Category: zerohedge

The United States Air Force is launching its largest-ever three-week premier set of air war drills, called Red Flag 18-1, starting on Friday and will conclude February 16, said the 99th Air Base Wing Public Affairs.

On January 26, the air war drill, known as Red Flag, officially kicked off at Nellis Air Force Base, 20-miles outside of Las Vegas. Base officials have warned residents of increased military aircraft activity due to aircraft departing from Nellis Air Force Base twice-a-day to conduct war drills on the Nevada Test and Training Range.

“We’re trying a few new and different things with Red Flag 18-1,” said Col Michael Mathes, 414th Combat Training Squadron commander. “It’s the largest Red Flag ever with the largest number of participants, highlighting the balance of training efficiency with mission effectiveness.”

The drill involves a variety of attack, fighter and bomber aircraft as well as participants from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and Marine Corps. Foreign participants include Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Air Force.

A video from the 2015 Red Flag drill is shown below.

“Red Flag 18-1 primarily is a strike package focused training venue that we integrate at a command and control level in support of joint task force operations,” said Mathes. “It’s a lot of words to say that we integrate every capability we can into strike operations that are flown out of Nellis Air Force Base.”

According to The Drive, the air war drill is the largest of its kind in the 42-year history, as the United States prepares for a possible conflict on the Korean Penisula.

Further, the USAF is going to “blackout GPS over the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range,” said the Drive, which will provide realistic war-like conditions to challenge aircrews.

Flying.com reports the drills at the Nevada Test and Training Range will cause rolling GPS blackouts for the vast portions of the Western United States from January 26 through February 18. All GPS-equipped aircraft operating in the Western United States should be prepared for possible navigation failure in the region.

The NBAA Command Center reports the U.S. military will begin training exercises on the Nevada Test and Training Range between 0400Z until 0700Z daily. Training maneuvers will impact vast portions of the Western U.S. including California, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico. FAA enroute ATC centers affected include Albuquerque (ZAB), Denver (ZDV), Los Angeles (ZLA), Salt Lake (ZLC), Oakland (ZOA) and Seattle (ZSE). Operations in R-2508 and R-2501 may also be impacted.  

“Arrivals and departures from airports within the Las Vegas area may be issued non-Rnav re-routes with the possibility of increased traffic disruption near LAS requiring airborne re-routes to the south and east of the affected area. Aircraft operating in Los Angeles (ZLA) center airspace may experience navigational disruption, including suspension of Descend-via and Climb-via procedures. Non-Rnav SIDs and STARs may be issued within ZLA airspace in the event of increased navigational disruption. Crews should expect the possibility of airborne mile-in-trail and departure mile-in-trail traffic management initiatives.”

The Drive explains why the USAF is determined to use GPS spoofing and jamming technology but offers no insight into what a GPS blackout might mean for the millions of civilians who live in the Western region of the US.

GPS denial is a becoming a huge issue for American military planners. Peer states, especially Russia, are already putting GPS spoofing and jamming tactics to work during various training events near their own borders. We have discussed this situation in great depth before, and I would suggest you read this article to understand just how deeply the loss of reliable global positioning system data can mean for the U.S. and its allies during a time of war, as well as what is being done to overcome such a monumental hurdle.

The Pentagon has mysteriously tested technology that can jam GPS over a wide area before, and it is likely that this same capability will be put to use in the Nellis Test and Training Range for this Red Flag 18-1. Line-of-sight and distance impact the way in which GPS users, especially other airplanes, operating far outside the training area will be affected. Here is an article on those tests, which emanated from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, which is located on the western edge of the Mojave Desert in California, in June of 2016.

Below is a released image showing the impact of a GPS jammer unleashed on the Western United States in a June 2016 test:

If there is a concrete reason why the Department of Defense is quietly preparing a massive air war drill in Nevada now, while simultaneously forcing a gigantic GPS blackout for the Western part of the United States, it has not been disclosed aside from the obvious, of course.

We know one thing: this exercise will last a lengthy three weeks and could pose significant risks and threats to devices that rely on GPS signals, which according to the DHS chart below, is pretty much anything with electronics in it these days.

 

Let’s hope that nothing goes wrong in the Western part of the United States if so, we will know whom to blame…

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Authored by Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna via The Mises Institute,

As gold prices hit a new cycle high, Americans, by and large, are still reluctant about gold… They don’t quite ‘get it’.

