Category: zerohedge

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

Upon hearing that a man dressed in a military-style outfit was shooting people with an assault rifle at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California on Sunday, I imagine that there were at least some Californians saying to themselves, “That’s impossible. It’s illegal in California to take an assault rifle into a public festival.” Indeed, according to Wikipedia, “The gun laws of California are some of the most restrictive in the United States.”

So, what are gun-control advocates in California going to do now? Make their gun laws even more restrictive?

For 20 years, I have been writing that people who are going to kill other people with guns don’t give a hoot about gun laws. After all, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, if a person doesn’t care about obeying a law against murder, he’s not going to care about violating a law against taking an assault rifle into a food festival.

But ordinary, law-abiding people do care about obeying gun laws. That’s because many of these laws make it a felony offense to violate them. That means jail time, big fines, and a serious criminal record. Even when it’s just a misdemeanor offense, oftentimes a conviction can also mean jail time.

For most people, violating the law in order to have a means of self-defense is just not worth the risk. The chances of being caught in a place where some mass murderer is indiscriminately shooting people is relatively low and, therefore, not enough to justify the risk of a felony conviction if caught with, say, a concealed handgun for self-defense.

Thus, as we learn, once again, gun-control laws destroy people’s natural, God-given right of self-defense by disarming them, while, at the same time, do nothing to dissuade a mass murderer from wreaking his deadly mayhem on innocent, disarmed victims.

[ZH: And judging by the avalanche of virtue-signaling demands that “enough is enough” and “gun reform” is needed immediately by any and all politicians able to fog a mirror, that is exactly what we see…]

U.S. Sen Kamala Harris

“Simply horrific. I’m grateful to the first responders who are on the scene in Gilroy, and my thoughts are with that community tonight. Our country has a gun violence epidemic that we cannot tolerate.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

“This brutal killing targeting children and families enjoying a day of community breaks the heart of America. We thank the heroic first responders who provided aid and support to those in need, and we send our prayers to all who are mourning the lives that were cruelly cut short by this shocking attack.

“Enough is enough. Congress has a responsibility to every family torn apart by gun violence to act, and help advance a future that is finally free from this senseless violence. Every day the Senate refuses to act is a stain on the conscience of our nation.

“May it bring some measure of comfort to the friends and loved ones of those whose lives were cut short that all of America mourns with and prays for them during this sad time.”

U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin

“My heart breaks for all of our Bay Area neighbors who attended the Gilroy Garlic Festival. We need gun reform and we need it now. Enough is enough.”

Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto

“Instead of sending racist tweets and stoking hate in America, how about Donald Trump put in a real day of work for once and bring legislative leaders together to find real solutions to the gun violence epidemic that’s plaguing our communities? Or is it more thoughts & prayers?”

Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland

“As news unfolds of another tragic mass shooting — at the Gilroy Garlic Fest— our communities weep, we grapple with both anger and heartbreak, and we hold our children closer. We send love to those whose lives are forever changed — we must match it with political courage to end this epidemic.”

Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda

“Unacceptable. Thoughts and prayers are not enough. Bold action on gun safety is required.You’ve (President Donald Trump) failed to adequately address gun violence even as mass shootings have repeatedly occurred on your watch. Unless you will act to make the US safe from gun violence, don’t talk. Action.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

“Our hearts go out to the victims of the shooting in Gilroy. It is devastating that families cannot enjoy a community festival without fear of gun violence. We have a moral imperative to end this epidemic.”

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco

“No more thoughts and prayers. Time to take more action so we can go to work, school and festivals in peace without fear of getting shot.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco

My heart goes out to the people of Gilroy, to the victims of this act of domestic terrorism, and to the families and community that will be impacted forever. Our country must take action — must stop ignoring — the flood of guns plaguing our country. These murders are avoidable.

“We’ve dramatically tightened access in California to guns whose purpose is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. But, we can’t do it alone. Congress must act and take this tidal wave of gun violence seriously. Too many people, too many of our kids, are dying.”

Of course, the deeper question is why this sort of thing continues to happen in the United States.

Here is my personal thesis as to the series of mass killings in America, one that I have set out in previous articles.

Keep in mind that I am not a psychiatrist and, therefore, that this is just a personal theory. But I remain convinced that it is a valid one.

I believe that America’s forever wars, sanctions, embargoes, and assassinations overseas are triggering some sort of mechanism within the minds of people who are bit off kilter mentally, which is causing them to wreak the same sort of violent and deadly mayhem here at home that the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, is wreaking in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

For some 30 years, U.S. officials have led the American people into believing that all the death and destructive wreaked on people overseas would have no effect on American society. After all, since the killings happen thousands of miles away from American shores, how could that affect the American people?

For three decades, there have been two separate worlds.

One world is thousands of miles away and entails constantly killing people with sanctions, embargoes, bombs, shootings, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, occupations, undeclared wars, coups, and alliances with violent dictators. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, maimed, or exiled or have their homes and businesses destroyed by U.S. forces.

The other world is here at home. Americans go to work. They go on vacation. They go to sports events and concerts. They engage in their hobbies. And whenever they see a person in military uniform, they go out of their way to thank him for his service, which purportedly consists of protecting the freedoms here at home by killing people abroad.

But the truth is that the freedom of the American people has never been threatened by any of the hundreds of thousands of people they have killed overseas. At worst, Americans have been threatened by terrorist strikes in retaliation for the death and destruction the U.S. government wreaks overseas.

Through it all, there has been a remarkable lack of concern for the sanctity of human life over there. Who cares, for example, about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi who have been killed at the hands of U.S. forces, beginning with the Persian Gulf War, continuing through the 11 years of deadly sanctions, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq based on those supposed WMDs? The deaths of all those people just don’t matter.

