Category: zerohedge

Authored by Raul Ilargi Mueller via The Automatic Earth blog,

Allow me to start with a question: Has anyone seen any of the main newspapers and networks who went after Donald Trump for 3 years accusing him of colluding with “the Russians”, apologize to either Trump, or to their readers and viewers, for spreading all that fake news now that Robert Mueller said none of that stuff was real, that they all just made it up?

I’ve seen only one such apology, albeit a very good and thorough one, from Sharyl Attkisson for The Hill. But one is a very meager harvest of course. With over 500,000 articles on collusion published on the topic, as Axios said -leading to 245 million social media ‘interactions’, shouldn’t there be more apologies, if only so people can hold on to their faith in US media for a while longer?

Apologies to President Trump

With the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe now known to a significant degree, it seems apologies are in order. However, judging by the recent past, apologies are not likely forthcoming from the responsible parties. In this context, it matters not whether one is a supporter or a critic of President Trump. Whatever his supposed flaws, the rampant accusations and speculation that shrouded Trump’s presidency, even before it began, ultimately have proven unfounded. Just as Trump said all along. Yet, each time Trump said so, some of us in the media lampooned him.

We treated any words he spoke in his own defense as if they were automatically to be disbelieved because he had uttered them. Some even declared his words to be “lies,” although they had no evidence to back up their claims.We in the media allowed unproven charges and false accusations to dominate the news landscape for more than two years, in a way that was wildly unbalanced and disproportionate to the evidence. We did a poor job of tracking down leaks of false information. We failed to reasonably weigh the motives of anonymous sources and those claiming to have secret, special evidence of Trump’s “treason.”

As such, we reported a tremendous amount of false information, always to Trump’s detriment. And when we corrected our mistakes, we often doubled down more than we apologized. We may have been technically wrong on that tiny point, we would acknowledge. But, in the same breath, we would insist that Trump was so obviously guilty of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet that the technical details hardly mattered. So, a round of apologies seem in order.

It’s a shame Attkisson refrains from labeling the whole decrepit circus as “fake news”, even if she says it’s just that, in different words. It’s a shame because the term “fake news” can this way remain connected to Trump, something the mainstream media really like. Because it allows for the media to cast doubts on the Mueller report, and for the Democrats to cast doubt on AG Bill Barr.

But they, the MSM, CNN and the NYT, are the ones who, as Robert Mueller has proven, have been spreading fake news all that time, not Trump. And if you would suggest they apologize, they’ll tell you that you’re too early, wait for the report to be released, or that Bill Barr is holding tons of stuff back, or that Mueller didn’t have access to elementary info, or that Trump is a really bad person or or or.

Their reputations would be lost forever if they issue a mea culpa, and apologizing constitutes a mea culpa, so that’s not going to happen. And they all think their credibility remains sound and alive, because they live in echo chambers where they don’t have to listen to anyone prepared to cast any doubt on their credibility.

I first said it years ago: in the new -digital, social- media age, the mainstream media have only one chance of survival: report the naked truth, and be relentless about that. There are a billion voices who can write up rumors, slander, smear and other falsities, but none have the organizations to find out the truth.

Well, it looks like they gave up on that one chance. Russiagate has made it crystal clear that the MSM would rather make a quick buck than investigate, that money and political views trump veracity any day where they operate. So stick a fork in them and turn them over; they’re done.

April 1 was the perfect moment to add it all up, and the Babylon Bee did exactly that:CNN Publishes Real News Story For April Fools’ Day

Fooling thousands of readers in a prank that the cable news organization said was “just for fun,” CNN published a real news story for April Fools’ Day this year. The story simply contained a list of facts, with no embellishment, editorializing, or invented details. The story also didn’t cite shaky “anonymous sources” and only quoted firsthand witnesses to the event. It was completely factual without any errors whatsoever. Baffled CNN fans immediately knew something was up.

“I was reading this story, and I was like, ‘Wait, what is this?’” said one man in New York who relies on CNN for his fake news every morning. “They really got me good. Then I looked up at the calendar and I realized I’d been duped. A classic gag!” “Those little rascals!” he added, shaking his head and laughing goodnaturedly. “As long as they return to their regularly scheduled fake news tomorrow, we’re good. We’re good.”

We could stop right there. What’s to add? It sums up America to the core. Then again, perhaps not quite yet. How about we add this from the BBC?

Is Facebook Winning The Fake News War?

For the people contracted by Facebook to clamp down on fake news and misinformation, doubt hangs over them every day. Is it working? “Are we changing minds?” wondered one fact-checker, based in Latin America, speaking to the BBC. “Is it having an impact? Is our work being read? I don’t think it is hard to keep track of this. But it’s not a priority for Facebook. “We want to understand better what we are doing, but we aren’t able to.”

[..] While there are efforts from fact-checking organisations to debunk dangerous rumours within the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook has yet to provide a tool – though it is experimenting with some ideas to help users report concerns.

Right, Facebook Fights Fake News. Right. 533,074 web articles on Trump-Russia collusion pre-Mueller report according to Axios, and 245 million ‘interactions’ -including likes, comments and shares- on Twitter and Facebook. Let’s say 100 million on Facebook.

How much did they catch as fake news in their valiant efforts? Not “the Russians” spreading fake news, but the New York Times? How about none? How many times did Facebook shut down the New York Times? Rachel Maddow? None. But Robert Mueller says all those articles about collusion were fake news.

Those reputations are gone forever. Nobody serious will ever again believe anything these people say. Oh, their own subscribers will, but they don’t count as serious people. They swallowed all the nonsense for all of that time. Get real.

Talking about reputations: I decided to try and follow the trails of the Steele dossier earlier, because I think if you figure out the road that dossier has traveled, who has been pushing it etc., you can get a long way towards finding out how how Russiagate came about.