 

This incomprehension is different than that of Americans not “getting,” for example, bitcoin (as few seem to).

They may understand gold as a safe haven that has always stood the test of time, war, crises, inflation, etc. Some also understand that no gold proponent advocates harkening back to a mythical 19th century gold hey-day (one that did not exist — certainly not consistently), or recommends re-issuing gold minted currency, or reverting to any kind of bimetallism (the 19th century norm).

That said, the “barbarous relic” view tends to persist. Overall, it is thought that gold simply has no place in a modernized (read: central bank-controlled) economy. Making matters more complex is the question of what is gold and what is not. The recent proliferation of gold derivatives, “paper gold,” ETFs, certificates, bogus gold; the Chinese, the Russians, depleted reserves, actual supply make its study opaque and abstract. In light of this confusion, a basic overview of the role of gold in an economy, both in classic and modern terms, is in order: 

The Complexity of the Age of Gold Standards

In the beginning of the modern economic era of the later 19^th century, a pure “gold standard” was never consistent. However, its rise to preeminence as ‘the’ pillar of sound economic theory was that of gold’s role as a hedge against inflation and against Unsound Money — paper money easily manipulated to reckless credit whims. In this regard, the European central banks of the day were excellent watchdogs.

Great Britain led the charge on this score. The country was on a full gold standard from 1816 onwards, but de facto (the nuance is important) since 1717. Ironically, this was after Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, did not depreciate gold enough when the country was on a bimetallic standard, like most of the world. According to the legend, Newton had set the official silver price of gold guinea at twenty-one shillings and inadvertently drove what were newly re-minted full-bodied silver coins out of Britain — an illustration of Gresham’s law. This left only worn silver coins to circulate as a means of payment along with overvalued gold coins. Yet, this error in judgment established the gold standard in practice in the country, later codified into law following the Napoleonic wars. This, in turn influenced other nations, especially Germany and Japan, to turn to the gold standard — a means of trying to emulate British success.

A consistently international gold standard proper dates from around the 1870s until 1914. The U.S. adopted de facto a gold standard with specie (metal coin in mass circulation) payment on greenbacks in 1879, and became de jure with the Gold Standard Act of 1900.

The features of this old gold standard, both European and American, were as follows:

a) that a national monetary unit was now defined in terms of a given quantity of gold;

b) that the central bank or Treasury would stand by ready to buy and sell gold at the resulting fixed price in the terms of the national currency;

c) that gold was freely coined and gold coins formed a significant part of the circulating medium (and thus implying fixed exchange rates).

It was not a flawless system, of course, and it did not ensure price stability. Variations were due mostly to fluctuations in gold production and gold-rush boom-cycles that took place after the Civil war.

The Age of Fiat Currency

After World War I, another international landscape emerged and the “gold standard” took on multiple meanings — a fact that eventually led to that standard’s degradation and abrogation. When the U.S. and France displaced England to emerge as the chief post-war creditor countries, the mechanism of the pre-war gold standard to which depreciated currencies related no longer existed. Only America was left with a full gold standard; Great Britain and France had a gold bullion standard and other countries (Germany, primarily) had a gold-exchange standard.

(A gold standard is a fixed price between a currency for a specified amount of old. A gold exchange standard, then dominant in the 1920s, meant that foreign governments held U.S. dollars and the British pound as reserves — not gold itself — as those currencies were exchangeable for gold. A gold-bullion standard means that gold coins do not circulate, but authorities agree to sell bullion on demand at a fixed price in exchange for the circulating currency.)

With these competing standards, unbalanced trade relationships started to overwhelm the international economy. The U.S. manipulated its own domestic credit policies to ease credit and exchange-standard controls, a factor culminating in the crash of 1929 and the international financial crisis of 1931.

The contemporary era of gold begins when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the country off the U.S. full gold standard, meaning, among many things, that creditors had lost the right to demand payment in gold and individual households were required to turn in their gold holdings.

Under Bretton Woods (1944), gold was effectively abandoned: domestic convertibility was illegal and its monetary use was very constrained in favor of the dollar.

President Nixon’s move in 1971 was, in effect, a post-script to the actions of Bretton Woods.