During the many years of the Iraq occupation (labeled “Operation Iraqi Freedom”), church ministers all across the country exhorted their congregations to pray for U.S. troops in Iraq but never for their victims, even though it is undisputed that neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States. Even while constantly reminding people of the sanctity of life when it comes to the unborn, church ministers have forgotten that in the eyes of God, the lives of the born, including the foreign born, is just as sacred as the lives of the unborn.

U.S. sanctions and embargoes target innocent foreign citizens with death, with the aim of achieving a political end, i.e., regime change. And there is never an upward limit on the number of people who can be killed in the process of trying to achieve that political end. Any number of deaths is considered “worth it,” the words used by U.S. Ambassador to UN Madeleine Albright to justify the deaths of half-a –million Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions.

What does all this have to do with the California shooting and, for that matter, other instances of mass violence in America?

I believe that when a nation’s government has been killing people continuously for three decades, all that death and destruction is inevitably going to seep into the subconscious of individual citizens, even though it’s happening thousands of miles away and even though the government tries to keep us immune from it. Most of us can handle it but my thesis is that there are some people who are a bit off-kilter mentally who cannot handle it. I believe that the massive death and destruction ultimately triggers something within them that causes them to mirror here in the United States what the U.S. government is doing overseas. In their off-kilter minds, they are unable to do what U.S. officials do — place a high value on the sanctity of American life and no value on foreign life. For the off-kilter people, all life is equally valueless. The fact that some of these mass killers are military veterans and may even have participated in the oversea death, destruction, and mayhem makes the psychological situation even more problematic.

There is an easy way to test my thesis: bring the forever wars to an immediate end and bring all U.S. soldiers home immediately. Even if my thesis isn’t correct, it’s the morally right thing to do anyway.

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

One could get whiplash listening to Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd’s rapidly changing opinions these days.

Back on May 29, the weightlifting CIO of the $265 billion asset manager, made a gloomy forecast on CNBC, predicting that the stock market sell-off is likely far from over, and said stocks would go “somewhere below the lows in December.” Near term, he saw an “immediate move” down to around 2,730 on the before it drops further. Oh, and he also said the next move by the Fed will be a rate hike.

Oops.

Not even two months later, everything miraculously changed, and on July 15, again on CNBC, Minerd changed his tune by 180 degrees, and no longer seeing any crash, said that he now thinks the S&P 500 could rise 15% and approach 3,500 before the end of year, comparing the current market environment to a 1998 rally amid interest rate cuts.

“This rally — whether you’re looking at bonds, you’re looking at stocks, high yield, pick whatever you want — is all being driven by liquidity. And the central banks around the world have basically signaled that they are going to step on the accelerator,” Minerd said adding that the Fed has “kind of hit the panic button” and that “you’re going to see the money flow out of the central banks into bonds, which will free up capital and that will naturally find another place to migrate to and ultimately it will end up in the hands of stocks.”

And so, Minerd now had all bases covered, with a soundbite to say he was right if stocks crashed, and another if they melted up by another 500 points. Actually, there was one base that needed covering: the same one that Trump has been pounding every single day, namely that if it all goes pear-shaped, it will be the Fed’s fault (he is actually right about that), and today, Minerd – undaunted by his recent dismal track record in making public predictions – slammed the Fed saying that the Fed should hike interest rates, not cut them.

The consequences of the Fed’s actions in the next week – the U.S. central bank is expected to cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point – could be with us for much longer than we think, culminating in the next recession and increasing the risk to financial stability.

In the meantime, the Fed could be delivering yet another sugar high to the economy that doesn’t address underlying structural problems created by powerful demographic forces that are constraining output and depressing prices.

Like we said, this time Minerd was correct, though we wonder: why does it take all these sophisticated financial professionals a decade to realize (or admit) what we have been saying since 2009. Must have something to do with vested year-end bonus options…

In any case, just in case everyone wasn’t completely confused yet, today’s Minerd released yet another research report in which he tried to predict not only when the next recession would hit (“we maintain our view that the recession could begin as early as the first half of 2020, but will be watching for signs that the dovish pivot by the Federal Reserve (Fed) could extend the cycle”), but also how severe it will be.

It is here that things get ugly, because as Guggenheim notes, credit markets “are likely to be hit harder than usual in the recession. This stems from the record high ratio of corporate debt to GDP and the likelihood of a massive fallen angel wave.”  With that in mind, the bank notes that “when recessions hit, the magnitude of the associated bear market in stocks is driven by how high valuations were in the preceding bull market.” And given that valuations reached quite elevated levels in this cycle, Guggenheim expects “a severe bear market of 40–50 percent in the next recession.”

Here are some additional details, starting with Guggenheim’s framework for when the next recession will hit: here, the bank notes that its Recession Probability Model rose across all horizons in the first quarter of 2019, and while near-term the recession probability remains subdued, over the next 24 months recession probability more than doubled compared to the third quarter reading. The deterioration in leading indicators, further flattening of the yield curve, and tightening of monetary policy all contributed to rising recession risks through the first quarter. And since Guggenheim expects these trends to continue and growth to weaken in 2019, it expects recession risk to rise throughout the year.

The bank’s Recession Dashboard also continues to point to a recession starting by mid-2020. The pace of decline in the unemployment rate is beginning to slow, with the unemployment rate holding steady, on net, over the last nine months. Past Fed rate increases and balance sheet runoff mean that monetary policy may already be tight enough to induce a recession. Additionally, yield curve flattening is now back in line with the average of prior cycles, with the three-month to 10-year Treasury yield curve having inverted recently (see our previous report, The Yield Curve Doesn’t Lie, for our analysis showing that the yield curve may not be unduly flat due to quantitative easing, but rather unduly steep due to outsized Treasury issuance). The strength of the Leading Economic Index has faded, putting it in line with the range of prior cycles. Hours worked and real retail sales have also cooled, and “these trends will continue this year as fading fiscal stimulus, tighter financial conditions, and rising policy uncertainty increasingly weigh on economic activity.”

