Twitter is barring people from liking and simply retweeting this post from President Trump:
But of course governments normally threaten serious force against people who try to set up zones “autonomous” from the government (for instance, excluding police, or barricading streets, or otherwise enforcing rules that they themselves made up; we’re not speaking just of lawful, peaceful protests here). Indeed, governments implicitly and often explicitly threaten serious force as a backstop for most laws.
Say some political activists decided to go onto the Twitter headquarters parking lot and set up an autonomous zone complete with barricades and exclusion of police and security guards, as a means of trying to change Twitter policy. I assume Twitter would ask to have them ejected. Such ejection, to be effective, has to rely on serious force.
Or say anti-abortion activists set up an autonomous zone in front of an abortion clinic, barricading streets to block access to the clinic and trying to stop police officers from entering to protect the women going to the clinic. The activists would and should be stopped through serious force (as much as is necessary to get them out of there). Indeed, if business owners decide to simply not comply with various taxes, regulations, and the like, the regulatory state will ultimately stop them using the threat of serious force.
Now of course such force usually soundly starts small (e.g., citations before arrests), and escalates only as necessary. That’s usually better for everyone (the citizenry that expects protection from illegal conduct, the people engaging in the illegal conduct, the police, and other government officials).
But it is the threat of escalation, including ultimately to lethal force, that makes it all work. The police might ask anti-abortion protesters to leave, but if they don’t, then the police might physically move them and arrest them. If the protesters resist, the police might use more serious force. And if the protesters continue to resist, in a way that endangers the police officers’ lives (or others’ lives), then the police can use deadly force.
Whether the government should or shouldn’t remove the “autonomous zone” organizers or let them stay until they get tired or worried about being shot or attacked by fellow autonomous zone denizens is an interesting practical question. (My view is that they should be removed, but that decision is not mine to make.) But surely the threat of serious force to enforce the law is at least a plausible, indeed commonplace, alternative.
Indeed, it isn’t just the police that can use serious force. I expect Twitter likely has its own security guards who can themselves use serious force against people who set up an autonomous zone on Twitter property. (Those guards can at some point escalate the serious force up to deadly force, though of course not always.) On the public streets, though, the way we deal with people trying to impose their own rules is by threatening serious force by law enforcement.
Now I realize that it’s pretty unusual for the government to send the message, “If you violate the rules, you’ll be met with serious force.” For many violations of the rules, the message goes without saying. In other situations, an influx of armed public servants is usually seen as speaking louder than words. But I see little sound basis for a social media platform to block people from retweeting or liking an elected official’s making explicit what is inevitably implicit.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3hXsXcX
via IFTTT
Senior editor Ash Bennington joins managing editor Ed Harrison to discuss the latest news in markets, macro, and coronavirus. Bennington and Harrison first analyze the breaking story about Wirecard, a German fintech company, and its implications for Germany. They also talk about how the Fed has released the animal spirits on markets, bolstered by exorbitant amounts of liquidity, and anticipate the pullback in consumption in light of a W-shaped recovery. Finally, they explain how the pandemic reasserting itself will end up strengthening the dollar and lead to a liquidity crunch. In the intro, Nick Correa explains the latest developments in the Wirecard story and provides some context around how they arrived at this point.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NqqREs Tyler Durden
Supreme Court Imposes Limits On SEC’s Ability To Obtain Disgorgements From Wrongdoers Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/23/2020 – 18:25
The U.S. Supreme Court took a step in limiting the SEC’s ability to recoup illegal profits from wrongdoers this week. A ruling on Monday preserved the agency’s power to win disgorgement but also said that any disgorgement shouldn’t exceed the profits made by the wrongdoer, according to Bloomberg.
And why wouldn’t now be a great time to roll back the SEC’s power? After all, just days ago, German FinTech giant Wirecard imploded amidst allegations that its $2 billion cash balance didn’t exist and its CEO was arrested on Tuesday morning.
The US usually wins disgorgements of more than $1 billion per year in federal court, different from fines, which the agency is also allowed to use as punishment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote on behalf of the court that Congress had prohibited the SEC from seeking disgorgement “in excess of a defendant’s net profits from wrongdoing.”