Today, investors still view gold as a great insurance policy of sorts, but, as I have written here, the gold market is itself vulnerable to manipulation through short-term rigged market trades and long-arm central bank interventions…

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value”, Alan Greenspan was quoted on this site when he returned to being the Old Greenspan after leaving the Fed. His move demonstrated what is necessary when it comes to any economy having clarity and common sense concerning the true value of money, which is, in many times and places, the standard of gold itself.

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Google parent company, Alphabet, is launching a new cybersecurity firm out of its X-moonshot group called “Chronicle,” which will apply machine learning and its enormous cloud-based processing power to fighting hackers, by helping large corporations analyze attacks in minutes, as opposed to hours or days. The new company will operate under the Alphabet umbrella.

Add in some machine learning and better search capabilities, and we think we’ll be able to help organizations see their full security picture in much higher fidelity than they currently can. –Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillet

Stephen Gillet

Former Symantec COO and board member, Stephen Gillet, will head the new venture after having joined the X-moonshot division in January, 2016. Gillet explained of X: “We want to 10x the speed and impact of security teams’ work by making it much easier, faster and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find. We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”

To accomplish this, Chronicle will be powered by Alphabet’s vast and powerful cloud computing infrastructure, which Gillett says will provide a massive speed advantage over traditional methods of analyzing attacks. Second, Google’s incredibly cheap storage will allow Chronicle customers to take advantage of machine learning to “see patterns that emerge from multiple data sources and over years.” 

 

While Chronicle doesn’t exactly have a product yet – as they are in an “early alpha program” of its “cybersecurity intelligence platform,” the company’s website is up and running at https://chronicle.security/, and has made two introductory blog posts (here and here). The venture also has a twitter account which has made precisely one tweet as of this writing. 

Hello, World! Introducing Chronicle, Alphabet’s newest company. Get the story: https://t.co/foaAWSNeP4.#cybersecurity

— Chronicle (@chroniclesec) January 24, 2018

Gillet writes: 

Today I’d like to introduce you to Chronicle, a new independent business within Alphabet that’s dedicated to helping companies find and stop cyber attacks before they cause harm. X, the moonshot factory, has been our home for the last two years while we figured out where we had the potential to make the biggest impact on this enormous problem. Now we’re ready to unveil our new company, which will have two parts: a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that we hope can help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data; and VirusTotal, a malware intelligence service acquired by Google in 2012 which will continue to operate as it has for the last few years.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Chronicle, a new independent business within Alphabet that’s dedicated to helping companies find and stop cyber attacks before they cause harm. X, the moonshot factory, has been our home for the last two years while we figured out where we had the potential to make the biggest impact on this enormous problem. Now we’re ready to unveil our new company, which will have two parts: a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that we hope can help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data; and VirusTotal, a malware intelligence service acquired by Google in 2012 which will continue to operate as it has for the last few years.

Chronicle was originally launched in February 2016 as an “X” division collaboration between Gillet, Google security experts Mike Wiacek and Shapor Naghibzadeh, and Bernardo Quintero – who built malware intelligence service VirusTotal that alerts businesses and anti-virus providers about new malware threats. 

While Chronicle has said it’s databases will be kelt separate from Alphabet and adhering to “our own contracts and data policies with our customers,” it will be interesting to see if Google’s new sibling will eventually be able to tap into other data sets in hot pursuit of hackers. 

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Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Yesterday’s post covered two foundational pillars for creating a better paradigm for humanity, knowledge and consciousness. Knowledge is key because if we don’t know how the world really works and how we’re systemically being preyed upon, there’s no incentive to get to work changing things. Consciousness is also critical, because knowledge without wisdom, thoughtfulness and heightened awareness will simply result in a destructive and counterproductive revolution after which we’ll find ourselves back in the exact same place.

Let’s now move on to exploring one of the avenues by which we can manifest consciousness in the physical reality.

Innovation

It’s impossible to look at how much the world’s changed since the advent of the internet and social media and not recognize the colossal impact of innovation and technology on how human affairs are conducted. The inescapable impact of technology has led to a split amongst many of us. Some are completely terrified of what’s to come. Robots, AI, driverless cars, crypto assets…it all seems so overwhelming and dystopian to many.

In contrast, there are those who swear technological advancements will invariably lead to a utopia that can free humanity from the drudgery of bullshit jobs and other tedious tasks, allowing us to focus on the higher nature of what makes us human. In other words, we shall soon see a manifestation of the world John Adams dreamed of thanks to innovation.