So with a recession coming as soon as under a year from now, there is some good news. First, Guggenheim notes that its work shows that the next recession will not be as severe as the last one, “but it could be more prolonged than usual because policymakers at home and abroad have limited tools to fight the downturn.”

Recession severity can be defined a number of ways: either by focusing on the i) magnitude of the contraction (the peak to trough decline in real gross domestic product (GDP)), ii) the size of the output gap (the difference between real GDP and potential output), iii) the peak unemployment rate relative to the natural rate, or iv) the length of time the recession lasts. Combining these four indicators to create a recession severity indicator that shows unsurprising results: the 2007–2009 recession was one of the worst of the post-war period, exceeded only by the “double dip” recession of 1980–1981. In contrast, the 2001 recession was mild by comparison.

Several factors play a role in determining the severity of a recession. From a sectoral basis, an overheated housing market has a strong relationship with severe recessions, reflecting the fact that housing is the largest asset for most households and is closely tied to the banking system. A related factor is stress on the banking system, which also makes recessions worse. Beyond housing, overinvestment (as measured by the private capital stock relative to GDP) contributes to more severe downturns. Other factors that can make recessions worse are monetary policy tightness (and degree of subsequent easing) and weaker global growth. Perhaps surprisingly, Guggenheim found that neither the length nor the magnitude of an expansion seem to have a relationship with the severity of the subsequent contraction. Also contrary to conventional wisdom, there is not a straightforward relationship between debt levels and recession severity, whether debt is measured by sector or from a total economy perspective. This is likely due to debt cycles lasting longer than business cycles, as the negative effects of debt accumulation can sometimes be put off in a downturn as borrowers simply take on even more debt.

Guggenheim’s analysis of these factors indicates that “the next recession should be about average. On the positive side, the housing market is not currently overheated, the banking system is sound, and the capital stock is only somewhat elevated.” In addition, Fed policymakers will likely act more quickly in response to signs of a slowdown than in the prior cycles, as evidenced by the recent Fed reaction to weaker economic data.

That’s the good news.

On the negative side, Guggenheim is worried about the limited scope for policy response once the recession hits. From a monetary policy perspective, Fed policymakers will be unable to ease to the same degree that they have in previous recessions, as cumulative rate cuts have averaged 5.5 percentage points in past downturns. Even with another hike or two in this cycle, per the Fed’s March 2019 Summary of Economic Projections, the Fed would have less than 3 percentage points of rate cuts available to combat the next recession.

With limited room to cut rates, it is therefore likely the Fed will again turn to unconventional policy tools, namely forward rate guidance and quantitative easing (QE). While another round of QE will undoubtedly provide some incremental stimulus, the efficacy of QE remains in question, according to Guggenheim. Furthermore, QE could also again come under fire from politicians looking to blame the Fed for economic woes, which could limit the size or duration of future QE programs. Moreover, the bank expects problems to center on corporate credit markets in the next downturn, but unlike some other central banks, the Fed lacks statutory authority to buy corporate debt or loans, at least for now. Policymakers are not likely to seek—nor would we expect Congress to pass—changes to the Federal Reserve Act that would permit the Fed to buy corporates. With these limitations in mind, the Fed is embarking on a review of its policy framework in 2019. This review will explore, among other things, the possibility of adding additional tools to the toolkit. These could include a version of Japan’s yield curve control policy and/or negative short-term rates, though both face hurdles to being deployed in the United States.

At the same time, since the monetary policy’s ability to stimulate the economy is limited, Guggenheim is also worried that fiscal policy will be constrained. Typically, the fiscal balance is countercyclical, meaning that when economic times are good we have small deficits or even surpluses that allow us to run large deficits when recessions occur, in part due to automatic stabilizers, and in part due to discretionary stimulus. However, over the past few years this relationship has reversed, with deficits widening even as the economy has strengthened due to discretionary spending increases and tax cuts.

It gets worse: when the next recession finally hits, the starting point for the federal deficit will likely be much worse than it typically is at the end of an expansion, raising the prospect that fiscal hawks will resurface to raise concerns about deficits and debt. Furthermore, the expected recession interval comes at a particularly challenging time in the political calendar given the presidential election in November 2020. If growth continues to slow, will the Democrat-controlled House really want to pass a spending bill that would stimulate the economy right before the election? Guggenheim see significant obstacles to the bipartisan enactment of proactive fiscal policy measures, which is informed by our analysis of polling data that reveals a historically high degree of political polarization.

But if the US is bad, the rest of the world is far worse as policy space is even more limited overseas. As constrained as Fed policy is likely to be, the problem is much worse for the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan (BOJ), where the starting point for inflation is lower, policy rates are still negative, and central bank balance sheets hold a much larger share of eligible assets. Given the Japanese yen’s status as a global safe-haven asset, the BOJ faces an especially difficult challenge in fending off what will likely be a deflationary exchange rate appreciation, with fiscal policy unlikely to offer much support.

Nor is fiscal policy the answer in northern Europe, where austerian ideas still hold sway. In southern Europe, fiscal tools are limited as political pressure from the north and sovereign spread widening will likely force pro-cyclical belt-tightening measures. Meanwhile, the ECB will have limited ability to cushion the downturn. If politicians in Spain, Portugal, Greece and especially Italy are not able to deliver the fiscal tightening that markets will demand, then concerns about the viability of the eurozone are likely to resurface. Advanced economies are therefore likely to be mired in a protracted downturn, spilling back into the U.S. economy by way of weak export demand, tighter financial conditions and potential concerns about exposures to weaker foreign banks.