Courts also must now subtract expenses, Sotomayor wrote. She continued that disgorgement needs to be geared toward compensating investors of fraudulent money and that it was still an “open question” if this money could be given to the Treasury when no investors were available. She also wrote that disgorgement needs to track individual wrongdoing and that the SEC couldn’t make one person give back the benefits an associate received.
She wrote: “Disgorgement must do more than simply benefit the public at large by virtue of depriving a wrongdoer of ill-gotten gains.”
Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, judges had traditionally made disgorgement awards in discretionary ways, instead of using strict rules.
Thomas Gorman, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey Whitney, and one of the country’s pre-eminent experts on SEC enforcement and insider trading said of the ruling:
“The SEC suffered a significant loss today with the Supreme Court’s decision in Liu v. SEC. There the Court held that a “disgorgement award . . . [is permissible] that does not exceed a wrongdoer’s net profits and is awarded for victims is . . .permissible. . . “ This rejects the SEC’s traditional approach to disgorgement which refused to net appropriate costs and expenses from an award of ill-gotten gains to victims. Under the Court’s ruling the SEC will now have to determine the amount of any claimed ill-gotten gains and net legitimate costs incurred before returning the money to victims.”
Howard Fischer, a former SEC trial lawyer, said of the ruling that it: “will provide defendants strong ammunition for battling back against the SEC’s tendency to seek aggressive disgorgement remedies.”
Some SEC attorneys are just happy that disgorgement is still allowed in any fashion. Stephen Crimmins, a former agency enforcement attorney said: “That was the existential threat. This is a big win for the SEC.”
The couple being charged in the case before the court, Charles Liu and Xin Wang, were arguing that the SEC shouldn’t have access to any court ordered disgorgement at all. Clarence Thomas was the only judge who agreed with them.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z1gKLZ Tyler Durden
Could the impeachment scandal have been prevented if the now-fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman had followed up on Ukrainian allegations about Joe Biden and his family in 2018?
That’s the tantalizing question raised by emails from fall 2018 between an American lawyer and the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan that were obtained by Just the News.
The memos show that well before Ukrainian prosecutors reached out to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, in 2019 to talk about the Bidens and alleged 2016 election interference they first approached Berman’s office in New York in October 2018 via another American lawyer.
The memos show Little Rock, Ark., lawyer Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney himself, reached out at least five times in October 2018 to Berman seeking to arrange a meeting with then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Lutsenko, who emerged as a key figure in the impeachment scandal, wanted to confidentially share with federal prosecutors in New York evidence he claimed to possess that raised concerns about the Bidens’ behavior as well as alleged wrongdoing in the Paul Manafort corruption case.
“Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is offering to come to U.S. meet with high-level law enforcement to share the fruits of investigations within Ukraine which have produced evidence of two basic alleged crimes,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018, one day after the two had talked on the phone about the allegations.
The allegations included that Joe Biden had “exercised influence to protect Burisma Holdings” after his son Hunter and his son’s business partner Devon Archer had joined the Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors and “substantial sums of money were paid to them,” Cummins wrote.
At the time Hunter Biden and Archer joined Burisma in 2014, the company was under criminal investigation in both England and Ukraine for alleged corruption. The British case was dropped in 2015, and the Ukraine cases were eventually settled in the final days of the Obama administration.
Joe Biden boasted during a 2018 public appearance that he forced the firing on Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, back in 2016by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine. At the time, Shokin was leading the investigation into Burisma. Biden denies the investigation factored into his decision.
Biden’s and Archer’s firm received more than $3 million in payments from Burisma between 2014 and 2016, bank records obtained by the FBI show.
Records recently released by the State Department also show Hunter Biden and Archer had contacts in 2015 and 2016 with senior State officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
In addition, Burisma’s U.S. representatives were lobbying the State Department in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking to make the corruption allegations go away, the State memos released under FOIA show.
“The allegation by Prosecutor General Lutsenko et al is that the US ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, Biden and Kerry made conclusions about who were the good guys and the bad guys in local government. They believe Biden and Kerry were influenced by payments to Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to influence certain decisions, particularly those benefitting Burisma,” Cummins wrote, relaying the allegations from the Ukrainian officials.