 I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study painting and poetry mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

The truth is it could go either way. We could end up in a dystopian nightmare in which a handful of oligarchs control advanced technology and use it to subjugate the masses, or we could go in the opposite direction. Personally, I’m optimistic and fully dedicated to doing my part to ensure we use new technologies to free and empower humanity. This is another reason why consciousness is so important. A conscious population will use tools the right way, while an unconscious one will be viciously and willingly subjugated by them.

This is precisely why I’ve been such a passionate supporter of Bitcoin from the moment I first learned about it. Put aside your biases for a minute and try to objectively analyze some of the key components of the protocol.

There’s decentralization, which makes it virtually impossible to shut down. Open source code, which keeps it transparent and free to all. Governance by anarchy in which no one’s in charge; there’s no CEO, board of directors, etc. Then there are the monetary qualities, a transparent supply curve that’s capped at 21 million.

If you think about all these attributes, you’ll quickly realize that Bitcoin is everything the external world is not. You don’t have to put your trust in anybody, which is a really good thing because humans are generally not trustworthy — particularly those who attain great power. Bitcoin is the most significant red pill ever created.

As someone named Mark so accurately summed up earlier today on Twitter:

 

Hah, yeah. #bitcoin has taught more people about monetary economics than all the libertarians arguing on the internet, ever.

— Mark (@Markoola121) January 25, 2018

 

He’s right, but there’s so much more to it. For example, imagine if internet giants like Google,Twitter and Facebook ran on open source code like Bitcoin does. This would make it far more difficult for them to do all the shady, opaque stuff we all know they’re doing. We wouldn’t have to theorize about shadow banning and censorship since we could take a look at the code and try to figure out what they’re up to. Moreover, imagine if these companies were decentralized like Bitcoin, without a CEO and management calling all the shots. It’d be a lot harder for politicians to threaten them behind the scenes and pressure them to adjust their algorithms in nefarious ways.

As I noted earlier today:

 

Bitcoin is extremely important for many, many reasons, but learning about governance via anarchy is certainly one of the more interesting and overlooked ones.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 25, 2018

 

What Bitcoin does, by the very nature of the protocol itself, is force us to question many of the preconceived and false notions we have about how human affairs should be organized, from governance and money to communication in general. It’s the application of all sorts of revolutionary theories into real life via a voluntary and extraordinarily disruptive alternative system. We’re taught that we need top-down, centralized systems in which we trust technocrats, “experts” and politicians to do the right thing, but this path leads to ruin and tyranny. We need to discard that way of thinking forever.

Technology isn’t good or evil, it just is. A conscious people will come up with conscious technologies that benefit mankind. Everything is connected. The collective output of human consciousness on earth will create our reality, which is why it’s so crucial for us to also focus on our personal development and take responsibility for each action we take and thought we think.

The next post in this series will examine the importance of local action.

*  *  *

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When the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had arranged a $130,000 payment to former adult film actress Stormy Daniels to stop her from sharing the story of a brief affair she had with Trump, many speculated that the story would quickly be overshadowed by the unceasing White House news cycle.

But here we are: It’s nearly February, and we’re still talking about Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. A week after In Touch Magazine published an interview with Daniels – her first national TV interview – that it had conducted back in 2011, where she dished on her encounter with Trump, Inside Edition sat down with the actress for a wide-ranging interview…

 

When asked point blank if she had a “sexual relationship” with Trump, Daniels demurred – answering only with a smile…(their affair allegedly took place at a golf event in Lake Tahoe back in 2006, just a few months after Melania Trump gave birth to Barron Trump).

Though she did add: “I think it’s clear from the photos that I’ve met him.”

One of Daniels’s friends who spoke with IE said Daniels joked after her tryst with Trump that he “chased her around his hotel room in his tightie-whities…”

Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels, and Cohen has said reports that he facilitated a payoff on behalf of his boss are “completely false.”

Daniels – who will appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Jan. 30, the day Trump is set to deliver the State of the Union – says she’s been overwhelmed by the fame, and that she has received death threats…

“Basically everyone who has ever had my phone number ever has texted or called,” she said.

While trying to ride out the scandal while living in the small Texas town where she lives with her husband and daughter. She says she has hired security following the threats.

She added that she’s “definitely very surprised with the size of the story, and also very surprised at how much stuff is just completely made up about me.”