I turned to Wikipedia first, where “Steele dossier” automatically becomes “Trump-Russia dossier”. I read the intro, and it was already so clear where Wikipedia stands on this: not on Trump’s side. Impartiality does not count as a virtue there either. And I know that this stuff is written by third parties, but does Jimmy Wales really want to devalue his life’s work for party politics?

Right below the intro of the very long entry, a familiar name pops up: Luke Harding, and I’m thinking HAHAHAHA!

Luke Harding, after making a mint with his book Collusion, which Robert Mueller has singlehandedly moved into the Fiction section of the bookstore, and co-writing Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange In Ecuadorian Embassy last November, which Mueller fully discredited, is presented as a source for an entry about collusion? Oh boy.

A few paragraphs down I come upon the name Victoria Nuland, and again of course I think HAHAHAHA, what kind of source is she? Nuland became notorious for colluding with John McCain on Maidan Square in Kiyv, and she has less credibility than Harding, if such a thing is possible. A Nuland quote from the Wikipedia article:

“In the middle of July [2016], when he [Steele] was doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, ‘This is not in our purview’.” “This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That’s something for the FBI to investigate.”

The entry continues:

It has remained unclear as to who exactly at the FBI was aware of Steele’s report through July and August, and what was done with it, but they did not immediately request additional material until late August or early September, when the FBI asked Steele for “all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos — some of which referred to members of Trump’s inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI.”[57][56]

According to Nancy LeTourneau, political writer for the Washington Monthly, the report “was languishing in the FBI’s New York field office” for two months, and “was finally sent to the counterintelligence team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.”, in September 2016.[65]

Meanwhile, in the July to September time frame, according to The Washington Post, CIA Director John Brennan had started an investigation with a secret task force “composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI”. At the same time, he was busy creating his own dossier of material documenting that “Russia was not only attempting to interfere in the 2016 election, they were doing so in order to elect Donald Trump … [T]he entire intelligence community was on alert about this situation at least two months before [the dossier] became part of the investigation.”

Ergo: the fully deranged Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, gets the dossier to the FBI, where nothing happens with it despite Nuland’s insistence that it shows terrible things going on, until someone (McCain?!) gets it to Brennan, and then the ball gets rolling.

There’s all these people in the Hillary sphere of influence who pick it up, in the media, the House, and the FBI and CIA. Because the campaign decides a story about prostitutes peeing on a bed where Obama once slept can a be a winner, and by July 2016 a few nerves had started twitching. The entire machinery shifted into gear right then and there.

The index to the entry contains some 350 links to articles, almost all by the usual suspects and with the usual angles. It all oozes collusion. An exception is Bob Woodward in January 2017: ‘Garbage Document’: Woodward Says US Intel Should Apologize Over Trump Dossier

Woodward said on “Fox News Sunday” the dossier was a “garbage document” and that Trump’s point of view on the matter is being “under-reported.”Woodward said the dossier should never have been presented at an intelligence briefing and it was a mistake for U.S. intelligence officials to do so. “Trump’s right to be upset about that … Those intelligence chiefs, who were the best we’ve had, who were terrific and have done great work, made a mistake here.

And when people make mistakes, they should apologize,” said Woodward. Meantime, Woodward’s former partner in reporting on the Watergate scandal, helped report the news about the dossier on CNN last week. Carl Bernstein defended the reporting on the dossier, dismissing Trump’s contention that it was “fake news.” Bernstein argued that U.S. intelligence saw fit to present the material to President Obama and President-elect Trump.

“Mistakes” by the intelligence chiefs? Hard to believe, if you’ve followed Brennan, Clapper, Comey in the past 2 years.

Not sure I’m going to finish reading that Wikipedia entry on the Steele dossier. What’s the point? It’s fantasy advertized as fact in order to make money. It’s misleading, it’s fake and it seeks to damage people. It would appear we’d be better off discussing what fake news is (and what is not), and to not stick the label to everything Trump says, or the $50 million spent on the Mueller probe will have been entirely wasted.

What we can learn from it is that we can no longer trust the media we once had confidence in. Those days are gone and they won’t be back. They’ve been lying for a long time for their 30 pieces of silver, and once your credibility is gone, it’s gone for good.

That, by the way, is why we need Julian Assange so much, because we know he doesn’t lie. But of course that little fact has also already been buried in a big pile of fake news.

Orwell would be delighted.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2OT5QlQ Tyler Durden

With Verizon having switched on its 5G wireless network in two markets this week – Chicago and Minneapolis, the folks over at TechRadar hit the streets of Chicago after the Verizon launch event with the only working 5G handset they could get their hands on. 

After TechRadar “literally cobbled together the world’s first 5G phone when we slapped the newly-launched 5G Moto Mod onto the back of an existing 4G phone,” they took their Moto Z3 with the 5G mod and “hung around in the limited spaces where 5G signal was being broadcast.” 

The results were interesting, to say the least, as finding and maintaining solid 5G signal proved difficult, since its “millimeter wave technology” is apparently fairly dependent on line of sight. 

Over the course of our initial hands-on, we seriously questioned Verizon’s 5G network’s reliability. 

Take the Verizon Store where the event took place: it was scarcely bigger than 30 feet across and 100 feet back, with a 5G node in the front of the building. Reception was spotty toward the back, and could even peter out near the front. We noticed the Moto Z3 switch from 5G to 4G LTE on multiple occasions as we moved around, and had to keep checking that our speed tests were 5G all the way through. –TechRadar

AT the Verizon store, the 5G modded Moto Z3 hit speeds of more than 650 Mbps.  Downloading a 1.81 GB PUBG Mobile game over the 5G network took just under 4 and a half minutes, while taking 6 minutes and 8 seconds on the 4G network. As TechRadar notes, “while the 5G network is clearly the faster of the two, it’s not by an order of magnitude.” 