In addition, Cummins told Berman that Lutsenko had evidence that a ledger found in Ukraine in 2016 alleging to show payments to Manafort from a Russian-backed political party in Ukraine was doctored and the U.S. knew the evidence was corrupted. The emergence of the ledger caused Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman in August 2016, and eventually led to his conviction on money laundering and tax charges.
“The second allegation above is that the Embassy and FBI willfully pressured Ukrainian officials to falsify evidence to be leaked to the media about Manafort to affect the outcome of the 2016 election,” Cummins wrote Berman.
Cummins said in an interview he had one phone call and four email contacts with Berman in October 2018 about the Ukrainian matter, but the prosecutor’s office never took Lutsenko up on his offer to come to Washington and lay out his evidence.
“I never heard from them again,” Cummins said of Berman’s office. “It was an opportunity for the Justice Department to address these concerns privately, and who knows how history would have turned out had the SDNY simply followed up.”
Berman, instead, would eventually indict two associates of Giuliani on campaign finance and other charges after they tried to help the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer publicize the Ukraine prosecutors’ concerns. (One of the indicted associates, Lev Parnas, worked as a translator and interview facilitator for this reporter on a handful of Ukraine interviews in 2019, but prosecutors do not allege he did anything wrong in that work.)
James Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, declined comment Monday when asked about the Cummins overture in 2018.
Cummins said he was not representing Lutsenko as his client, but rather a Ukrainian-American citizen who was trying to help the prosecutor general get information into U.S. authorities’ hands.
Cummins’ email states that Lutsenko wanted to meet with Berman because the U.S. attorney’s office in New York had successfully prosecuted Archer on unrelated charges earlier in 2018. Archer’s conviction, however, was overturned by a judge, and Berman’s office never retried the case.
Lutsenko said in an interview last year that when Cummins’ efforts failed to get an audience with the Justice Department he reached out to Giuliani, hoping to find a different channel to get information investigated.
It was those contacts that eventually spurred the entire impeachment inquiry, which ended in January in the Senate’s acquittal of Trump.
Democrats have tried to portray Giuliani’s activities as an effort to dig up dirt on Trump’s 2020 rival, and to get Ukrainian officials to launch a probe of Biden.
But Cummins’ emails make clear Ukrainian authorities weren’t interested in investigating the Bidens on Ukrainian law violations. Rather, they wanted to confidentially provide evidence of possible violations of U.S. law so American authorities could investigate. And they had no interest initially in involving the Trump White House. Rather, they simply wanted to share evidence with U.S. authorities at the prosecutor-to-prosecutor level.
Cummins’ emails to Berman make clear that Lutsenko did not trust the U.S. embassy in Kiev or the FBI to review the materials, fearing they were too political.
“Lutsenko faces political hurdles in getting a visa to come here. It is believed that the embassy in Kiev has blocked his obtaining a visa in the past. He believes it is because the US ambassador knows the nature of his investigation and wants to obstruct him from coming and sharing it,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018.
Five days later, Cummins wrote that Lutsenko was prepared to deliver serious evidence, including copies of two ledgers in the Manafort case that Ukrainian prosecutors believed were faked
“Presumably he will be prepared to discuss eyewitness testimony he believes will corroborate both this story and also the separate bribery allegations,” Cummins wrote.
When Berman stopped responding, Cummins offered to have Lutsenko meet with a lower-ranking federal prosecutor simply to transfer the evidence.
“Perhaps you can provide at least one trusted prosecutor and trusted agent to meet with a couple of the actual investigators and just let them take down the information like they would if any citizen walked in the door with some information to share,” Cummins wrote on Oct. 18, 2018.
There was never any further response, Cummins said.
Ukrainian officials have said they did not believe the Bidens broke Ukrainian law but may have engaged in conflicts of interest prohibited by U.S. law. The concerns about the Bidens engaging in conflicts of interest were confirmed by U.S. officials as well.
During impeachment testimony last fall, both Yovanovitch and her top deputy in the Kiev embassy, George Kent, testified that Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma while his father oversaw U.S.-Ukraine policy created the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” Kent said he even tried to raise his concerns with Biden’s VP office but was rebuffed.