But most importantly, during the last recession a major source of global stimulus was China’s massive credit easing and infrastructure spending, without which the global recession would have been even more severe. China has, until recently, actively been working to deleverage its economy, where debt growth over the past 10 years has been on par with some of the biggest debt bubbles in history. When the global economy slows, Chinese policymakers are unlikely to deliver nearly as much stimulus as last time around, even if China manages to avoid a debt crisis or “hard landing” scenario. Other emerging markets (EM) are also unlikely to deliver the needed global stimulus, as balance of payments pressures in many EM countries will limit domestic policy space and force them to intervene in foreign exchange markets to avoid disorderly currency depreciations. This would reduce their net demand for U.S. Treasury and Agency securities, which could further complicate the Fed’s ability to deliver an appropriate degree of monetary stimulus.

Taking these factors together, Guggenheim anticipates a scenario where the magnitude of the decline in the U.S. economy is not especially severe when the recession hits, given the lack of major imbalances and relative soundness of the banking system. However, this downturn is likely to be more prolonged than usual, given the limited ability of policy to respond and the potential spillback from economic weakness abroad. The result could be a cycle that is more “U-shaped” than “V-shaped”.

Yes but…

Prepare for a Steep Decline in Risk Assets: On the surface, this scenario may not seem particularly dire for investors,  but Minerd would caution that market behavior is only loosely correlated with economic conditions, and a moderate recession does not mean moderate market movements. On the contrary, as he cautions “years of low interest rates have served to amplify the financial cycle over the past few decades, and this amplification has been further heightened in the current cycle by asset purchases by global central banks.”

Worse, as Minerd’s work shows, when recessions hit, the severity of the downturn has a relatively minor impact on the magnitude of the associated bear market in stocks. A far more important factor is how high valuations were in the preceding bull market. A good example is the 2001 recession, which was relatively modest economically, but saw one of the worst bear markets on record given the sky-high valuations of the tech bubble.

So given that valuations reached elevated levels in this cycle, Guggenheim’s CIO now expects a severe equity bear market of 40–50 percent in the next recession, consistent with the bank’s previous analysis that pointed to low expected returns over the next 10 years.

Finally, from a purely asset allocation standpoint, given this historical lesson and the fact that the exits tend to shrink when investors need them most, Guggenheim has been steadily upgrading portfolio credit quality and reducing spread duration in the lead up to the next recession. As Guggenheim concludes last quarter, the Fed’s dovish pivot has supported risk assets, which afforded investors a window of opportunity to further recession-proof client portfolios.

And the punchline: as Minder concludes, he will be looking to add rate duration this year given his firm’s view that policy rates will return to the zero lower bound during the upcoming recession. In other words, ZIRP is coming back, and NIRP may follow shortly after.

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

Patricia Russell was a certified financial planner and graduate of several prestigious colleges whose advice was quoted in giant publications like MarketWatch, Consumer Reports and Business Insider.

The only problem, as the Huffington Post pointed out, is that she’s not a real person.

A reporter at HufPo was tipped off by another reporter that Russell was somebody had who had responded to many inquiries on HARO, a service called “Help A Reporter Out”, that connects reporters to experts in various fields.

When one reporter, Elizabeth Aldrich, finally decided to write about Russell, she couldn’t find any online presence for her aside from her website, FinanceMarvel, where she claimed to be a certified financial planner. Additionally, the photo on her site turned out to be a stock image. 

Aldrich said:  “I emailed her asking for a LinkedIn page, and she said she had zero social media profiles. But while I was waiting for her to respond, I reverse-Google-image-searched her photo to see if I could find her profile on my own, and it’s a stock photo.” 

Shortly thereafter, a LinkedIn profile mysteriously popped up. 

“Now she has a LinkedIn [profile], which she created right after I told her I couldn’t use her responses,” Aldrich said. 

Russell had even connected with the reporter of the Huffington Post story on LinkedIn, too. In addition to being a Certified Financial Planner, she also lists degrees in accounting and finance from MIT and a business administration degree from the University of Oxford. Russell had emailed reporters at the Huffington Post several times, asking to contribute her expertise on stories that were being written. She wanted to talk about everything from the best time to buy a car, to how the dark web works.

But by then, more problems started to pop up. A search on the Certified Financial Planner board of standards database didn’t turn up anybody named Patricia Russell. The director of communications for the CFP Board confirmed that there is no CFP named Patricia Russell.

The reporter emailed Russell and asked if she was certified under a different name. She told the reporter that she had recently gotten married and her credentials with the CFP hadn’t been amended yet. When asked for her maiden name, the reporter claims that she picked another Patricia off the CFP Board‘s list and try to pass herself off as someone else.

The Huffington Post also contacted the registrar at MIT to verify if Russell had attended. MIT confirmed that there was no record of an individual with either name that was provided to the reporter. The University of Oxford didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Russell’s company, FinanceMarvel, said on its website that Russell was a graduate of the Yale School of Management on its “About” page. On that page, Russell claims to be a single woman in her 30s working to be mortgage-free by age 40.

The site said:

 “I will share my knowledge and teach you how to repair and improve your credit score, how to become debt-free, how to save more money and how to generate a passive income.”

She also claimed that her FICO score “has been well above 800 every year for the last 20 years,” despite the fact that she technically could have only been an adult for 17 years.

She also claimed: “I spent 25 years researching, testing, and proving these methods ― they work.”

When faced with the details that the reporter found out, Russell continued to refuse to identify herself and said that she is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy and avoid identity theft. She even updated her “About” page to state that her name isn’t real.