“The big misconception is that I’m stupid, or that I’m greedy, or an opportunist or an attention… I can’t say that word, but you-know-what,” Daniels said on the program. “People are saying I dated this person or that person and I’ve never heard of this person.”

Asked about her portrayal on Saturday Night Live, Daniels said she was flattered, adding that it’s her favorite show. “Did I giggle? Yes.”

While she’s been stunned by the attention she’s received in the aftermath of the story, she says it’s been far more negative than positive. Asked if she would make it all go away if she could, Daniels said “yes.”

But what’s the likelihood that the news media will all of a sudden forget about one of its newfound favorite subjects”

“I don’t know. Do you have a magic wand?”, Daniels responded.

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Authored by Nicholas Colas via DataTrekResearch.com,

How are Americans feeling about themselves, their economic prospects, and the stock market? Today we use Google Trends to answer those questions. The conclusion: they are pretty upbeat. Interest in equity investing is at one-year highs (for good or for bad), and “Bitcoin fever” seems to have broken. At least for now.

For most of human history, mankind did not know that fever was a symptom of illness. Instead, physicians tended to believe that the fever was the illness. Lack of reliable measurement tools complicated things as well; the modern clinical thermometer is only 150 years old. Once it came into common use, modern medicine could begin to link symptom with disease progression and treatment.

On a quarterly basis we use Google Trends as essentially a thermometer for a range of social and capital markets measurements. How are Americans feeling about themselves and their economic prospects? Are they interested in investing? Those are queries most often answered by polls and surveys, of course. But Google Trends lets us see what people are searching for online, in the privacy of their homes. And that can be much more telling than what they reveal to a random phone survey taker.

Question #1: What is the mood of the country?

• Google searches for “Anxiety” and “Depression” are stable over the last 12 months. As for long-term trends, queries about “Anxiety” are up 3x since 2007 while searches related to “Depression” are about the same. Fair warning: American searches for “Depression” routinely peak in March of each year. And it isn’t even February yet…

• Searches with the word “Angry” in them are down 22% year on year. The most riled-up states: Arizona, Maine, Illinois and Connecticut.

• Search volumes for “Donald Trump” continue to wane from their post-inauguration highs, down 75% from a year ago. In terms of where these searches come from, the top 5 states that Google the President the most all voted against him: DC, Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington, and Oregon.

• Google searches for popular antidepressants (Prozac, Xanax, etc) are all stable over the last 12 months.

Question #2: What is the economic mood of the country?

• “Unemployment” searches on Google are actually higher than the same period last year by 7%.

• Importantly, actual (as opposed to seasonally adjusted) unemployment in the US peaks every first quarter. The fourth quarter has the benefit of Holiday-related seasonal hiring, and Q2/Q3 get a boost from temporary tourism/hospitality related employment. We’ll be watching this one, though. It could just be that Holiday 2017 hiring was especially strong and so more seasonal workers are eligible for unemployment benefits in early 2018.

• Searches for “Mortgage” are down 7% year over year, likely a function of higher interest rates.

• Google queries for “Car loan” are flat to last year, a positive sign for automakers since many industry observers are calling for a decline in sales this year.

• Searches for “Coupon” are at 5-year lows. We think of this as a “tell” about consumer attitudes to inflation. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be much concern out there about rising prices.

• Searches for “Ask for a raise”/”Get a raise” are stable over the past five years, but the latter query showed an uptick in Q4 2017. States where “Get a raise” are most popular: California, New York, Texas, Illinois, North Carolina and Florida. Still, we see no overwhelming pattern in the search data that points to widespread wage inflation pressures.

Question #3: What does Google Trends tell us about general interest in investing?

• Search interest in “Bitcoin” is waning, down by 50% from the December highs. States with the most interest in the crypto: Hawaii, California, Washington, New York and New Jersey.

• After a large runup of interest through December, searches for “Coinbase” (the popular online crypto wallet) are lower in volume than those for “Schwab” and close to those of “etrade”.

• Interest in robo advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront are unchanged from a year ago. In fact, neither term has seen a big uptick in Google search traffic since 2015.

• Google searches for “Stock market” were at one year highs just last week, up 33% from a year ago.

Our takeaway from all this: Americans are feeling pretty positive about their economic and personal lives right now. Some are getting up the courage to ask for a raise, but not many. They aren’t seeking out the very lowest prices when they shop. They have finally noticed the stock market’s rise, and want to learn more.

