must ask ourselves how much longer Washington is going to permit any of us via the Internet to report the real news instead of the fake news that Washington uses to control explanations.

The effort by the Federal Communications Commission chairman to destroy net neutrality and other efforts underway to discredit factual news as Russian propaganda indicate that Washington has concluded that in order to war on Russia Washington must also war on truth.

Washington will not survive its war, and neither will the American and European people.

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Chinese Researchers Experiment With Anti-Gay Spray

Around mid-November, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a shocking report detailing China’s gay conversion problem.

Powerful first-hand accounts expose how state-owned hospitals are using electric shock machines and medication to convert gays back to some form of 'normalcy'. The practice is an open secret in China, where a majority of gays are forced by their families into hospitals, because the culture labels it as a curable-disease.

 Even the World Psychiatric Association has come out denouncing the practice as “unethical, unscientific and harmful”.

It’s been rumored that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have received better treatment than those in China, who have been put through the conversion process.

With that being said, the Chinese knew the rest of the world was going to figure out about the inhuman treatments to literally shock the gay out of you; and so, back in 2015, the Government approved a research team at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou to study the effects of spraying oxytocin up the noses of homosexual men to see how it affects their sexual orientation.

Oxytocin has been best known for its roles in the female reproduction system. Recently, scientist have been investigating oxytocin’s role in various behaviors including, orgasm, social recognition, bonding, and maternal behaviors. The article says it’s also known as the ‘love hormone’ or the ‘cuddle hormone’ because levels of oxytocin are increased during hugs and orgasms. Oxytocin’s connection in love and sexuality is not well understood, which spurred the scientist’s two years clinical, to spray the natural hormone up gay men’s noses.

Darius Longarino, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, indicated on Twitter, the 2-year study is in the final stages and results should be out by the end of December.

On the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry website, the study states the objective of the trial: “the feature of brain activity and social gender cognition in male homosexuals, and how oxytocin affects them.” In pursuit of these objectives, 20 volunteers were chosen at random. Among other things, the volunteers had to be right-handed, aged 18-40, and have “complete male homosexuality.”

Researches then conducted a blind study with 20 test subjects who were divided into two groups. One group had oxytocin sprayed up their nose, while the others used a placebo saline solution.

According to the article, the study began in October 2015 and is now in the latter stage of completion.

The study began in October 2015 after being approved by an ethics committee and is set to end at the end of this year. Subjects are being measured on the Kinsey Scale, the Klein scale, through gender cognitive tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, and by testing their blood pressure. Hu Shaohua, the deputy director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Zhejiang University School of Medicine, is in charge of the study.  

Further, the article notes,

Sup China’s Jiayun Feng notes that the study generated quite a bit of controversy upon its initial posting on the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry earlier this year after it was discovered that on the space in the form for “target disease,” someone had written “male homosexual.”

 

The experiment has since been redefined as a “basic study,” not one intended to cure a disease, eliminating the need to fill in that blank.

And we’re curious to see what they find out. Back in 2015, researchers at Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico found that they were able to induce a conditioned homosexual preference in male rats by giving them oxytocin and the psychoactive drug quinpirole.

At the very least, it seems likely that one group of men had a much better time these last few years than the other group. A 2013 study found that taking oxytocin before lovemaking makes for a much more intense orgasm and feeling of satisfaction, particulary for men.

 

And perhaps, the chart above identifies why China’s government is racing to find the most humane method in gay conversions, as the gender gap is about to take the next leg up similar to the 1980’s through the mid-2000’s widening. Anti-gay spray seems to be the communist regimes solution to combat homosexuality.

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Expect Desperate, Insane Behavior From Government In 2018 – Part 1

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

As we head into 2018, I believe governments around the world will become increasingly insecure about their positions of power and control, which will result in increased paranoia about whether or not they have the consent of the governed.

Being a global empire in decline, the U.S. power structure has the most to lose, making it particularly vulnerable to such panic. I suspect forces within the U.S. government are likely to engage in various attempts to reestablish authority via desperate and authoritarian moves as 2018 unfolds. I don’t say this to spread fear; rather, I think such moves will result in considerable pushback from the population at large, particularly from younger generations who are intimately aware of how spectacularity the status quo has failed them. Panic and desperation from those in control shouldn’t be feared, it should be expected and contemplated ahead of time. That’s why I’m writing this series. I want as many people as possible to start thinking about this now so we aren’t caught off guard.