Walking around Chicago – areas with strong reception provided downloads of more than 400 Mbps. 

Read TechRadar’s ongoing hands-on test here. Their findings as of this writing are below: 

4/5, 1:30 pm CT: Checking to make sure Netflix and the Play Store weren’t a speed bottleneck, we connected to Wi-Fi and retried the downloads. The movie downloaded at close to 20MB/s and the game downloaded at about 13MB/s, vastly exceeding what we could get on our 5G connection.

4/5, 12:59 pm CT: Took another 5G field trip, and found a consistent signal at the base of a building that seemed like it would have actually blocked signal. A few speed tests that exceeded 400Mbps confirmed we had a real 5G connection, though a test using a single data stream showed only 17.3Mbps downstream. In between multiple tests that showed high speeds, we attempted to download another movie on Netflix and a game on the Play Store, but neither managed to download much faster than 1MB/s, whereas a 400Mbps connection should offer up to 50MB/s download speeds.

4/5, 9:10 am CT: Further into West Loop, found a semi-stable 5G signal and ran a series of speed tests, getting 292Mbps,  113Mbps, 65.5Mbps, and 240Mbps. The speed tests didn’t show a correlation between 5G signal strength and speeds.

4/5, 8:58 am CT: Walked into the West Loop on a street that has frequent wide views of The Loop. Once again, experienced 4G and 5G quickly switching back and forth. Ran a speed test while the network was toggling and got 47.4Mbps downstream.

4/4, 5:25 pm CT: Left the West Loop after a day generally spent without 5G. The millimeter wave technology used is fairly dependent on line of sight, and that can be hard to find, but we’ll keep trying.

4/4, 12:30 pm CT: Popping back outside into the rain to see how long it’d take to download The Raid Redemption at 446MB on the 5G network, we gave up after 2 minutes and 30 seconds that had only netted 44MB. A quick speed test showed the lowest speeds we’d seen all day at 59.9Mbps. Never mind downloading a whole TV show season before a flight takes off, we couldn’t even download Iko Uwais kicking his first ass.

4/4, 12:08 pm CT: Went into the grocery store on that same corner and couldn’t get 5G even sitting next to a window near that corner. 

4/4, 11:56 am CT: Took the Moto Z3 out for a walk in the West Loop, because the 5G signal couldn’t bother to join me indoors on this cold and rainy day. Found a corner closer to The Loop that had 5G signal, though it was still spotty. Ran a speed test that hit 448Mbps downstream with a 19ms ping time.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2U1YfCi Tyler Durden

Authored by Ritesh Jain via WorldOutOfWhack.com,

There is nothing that a human mind can’t conceive. It can shoot for the stars or dive in the ocean which twinkles in the shadows of stars and ascend back with sparkling mind bearing uncanny ambition only to float contended.  

Today, we live in fear of losing wealth, we worry what economic consequences would do to our cash, we look through a microscope and scrutinize every word, every policy, every regulation or find something to put above ‘every’ and list out the glaring negatives with a slight trace of approval. If only one could notice the lens of the microscope, would then one could tell reel and real apart.

Such is the case of negative interest rates. It is dealt differently by different flock of loaded individuals, generally in ways which would not only prevent losses but essentially gain cash. This flock stands on one side of the transaction contemplating means to win regardless of the loss that still deliberating other doomed flock endures. Well, this is how the world works. It is a Bernoulli trial. But there exists a splash of humble wit folks floating beneath the starry sky delighted by the victory of each one and beaten down none.

Theory? Without thinking too much, negative rates indicate that the economy is unable to generate sufficient income to service its debt. Almost always, all roads leads us back to debt sustainability levels. In order for an economic system to reduce debt, it requires growth or inflation or currency devaluation. For an economic system to exercise one of the two (growth not included), capital transfer is to be facilitated. This capital movement in negative rates environment is from the savers to the borrowers. Your invested value, the money you gave to borrowers would have a value lower than the face value. Barbaric! Savers should be the winners not the borrowers!

So each flock as per their liking would act in a way that makes them the gaining side. In real world scenario, one flock could be investors who when yields falls even deeper into negative territory scoop a profit through capital gain. Flock of foreign investors may try to earn through currency appreciation. Another flock would focus on real rates even though they are negative as that would preserve their capital under deflationary conditions when nominal yields would decrease their capital. Who would want that!

Investopedia gave an example, “In 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) instituted a negative interest rate that only applied to bank deposits intended to prevent the Eurozone from falling into a deflationary spiral.”

Let’s recall a real practical example. The case of Switzerland.

Paul Meggyesi of JP Morgan said, “The defacto negative interest rate regime lasted until October 1973. The negative interest rate was re-introduced in November 1973 at 3% per quarter and then increased to 10% per quarter in February 1978. All though this period capital inflows were being sustained by the global monetary turmoil/inflation that characterized the first years of floating exchange rates, not to mention the SNB’s singular focus on   promoting monetary and price stability through money supply targeting. Ultimately the SNB abandoned these purely technical attempts to curb capital inflows and embraced a much more effective policy of currency debasement, namely it abandoned money supply targeting in favor of an explicit exchange rate target that required huge amounts of unsterilized intervention, money supply expansion and ultimately inflation. (Suffice to say this policy lasted only until 1982, when the Swiss realized that inflation was too high a price to pay for a weak currency).”

He continued “Negative interest rates will only deter capital inflows if they are sufficiently large to offset the capital gain an investor expects to earn through capital appreciation. CHF rose by 8% in nominal and real terms in 1972-1973. Appreciation in 1973 – 1978 was 62% in nominal and 29% in real terms.”