All federal officials are required by federal ethics laws to avoid taking actions that create the appearance of a conflict of interest.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hYtawz Tyler Durden
FBI Debunks Bubba Wallace NASCAR Noose Conspiracy Theory Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/23/2020 – 17:46
From ‘conspiracy theory’ to ‘fact’…
A ‘noose’ which was ‘found hanging in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage’ turns out to be a garage pull which has been there since October, 2019 – while Wallace was assigned that garage last week, according to the FBI.
Of course, the outrage mob – including LeBron James – whipped up racial division over the non-incident in a tweet which has received 66,000 ‘likes,’ while the hashtag #iStandWithBubba trended on Twitter.
“On Monday, fifteen FBI special agents conducted numerous interviews regarding the situation at Talladega Superspeedway,” reads an FBI statement. “After a thorough review of the facts and evidence surrounding this event, we have concluded that no federal crime was committed.”
“Although the noose is now known to have been in garage number 4 in 2019, nobody could have known Mr. Wallace would be assigned to garage number 4 last week.”
BREAKING: FBI concludes no federal crime was committed in Bubba Wallace noose investigation. It had been in the garage since October 2019 pic.twitter.com/3aQXNx7Iav
On Tuesday, Wallace went on The View and called Wallace dismissed what the New York Post framed as ‘conspiracy theories’ over the noose incident being staged, or never happening. The day before, Wallace told Fox Sports reporter Jamie Little “Sorry I’m not wearing my mask, but I wanted to show whoever it was that you’re not going to take away my smile.”
So – to all you Talladega facilities managers, you didn’t take away Bubba’s smile.
And this is why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It only took a day but NASCAR couldn’t wait that long. pic.twitter.com/fw7ifqPthb
As the outrage mob frothed over yet another fake noose incident, cooler heads began to circulate the ‘garage pull’ evidence – long before the FBI cracked the case mind you.
6) And finally here’s the side-by-side that shows the manual garage door pull hand loop in place [Nov ’19] and the hand loop (purposefully identified as a “noose”) missing or cut-off [June 22, 2020]
In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, “Looking Forward to the End of Humanity”, Adam Kirsch posits a technological push, impelled by the global coronavirus pandemic, that would abolish death:
Eternal life through advanced technology seems like a pipe dream for a society that, until recently, had trouble manufacturing enough masks to save doctors’ and nurses’ lives. Yet Covid-19 may turn out to be just the kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts to create what its advocates call a “transhuman” future. With our biological fragility more obvious than ever, many people will be ready to embrace the message of the Transhumanist Declaration, an eight-point program first issued in 1998: “We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth.”
There is an abundance of well respected thinkers who believe this is possible, including Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, cited in the article, and Yuval Noah Harari, in his Homo Deus sets the tone early on by declaring:
In the twenty-first century, humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality…
Humans always die due to some technical glitch…
Nothing metaphysical about it. It is all technical problems.
Then of course, no discussion of techno-utopianism would be complete without Ray Kurzweil, who posits a “technological singularity” which would provide for a personalized and totally controlled universe for every human, one where they would be in complete control to experience whatever they desired, for all eternity, once we all upload our consciousnesses into the cloud.
The WSJ piece hits on the same theme:
Today, cognitive scientists often compare the brain to hardware and the mind to the software that runs on it. But a software program is just information, and in principle there’s no reason why the information of consciousness has to be encoded in neurons.
The Human Connectome Project, launched in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health, describes itself as “an ambitious effort to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function.” If those pathways could be completely mapped and translated into digital 0s and 1s, the data could be uploaded to a computer, where it could survive indefinitely.
Does any of this sound like heaven? Or paradise? Valhalla? That’s not surprising because Scientism (as distinct from exploration and discovery using the scientfic method) has ushered in a new era of material reductionism so that religion, spirituality, or any other non-material aspect of reality that cannot be readily quantified have been stripped of relevance and meaning in our Brave New World.
Something has to fill the void that the absence of religion and spirituality will vacate. In my next book, The Singularity Has Been #Canceled, I posit that this vacuum will be filled with techno-utopian thinking, which will pull forward utopia and everlasting bliss from the next life, and via the promise of expertly managed technology, roll it out into this one.