She now writes: “Whilst I do have relevant credentials to my real name I have decided it was in my best interest to remove them in order to avoid any misunderstandings.” 

She also deleted the entire story describing her journey to becoming a financial expert and replaced it with a disclaimer.

Her blog promotes various credit repair companies. These could be affiliate links where “Russell” is paid everytime somebody signs up for services.

When looking into the information on the website, the report found that the site’s owner information is protected. However, the reporter was able to drum up all of the websites that are hosted on the same server as FinanceMarvel.com and many of them relate to debt relief and credit repair, including:

• Aaadebtconsolidationloan.com

• Arizonadebtconsolidationquote.com

• Californiadebtconsolidationquote.com

• Call4debtrelief.com

• Creditrepairexpert.org

• Floridadebtconsolidationquote.com

• Freedebtmanagementtips.com

• Helpwithdebtsettlement.com

• Helpwithmycreditcarddebt.com

• Howtodebtnegotiation.com

• Howtodebtsettlement.com

• Illinoisdebtconsolidationquote.com

• Nationaldebtreliefaffiliates.com

• Nationaldebtreliefreviews.com

• Newyorkdebtconsolidationquote.com

• Nocreditcardbills.com

• Pennsylvaniadebtconsolidationquote.com

• Stopdebt.org

• Texascreditcarddebt.com

• Texasdebtconsolidationquote.com

• Texaspersonalloans.org 

What all of the sites have in common is that they reference the company National Debt Relief. Adam Tijerina, marketing manager for National Debt Relief, is listed as the owner of several of the websites on the server, and according to him, there is no link between his website and FinanceMarvel.

“As far as I know, we are not working with Patricia and FinanceMarvel.com,” he said.

The Post noted that they still have no idea who is behind the Patricia Russell persona, but the fact that their personal details have disappeared indicates that they “have more to hide then their name”.

She’s now listed as the editor of Finance Marvel on her website and her education and credentials have been scrubbed from her LinkedIn profile.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2018, an investigation revealed that Drew Cloud, a persona well known and frequently quoted on student loans, was actually a fictional person that was fabricated by the financial services marketplace LendEDU.

“Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education,” Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU said at the time.

We’re guessing that since the Patricia Russell story has now gone mainstream, it’s not gonna be long until her real identity is exposed. 

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

A six-year-old South Korean YouTube celebrity named Boram, who has 30 million subscribers, has gone out and bought herself an $8 million, five story home in Seoul, according to CNN.

The child star bought the building in the suburb of a Gangnam earlier this year through a company set up by her parents. She has two popular YouTube accounts: one where she reviews toys that has 13.6 million subscribers and another video blog account that has 17.6 million subscribers.

One of her most popular videos has attracted over 376 million views. In it, she makes instant noodles using a plastic toy kitchen and eats them on camera. Her content, however, has attracted some controversy in South Korea because people have been worried that her clips could negatively impact the emotional and ethical development of younger viewers.

Among the videos people are concerned about are staged clips showing her stealing money from her father’s wallet and appearing to drive cars on the road.

The non-governmental organization Save the Children reported her videos to the police and a local family court ordered her parents to complete a counseling course designed to prevent child abuse as a result. Those clips have now been taken down. Child stars on YouTube can be big business, according to CNN:

According to Forbes, the highest earning YouTuber last year was seven-year-old Ryan Kaji, the American star of Ryan ToysReview. In 2018, he earned an estimated $22 million through his channel, which has attracted over 20.8 million subscribers.

Other young stars include five-year-old American Tydus, who appears on his family’s YouTube channel Trav and Cor, which has 3.1 million subscribers.

These YouTube stars make money in a couple ways. They can take a cut of the ads that play on their videos and they can also partner with brands to sell merchandise or include products in their videos.

In February, YouTube shut down comments on videos of minors after accusations that the platform had aided pedophiles.

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

Authored by Max Yakubowski via CoinTelegraph.com,

It’s hard to tell who was the first to coin – pun intended – Bitcoin as “digital gold,” underlining the idea that Bitcoin is a good store of value. To understand the community leaders’ thoughts about digital gold nowadays, we asked Binance’s  Changpeng Zhao, award-winning technology leader Jonathan Reichental, the  United Nations’ Susan Oh, Singularity University’s David Obran and other outstanding experts. 

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The phrase “digital gold” possibly came into more widespread use after The New York Times journalist Nathaniel Popper’s book, “Digital Gold,” was published in 2015. Google searches for the term “Bitcoin digital gold” peaked in December 2017, when the leading cryptocurrency’s price hit record highs around $20,000 per coin.

Well before Bitcoin was born, computer scientist Nick Szabo wrote a proposal for “bit gold,” laying out a concept for secure digital money that is often referred to as Bitcoin’s predecessor.

After 10 years of existence, the question of whether or not Bitcoin can in fact be considered “digital gold” continues to be debated in the industry. Yes, Bitcoin is designed to be scarce, but when discussing it as a potential store of value, many point to Bitcoin’s historical volatility as an argument against doing so. 

To see where we’re at with the debate today, we asked a variety of crypto and blockchain experts to revisit the question.

Is Bitcoin a good store of value? Can it be considered “digital gold”?

“Maybe it’s too simple of an answer, but it just continues to be too unstable. Gold fluctuates, but it doesn’t double its value over a short period of time. 

“I don’t know if this is fake or not, but diamonds are abundant. And so, they really not of any value. But if you go to a store and you buy a diamond, it’s expensive, right? And the way in which it retains value is scarce. It’s supposed to be scarce. It looks beautiful, it’s a particular shape, whatever. And one particular big diamond company, I believe, gathered up a lot of diamonds and dumped them in the sea to keep the price high, because if beautiful diamonds are available to everybody, then they drop in price very quickly and it’s no longer a billion dollar market. I have no way to prove it, but I’ve read it on reliable sources.