In fact, during global financial crisis many central banks reduced their policy interest rates to zero. A decade later, today, still many countries are recovering and have kept interest rates low. Severe recessions in the past have required 3 – 6 percent point cuts in interest rates to revive the economy. If any crisis were to happen today, only a few countries could respond to the monetary policy. For countries with already prevailing low or negative interest rates, this would be a catastrophe.

Today, around $10 trillion of bonds are trading at negative yields mainly in Europe and Japan as per Bloomberg.

Poisons have antidotes, and sometimes one need to gulp down the poison to witness the mystique surrounding the life and glide with accidental possibilities, the possibilities which one wouldn’t seek if they remain wary of novel minted cure. 

Here enters a splash of humble wit folks! They want a win – win. So these folks came up with an idea, an idea with legal and operational complication but they have swamped themselves with research to find ways to not stumble in future and yes they do have a long way to go but we have a start. These folks are our very adored IMF Staff.!

They are exploring an option that would help central banks make ‘deeply negative interest rates’ feasible option.

Excerpt from their article ‘Cashing In: How to make Negative Interest Rates Work’:

“In a cashless world, there would be no lower bound on interest rates. A central bank could reduce the policy rate from, say, 2 percent to minus 4 percent to counter a severe recession. When cash is available, however, cutting rates significantly into negative territory becomes impossible.”

“…Cash has the same purchasing power as bank deposits, but at zero nominal interest. Moreover, it can be obtained in unlimited quantities in exchange for bank money. Therefore, instead of paying negative interest, one can simply hold cash at zero interest. Cash is a free option on zero interest, and acts as an interest rate floor.

Because of this floor, central banks have resorted to unconventional monetary policy measures. The euro area, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and other economies have allowed interest rates to go slightly below zero, which has been possible because taking out cash in large quantities is inconvenient and costly (for example, storage and insurance fees). These policies have helped boost demand, but they cannot fully make up for lost policy space when interest rates are very low.”

“… in a recent IMF staff study and previous research, we examine a proposal for central banks to make cash as costly as bank deposits with negative interest rates, thereby making deeply negative interest rates feasible while preserving the role of cash.

The proposal is for a central bank to divide the monetary base into two separate local currencies—cash and electronic money (e-money).

E-money would be issued only electronically and would pay the policy rate of interest, and cash would have an exchange rate—the conversion rate—against e-money. This conversion rate is key to the proposal. When setting a negative interest rate on e-money, the central bank would let the conversion rate of cash in terms of e-money depreciate at the same rate as the negative interest rate on e-money. The value of cash would thereby fall in terms of e-money.

To illustrate, suppose your bank announced a negative 3 percent interest rate on your bank deposit of 100 dollars today. Suppose also that the central bank announced that cash-dollars would now become a separate currency that would depreciate against e-dollars by 3 percent per year. The conversion rate of cash-dollars into e-dollars would hence change from 1 to 0.97 over the year. After a year, there would be 97 e-dollars left in your bank account. If you instead took out 100 cash-dollars today and kept it safe at home for a year, exchanging it into e-money after that year would also yield 97 e-dollars.

At the same time, shops would start advertising prices in e-money and cash separately, just as shops in some small open economies already advertise prices both in domestic and in bordering foreign currencies. Cash would thereby be losing value both in terms of goods and in terms of e-money, and there would be no benefit to holding cash relative to bank deposits. This dual local currency system would allow the central bank to implement as negative an interest rate as necessary for countering a recession, without triggering any large-scale substitutions into cash.”

Negative rates are coming whether we like it or not. There is only so much growth we can get in steady state among rising debt levels. The only hurdle to implementing negative rates is currency in circulation and that’s why more and more countries are trying to outlaw cash. Interesting and profitable times ahead for those who understand the brave new world.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2uQokdC Tyler Durden

A study published by the Center for Advanced Defense has determined that the Russia security services are using a cutting-edge new technique, presumably to protect President Putin – as well as several government buildings in Russia, and military facilities in Syria – from drone attacks.

Using publicly available data sets and reports on social media and in the press, the organization pinpointed incidences of “GPS spoofing” when an electronic weapon scrambles the data stream between nearby ships, vehicles and aircraft and the satellites that help power their navigation systems. In many cases, like one incident that occurred near the Kerch Strait, the site of a skirmish late last year between Ukrainian and Russian forces. As Putin and a convoy of construction vehicles crossed a new bridge over the Strait, the GPS of ships docked in a nearby harbor suddenly went “haywire.”

Here’s more on that from CBS News:

The ships’ GPS systems suddenly began to indicate they were actually 65 kilometers away, on land, in the middle of an airport.

The incident is one of many highlighted in a new report that found the Kremlin “spoofed” global positioning systems, or GPS, to effectively place a bubble around Putin or properties associated with him. The researchers, with a nonprofit called C4ADS and the University of Texas at Austin, used public marine GPS databases, as well as a GPS monitoring device on the International Space Station to track similar instances.

The report, which documented a pattern of spoofing surrounding the movements of the Russian head of state…

….surmised that the GPS scrambling technology was employed to protect him against drone attacks, or airborne robot spies.

The researchers theorize that one reason “spoofing” is deployed is to protect Putin and other Russian officials from attacks or surveillance by drones that rely on GPS.

“The purpose of this spoofing activity was likely to prevent unauthorized civilian drone activity as a VIP protection measure,” they wrote in the study.

The report also identified buildings used by Russian security services or the president that appeared to be hotspots for spoofing activity, and detailed several incidents of suspected mass-spoofing activity.

While the technology was presumably employed to protect Putin, there is an inadvertent drawback that could be used by exploited by malicious actors to stalk the president.

However, there’s a drawback to creating a GPS bubble around a world leader, said Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who was involved with the study. It also makes it easier to keep track of Putin.