My premise for the book includes four main assertions, which are:
It is techno-utopian thinking, the idea that systems and expert management can control for all undesirable outcomes, that paradoxically exacerbates undesirable outcomes they seek to ameliorate.
True “artificial intelligence” as defined as “wide AI”, sentient and conscious, can never be achieved under our current assumptions. The idea that consciousness is just something our brains emit “as a liver secretes bile” is, I think, actually wrong. No amount technological advancement will achieve wide AI so long as this is the core belief.
That there are fundamental internal contradictions in techno-utopian thinking. The logical extension of the intellectual framework is that consciousness is an illusion, albeit, one we we’ll be able to perpetuate ever after by uploading it into the cloud. These internal inconsistencies, when taken hold at a societal level lead to a type of hypernormalization or what spiritual philosopher Ken Wilbur calls “aperspectival madness”.
Finally, because I’m not a luddite, far from, in fact, I introduce a framework for what I call “techno-realism”, the central premise being that every technological leap ushers in a new set of larger, more complex problems and that this is ok. I do think it’s possible that an era of radical life extension could be upon us, for those who can afford it. Life extension is not eternity, however. Do the math.
The downside to this is that every technological quantum leap also bifurcates society into a breakaway civilization that gets to front-run the new technology. The wider masses are slower to benefit (although they do benefit over time), and the ways to mitigate this inequality are typically impeded by institutionally entrenched interests.
Which brings us back to the Wall Street Journal article, that posits a techno-utopian immortality and presents evangelists from the likes of Google and myriad think tanks to advance it.
As we move into a more algorithmically controlled society, I would expect that technocratic social credit systems will supplant conventional moral structures, and the prospect of having your mind uploaded into an everlasting paradise will be the religious payoff for conforming to the rules.
It will be interesting to see how this narrative will be promulgated by various thought leaders and MSM outlets over the coming years. I hope to have my book out sometime in 2021.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/37W4GzJ Tyler Durden
DOJ Releases “Totally Exculpatory” Strzok Notes To Michael Flynn’s Lawyers Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/23/2020 – 17:05
The Department of Justice on Tuesday released handwritten notes from the Michael Flynn case taken by former FBI official Peter Strzok, which the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross reports to be “totally exculpatory” for the former national security adviser.
The notes, likely taken between January 3-5 of 2017, were released to Flynn’s lawyers under seal by Michael R. Sherwin – acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia – and are “very significant,” according to the Caller‘s source. They were discovered by a federal prosecutor appointed to review the Flynn case.
Flynn update – the DOJ has produced more evidence.
A page of notes from Peter Strzok, taken possibly between January 3 and January 5, 2017.
This is when the FBI Washington Field Office wanted to drop the Flynn case.
On May 7, the DOJ moved to drop charges against Flynn despite the former Trump adviser pleading guilty to making false statements to the FBI on December 1, 2007 regarding his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. It has since emerged that Flynn may have done so under duress – with prosecutors threatening an expensive litigation that would involve his son, Michael Flynn Jr.
Flynn retracted his guilty plea in a January 29 statement filed by his new attorney, Sidney Powell, who accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory information according to the report.
Attorney General William Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to review Flynn’s case after his lawyers accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory information.
Jensen has since discovered and turned over several documents to Flynn’s lawyers. –Daily Caller
Meanwhile, the FBI tried to close the Flynn investigation on January 4, when agent Peter Strzok insisted it continue. Handwritten notes from an FBI agent tasked with investigating Flynn reveal that they were targeting Flynn in early 2017 with the intent of prosecuting him or getting him fired.
One document is a Jan. 4, 2017, memo from the FBI’s Washington Field Office recommending that the counterintelligence investigation against Flynn be shut down due to a lack of evidence that he was conspiring with Russia.
Strzok intervened to keep the case open, writing to others at the FBI that the “7th floor” — the FBI’s leadership — wanted to continue its investigation of Flynn. –Daily Caller
“What is especially terrifying is that without the integrity of Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney Jensen, we still would not have this clear exculpatory information as Mr. Van Grack and the prosecutors have opposed every request we have made,” said Powell.
It appears, based on the notes and emails that the Department of Justice was determined at the time to prosecute Flynn, regardless of what they found, Powell said.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31miF0v Tyler Durden
In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities.