And the “bitcoin fever” of the last quarter may well have finally broken.

Sources: History of Fever: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15236913

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The hazelnut spread Nutella nearly triggered a wave of riots across France this week when Intermarche supermarkets offered a 70% on the popular product, lowering the price of a jar from 4.50 euros to 1.40 euros.

 

In some cases, police were called when people began pushing and fighting one another trying to get their hands on as many containers as they could carry, the BBC reported.

“They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand,” one customer told French media.

A member of staff at one Intermarché shop in central France told the regional newspaper Le Progrès: “We were trying to get in between the customers but they were pushing us.”

All of that supermarket’s stock of Nutella was gone within 15 minutes, while one customer left with a black eye. Similar scenes have been reported across France, with some being described by authorities as “riots.”

 

Serieux ??!! Tout ça pour du Nutella ?! 😮 #Emeute #Nutella pic.twitter.com/UoNTmK78eE

— •KENNY LE BON• (@kennyLebon) January 25, 2018

 

The hunt for discounted jars continued on Friday, with a supermarket near Toulouse rationing one jar per customer.

Nutella was created by the Ferrero family in the 1940s in the Piedmont region of Italy, which is famed for its hazelnuts.

Intermarche said it regretted the violence it had inadvertently caused, saying the discount had been decided at the corporate level.

If nothing else, the phenomenon has been a valuable source of free advertising for the brand…

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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it … as soon as possible. … under oath, absolutely.”

On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room after the 38-7 rout of the Vikings put them in the Super Bowl.

If the president’s legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller’s agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.

For what Mueller is running here is not, as Trump suggests, a “witch hunt.” It is a Trump hunt.

 

After 18 months investigating Trumpian “collusion” with Putin’s Russia in hacking the DNC’s and John Podesta’s emails, the FBI has hit a stone wall. Failing to get Trump for collusion, the fallback position is to charge him with obstruction of justice. As a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the tactic is understandable.

Mueller’s problem: He has no perjury charge to go with it. And the heart of his obstruction case, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

Consider what is now known of how Comey and the FBI set about ensuring Hillary Clinton would not be indicted for using a private email server to transmit national security secrets.

The first draft of Comey’s statement calling for no indictment was prepared before 17 witnesses, and Hillary, were even interviewed.

Comey’s initial draft charged Clinton with “gross negligence,” the requirement for indictment. But his team softened that charge in subsequent drafts to read, “extreme carelessness.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others, appears to have known in advance an exoneration of Clinton was baked in the cake. Yet Comey testified otherwise.

Also edited out of Comey’s statement was that Hillary, while abroad, communicated with then-President Obama, who had to see that her message came through a private server. Yet Obama told the nation he only learned Hillary had been using a private server at the same time the public did.

A trial of Hillary would have meant Obama in the witness chair being asked, “What did you know, sir, and when did you know it?”

More information has also been unearthed about FBI collusion with British spy Christopher Steele, who worked up — for Fusion GPS, the dirt-divers of the Clinton campaign — the Steele dossier detailing Trump’s ties to Russia and alleged frolics with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

While the Steele dossier was shopped around town to the media, which, unable to substantiate its lurid and sensational charges, declined to publish them, Comey’s FBI went all in.

Not only did the Steele dossier apparently trigger a wider FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, it served as the basis of FBI requests for FISA court warrants to put on Trump the kind of full-court press J. Edgar Hoover put on Dr. King for the Kennedys and LBJ.

Amazing. Oppo-research dirt, unsourced and unsubstantiated, dredged up by a foreign spy with Kremlin contacts, is utilized by our FBI to potentially propel an investigation to destroy a major U.S. presidential candidate. And the Beltway media regard it as a distraction.

An aggressive Republican Party on the Hill, however, has forced the FBI to cough up documents that are casting the work of Comey’s cohorts in an ever more partisan and sinister light.

This cabal appears to have set goals of protecting Obama, clearing Hillary, defeating Trump, and bringing down the new president the people had elected, before he had even taken his oath.

Not exactly normal business for our legendary FBI.

What have these people done to the reputation of their agency when congressmen not given to intemperate speech are using words like “criminal,” “conspiracy,” “corruption” and “coup” to describe what they are discovering went on in the FBI executive chambers?

Bob Mueller, who inherited this investigation, is sitting on an IED because of what went on before he got there. Mueller needs to file his charges before his own investigation becomes the subject of a Justice Department investigation by a special counsel.