“What’s ironic is if you look at these patterns, and if you coordinate it with the movements of the leader of Russia, it appears you have a Putin detector,” Humphreys said. In other words, if you detect spoofing, there’s a good chance Putin may be nearby.

It also creates the possibility for collateral damage.

The technique could also prove dangerous. The 24 maritime vessels that reported the Kerch bridge incident were otherwise unaffected. But Humphreys said a similar tactic in Syria could affect airplanes, which require functioning GPS to stay out of harm’s way.

The researchers identified Russian equipment in Syria emitting what Humphreys described as “a whole different signal, one that was much much stronger, but not spoofing.” The signal appeared to be jamming airplane GPS units, effectively rendering their navigation systems inoperable.

When the same tactic was apparently deployed during large-scale Russian military exercises in eastern Europe, civilians saw the effects, according to the report.

“Norway and Finland reported severe GPS outages affecting commercial airliners and cell phone networks for several days,” according to the report.

Unfortunately, this drawback would probably exclude GPS spoofing from the list of possible anti-drone techniques employed by airports…we imagine the security staff at Heathrow and Gatwick will be very disappointed.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Uz76Qt Tyler Durden

Authored by Gary Galles via The Mises Institute,

With all the “turn that over to the government, too, so someone else will have to provide it for you” proposals that have come from Democrat Presidential hopefuls already, candidates are actually being asked if they are a “socialist” or a “capitalist.”

Bernie Sanders, who has called for “economic rights” guarantees to be treated as Constitutional rights, admits being a socialist.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who may want even more people to live at everyone else’s expense, is on the same bandwagon: “Capitalism is an ideology of capital–the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit.” Consequently, “capitalism is irredeemable.”

However, other candidates, proposing or supporting very similar changes, have claimed they are (modified) capitalists.

Elizabeth Warren has said “I am a capitalist to my bones…I believe in markets. What I don’t believe in is theft.” Along the same lines, she has said, “I love what markets can do. I love what functioning economies can do. They are what make us rich; they are what create opportunity. But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all…And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.”

Kamala Harris offered a similar complaint that “the rules aren’t applying equally to all people.”

Joe Biden asked, “What happened to a moral responsibility, to a moral capitalism?”

Beto O’Rourke followed up his claim to be a capitalist with “Having said that, it is clearly an imperfect, unfair, unjust and racist capitalist economy.”

Unfortunately for these candidates (and for Americans if voters don’t understand better), every one relies on false assumptions about markets and governments.

Senator Sanders fails to see that his call for more positive rights to things, from education to health care, must violate Americans’ negative rights (prohibitions laid out against others, especially government, to prevent unwanted intrusions). The Declaration of Independence, echoing John Locke, asserts that all have unalienable rights, including liberty, and that our government’s central purpose is to defend those negative rights, which is further reinforced in our Bill of Rights. Each citizen can enjoy them without infringing on anyone else’s rights. Negative rights impose on others only the obligation not to invade or interfere. But when the government creates new positive rights, extracting the resources to pay for them necessarily takes away others’ unalienable rights. That is, you cannot add new positive rights to existing negative rights, you can only do so by destroying some of the negative rights that define the idea that became America.

AOC, as she is now typically called, shows that she “learned” things that contradict what she should have learned in her economics major. She subscribes to what Marx intended in naming capitalism – making it seem that the owners of capital gain and others are hurt. But capitalism is better defined as a system of private ownership of resources, including one’s labor, not simply ownership of capital, coordinated by solely voluntary arrangements. Private property prevents the physical invasion of a person’s life, their liberty, or their property without their consent. By preventing such invasions, private property is an irreplaceable defense against aggression by the strong against the weak. No one is allowed to be a predator by violating others’ rights. In such a system, capitalists need the voluntary consent of laborers in their arrangements, preventing capitalists from exploiting laborers. In Herbert Spencer’s words, “far from being, as some have alleged, an advocacy of the claims of the strong against the weak, [capitalism] is much more an insistence that the weak shall be guarded against the strong.”

Elizabeth Warren’s supposed endorsement of markets, but opposition to markets without rules is senseless. There are no markets without rules in capitalism. The core rule is that of private property, which requires arrangements to be voluntary, which in turn rules out the possibility of the theft she supposedly objects to. If there is theft, or fraud that allows it, that represents a government failure to defend someone’s property rights or a piecemeal violation of equal property rights by government, neither of which justifies still more government intervention to fix, unless it is to better defend private property rights now being violated or stop violating them itself. And Kamala Harris’ complaint that “the rules aren’t applying equally to all people” is subject to the same criticism.

Joe Biden’s “What happened to a moral responsibility, to a moral capitalism?” reflects a similar confusion. The most basic moral or ethical basis for any human relationship is to not violate others’ rights, which Cicero called “giving each his own,” over two millenia ago. Or, as Adam Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, “The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbors…does everything which his equals can with propriety force him to do, or which they can punish him for not doing. We can often fulfill all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.” Yet Biden seems to think that policies that require the violation of unwilling Americans’ rights is more moral than one that does not.

Beto O’Rourke’s endorsement of capitalism, then described as “imperfect, unfair, unjust and racist,” seems to reflect a similar view, but mainly reflects serious confusion. What American would endorse something that meets his description of capitalism, unless he was a sadist?

For each of these candidates, even a rudimentary understanding of private property rights and voluntary arrangements eviscerates their evaluations of capitalism, and sweeps away any reliable basis for their proposed “solutions.”