The areas I’ll be diving into with these pieces consist of cannabis, Bitcoin, and war against Iran. I’m sure there are plenty of other areas government will target in its last ditch effort to exert control over a populace sick and tired of these busybody, corrupt authoritarians, but these are issues I follow closely and have a certain degree of familiarity with. As such, they’ll be the focus of this series.

Today’s topic is cannabis. This seems the least likely area for government action, specifically because it would be such a monumentally stupid move. That said, just because something’s idiotic doesn’t mean we should simply discount it, particularly with human fossil Jeff Sessions continuing to chirp on the issue every chance he gets.

Although Sessions has been threatening to stomp on states’ rights and freedom of choice when it comes to cannabis ever since he became Attorney General, he hasn’t done anything yet. Nevertheless, he continues to issue threats.

As Axios reported yesterday:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested in a press conference on Wedenesday that the Department of Justice is looking at changing Obama-era policies that allowed states to decide what to do about marijuana despite the drug remaining illegal under federal law, according to McClatchy DC.

 

Why it matters: This could have a huge impact on the 6 states and D.C. which will have legalized marijuana by January, 2018. Places that have already legalized marijuana and have seen the marijuana industry boom in their states could face particularly tricky legal situations.

 

Key quote: “In fact, we’re looking at that very hard right now, we had a meeting yesterday and talked about it at some length. It’s my view that the use of marijuana is detrimental, and we should not give encouragement in any way to it, and it represents a federal violation, which is in the law and is subject to being enforced.”

 

Meanwhile, bipartisan groups of Senators and House members have been pushing for criminal justice reform bills, which would lower minimum mandatory sentences for non-violent drug crimes. A crackdown on drug crimes is not what they’re looking for from Sessions. 

If Sessions decides to do something, I predict he’ll have his ass handed to him in spectacular fashion. First of all, I can’t think of a single issue that unites Americans at this time more than the belief cannabis should be legalized. A recent Gallup poll proved this in spades. We learned:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans continue to warm to legalizing marijuana, with 64% now saying its use should be made legal. This is the highest level of public support Gallup has found for the proposal in nearly a half-century of measurement.

 

Gallup first asked national adults about their views on the topic in 1969, when 12% supported legalization. Support had more than doubled by the end of the next decade but changed little throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2001, however, about a third of Americans favored legalizing marijuana, and support has steadily increased since. A majority of Americans have consistently supported legalizing marijuana since 2013.

 

That looks like the chart of Bitcoin.

More significantly, we live in an era in which basically no issue issue successfully crosses partisan political lines. Except cannabis. Also from Gallup:

Democrats and independents have historically been much more likely than Republicans to say marijuana should be legalized. In 2009, Democrats were the first partisan group to see majority support for legalization, followed by independents in 2010.

 

This year for the first time, a majority of Republicans express support for legalizing marijuana; the current 51% is up nine percentage points from last year.

Moreover, many of those against legal cannabis in their particular state still accept the right of people in other states to decide for themselves. The idea of the federal government going into states and denying the will of the citizens who voted to legalize it would be extraordinarily unpopular across the board. It’ll be completely obvious to everyone that if the feds think they can tell people their votes don’t matter on that issue, there’s zero freedom of choice for anything in this country. It’s the ultimate canary in the coal mine.

In fact, I’ll take this one step further and say if Sessions dares to make this move, it’ll accelerate secessionist movements across the country and delegitimize government credibility more than any other single act in the forty years since I’ve been alive.

If the Trump administration actually moves on this issue, we’ll know for sure how completely inept and desperate it is. Part of me almost wants to see them try, because the resulting monumental fail will demonstrate the power of the people and give a gigantic black eye to authoritarians in government.

Stuff like this is all part of the process we’ll be going through over the next few years, and we need to be mentally prepared for it. We the people will increasingly move to take sovereignty back in a variety of ways, and government will respond with panic. The good news is they’ll be reacting from a position of weakness, not strength.

Which brings us to the topic of Bitcoin. As the price crossed $10,000 recently, I noticed increased squeamishness and fear on behalf of various banksters, economists and other assorted statists.

Monday’s post will dig into what all of that means.

*  *  *

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ABC Makes “Epic Mistake”, Retracts Bombshell Flynn Story

Having caused chaos in financial markets briefly, set the liberal media on fire with 'I told you so's, and sparked a renewed round of #ImpeachTrump demands, ABC News issued a 'clarification' to their bombshell Flynn report that not only negates the entire story but provides President Trump with another round of ammunition to fire against the 'fake news' media.