“The big question in crypto is: Can we enter a phase where it’s stable? We have standards. It probably can’t exist in the complete absence of regulation. That’s kind of a nasty word to the cyber crypto marketplace. But, there probably — for some level of protection — needs to be some agreed regulations in national countries, but also globally.

“So, until such a time when it is stable over a long period of time and is recognized by the largest amount of organizations and governments, I think it won’t be able to be any gold or a stable asset class.”

— Jonathan Reichental, CEO of Human Future, professor at UC Berkeley, Former chief information officer for the city of Palo Alto

“Bitcoin is not gold. Gold is heavy, hard to carry around. Bitcoin is better.“

— Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance

“Bitcoin might be the greatest store of value in the history of the world. Yes, it’s volatile — as it’s only been useful for about seven years — but its ‘unconfiscatability’ property is unmatched. That is its true store of value, as gold is confiscatable and all other assets even easier.”

— Tone Vays, Trader and crypto analyst

“When I asked my friend Dan Sokol if he owned any Bitcoin in 2016, he said: ‘F— no, child. My heart couldn’t take it.’ Dan is an old time Silicon Valley dude of some 40 years, now retired. Among the world’s first hackers, Dan was a semiconductor engineer/serial inventor manager who took a copy of BASIC and gave out copies of it to hacker nerds, and said, ‘F— with it, break it, and once you figure out how to fix it, tell the rest of us how you did it.’ It was one of the first events of open-source in Silicon Valley. 

“Even he told me he didn’t want to risk owning Bitcoin. Until we stop valuing the short-term gain of trading on the volatility, it is a poor store of value, and not a currency. It’s an excellent technology that provides a trustless system without a single point of failure. It is a technology with a philosophy — of transparency, decentralization, and a democratization of value. Ideally.”

— Susan Oh, CEO of MKR AI and co-chair of Blockchain for Impact at the United Nations General Assembly

“The definition of a store of value is a bit circular: Something is a store of value if everybody believes it will still be valuable for a long time.

“Gold is considered the ultimate store of value because it has been considered valuable for most of human history in most places (there are some exceptions), so there is a strong widespread belief that gold will remain valuable in the future no matter how politics might feasibly change.

“With Bitcoin, the case that it is a store of value is much less clear. It’s certainly conceivable that five-10 years from now, Bitcoin could have almost no value.

“This is the economic definition, not the legal definition, which I’m not sure about.”

— Joseph Bonneau, Lecturer at New York University (course on crypto), Co-author of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies”

“I’ve always maintained that Satoshi originally intended Bitcoin to be used for payments, not store of value. That said, he left Bitcoin, so the community is now in control — for better or worse. 

“Since its creation in 2008, Bitcoin has been in the process of becoming a digital commodity. By definition, a store of value can be a commodity that’s not perishable or subject to depreciation over time versus main reference assets, like national currencies or currency baskets. 

“There is typically a base level of demand in which a store of value’s price is not expected to drop below a certain level, with the possible exception of structural changes to the local or global economy. Essentially, stores of value are items in which the value does not decay over time, but can in fact also increase. 

“For Bitcoin to be a reliable medium of exchange, or ‘a currency,’ it needs to be stable, and have low volatility. In other words, people need to accept and hold Bitcoins because they are trusted and will not fluctuate in value. Ultimately, to become a currency, it’s about network effect and the demand for a commodity that is mathematically limited to a supply of 21 million units.”

— Vinny Lingham, CEO of Civic

“Over the course of the past 10 years, the number of people knowing about Bitcoin and owning some amount has gone from zero to several million. Is this number going to grow to hundreds of millions or billions of people over the course of the next 10 years? I believe that it will. 

“And, even discounting the eventual further appreciation of BTC against various national fiat currencies, its features will make it attractive as a store of value to an increasing amount of people.

“Borderless, permissionless, portable — it is actually superior to gold. The current examples of people from countries like Venezuela will, over the years, be substituted by new ones. What will the citizens of the U.S. decide to do once the “petro-dollar” will cease to exist and a new geopolitical order emerge? Will they decide to trust Bitcoin in large numbers?”

— David Orban, Advisor to Singularity University, Founder of Network Society Ventures

“I am skeptical that a ‘good store of value’ can be defined in the abstract. Whether Bitcoin meets the standard depends on what you’re actually trying to accomplish through buying or hodling. What are your object-level goals, what properties are required to satisfy those goals, and does BTC have those properties? What are your other options, and how do the affordances of those options compare to BTC with respect to accomplishing your goals? In other words, what are your store-of-value priorities and which tradeoffs are you willing to make? Therein lies the answer.

“Of course, it is possible to generalize about Bitcoin’s suitability as a store of value. I’ve certainly seen people do it intelligently (for example, the back-and-forth in this Twitter thread). However, in my opinion, storing value is such a broad use case, pursued with so many different motivations and objectives, in so many different situations with idiosyncratically constrained local optima, that it’s impossible to establish BTC as a ‘good store of value’ in any universal or definitive sense.

“All of that said, Bitcoin is deflationary by nature, due to the capped 21 million supply and the clever incentive structure that has reliably safeguarded its inviolability. The emergent order governing Bitcoin, as both a software product and a phenomenon, is undeniably path-dependent, attributable in large part to Satoshi Nakamoto’s design decisions. There is no guarantee that BTC will increase in value, but past trends and the underlying supply-demand dynamics suggest that it’s a reasonable long-term prediction.