In fact, both logic and history attest to the damage their proposals can create. As Ludwig von Mises explained it, private property is the basis for “joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner’s success as a means for the attainment of his own,” in sharp contrast to any “us versus them” zero- or negative-sum view of social interaction which treats someone’s gains as others’ losses. In capitalism (which is actually inconsistent with the government- created or enabled crony capitalism we see all around us), even those who would be tyrants, if given the opportunity, must focus their efforts on providing willing service to others to induce their voluntary cooperation. In contrast, the drive for power that animates these politicians who condemn a capitalism they plainly don’t comprehend would increasingly turn others into their unwilling servants.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FZ1LbB Tyler Durden

The White House is preparing to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization, the Wall Street Journal reported late Friday, citing US officials. 

This would take Washington and Tehran’s four decade long hostile dealings into uncharted territory, likely paving the way for future war, given as the WSJ points out it “would mark the time that an element of a foreign state has been official designated as a terrorist entity.”

The IRGC is the elite branch of Iran’s armed services founded upon the 1979 Islamic revolution by order of Ayatollah Khomeini and charged by the constitution with safeguarding internal order, and preventing coup attempts and external plotting.

Its specialized “Quds” force is the foreign arm of the IRGC, often accused by US and Israeli officials of committing espionage and terror attacks abroad. It handles all clandestine and special forces style operations on foreign soil. 

According to the report, the Trump administration plans to announce the move as early as Monday, which could be accompanied by an alert going out to all military personnel and foreign service staff abroad warning them of possible retaliation. 

However, all of Iranian government entities, including the Guard, are already under unprecedented and aggressive sanctions, so it’s unclear just what impact the White House hopes to make; but it certainly will bring Washington and Tehran into more direct conflict. 

It’s also a move designed to instill greater fear and hesitancy in European and international countries still trying to do business with Iran, given the IRGC actually controls a significant segment of the Iranian economy.

White House officials have in the past speculated IRGC could have its hands in up to half of the total economy, something veteran Iran analysts say is hugely overblown. 

And crucially, the IRGC being branded a terrorist entity would make it much harder if not near impossible for a future American president to attempt to restore relations with Iran, and would permanently dash any near term or future attempt to renew any semblance of the 2015 nuclear deal. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Ij5dB0 Tyler Durden

Authored by Dagny Taggart via The Organic Prepper,

A robot walks into a bar and takes a seat. The bartender says, “We don’t serve robots.”

The robot replies, “Someday – soon – you will.”

Because the inevitable reality of robot overlords eventually taking over isn’t troubling enough, we now have another reason to be concerned about artificial intelligence.

Robots don’t understand humor.

A new report from the Associated Press has the details.

“Artificial intelligence will never get jokes like humans do,” Kiki Hempelmann, a computational linguist who studies humor at Texas A&M University-Commerce, told the AP.

“In themselves, they have no need for humor. They miss completely context.”

Tristan Miller, a computer scientist and linguist at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany, elaborated:

“Creative language — and humor in particular — is one of the hardest areas for computational intelligence to grasp. It’s because it relies so much on real-world knowledge — background knowledge and commonsense knowledge. A computer doesn’t have these real-world experiences to draw on. It only knows what you tell it and what it draws from.” (source)

Puns are based on different meanings of similar-sounding words, so some computers can get them (and some can generate them), Purdue University computer scientist Julia Rayz explained. “They get them — sort of,” Rayz said. “Even if we look at puns, most of the puns require huge amounts of background.”

Rayz has spent 15 years trying to get computers to understand humor, and at times the results were, well, laughable. She recalled a time she gave the computer two different groups of sentences. Some were jokes. Some were not. The computer classified something as a joke that people thought wasn’t a joke. When Rayz asked the computer why it thought it was a joke, its answer made sense technically. But the material still wasn’t funny, nor memorable, she said. (source)

There are pros and cons to developing robots that understand humor.

Some experts believe there are good reasons to develop artificial intelligence that can understand humor. They say it makes robots more relatable, especially if you can get them to understand sarcasm. That also may aid with automated translations of different languages, Miller explained.

But some think that might not be such a good idea:

“Teaching AI systems humor is dangerous because they may find it where it isn’t and they may use it where it’s inappropriate,” Hempelmann said. “Maybe bad AI will start killing people because it thinks it is funny.” (source)

Remember Sophia, the robot who said (while looking shockingly amused) that she would “destroy humans”? When “her” creator asked “Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no”, Sophia promptly answered “Okay, I will destroy humans,” like she was causally agreeing to grabbing a pizza for dinner.

Allison Bishop, a Columbia University computer scientist who is also a comedian, told the AP she agrees with all the experts who have been warning us that AI will surpass human intelligence someday.

“I don’t think it’s because AI is getting smarter,” Bishop jokes, then she adds: “If the AI gets that, I think we have a problem.” (source)

Recently it was revealed that robots probably have the capacity to develop prejudices toward others and even to hate. One recent study showed that AI doesn’t need provocation and inspiration from trolls to get it to exhibit prejudices: it is capable of forming them all by itself.

Unlike humor, prejudice does not seem to be a human-specific phenomenon.

Experts have warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence for years.

The late Dr. Stephen Hawking rang the warning bell for years.

In 2014, he told the BBC:

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded. (source)

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has spoken about the possible terrifying issues we may see in the next few years:

The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. Please note that I am normally super pro technology and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don’t understand.

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential.

I am not alone in thinking we should be worried.

The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen… (source)

Regarding the news about AI not having a sense of humor, I am inclined to agree with Lou Milano’s take:

What’s not nice, is that robots will kill people if we try and teach them humor, nothing funny about that I’ll tell ya. This is another example in an ever growing list of reasons that robots suck so hard and need to be killed. They don’t get humor, have no need for it and should we insist they learn it, they may go on a killing spree.

I’m going to keep shouting it until you all get woke. We have to stop these robots while we can, we have to stop them now before they are afforded civil rights. If you think that’s a ridiculous notion you should know that some robotics experts say that day is not far off.