As for Trump, he should not sit for any extended interview by FBI agents whose questions will be crafted by prosecutors to steer our disputatious president into challenging or contradicting the sworn testimony of other witnesses.

This a perjury trap.

Let the special counsel submit his questions in writing, and let Trump submit his answers in writing.

At bottom, this is a political issue, an issue of power, an issue of whether the Trump revolution will be dethroned by the deep state it was sent to this capital to corral and contain.

If Trump is guilty of attempted obstruction, it appears to be not of justice, but obstruction of an injustice being perpetrated against him.

Trump should be in no hurry to respond to Mueller, for time no longer appears to be on Mueller’s side.

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Just one day after the White House reversed its position on naturalizing young illegal immigrants, unveiling a proposal late on Thursday to double the number of Dreamers the US would accept in exchange for billions in Wall funding, President Trump said on Friday that Republican senators – even those who have taken a tough approach to immigration such as Tom Cotton, John Cornyn and David Perdue – could agree to the unexpected proposal to offer citizenship within 10 to 12 years to so-called “Dreamers.”

“They’ve really shifted a lot, and I think they’re willing to shift more, and so am I,” the Republican president told CNBC in an interview from Davos. “We’re going to see. If we make the right deal, I think they will.”

The problem is that while a handful of republicans were happy with Trump’s plan, many more were not even as the elephant in the room – or rather the donkey – remained the democrats. As we said yesterday, the fate of Trump’s proposal – and by extension whether or not the government is shut down again on February 8 should  there be no immigration deal – “depends on the Democrats’ response which is yet to come.”

And, as it turns out, early indications are not looking good, because as The Hill reports, Trump’s immigration plan has slammed into heavy opposition on and off Capitol Hill, suggesting the much-anticipated framework has failed to move the needle as a bipartisan group of senators try to negotiate a deal.

While Trump is hoping the Senate will draft legislation based on his blueprint (it can be seen here)and introduce it by Feb. 5, just three days before funding for the government runs out, the day-old plan is already taking heavy fire from both the right and the left.

In some ways, it may now be even worse than before: for the bipartisan gang of 20 senators trying to hammer out an agreement to protect the “Dreamers,” it’s clear the Trump outline — intended as an olive branch to Democrats — gets them no closer to a deal. One of the key negotiators of the group, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), warned that Trump’s plan places the White House’s “hardline immigration agenda … on the backs of these young people.“

Charles Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader who will need to sign off on any deal for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to pass the upper chamber, echoed those sentiments on Twitter on Friday. Trump is using DACA recipients as “a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish list that anti-immigration hardliners have advocated for for years,” he wrote.

What is more surprising is how much pushback the Trump plan got from his own party.

In all, while Trump’s plan did get an endorsement from a pair of key conservatives, i.e., David Perdue and Tom Cotton, for the most part conservative outside groups, members of the House Freedom Caucus and other vocal immigration hard-liners all panned the White House plan, saying providing a path to citizenship for 1.8 million “Dreamers” amounted to “mass amnesty” for law breakers.

“Illegals have No Right to be here & have ALL violated our laws. This #Amnesty deal negotiates away American Sovereignty,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an immigration hawk, tweeted Friday.

The American People have a Right to enforcement of our laws & a Right to a sealed border. Illegals have No Right to be here & have ALL violated our laws. This #Amnesty deal negotiates away American Sovereignty.

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) January 26, 2018

Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reduced immigration, had embraced an immigration proposal by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). That bill includes a path to legalization for nearly 700,000 DACA recipients — the first time since 1986 that NumbersUSA has supported any proposal along those lines.

But the White House proposal goes too far for Beck.

“NumbersUSA has no choice but to oppose what is being suggested as the White House ‘framework’ for a mass amnesty,” Beck said.

The pile up continued:

The outside conservative group Heritage Action described Trump’s plan as a “nonstarter” because it “expands the amnesty-eligible population,” while the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration restrictionist group, suggested Trump had betrayed the conservative base that had propelled him to the presidency.

“Time to start burning your #MAGA hats. Send pictures and I’ll retweet,” Mark Krikorian tweeted.

And former Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), appearing on Fox News on Friday, said he had “concerns” about the Trump plan.

