A Vermont legislator has introduced a bill that would ban anyone under 21 from using a cellphone. Under the legislation introduced by Sen. John Rodgers (D–Essex-Orleans), 20-year-olds caught talking, texting, or TicToking could be imprisoned for up to a year and face $1,000 in fines.
If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it’s supposed to be. Judging from Rodgers’ comments to the Barre Montpelier Times Argus, the pro–Second Amendment Democrat is trying to troll his gun-grabbing colleagues.
“I have no delusions that it’s going to pass. I wouldn’t probably vote for it myself,” Rodgers told the Times Argus. He added that the Vermont legislature “seems bent on taking away our Second Amendment rights.”
The text of Rodgers’ bill says that “young people frequently use cell phones to bully and threaten other young people, activities that have been linked to many suicides.” The bill also notes that cell phones have been used to radicalize youth and that mass shooters have used them to research previous mass shootings.
“In light of the dangerous and life-threatening consequences of cell phone use by young people, it is clear that persons under 21 years of age are not developmentally mature enough to safely possess them, just as the General Assembly has concluded that persons under 21 years of age are not mature enough to possess firearms, smoke cigarettes, or consume alcohol,” the bill cays.
In May 2019, Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a bill raising the state’s smoking age to 21. In April of the previous year, Scott signed legislation that raised the minimum age required to buy a gun to 21.
In light of all that, Rodgers is clearly trying to push back against the creeping infantilization of America’s young adults. That’s an important message. Whether a piece of troll legislation is the best medium for that message is another question.
Generally, I think lawmakers should pass on introducing purely symbolic bills. A more constructive approach would be for him to introduce legislation that actually repeals the restrictions he finds offensive.
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The assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, begins a new decade of American foreign policy by perversely recommiting us to the errors of the old one. With Soleimani’s death, President Donald Trump capped months of uncertainty in U.S.-Iranian relations with a lurch toward war.
Iran’s face-saving missile strikes on Tuesday had no casualties, and Trump appears to be wisely taking this as an offramp from open conflict. But it’s only a matter of time before we again start hearing the war drums calling for regime change in Iran. Escalation breeds escalation. “IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump tweeted Monday morning, but his short-sighted tactics make it more likely that Iran—to say nothing of other adversarial states, such as North Korea—will seek a nuclear deterrent.
This paradox is not unique to this administration. Washington’s bipartisan military-first approach to foreign affairs broadcasts to bad actors worldwide that U.S. intervention is always at hand and that a nuclear arsenal is the only sure deterrence against it.
North Korea has affirmed this logic explicitly. “History proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasure sword for frustrating outsiders’ aggression,” a state-run media editorial declared in January 2016. Neither Iraq’s Saddam Hussein nor Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, both deposed and killed with U.S. involvement, could “escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations of nuclear development and giving up undeclared programs of their own accord,” the editorial continued. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is visibly determined not to follow in their footsteps.
For all its imperfections, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—better known as the “Iran deal”—presented an opportunity to break this pattern. Unfortunately, that opportunity is gone following Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018. After the Soleimani strike, Tehran announced its own exit from the plan and, with that, its intent to proceed with nuclear research and development at will.
Before Trump left the JCPOA, independent observers repeatedly verified Iran’s compliance. As recently as this past fall, with halting but sometimes promising talks between Washington and Tehran underway, Iran’s initial steps away from compliance were not a sprint toward nuclear warheads so much as a lunge for leverage at the negotiating table.
That lunge was part of a broader foray into provocation, which in turn was Iran’s response to the administration’s “maximum pressure.” That reckless Trump policy consists of leaving the nuclear deal, reinstating harsh sanctions that the agreement had repealed, and expanding the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, including stationing thousands of American forces to defend Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia, and keeping troops in Iraq “to watch” neighboring Iran.
Such pressure, the White House assured us, would force Iran to come begging for relief at any cost. It failed.
Far from humbling Iran, maximum pressure multiplied the political capital of Iranian hardliners and pushed us closer to open conflict. It raised the specter of direct U.S. military intervention and, with it, the nagging perception that nuclear weapons are the single reliable guarantee against it. Even if Iran does not build a nuclear arsenal, the last year has more than demonstrated that Tehran will not passively defer to Washington’s coercion, the Soleimani strike included.
Whether we are now “at war” with Iran is impossible to say. In another time, one nation taking credit for bombing another nation’s high-ranking military official—however dastardly his record—would unquestionably be an act of war. But Washington has long since abandoned old constraints of conflict; wars don’t formally begin anymore, and they certainly never end.