Preserve humanity, kill a robot today. (source)

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2YVTcHe Tyler Durden

Desperate to explain the debacle following its recent IPO, when its stock crashed from its opening print of $87, tumbling below the $72 IPO price and then sliding some more for good measure to enter a bear market within 2 days of opening for trade, the newly public Lyft has found a scapegoat: the lead underwriter for the upcoming IPO of its biggest competitor, Uber. 

After reading an unverified article in the NY Post, which said that Morgan Stanley was marketing a short-selling product that “appeared to offer Lyft’s pre-IPO shareholders a way to get around lockup agreements that prevent them from selling for at least six months after the IPO” and was allegedly depressing the Lyft stock price according to the Information, and facing investor ire for a bungled IPO, Lyft threatened the Times Square-based investment banking giant with legal action, demanding in an April 2 letter that the bank stop marketing the controversial product.

Whether or not Morgan Stanley was doing anything illegal, or anything at all for that matter, is unclear: according to the original Post report, “Morgan Stanley, a lead underwriter for Lyft rival Uber, is one of the brokerages selling a “short” product to pre-IPO investors.”

What is even more ironic is that the swap was only made possible due to deficiencies in the Lyft IPO lockup terms:

Driving the unusual bets is language in Lyft’s lock-up agreements that has hedge funds and other early Lyft investors giving themselves a green light to make limited “short” bets, which make money on a stock’s decline.

The goal is to position the bets in such a way that investors don’t benefit from a decline or a rise in the stock. But simply to lock in their IPO gains, which were significant.

“If I can lock in $70 now, I’m going to do that,” said an investor.

“Lyft made a mistake,” one investor who bought into Lyft shares prior to the IPO told The Post. “People who own the stock are allowed to hedge their positions. You are not allowed to reduce your economic interest.”

In other words, while not explicitly selling, many of the investors – confident the stock would tumble – precipitated precisely such a tumble with their own hedging actions, reportedly facilitated by Morgan Stanley. The result, according to Lyft, was the plunge in the stock. in the hours and days following its IPO.

We say “supposedly” because Morgan Stanley denies: bank spokesman Mark Lake told TechCrunch that the New York Post report was flat-out wrong:

“Morgan Stanley did not market or execute, directly or indirectly, a sale, short sale, hedge, swap, or transfer of risk or value associated with Lyft’s stock for any Lyft shareholder identified by the company or otherwise known to us to be the subject of a Lyft lock-up agreement.

Our firm’s activities have been in the normal course of market making, and any suggestion that Morgan Stanley engaged in an effort to apply short pressure to Lyft is false.”

So to summarize: having read an anonymously sources and unconfirmed piece (in the NY Post of all places) that gave Lyft management a possible explanation for the stock drop, an explanation that relied on management’s own sloppy lockup language, the car-hailing company could barely wait before sending out an angry letter to Morgan Stanley, lead underwriter of the upcoming IPO of Uber, demanding it cease and desist doing… whatever it was doing. Which according to Morgan Stanley was nothing.

As TechCrunch notes, whether the story ends here remains to be seen. The Information has updated its original post to include part of Morgan Stanley’s statement of denial, but it continues to report that, according to one of its sources, Morgan Stanley had been calling early Lyft investors for weeks during its roadshow and pitching them on a short-selling transaction that would enable them to lock in gains, regardless of the lockup.

Assuming Morgan Stanley is telling the truth – which is very likely with its on-the-record denial – the question then is who were the “three sources close to the situation” that fed the NY Post the misinformation.

As for the suggestion that Uber somehow tried to sabotage the Lyft IPO (which apparently Lyft management was quite capable to do on its won with its sloppy S-1 drafting), that may be a stretch considering the very bitter taste in investors mouths following the biggest “decacorn” IPO in years, and the fact that this will surely reflect quite poorly on demand for Uber’s own (Morgan Stanley-managed) upcoming IPO, which will reportedly be valued at over $100 billion despite losing $1.8 billion in 2018, and amount that is growing with every passing quarter.

As for Lyft, its damage control scramble may be too late: the good news is that for now, the cost of shorting LYFT stock is about 100%, which makes it prohibitively costly to engage in a lengthy short. The bad news is that the cost of shorting LYFT stock is about 100% because everyone wants to do it; and somehow we doubt Lyft can sue all the shorts.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IgCnRC Tyler Durden

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

According to a brand new survey that was just conducted by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of all Americans are either “very worried” or “fairly worried” about America’s moral health.  Of course the truth is that we should all be deeply concerned, because we can see evidence of the cancerous moral decay that is eating away at the foundations of our society all around us.  In life, each one of us gets to make choices, and some of those choices can lead to very bad outcomes.  We all have old friends that “got on the wrong path”, and their lives ended up becoming cautionary tales.  Well, the same principle applies to nations as a whole.  America has been given very clear choices between good and evil, life and death, blessings and curses over and over again, and we have consistently made the wrong choices.  If we stay on this road, there is only one result that will be possible.

As long as we are drawing breath, there is always an opportunity to turn things around.  That is true for individuals, and it is also true for our entire nation.  But if we continue running toward evil, it is only a matter of time before exceedingly painful consequences overtake us.

The following are 40 facts that prove that America’s moral collapse is spinning wildly out of control…

#1 America has killed more than 60 million children since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.  The federal government endorses this activity by heavily funding the country’s leading abortion provider, and after that abortion provider harvests the organs of the dead children, the federal government also heavily funds the research that is conducted on those harvested organs.

#2 According to a Quinnipiac University poll from last year, 63 percent of all Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade in place.

#3 America is a global leader in sexual depravity.  If you doubt this, just check out what is going on in Cleveland at the end of this month.