“Anyway. Thoughts on ‘digital gold’… There are sufficient similarities between gold and Bitcoin, with respect to production economics and censorship-resistance, that ‘digital gold’ is a useful term — albeit primarily as a shortcut that conveys the gist of how BTC works and what it does. ‘Digital gold’ is quick and convenient in the same way that describing a startup as ‘Uber for whatever’ is quick and convenient. Is the comparison 100% accurate in a strictly literal sense? No, but we don’t typically hold analogies to that standard.

“A more precise question: ‘Does BTC share the properties of gold that have made gold attractive as a store of value?’ Here, again, the answer depends on a specific context.

“Personally, I think that Bitcoin’s lack of privacy and related lack of fungibility are serious drawbacks that undermine its censorship-resistance as well as users’ other practical security needs. Teams like zkSNARKs have made significant and commendable progress in providing BTC users with more private options; I would like to see that continue. However, there is no substitute for future-proofed Layer 1 privacy, due to the probabilistic attacks to which decoy-based systems are vulnerable, and the rewards for successful high-stakes deanonymization.”

— Sonya Mann, Head of communications at the Zcash Foundation, Tech journalist

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Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) Airport security officials were alerted by computers on Monday morning when a Texas man’s checked luggage contained an unloaded missile launcher, reported the Capital Gazette.

The man, a resident of Jacksonville, Texas, told Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers he was active duty with the military traveling home from the Middle East and wanted to keep the launcher as a reminder of his service.

.@TSA officers at @BWI_Airport detected this missile launcher in a checked bag early this morning. Man said he was bringing it back from Kuwait as a souvenir. Perhaps he should have picked up a keychain instead! pic.twitter.com/AQ4VBPtViG

— TSAmedia_LisaF (@TSAmedia_LisaF) July 29, 2019

TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said the launcher wasn’t loaded nor a “live device,” but the man was detained for questioning.

She added that military weapons are strictly prohibited in checked or carry-on bags, but also not illegal.

TSA officials questioned the man before releasing him so that he could catch a connecting flight. Government officials confiscated the missile launcher and sent it to the state fire marshal for disposal.

As far as we can see, not yet confirmed by officials, the missile launcher appears to be an AGM-176 Griffin, a lightweight, precision-guided munition developed by Raytheon.

The Griffin confiscated at BWI could be the tail-end of the launcher, as shown in the infographic below:

Another graphic shows the Griffin can be used to guard military bases.

The missile fired out of the launcher is a relatively small warhead and was designed for precision warfare.

Here’s a picture of the missile.

TSA uses their social media accounts to inform travelers that military weapons are prohibited at airports, could result in a fine or jail time.

In March, we reported that TSA confiscated a “rocket-propelled grenade launcher” at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley International Airport.

Farbstein told the Capital Gazette that this is the first time someone tried to sneak a missile launcher through BWI security, though TSA officials regularly confiscate weapons of all sorts.

TSA officials said twenty people had been caught so far this year (as of July 22) for having loaded firearms in their bags at BWI.

“Passengers are permitted to travel with firearms in checked baggage if they are properly packaged and declared,” the TSA said in a release.

“Firearms must be unloaded, packed in a hard-sided case, locked, and packed separately from ammunition. Firearm possession laws vary by state and locality.”

TSA’s Instagram account showcases several posts of some very unusual finds:

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Mqydc6 Tyler Durden

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

In order to keep globally rising temperatures from increasing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, the international community will have to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and down to zero by the middle of the century. Meanwhile emissions continue to increase every year, and the increase is accelerating, rising by 1.6 percent in 2017 and about 2.7 percent in 2018 to reach an all-time high. Making matters even more dire, global energy demand is projected to grow by approximately 27 percent by 2040, or 3,743 million tons oil equivalent (mtoe). What if there was one energy solution that could solve all of these pressing problems?

While it sounds fantastical, there is a comprehensive solution. And it’s right around the corner. 

One of the most powerful forms of power we use today is nuclear energy. While modern nuclear is extremely efficient and creates zero carbon emissions, it has a lot of drawbacks, and they’re big ones: potential nuclear meltdowns and radioactive waste that remains hazardous for thousands of years (costing taxpayers a bundle in the process). But there is a better way. Our current nuclear reactors are all powered using nuclear fission, the process of splitting atoms to generate energy. For years, scientists have wondered how we can harness nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun by fusing atoms together, for use on earth. Fusion is ultra-powerful, several times more potent than fission, and generates zero nuclear waste, since its fuel is not uranium or plutonium, but hydrogen. 

“Achieving controlled fusion reactions that net more power than they take to generate, and at commercial scale, is seen as a potential answer to climate change,” writes Nathanial Gronewold for Scientific American.

“Fusion energy would eliminate the need for fossil fuels and solve the intermittency and reliability concerns inherent with renewable energy sources. The energy would be generated without the dangerous amounts of radiation that raises concerns about fission nuclear energy.”

The dream of nuclear fusion has long been out-of-reach, but now, with companies like the Jeff Bezos-backed General Fusion and a huge pool of fusion startups heating up the competition, fusion is quickly becoming a reality. Just this week, the “world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment” has made a major breakthrough. 

Officials from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a multinational project based in Southern France, have announced that they are now just 6.5 years away from “First Plasma,” in a historic milestone. ITER’s project, supported by a consortium of 35 nations, is now 65 percent complete according to this week’s press release. “The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core,” reports Scientific American.

The project is the world’s very first commercial-scale fusion reactor project, and all eyes are on ITER’s tokamak to set the bar, as well as the timeline, for the commercialized nuclear fusion race. While the project is scheduled to launch at the end of 2025, it will take another decade (at least) to bring the facility to full power.

“The date for First Plasma is set; we will push the button in December 2025,” spokeswoman Sabina Griffith told SA.

“It will take another 10 years until we reach full deuterium-tritium operations.”