The most probable outcome is that Washington will sleepwalk into a new theater in what I suspect historians will record as Washington’s multi-front Hundred Years’ War of the Greater Middle East. But it may not be too late to change course, to learn the lesson that escalation breeds escalation, and to apply that lesson both here and elsewhere. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot act without regard for cost and consequence. Constantly threaten conflict with simplistic shows of “strength,” and conflict is what you’ll eventually get.
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DHS Warns Female Suicide Bomber ‘Of Middle Eastern Descent’ Being Smuggled Into The US Within Days
The US border patrol is on alert for a possible suicide bomber heading north toward the US-Mexico border, according to Breitbart, which obtained a copy of an internal memo issued by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“On January 8, 2020, Yuma Sector (YUM) Operations Center (OPCEN) received information from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) regarding a Guatemalan National [name redacted], who was deported from California approximately a year ago. Information received claims that [redacted] may attempt to smuggle 4 males and 1 female (suspected suicide bomber) of Middle Eastern descsent into the United States.”
The group has traveled through Guatemala, Belize, and is currently in Veracruz, Mexico, and is headed towards Sonora, Mexico. They plan to cross into the United States “in the next couple of days,” through the All-American Canal in California, according to the alert, which notes that no specific time or location are given.
As Breitbart notes, “The report being authentic does not verify that a suicide bomber is actually headed toward the U.S.-Mexico Border, but rather that such intelligence was received from a credible source or sources.”
The assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, begins a new decade of American foreign policy by perversely recommiting us to the errors of the old one. With Soleimani’s death, President Donald Trump capped months of uncertainty in U.S.-Iranian relations with a lurch toward war.
Iran’s face-saving missile strikes on Tuesday had no casualties, and Trump appears to be wisely taking this as an offramp from open conflict. But it’s only a matter of time before we again start hearing the war drums calling for regime change in Iran. Escalation breeds escalation. “IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump tweeted Monday morning, but his short-sighted tactics make it more likely that Iran—to say nothing of other adversarial states, such as North Korea—will seek a nuclear deterrent.
This paradox is not unique to this administration. Washington’s bipartisan military-first approach to foreign affairs broadcasts to bad actors worldwide that U.S. intervention is always at hand and that a nuclear arsenal is the only sure deterrence against it.
North Korea has affirmed this logic explicitly. “History proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasure sword for frustrating outsiders’ aggression,” a state-run media editorial declared in January 2016. Neither Iraq’s Saddam Hussein nor Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, both deposed and killed with U.S. involvement, could “escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations of nuclear development and giving up undeclared programs of their own accord,” the editorial continued. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is visibly determined not to follow in their footsteps.
For all its imperfections, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—better known as the “Iran deal”—presented an opportunity to break this pattern. Unfortunately, that opportunity is gone following Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018. After the Soleimani strike, Tehran announced its own exit from the plan and, with that, its intent to proceed with nuclear research and development at will.
Before Trump left the JCPOA, independent observers repeatedly verified Iran’s compliance. As recently as this past fall, with halting but sometimes promising talks between Washington and Tehran underway, Iran’s initial steps away from compliance were not a sprint toward nuclear warheads so much as a lunge for leverage at the negotiating table.
That lunge was part of a broader foray into provocation, which in turn was Iran’s response to the administration’s “maximum pressure.” That reckless Trump policy consists of leaving the nuclear deal, reinstating harsh sanctions that the agreement had repealed, and expanding the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, including stationing thousands of American forces to defend Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia, and keeping troops in Iraq “to watch” neighboring Iran.
Such pressure, the White House assured us, would force Iran to come begging for relief at any cost. It failed.
Far from humbling Iran, maximum pressure multiplied the political capital of Iranian hardliners and pushed us closer to open conflict. It raised the specter of direct U.S. military intervention and, with it, the nagging perception that nuclear weapons are the single reliable guarantee against it. Even if Iran does not build a nuclear arsenal, the last year has more than demonstrated that Tehran will not passively defer to Washington’s coercion, the Soleimani strike included.
Whether we are now “at war” with Iran is impossible to say. In another time, one nation taking credit for bombing another nation’s high-ranking military official—however dastardly his record—would unquestionably be an act of war. But Washington has long since abandoned old constraints of conflict; wars don’t formally begin anymore, and they certainly never end.