Criticially, ABC News reports, correcting their earlier report, that Michael Flynn is prepared to testify that Donald Trump directed him to contact the Russians as president-elect, not as a candidate.

Here is the full 'clarification'

During a live Special Report, ABC News reported that a confidant of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said Flynn was prepared to testify that then-candidate Donald Trump instructed him to contact Russian officials during the campaign.

 

That source later clarified that during the campaign, Trump assigned Flynn and a small circle of other senior advisers to find ways to repair relations with Russia and other hot spots.

 

It was shortly after the election, that President-elect Trump directed Flynn to contact Russian officials on topics that included working jointly against ISIS.

So to clarify – just as President Trump had stated, there was no contact with Russians during his time as a candidate but in fact it was in transition as he attempted to mend broken bridges with another world super-power in his role as president-elect – this in no way a criminal act at all. In fact, reaching out to foreign governments during transitions is standard procedure.

CNN is embarrassed…

Axios apologizes for its use of the story…

(We regret highlighting a story that had one source making an astonishing allegation.)

And maybe Brian Ross, so-called journalist and ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent, who wrote the ABC article, will explain himself and his 'sources' for this nothingburger of a story.

One wonder what the consequecnes are, or should be, for such an obvious error.

We look forward to President Trump's tirade over this.

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South Korea Unveils Plan To Strike North Korean Missile Launchers

North Korea launched its Hwasong-15 ICBM into the waters west of Japan at 3:17 am local time on Wednesday. Barely six minutes later, South Korean artillery, air force, and Navy sprang into action and began firing missiles into the waters off eastern Korea – yet another military show of force meant to intimidate the North into ceasing its missile strikes.

The retaliatory display was calibrated to target a spot in the waters off the Korean peninsula that was exactly as far away as Pyongsong, a town about 20 miles north of Pyongyang where the Hwasong 15 was reportedly launched. The distance was meant to signify that the South Korean military could destroy the North’s missile launchers if it chose to do so, the Wall Street Journal.

But while the precision strike probably impressed any bystanders who were watching, in reality, the South’s technology for detecting and responding to North Korean missile launches is still unreliable.

But detecting missile tests is an imperfect science, involving misses as well as hits. In a conflict situation, North Korea is likely to take more steps to conceal its movements, for instance by deploying decoy launchers, said Yang Uk, senior defense researcher at the Korea Defense and Security Forum, a Seoul think tank.

 

In such a scenario, the likelihood falls that South Korean, U.S. or Japanese forces would pinpoint the exact launch site, Mr. Yang said. Still, he viewed the South’s response to the missile test as a success, especially considering the short time the military needed to return fire.

 

A spokesman for the U.S.-led U.N. Command in Korea said no U.S. or other forces participated in the response.

 

“What we saw Wednesday was an active response to a North Korean missile launch that South Korea calls its ‘kill chain’ system’,” Mr. Yang said. The kill chain is part of a larger defense system designed to pre-emptively strike the North’s missile systems in the case of a nuclear attack.

 

South Korea this year installed a U.S.-operated Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense antimissile battery that can shoot down short- and medium-range missiles, complementing its Patriot PAC-2 antiballistic missile system.

 

The new battery has a longer-range, but it can’t cover the whole country.

A retired senior South Korean military official said that the South lacks a military satellite that can watch the North, although US and Japanese satellites share images with South Korean officials in real time.

Meanwhile, analysts said North Korean officials install devices onto missiles that generate signals and send them to ground-based control towers. The South has a way to tap into these signals and track the missiles, they said.

But in a real missile launch targeting a South Korean, Japanese or U.S. city, the North Koreans may choose not to install them, said Jo Dong-joon, deputy director of the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. This means that the South might have no way to track a hostile missile, Mr. Jo said.

The retired military official also noted that the South has a network of human intelligence in the North that may have tipped off Seoul officials about this week’s launch. He declined to give further details, citing security concerns.

Details on the South’s spy network in the North remain murky, but local media have reported in recent months that the South has lost most of its human network in North Korea in recent years.
 

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What Gives Cryptocurrencies Their Value

Authored by Peter St.Onge via The Mises Institute,

The value of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, just like any other kind of money, comes fundamentally from what you can do with it. As a follow up to What Backs Bitcoin, I want to dig into that value.