Nuclear fusion is so difficult to achieve because of the extreme conditions–like those in the core of the sun– needed to be reproduced here on Earth. As explained by the United States Department of Energy, “fusion reactions are being studied by scientists, but are difficult to sustain for long periods of time because of the tremendous amount of pressure and temperature needed to join the nuclei together.”

While nuclear fusion holds an incredible amount of promise for solving some of the modern world’s toughest issues, the clock is ticking, and many experts say that even with fusion right around the corner, time is not on our side. While it is hopeful that ITER’s tokamak will be up and running by 2025 and fully operational by around 2035, that could be too late. Climate experts are now saying that the 12-year deadline the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave the world to turn climate change around may need to be shortened–to 18 months. Potsdam Climate Institute’s Hans Joachim Schellnhuber puts it simply: “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020.”

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A student activist who rose to fame during Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement 5 years ago says that the U.S. government should suspend its sales of riot gear to the city to prevent human rights abuses. Joshua Wong made the comments in a Tweet on Monday, as weeks long protests in Hong Kong intensify, according to Bloomberg. 

He attached photos to his Tweet on Monday showing riot police shooting at protesters and close ups of a tear gas canister that was manufactured in Homer City, Pennsylvania by NonLethal Technologies, Inc. He also tweeted out photos of rubber-bullet shells made by ALS, which is a subsidiary of Pacem Defense Co., based in Florida. 

HK Riot Police fired bullet & tear gas directly at persons and indoor that made in US. I am calling US Gov for the suspension of crowd control equipment exports to HK, prevent human rights abuses.

https://t.co/eVTWOGnlQ5 pic.twitter.com/HRjWWtaCNX

— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 (@joshuawongcf) July 29, 2019

“HK Riot Police fired bullet & tear gas directly at persons and indoor that made in US. I am calling US Gov for the suspension of crowd control equipment exports to HK, prevent human rights abuses,” he wrote. 

Later in the day he also tweeted out gruesome injuries sustained by protesters, allegedly from “tear gas made in U.S. unleashed by HK riot police”. 

Upgraded tear gas made in US unleashed by HK riot police yesterday. It caused protester injured seriously.
(https://t.co/XlQlOZYrPN)

[Activist Calls on U.S. to Stop Selling Tear Gas to Hong Kong by White House Petition: https://t.co/eVTWOGnlQ5] pic.twitter.com/1hRdgLOvME

— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 (@joshuawongcf) July 29, 2019

He said in an interview that he tweeted the photos not specifically to target the two companies, but because it appeared that they were being used in Hong Kong for the first time last weekend. 

Wong said: “One year ago, who would have imagined the police in Hong Kong would attack ordinary citizens with such extreme force? Governments and companies should not allow the police to use their equipment to harm ordinary citizens and peaceful protesters.”

The attention from the prominent activist could put pressure on the U.S. businesses as the protests move into their ninth straight weekend. Injuries have been reported among demonstrators and police. Other companies, like Cartier-owner Richemont and Television Broadcasts Ltd. have also been subject to fallout from the unrest in Hong Kong, which has cause some store closures and put companies under the microscope for criticism on social media. 

Wong’s tweet also included a link to a petition he created directed at the White House for the same purpose. As of writing, the petition had over 75,000 signatures of the 100,000 necessary to get a response from the White House. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/319cVUp Tyler Durden

Authored by Oliver Boyd-Barrett via ConsortiumNews.com,

For over two years RussiaGate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.

In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow schooling viewers.

The RussiaGate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated  by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.

Free and Open Exchange of Ideas

Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.

(Book Catalog/Flickr)

The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Russian Contacts Deplored

Trump and Putin at a working lunch, July 16, 2018 (White House/ Shealah Craighead)

Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, RussiaGate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

Even if we address RussiaGate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak. 

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

Robert Mueller at July 24, 2019, congressional hearing.

The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017.

One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

Who Benefits?

Why then does the RussiaGate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

RussiaGate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.

While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.

The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

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

Just a few short days after the Equifax data breach settlement – which affected 147 million Americans – Capital One Financial has just issued a statement confirming that on July 19th 2019, there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

Based on their analysis, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

“While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” said Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman and CEO.

“I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”

As The Washington Post reports, The FBI has arrested Paige A. Thompson, a Seattle area woman, on a charge of computer fraud and abuse, court records say. Thompson, who authorities say used the name “erratic” in online conversations, is suspected of “exfiltrating and stealing information, including credit card applications and other documents, from Capital One,” according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. She was ordered to remain in jail pending a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday, according to court records.

It is unusual in a major hacking case for a suspect to be apprehended so quickly, and in this case, that was apparently due to boasts made online. In one online posting, “erratic” wrote:

“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, [expletive] dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it,” according to the complaint.

The Capital One press release concludes:

We will notify affected individuals through a variety of channels. We will make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to everyone affected.

Safeguarding our customers’ information is essential to our mission and our role as a financial institution. We have invested heavily in cybersecurity and will continue to do so. We will incorporate the learnings from this incident to further strengthen our cyber defenses.

We are very thankful to the FBI’s Seattle Field Office and Special Agent Joel Martini, to U.S. Attorney Brian T. Moran, and to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Steven Masada and Andrew Friedman of the Western District of Washington for the speed with which they responded to this incident and apprehended the responsible party.

For more information about this incident and what Capital One is doing to respond, visit www.capitalone.com/facts2019. In Canada, information can be found at www.capitalone.ca/facts2019 and www.capitalone.ca/facts2019/fr. The investigation is ongoing and analysis is subject to change. As we learn more, we will update these websites to provide additional information.

Bloomberg reports that in court on Monday, Thompson broke down and laid her head down on the defense table during the hearing. She is charged with a single count of computer fraud and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32Zd6mP Tyler Durden