Here’s how every modern con starts: let’s look at the data. Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to look at the data because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con.
We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the faith of data. We’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief that “data doesn’t lie,” when the reality is that data consistently misleads us because that is the intent.
Nobody in the False Religion of Data ever looks at what we don’t measure because that would uncover disruptive truths. My latest book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World looks at everything consequential that we don’t measure, and since we don’t measure it, we assume it doesn’t exist. That’s the end-game of the False Religion of Data: what’s actually important isn’t measured and therefore it doesn’t exist, while what is measured is artfully packaged to support a narrative that enriches those behind the screen of “objective data-based science.”
The data-based con can be constructed in any number of ways. A few data points can be cleverly extrapolated to “prove” some self-serving claim, a bit of data can be conjured into a model that just so happens to support the most profitable policy option, inconvenient data points can be covertly deleted via “filtering out the outliers,” statistical trickery can be invoked (with a wave of this magic wand…) to declare semi-random data “statistically significant,” and so on, in an almost endless stream of tricks.
While the official statistics on inflation claim an annual rate of 2.5%, unmanipulated estimates (the Chapwood Index for example) find inflation is north of 10% in major U.S. urban areas.
The official data soothsayers’ bag of tricks include completely bogus, made-up “hedonic adjustments” which magically lower the price of real-world goods and services. Autos are supposedly “cheaper” now because they’re so much safer and reliable. Perhaps, but can we be honest and admit they cost a lot more than they did a generation ago?
The poor fools giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the con artists of Big Data Marketing apparently don’t understand the flimsiness of the “science.” As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in our latest Salon, Algorithmic Guerrilla Warfare, a few purposefully misleading data points turn the entire Big Data Marketing “science” into the familar “garbage in, garbage out.”
And so here we are in the midst of a pandemic, and the battles over “what the data tells us” sound more like religious wars than science. Everybody’s in such a hurry to conjure up a profitable con or make grandiose claims for their narrative that what we aren’t measuring is ignored.
Here’s the raw data I’d like to see collected:
1. What percentage of people under the age of 50 who do not have chronic health conditions who test positive end up with severe symptoms that incapacitate them for weeks or months?
2. What percentage of these younger, healthier people who exhibit severe symptoms have organ damage that doesn’t heal in a few months?
3. What percentage of people who had antibodies for the virus end up coming down with the illness again a few months later?
Collecting this data is non-trivial, and so it may never be collected–partly because the results might not support the approved narratives:whatever data we don’t collect doesn’t exist and can’t disrupt our models, profit centers, narratives, policies, etc.
In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities. Much safer to burn heretics at the stake than let them question the cons.
WTI Holds Losses After Bigger Than Expected Crude Build Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/23/2020 – 16:34
Oil prices rolled over today (with WTI testing down to $40.00 towards the close after hitting a three-month high) which followed a volatile overnight session thanks to confusing China trade headlines.
“Crude has had a draw only three weeks since mid-January, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see another build from this week’s report,” said Michael Hiley, head of over-the-counter energy trading at New York-based LPS Futures.
Additionally, while the market has been buoyed in recent days by signs that demand is coming back, renewed fears of a second wave of the coronavirus is spurring some caution.
The demand outlook for oil is “less clear given the uneven recovery thus far as some states are experiencing spikes in new cases,” said Marshall Steeves, energy markets analyst at IHS Markit.
API
Crude +1.749mm (+1.5mm exp, Platts -100k exp)
Cushing -2.605mm
Gasoline -325k (-1.9mm exp)
Distillates -3.856mm (+100k exp)
After last week’s product draws and small crude build, expectations were very mixed this week but API reports that crude stocks rose by 1.3mm barrels last week – more than expected.
Source: Bloomberg
WTI traded around $40.20 ahead of the API data and limped a little lower on the print…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2B6eBqj Tyler Durden
The past few years have seen many states and localities easing their restrictions on selling and using fireworks. Not so in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has just announced the creation of a new task force to enforce the city’s unchanged ban on all consumer fireworks.