The most probable outcome is that Washington will sleepwalk into a new theater in what I suspect historians will record as Washington’s multi-front Hundred Years’ War of the Greater Middle East. But it may not be too late to change course, to learn the lesson that escalation breeds escalation, and to apply that lesson both here and elsewhere. Even the most powerful nation on earth cannot act without regard for cost and consequence. Constantly threaten conflict with simplistic shows of “strength,” and conflict is what you’ll eventually get.
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Is the Super Bowl a magnet for sex traffickers? Nope, and it never has been. But no matter how many times this wretched rumor gets debunked, some gullible members of the media insist on trotting it out anew every year.
This year, it’s the Associated Press and Timedoing their part to poison the discourse, with an article warning that Uber drivers and hotel maids must be on high alert for this sham epidemic.
Luckily, a huge range of press has already thoroughly torn apart this nonsense in years past. Here are some of Reason‘s contributions to the genre:
Even the Polaris Project (one of the biggest purveyors of bad statistics dressed up as “human trafficking awareness”) has stopped relying on this particular rumor. The “reality is that sex trafficking happens during the Super Bowl with the same frequency as it does every single day,” the group says.
Outside of some reporters with dubious judgement, the only people who are still earnestly pushing the idea that sporting events like the super bowl are hotbeds of human trafficking seem to be 1) politicians who have made a name for themselves stirring up crime panic, 2) state prosecutors, who like to use the prospect of “sex slaves” to justify ramping up their routine vice stings during the big game, and 3) the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for whom the panic dovetails nicely with their efforts to round up immigrants and promiscuous women. But poke any “Super Bowl sex trafficking sting” headline from the past decade and all you’ll find is a bunch of sex workers and their customers arrested for trying to hook up with another consenting adult.
At this point, there’s simply no excuse for any reporter, politician, or other entity to repeat the Super Bowl Sex Trafficking lie. Those that do are either wholly incapable of basic research and reading comprehension or willfully trafficking in misinformation.
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The police chief in Twinsburg, Ohio, is calling for more accountability from his own department after his officers let a Cleveland police captain go home without charges despite driving drunk.
Twinsburg Police Department Chief Christopher Noga issued a statement on Wednesday explaining the incident.
After receiving reports of an erratic driver, the officers pulled over John Sotomayor of the Cleveland Police Department on Christmas at 11:21 p.m. Sotomayor identified himself as an officer, and the Twinsburg cops believed he was showing signs of impairment.
A sergeant then arrived on the scene and decided to release Sotomayor. Sotomayor’s wife picked him up; his vehicle was impounded and his gun taken.
A Cleveland station, Fox 8, obtained body camera footage from the stop and brought attention to the incident. The footage does not show officers conducting a drunk driving test. It does show officers acknowledging that Sotomayor is “highly intoxicated” and saying they were “giving him a courtesy” by allowing him to contact his wife.
Presented with the footage, the Twinsburg Police Department investigated the incident.
The station also reported that only one officer was wearing a body camera that night. Noga said that the sergeant who cleared Sotomayor should have been equipped with one.
Noga’s statement included the following reflection:
Poor choices were made on Christmas night. The first was Mr. Sotomayer’s decision to place the public in harm’s way. The second poor choice was made by my officers to treat Mr. Sotomayer differently from anyone else in relation to their interaction with him. While the officers ensured that an impaired individual would not drive away, the fact that Mr. Sotomayer is a Cleveland Police officer should not have weighed any differently in this situation. In fact, this should hold greater weight as the choice to not arrest Mr. Sotomayer that night has affected public trust not only for us, but for law enforcement as a profession.
Noga added that the Twinsburg officers were “fully counseled” following the review.
Sotomayer has now been charged with having physical control of a vehicle while under the influence, a misdemeanor.
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Is the Super Bowl a magnet for sex traffickers? Nope, and it never has been. But no matter how many times this wretched rumor gets debunked, some gullible members of the media insist on trotting it out anew every year.
This year, it’s the Associated Press and Timedoing their part to poison the discourse, with an article warning that Uber drivers and hotel maids must be on high alert for this sham epidemic.
Luckily, a huge range of press has already thoroughly torn apart this nonsense in years past. Here are some of Reason‘s contributions to the genre:
Even the Polaris Project (one of the biggest purveyors of bad statistics dressed up as “human trafficking awareness”) has stopped relying on this particular rumor. The “reality is that sex trafficking happens during the Super Bowl with the same frequency as it does every single day,” the group says.