The idea, which comes from Austrian economist Carl Menger, is that just as a shovel’s value comes from its ability to dig, a currency’s value comes from its ability to help you do two things: transactions and savings.

Think of transactions as the money you carry in your wallet or checking account, and savings as the rest of what you have in the bank or buried in the yard. It’s worth mentioning here that that vast majority of money demand is indeed savings, making up 90% or more of all money demand.

The reason this matters is because if we know what transactions cryptocurrencies are good at, we can estimate how much money demand they’ll start pulling from fiat or gold, and therefore how much those cryptos will increase in price.

For transactions, some features that matter are cost and speed of transaction, anonymity, reversibility, counter-party risk, regulatory treatment. For savings demand, those factors are overwhelmed by the specific question of how well the currency keeps its price.

Supply and Demand Determine Price — Always

Price, as always in economics, is simply a matter of demand and supply. When demand is rising faster than supply, the currency will go up in price. And if demand is rising slower than supply, price will go down.

Since bitcoin was born in 2009, it has generally enjoyed demand rising much faster than supply, hence price has soared. While the US dollar, say, has gone down — has “price inflated” — because demand failed to keep up with dollar creation.

Those are the features, now what are the applications: what are people using money for?

When we’re looking at a currency’s price, because we’re looking at total demand we don’t care about the number of transactions rather the total amount transacted.

And here, the vast majority of money moving around in the economy is not goods and services — buying a cup of coffee, or a plane ticket — rather financial movements. Paying salaries, buying and selling stocks or bonds, investments and dividends. These occur mostly by bank transfer, which account for 80% of all money moved in the US. Another 15% goes by check, leaving just 3% for credit or debit cards, and 4% for paper cash.

Bitcoin Still under 0.01% of Global Transactions

A final part of the puzzle, what’s the competition to cryptocurrencies? Most money payments worldwide are, of course, denominated in fiat currency like dollars or yen — about 99% by amount. With the remaining 1% made in gold.

Note that fiat has both physical and electronic forms, such as credit cards and bank transfers. Even gold payments can be made with paper rather than physically moving the gold, including gold-based securities that trade in financial markets (so-called “paper gold”).

Now we’re ready to go through those features for each currency. On cost of transaction, bitcoin’s fees nowadays average about $1, and don’t vary by amount you transfer.

You can send one bitcoin, worth $5,000, or 1,000 bitcoins, worth $5 million, and the fees are still a dollar. In contrast, banks typically charge a percentage of the transaction, which adds up on million-dollar transfers.

Meanwhile, on speed bitcoin is much faster than banks; between 10 minutes and an hour to confirm a transaction, while banks take days.

So bitcoin beats on the most important application of money: financial transfers. The one caveat here is exchange costs. Just as you pay fees and spreads when you exchange your dollars for yen, every time you convert dollars into bitcoin you’ve got to pay fees and spreads.

This means that bitcoin’s low fees only really dominate if both the sender and receiver are keeping the money in bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s Exchange Rate Woes

On the other hand, if you have a bunch of dollars and want to buy a house from somebody who likes to keep dollars in the bank, then you’ll have to convert your dollars into bitcoin, send the bitcoin for a buck, then the other guy converts the bitcoins into dollars again. You saved on the transfer itself, but you had to exchange the money twice.

So, bitcoin as a technology is superior for the main type of transaction by value, but in reality that advantage is eroded if people are keeping their wealth in fiat. This isn’t really a flaw of cryptocurrencies per se, it’s just a standard penalty suffered by any minority currency — having to pay for conversion into the dominant currency.

To finish up on cost and speed, obviously physical cash or physical gold are fantastic on both cost and speed, but only if buyer and seller are touching each other. Given paper cash has only a 4% share today, touchable buyers and sellers is a very small part of demand.

For remote orders, then, bitcoin carries lower fees than credit and debit cards, but again with that double-exchange problem unless both buyer and seller are staying in bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s Potential to Outperform

Next up are some secondary benefits: anonymity, reversibility, counter-party risk, regulatory treatment.

Briefly, bitcoin is nearly anonymous unless the US government cares enough about you to put some serious people on you. In this sense it’s essentially like using cash, but with the advantage you can use it over long distances with those low fees.

In practice, the closest alternative is probably a pre-paid debit card that you buy at 7/11, which can cost several dollars in addition to the merchant fees, and isn’t going to work for large amounts nor overseas.