“Illegal fireworks are both dangerous and a public nuisance,” said de Blasio today. “We’re cracking down on this activity at the source to ensure the safety of all New Yorkers and the ability of our neighbors to get some sleep.”
The 42-member task force will be comprised of officers from the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Intelligence Bureau, members of the city’s Fire Department (FDNY), and members of the city’s Sheriff’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The latter agency is responsible for investigating city tax and financial crimes, including the trade in untaxed cigarettes.
The fireworks task force, according to a city press release, will “target suppliers, distributors and possessors of large quantities of illegal fireworks by conducting investigations and sting operations within and outside of New York City to disrupt supply chains.” The FDNY will be responsible for running educational campaigns on the dangers of fireworks.
Currently, all consumer fireworks are illegal in New York City. That includes everything from M-80s to sparklers.
The creation of this task force comes amid a surge in complaints about firework use. City officials said at a press conference that the city received 1,737 complaints about illegal fireworks in June 2020, up from just 21 this time last year.
The added noise from those fireworks has spawned both demonstrations and conspiracy theories. Last night, a crowd of motorists honked their horns outside de Blasio’s home to protest the constant disruptions to their sleep.
“Our message tonight was simple: Mr. Mayor, if we can’t sleep, you won’t sleep,” tweeted City Councilmember Chaim Deutch, who attended the protest.
Our message tonight was simple: Mr. Mayor, if we can’t sleep, you won’t sleep. pic.twitter.com/7UuWnLfyrg
In a viral tweet thread, author Robert Jones Jr. speculated that the fireworks were being sold by government officials in an effort to desensitize minority communities to loud explosions and disrupt the Black Lives Matter movement.
There’s no evidence for that theory. Others have suggested that the mass cancellation of Fourth of July celebrations has seen vendors selling off their stock of more-powerful commercial fireworks to regular consumers.
Julie Heckman of the American Pyrotechnics Association dismisses this theory out of hand, given the serious legal consequences that would come with selling professional fireworks to consumers.
“If [professional firework display companies] diverted them or tried to sell them to someone who’s unlicensed, that is a felony, they would go to prison, and they would lose their license with [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives],” says Heckman. “No legitimate professional firework company is going to even entertain that idea.”
Heckman says every video she’s seen of fireworks popping off in New York City appears to be of the normal consumer variety. She theorizes that the spike in fireworks use is a result of lockdown orders that have left people inside with little to do for months now. What better way to blow off some steam than by blowing something up?
One licensed pyrotechnician interviewed by The Washington Post also threw cold water on the diversion theory, saying that commercial fireworks require special equipment to set off, and that consumer fireworks can be pretty loud all by themselves.
Creating a specialized police task force to crack down on consumer fireworks use raises a number of concerns.
Tensions between the NYPD and city residents are high right now after weeks of anti-police brutality protests and riots, which were often met with excessive force by the cops. Asking the police to step up their enforcement of yet another prohibition in this environment raises the potential for more citizen-police encounters to turn violent.
One of the worst examples of police violence in the city—the 2014 killing of Eric Garner—was committed by officers trying to crack down on the sale of black market cigarettes. That’s an extreme example, to be sure, but also one to remember as the city embarks on a crackdown on black market fireworks.
The trend over the last few years has been for states and localities to ease their restrictions on consumer fireworks. This has coincided with a sharp increase in fireworks sales. Injuries related to fireworks have stayed pretty flat, however, hovering between 9,000 and 12,000 a year. That means the rate of fireworks injuries per million pounds sold has continued to fall.
Deaths related to fireworks are also mercifully rare. According to a 2019 government safety report, only five people died from fireworks-related injuries in 2018. That included a man who tried launching fireworks off of a football helmet he was wearing.
Heckman says that prohibitions on the use of fireworks in large cities remain commonplace, and make sense given the space constraints there. She says the American Pyrotechnic Association encourages everyone to know and follow their local fireworks regulations, and is therefore supportive of de Blasio’s task force.
It’s still important to remember that every government ban requires government force to maintain. The potential negative consequences of illegal fireworks use in a large, dense city like New York have to be weighed against the costs of enforcing the city’s prohibition.
Given the NYPD’s recent track record, it might be better to let people set off a few cherry bombs.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YZNvcs
via IFTTT