Outside of some reporters with dubious judgement, the only people who are still earnestly pushing the idea that sporting events like the super bowl are hotbeds of human trafficking seem to be 1) politicians who have made a name for themselves stirring up crime panic, 2) state prosecutors, who like to use the prospect of “sex slaves” to justify ramping up their routine vice stings during the big game, and 3) the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, for whom the panic dovetails nicely with their efforts to round up immigrants and promiscuous women. But poke any “Super Bowl sex trafficking sting” headline from the past decade and all you’ll find is a bunch of sex workers and their customers arrested for trying to hook up with another consenting adult.
At this point, there’s simply no excuse for any reporter, politician, or other entity to repeat the Super Bowl Sex Trafficking lie. Those that do are either wholly incapable of basic research and reading comprehension or willfully trafficking in misinformation.
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The police chief in Twinsburg, Ohio, is calling for more accountability from his own department after his officers let a Cleveland police captain go home without charges despite driving drunk.
Twinsburg Police Department Chief Christopher Noga issued a statement on Wednesday explaining the incident.
After receiving reports of an erratic driver, the officers pulled over John Sotomayor of the Cleveland Police Department on Christmas at 11:21 p.m. Sotomayor identified himself as an officer, and the Twinsburg cops believed he was showing signs of impairment.
A sergeant then arrived on the scene and decided to release Sotomayor. Sotomayor’s wife picked him up; his vehicle was impounded and his gun taken.
A Cleveland station, Fox 8, obtained body camera footage from the stop and brought attention to the incident. The footage does not show officers conducting a drunk driving test. It does show officers acknowledging that Sotomayor is “highly intoxicated” and saying they were “giving him a courtesy” by allowing him to contact his wife.
Presented with the footage, the Twinsburg Police Department investigated the incident.
The station also reported that only one officer was wearing a body camera that night. Noga said that the sergeant who cleared Sotomayor should have been equipped with one.
Noga’s statement included the following reflection:
Poor choices were made on Christmas night. The first was Mr. Sotomayer’s decision to place the public in harm’s way. The second poor choice was made by my officers to treat Mr. Sotomayer differently from anyone else in relation to their interaction with him. While the officers ensured that an impaired individual would not drive away, the fact that Mr. Sotomayer is a Cleveland Police officer should not have weighed any differently in this situation. In fact, this should hold greater weight as the choice to not arrest Mr. Sotomayer that night has affected public trust not only for us, but for law enforcement as a profession.
Noga added that the Twinsburg officers were “fully counseled” following the review.
Sotomayer has now been charged with having physical control of a vehicle while under the influence, a misdemeanor.
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I remember where I was the first time I heard about gold. I was in my 1995 Toyota Tercel in downtown San Francisco, listening to the radio. Usually I listened to the Razor and Mr. T on KNBR 680, but for some reason I had the news on. The announcer mentioned that gold was up that day, to $265 an ounce.
It wasn’t a white light moment. And gold didn’t seem exceptionally cheap to me. $265 an ounce seemed like a lot. But if I’d known anything at all about the price history, I might have had a different opinion.
I didn’t think about gold much when I got to Lehman Brothers in 2001, either. I was getting a job in equities. All the jobs were in equities or fixed income. I didn’t even know that Lehman Brothers had a commodities desk, and even if I did, nobody would have thought about getting a job there.
Around this time I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand stuff, and I kept coming back to Alan Greenspan’s 1966 essay titled “Gold and Economic Freedom.” I probably read it a hundred times and even memorized parts of it. The takeaway was that if the government had too much debt, it would be compelled to print money to buy the debt to keep interest rates down.
The year was 2005 – we were still three years away from quantitative easing, although it was already a twinkle in Bernanke’s eye.
That was about the first time that I thought of gold as an investment. And coincidentally, that was the time that some folks from State Street and the World Gold Council came by the office to sign us up as Authorized Participants for the new gold ETF, GLD.
To this day, GLD remains a very important financial innovation – subsequent attempts to securitize commodities have led issuers to create products in ETN form that tracked or held futures contracts, introducing basis and roll risk into the equation.
GLD is simple – it holds physical gold. A few years later, there would be some arguments about “paper gold” and unallocated versus allocated gold. But GLD is still trucking to this day, and it’s the most liquid and practical way to buy large quantities of gold.
Of course, when Bernanke actually did launch quantitative easing, gold got really popular, along with something called CMS caps, which was basically a structured call option on interest rates. People thought there would be lots of inflation, and if you read Greenspan’s “Gold and Economic Freedom” essay, you might be led to believe that.
Gold worked, but the CMS caps didn’t, as bond yields actually went lower. Of course, the feared inflation never materialized. But as far as trades go, the gold trade was a pretty good one, and it worked based on the fear of inflation, not actual inflation.