#4 Americans are now more likely to die from an opioid overdose than they are from a car accident.

#5 In the city of Baltimore, approximately one out of every four babies is born as an opioid addict.

#6 Overdosing on drugs has now become the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50.

#7 McDonalds feeds approximately 70 million people a day globally. Pornhub gets more than 78 million visits a day.

#8 The teen birth rate in the United States is higher “than in any other industrialized country in the world”.

#9 According to the CDC, approximately 110 million Americans have a sexually-transmitted disease right now.

#10 The CDC also tells us that there are approximately 20 million new sexually transmitted disease cases in the U.S. every single year.

#11 The number of married couples with children in the U.S. just reached a 56 year low.

#12 According to the United Nations Population Fund, 40 percent of all births in the U.S. now happen outside of marriage. But if you go back to 1970, that figure was sitting at just 10 percent.

#13 At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

#14 Approximately one-fourth of the entire global prison population is in the United States.

#15 By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders on television.

#16 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug.  An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#17 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.

#18 Over half a million people are homeless in the United States right now, but more cities than ever are passing laws making it illegal to feed them.

#19 One recent study found that the average American spends 86 hours a monthon a cell phone.

#20 A different study found that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.

#21 Americans are obsessed with material things and are willing to go deep into debt to get what they want.  At this point, 480 million credit cards are in circulation in this country. That number has risen by nearly 13 percent since 2015.

#22 37 million credit card accounts in the U.S. are “seriously delinquent” at this moment.

#23 According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately two-thirds of all Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age bracket have engaged in oral sex.

#24 It has been reported that one out of every four teen girls in the U.S. has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

#25 It has been estimated that 30 percent of all Internet traffic now goes to adult websites.

#26 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

#27 The city of San Francisco handed out a total of 5.8 million free syringes to drug addicts in 2018.

#28 During one seven day stretch last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaintswere submitted to the city of San Francisco about piles of human feces littering the streets.

#29 When you include unfunded liabilities, the true size of our national debt is 222 trillion dollars.  What we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

#30 The suicide rate in the United States is up 34 percent since the year 2000.

#31 Suicide is now the second leading cause of death for Americans from age 15 to age 24.

#32 We are literally destroying the planet that we have been given.  It is being projected that the total amount of plastic in the oceans of the world will exceed the total weight of all fish by the year 2050.

#33 There are more than 850,000 registered sex offenders in the United States today.

#34 The number of American babies killed by abortion each year is roughly equalto the number of U.S. military deaths that have occurred in all of the wars that the United States has ever been involved in combined.

#35 About one-third of all American women will have had an abortion by the age of 45.

#36 Approximately 3,000 Americans lost their lives as a result of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11.  Every single day, more than 3,000 American babies are killed by abortion when you include all forms of abortion.

#37 One very shocking study found that 86 percent of all abortions are done for the sake of convenience.

#38 An average of more than 100 churches are dying in the United States every single week.

#39 Only about 27 percent of all U.S. Millennials currently attend church on a regular basis.

#40 The number of Americans with “no religion” has increased by 266 percent over the last three decades.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IgynR6 Tyler Durden

The European Union Commission on Friday accused BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen Group of colluding to limit emissions reduction technology in their vehicles, reports Ars Technica. Of note, Volkswagen owns VW, Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati and Lamborghini – which hasn’t been Italian for over 30 years.

The commission accused the three manufacturers of coordinating to limit the size and refill ranges of AdBlue tanks on their diesel vehicles made between 2006 and 2014. AdBlue is a urea-based liquid that is injected into exhaust gas to reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) that are released during diesel combustion.

The commission also accused the three manufacturers of agreeing to avoid or delay the introduction of “Otto” particulate filters on gas-powered vehicles between 2009 and 2014. –Ars Technica

As part of an investigation launched last September, the EU Commission sent the three German automakers formal Statements of Objections which conclude that their behavior was illegal. 

“Such market behavior, if confirmed… would violate EU competition rules prohibiting cartel agreements to limit or control production, markets or technical development,” reads an EU Commission press release. 

As Ars Technica notes, this isn’t related to the 2015 Volkswagen Group diesel scandal where it lied to governments about how well its diesel vehicles reduced harmful emissions. Moreover, BMW, Daimler and VW Group are not being accused of violating any environmental laws – rather, the EU Commission says they violated laws pertaining to competition among firms. 

As we noted in 2017, the three German automakers have been holding secret “working groups” since the 1990s, where they would discuss, production costs, suppliers, strategy and – importantly – emissions issues, according to Spiegel.

***

It was at these meetings that the companies agreed on the appropriate gas purification standards for their diesel vehicles, thus laying the groundwork for the diesel scandal that has resulted in massive fines for these companies both in Germany and the US. The working groups also selected suppliers, helping to set costs for vehicle components. The ongoing discussions allegedly involved more than 200 employees in 60 working groups in areas including auto development, gasoline and diesel motors, brakes and transmissions.  Talks may have also involved the size of tanks for AdBlue fluid for diesel autos, according to Bloomberg.

The allegations are guaranteed to result in more fines for the automakers, which were just beginning to move on from the diesel emission scandal that rocked the industry.

“These allegations look very serious and would mean more than 20 years of potential collusion,” said Juergen Pieper, a Frankfurt-based analyst with Bankhaus Metzler told Bloomberg. “There seems to be a never-ending story of bad news about the industry’s bad behavior.”

German authorities first became aware of the problem when they raided Volkswagen’s offices in 2016 searching for evidence that the company sought to rig steel prices. Instead, it found evidence of collusion between German automakers. Two weeks later, VW submitted a voluntary admission to antitrust authorities, as did Daimler in hopes of minimizing penalties.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G4cgvE Tyler Durden