The Ohio Republican said he favors the Goodlatte bill, which places greater emphasis on border-enforcement measures like mandating that all employers use E-Verify, ending chain migration, also known as family reunification, and cracking down on sanctuary cities.

If there is a “focus on DACA first and then a little pretend security and pretend border wall and pretend chain migration,” Jordan said, “that’s a different animal, and I won’t be for that, and neither will lots of conservatives, more importantly, lots of Americans.”

* * *

Meanwhile, predictably, Democrats threw up all over Trump’s plan. On the other end of the political spectrum, Democratic leaders, liberal groups and pro-immigration advocates accused Trump of holding Dreamers hostage while demanding draconian policies that would greatly curb legal immigration.

The plan calls for a $25 billion trust fund for border security — many times more than what Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had entertained in their bipartisan negotiations. It also would scrap the visa lottery system and severely limit family-based immigration, which Republicans call “chain migration.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group that works closely with progressive members on immigration, said the White House plan “comes nowhere close to finding the sweet spot” for a bipartisan agreement.

“It is a far-right restructuring of our entire immigration system in trying exploit the crisis that was created by Trump ending DACA,” he said.

Greisa Martinez Rosas, a DACA recipient and policy director for United We Dream, a youth network of Dreamer advocates, said Dreamers — even those benefited by the proposal — would not accept its price.

“The immigration proposal presented yesterday by the Trump White House is nothing more than a white supremacist ransom note. A ‘Sophie’s choice’ by an immoral and horrible man whose aim is to wipe immigrant families from this country,” she said.

Like the Goodlatte bill, the White House proposal would cut legal immigration and change the methods by which immigrants are selected. John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the proposal “decimates the family immigration system that has made this country so dynamic.”

Democrats, wary of their base’s reaction to the short-lived shutdown, took a similar tone.

“We cannot allow the lives of young people who have done everything right to be used as bargaining chips for sweeping anti-immigrant policies,” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) in a statement.

“The White House is using Dreamers to mask their underlying xenophobic, isolationist, and un-American policies, which will harm millions of immigrants living in the United States and millions of others who want to legally immigrate and contribute to our country,” she said.

* *  *

In short, with one short proposal Trump managed to infuriate both Democrats and Republicans.

And while the White House proposal follows a well-worn formula in immigration negotiations — trading enforcement measures for legalizing blocs of immigrants in the country illegally, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) on Thursday warned, before the White House made its proposal public, that Republican enforcement demands were far outweighing their offer in terms of legalizations.

“It’s not reasonable to say that for a group of 700,000-800,000 students in this country, to ask what was negotiated for comprehensive immigration reform,” he said.

Finally, with the White House unlikely to move much on its original proposal, Trump’s gambit is that the Democrat will cave entirely lest they be blamed for the next government shutdown in exactly two weeks. The problem is that Schumer won’t agree to a capitulation, and the most likely outcome is another government shutdown, only this time with no possibility of an olive branch, it will extend deep into February if not March.

Which is a problem, because as we discussed last week, should the shutdown extend into the debt ceiling X-Date period, expected to hit around mid-March, then not only are all bets off, but a US technical default suddenly looks especially likely.

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Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

What goes up, eventually comes down.

That is just reality.

The bull market that began in 2009, has now entered the final stage of “capitulation” as investors throw caution to the wind and charge headlong into the markets with reckless regard for the consequences.

Of course, it isn’t surprising given the massive amounts of liquidity continually injected into the financial markets and global Central Banks have now figured out that continually rising financial markets solve much of the world’s ills. Simply, with enough liquidity, you can cover up bad (credit risks) by guaranteeing holders they will never default.

It’s genius.  It’s a “no lose” investment scheme.

Unfortunately, we have seen this repeatedly in the past.

In the 1980’s it was “Portfolio Insurance” – a “no lose” investment program that eventually erupted into the crash of 1987. But not before the market went into a parabolic advance first.

In the 1990’s – it was the dot.com phenomenon which was “obviously” a “no lose” proposition. Even after Alan Greenspan spoke of “irrational exuberance,” two years later the market went parabolic once again.

Then in 2006-2007, banks invented the CDO-squared, a collateralized derivative obligation based on other collateralized derivative obligations. It was a genius way to invest with “no risk” because the real estate market had never crashed in history.

Today, it is once again an absolute “certainty” that markets will rise from here as global Central Banks have it all under control.

What possibly could go wrong?

Here is your weekend reading list.

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