After the last eight years in purgatory, gold is starting to work again. The technicians are saying that it broke out. This is where things get complicated. Why does one buy gold?
Is it as an inflation hedge?
Is it because of political risk or geopolitical risk?
Is it because of deficits?
Is it because of stupid monetary policy?
It is kind of a confluence of all these things:
Inflation trades have started to work in the last month or so
The election is going to be bananas, and now there is tension in the Middle East
The deficit problem seems to be intractable, and people are talking about MMT
Powell is widely seen as caving to Trump’s demands
Which means it should be a pretty good environment for gold.
You don’t need gold if you believe that the Federal Reserve will be a good steward of purchasing power. That looks less likely under this administration or any subsequent administration. The takeaway:
You don’t need inflation to skyrocket for gold to work-although we should have learned that from the 2009–2011 period.
Am I a gold bug? Maybe, but without the conspiracy theories. I’ve always been pessimistic about the Fed’s ability to control the currency. That pessimism has at times been unwarranted.
Bernie Sanders is essentially tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. The probability of him being president is not zero (in fact, it’s about eleven percent). Try to imagine what a Bernie Sanders Fed would look like, given what we know about his love for MMT. Something tells me that the Sanders Fed would be even less free from political influence than the Trump Fed.
I’m not here to tell scary stories. Some people say that gold outperforms stocks. Some people say that stocks outperform gold. It depends on where you pick your starting point, and people are very dishonest about that.
I will say this: It only takes a small amount of gold to dramatically change the risk characteristics of your portfolio—for the better.
And I don’t think that millennials own a single ounce.
* * *
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Where The December Jobs Were: Who Is Hiring And Who Isn’t
After the “bang” of a November jobs juggernaut, when the US economy added a whopping 256K jobs (revised lower from 266K) largely on the back of a surge in mfg jobs as GM workers returned from strike, the December jobs report was decidedly a whimper, with just 145K jobs added, a sharp 111K drop from the prior month and below the 160K consensus estimate.
What is more concerning than the headline payroll, was the parallel drop in average hourly earnings, which posted the lowest annual increase since July 2018.
Why the wage weakness? One look at the composition of job gains in December reveals the reason for the latest poor wage print: Of the 145K December job gains, 80% went to minimum-wage and low-paying industries,namely 41.2K new retail workers, 40K Leisure and Hospitality workers and another 36K Education and health workers, a total of 117 minimum wage, or close to it, job gains.
Indeed, as shown in the chart below, unlike November’s blockbuster gains in professional & business service and manufacturing jobs, December’s job gains were mostly across low-paying jobs.
Worse, on the other ends, December also revealed big drops in some of the best paying jobs, namely manufacturing, transportation and mining, all of which shrank in December. In fact, as we showed previously, manufacturing just suffered its second worst month in 4 years, and November’s huge drop was largely a function of the GM strike, so one can argue that the December manufacturing slump is the starkest consequence yet of the ongoing trade war with China.
Some other observations on who is hiring, and who isn’t:
Retail trade added 41,000 jobs. Employment increased in clothing and accessories stores (+33,000) and in building material and garden supply stores (+7,000); both industries showed employment declines in the prior month. Employment in retail trade changed little, on net, in both 2019 and 2018 (+9,000 and +14,000, respectively).
Health care employment increased by 28,000 in December. Ambulatory health care services and hospitals added jobs over the month (+23,000 and +9,000, respectively). Health care added 399,000 jobs in 2019, compared with an increase of 350,000 in 2018.
Leisure and hospitality jobs continued to trend up in December (+40,000). The industry added 388,000 jobs in 2019, similar to the increase in 2018 (+359,000).
Mining employment declined by 8,000 in December. In 2019, employment in mining declined by 24,000, after rising by 63,000 in 2018.
Construction employment changed little in December (+20,000). Employment in the industry rose by 151,000 in 2019, about half of the 2018 gain of 307,000.
Employment in professional and business services showed little change (+10,000). The industry added 397,000 jobs in 2019, down from an increase of 561,000 jobs in 2018.
Transportation and warehousing jobs were changed little in December (-10,000). Employment in the industry increased by 57,000 in 2019, about one-fourth of the 2018 gain of 216,000.
Manufacturing employment dropped in December (-12,000). Employment in the industry changed little in 2019 (+46,000), after increasing in 2018 (+264,000).
Finally, courtesy of Bloomberg, here is a breakdown of the ten industries with the highest and lowest rates of employment growth for the most recent month; it shows that there was a renaissance in museum and actor jobs as we closed out 2019.