As for reversibility, the question is whether the buyer can cancel his payment. A problem for online vendors who get scammed by people who buy the product, get it in the mail, cancel the order and keep the goodies.

Credit card companies or Paypal famously always side with the customer, which can suck for the honest vendor getting ripped off online. Bitcoin, again like cash, is irreversible once it’s confirmed — so about 10 minutes to an hour. That’s slower than cash, but faster than Paypal or credit cards where buyers can reverse months later.

Fourth characteristic is counter-party risk; the idea that your bank could go under, taking your money with it. Remember bitcoin was invented in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, where bank failures were common.

Because bitcoin is distributed across many computers and isn’t managed by a central organization, it has no single point of failure. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies do still have potential technical glitches that probably more than make up for that risk.

Regulation: Not If but When

Finally, regulatory treatment. This is where we’ll probably see a lot of change over the next couple years, as governments digest cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

So far cryptos have enjoyed mostly benign neglect from regulators; tolerated, neither discouraged nor encouraged. On the bright side this has meant little regulatory burdens or fees, although this is changing in places like New York.

On the down-side, this regulatory grey-zone has meant a lot of companies and institutional investors are afraid to use, or even to buy, bitcoin. So increasing regulations could actually boost bitcoin demand, as those regulated users become unafraid to play.

As for what happens in the future, countries are gradually drifting into two camps: broadly enthusiastic (Japan, Dubai, Taiwan, Switzerland), broadly skeptical (China, Korea), with the USA and European Union still lurching between the camps.

Cryptos: For now, Only for Adrenaline Junkies

Now, given how much savings dominate money use, the elephant in the room is would you feel comfortable keeping your life savings in bitcoin.

As we mentioned, the key point here is how its price will hold up, meaning will demand grow faster than supply. While bitcoin has knocked the socks off dollars or even gold, rising 800% in the past year alone, even this soaring growth has come with the major downside that bitcoin also fluctuates a lot — easily up or down 50% in a month.

However, as with any product, service, or medium of exchange, the value of cryptocurrencies will depend on the future choices of countless users and consumers — based on their subjective valuations of the currencies themselves. Those who can successfully guess what will become more valuable in the future will become wealthy. But risks always remain.

via http://ift.tt/2kgczeg Tyler Durden

Chicago Cop Caught On Video Telling Teen He’s Being Detained “Because You’re White”

A police detective in Illinois has faced disciplinary action this week, after he was recorded on video telling a teenager he was being detained because he’s white.

Footage of the controversial encounter surfaced on Facebook on Monday, and has since gone viral with more than 85,000 views.

Dezi Baczek,18, who recorded the video, was among a group of teens who went to the local pawnshop in Lake Villa, a suburb of Chicago, to sell an ‘item’ so the group could buy her brother a book that he wanted to read…How thoughtful…

When the group of millennials exited the shop, they found Detective Gomez waiting out in the parking lot for them. Immediately, the group of teens were ordered to sit down or face being arrested. 

Baczek told NBC 5, “I was yelled at to sit down”.

When asked ‘what for?.. That is when she started filming.

Police said the detective was conducting a theft investigation at the time and was questioning the group of teens. One unseen teen in the video questions why he’s being detained— he asked Gomez, “Is it because I’m a teenager? Because I have baggy pants on?”

Detective Gomez was seen storming off, then spun around and yelled back, ”because you’re white."

In response to the incident,  Lake Villa Police Chief Craig Somerville said such behavior will not be tolerated, said the Daily Herald.

“We are a professional department with high standards and we value our relationship with the public, particularly our youth,” Somerville said in a statement.

 

“Our relationships are built upon mutual understanding and trust and this type of behavior contradicts that.”

Somerville said Gomez became suspicious of the group when they were accompanied by the suspect of a theft investigation at the pawn shop and another member gave officers a fake name. That person was charged with obstructing police.

The chief did not directly acknowledge what was said in the video, but he did note it as inappropriate and unprofessional.

Somerville said in a statement, “Gomez admitted his words were poorly chosen and insensitive and he immediately regretted what he had said. The Lake Villa Police Department does not condone this type of behavior of its officers.Gomez has been disciplined for behavior unbecoming an officer. He will be assisting me with speaking to the parents and teens involved in this incident.”

via http://ift.tt/2Az2znc Tyler Durden