Students “Feel Unsafe” – Start Petition To Rename ‘Clarence Thomas’ Building

Authored by Zachary Petrizzo via Campus Reform,

A Change.org petition calls for the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia to remove the name of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a Savannah area native, from one of the school’s buildings because it alleges he is a “sexual predator.”

Sage Lucero, a 2018 SCAD graduate, started the petition, titled, “Take A Sexual Predator’s Name Off of SCAD’s Building,” which calls on the school to rename the Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation.

During a phone interview with Campus Reform, Lucero said the petition is a way “to really start a conversation around the way in which we talk about wom[e]n… and the way in which we advocate for women’s rights and diversity.”

Lucero added that the petition was “not so much [about] politics but more so about wom[e]n.” Not only was the goal to remove Thomas’ name from the building, but “even more so to start that conversation regarding the bigger issue here.”

“It’s a small building that most people don’t go to,” Lucero said. “Everyone who goes to the university mostly is unaware that the name of the building had the namesake of him [Justice Clarence Thomas].”

Lucero also told Campus Reform that “many of the students feel unsafe about the building” name.  

Lucero writes on the Change.org petition description that until the recent controversy involving decades-old sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, she “wasn’t aware” of the fact that a building on the school’s campus bore Thomas’ name.

“The case between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill in 1991 was extremely similar to what is happening to Dr. Ford today. When it was time for Thomas to become an associate justice of the supreme court, Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, came forward with accusations that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her,” Lucero writes. 

“The same situation is happening before our eyes today with Dr. Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. When will we learn that a victim’s trauma should outweigh politics? For women like Dr. Ford, and Anita Hill to come forward and speak out about what happened to them is extremely traumatic. For someone to not believe a victim who remembers sheer details such as laughter and has gone through therapy because of it is honestly disgraceful,” Lucero continues.

Lucero told Campus Reform that the university reached out to her in early October. She said that one of the presidents of the school said they were “basically trying to get my opinion and more so listen.”

“It’s utterly disgraceful to me that I attended a school where a building was named after a sexual predator. And not just any sexual predator, one who wrongfully won against a woman’s word,” Lucero concludes in the petition description.

At the time of publication of this article, the petition had accumulated more than 2,100 signatures. The current enrollment of undergraduate and graduate students at SCAD is more than 14,000 students.

“Please sign this petition to convince Savannah College of Art and Design and Paula S. Wallace to rename Clarence Thomas Center for Historic [sic] Preservation after Anita Hill,” Lucero implores readers of the site, describing Hill as “a woman who stood up for herself despite being denied of true justice.”

The Savannah College of Art and Design did not respond to requests for comment from Campus Reform. However, in a statement to WSAV-TV, a spokesperson for the college said, “We are aware of the petition and have reached out to the sponsor.”

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Who Was Hit The Hardest During Last Week’s Market Rout?

While we previously reported that quant and hedge funds who were over-exposed to momentum and growth factors and stocks, as well as “hedge fund darling” names were hit especially hard during last week’s rout, which saw a violent rotation out of “growth” and into “value” stocks, a deeper dive into factors and sensitivities indicated that beta, GDP sensitivity, and momentum were especially challenged during the recent pullback, based on an analysis of month-to-date performance through Oct 11 conducted by Bank of America.

Among macro exposures, GDP sensitivity and nominal interest rates sensitivity were among the most significant factors explaining performance, as both highly cyclical and rate-sensitive stocks underperformed most in BofA’s screens. Whereas overall leverage was not penalized, having floating rate debt – which is set to rise alongside the Fed Funds rate – was, with the top 25 companies by high floating rate debt as a percentage of market cap underperformed the S&P 500 by 2.2ppt, with nearly 70% of those stocks down more than the market.

Looking at who was impacted the most, BofA found that large cap active managers’ darlings were hit the hardest – the top 50 stocks most overweight by active funds declined 8.9% during the sell-off (as of Oct 11), lagging the equal-weighted S&P 500 index by 2.4ppt, while the top 50 most underowned stocks were unchanged.

Incidentally, last Tuesday – just before the rout hit – we laid out a list of the “Top 20 Hedge Fund Long And Short Positions” in which we said that “the best performing strategy in the market has been also the simplest one: buying the most underweight stocks by large cap active funds and selling the most overweight stocks by large cap active funds has consistently generated alpha.”

Just two days later, anyone who had pursued this strategy was not only insulated from the rout, but generated substantial alpha.

As for the internals of the market heading into and during last week’s rout, growth stocks had led all other factor groups YTD through Sept., (+12.4%), as Value lagged (+4.3%). But during the sell-off, Growth factors proved one of the weakest links with a 7.2% decline (on avg.), lagging Value by 0.8ppt. Growth vs.

Perhaps the most notable move during last week’s rout is that value saw the biggest week-over-week reversal in nearly a decade, as Russell 1000 Value outperformed Growth by 2.4% in the week of Oct 1, reversing the Growth outperformance over Value (also by 2.4%) during the prior week.

Meanwhile, as we also noted last week, Momentum factors were especially ugly during the sell-off – the factor group took the deepest dive (-9.0%), almost wiping all of their YTD gain with the MTUM ETF suffering its worst performance day ever on Wednesday…

… and is now up +1.6% as of Oct 11. High Beta, a Risk factor, also suffered from the pullback (-9.7%), lagging the equal-weighted S&P 500 by 3.1ppt.

Finally, for those asking which hedge funds are doing the best – and worst – in the current environment, here are the Top 20 best and worst performing hedge funds of 2018 via HSBC, where we find, among other things, that after years of pain, Odey is once again leading the pack.

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Jim Kunstler: “We’re Now A Nation Consumed By Make-Believe”

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Speaking as a black woman… wait a second! Can I do that?

Well, why not. We’re now a nation consumed by make-believe, in which you can declare anything you want about yourself and insist that everyone else agree that it is so.

If I identify this way, you must believe me! (Or else I will come after you with my cos-play mob and destroy you.)

 

The avatars out on the cutting edge of culture want to dissolve all the boundaries between all categories of everything — except us and them: their allies and their enemies. Everything else is slated to become — by force, if necessary — a big, turbid, zero-gravity soup of intersectionalrelativity. The reasons for this sanctioned insanity are not exactly what you think they are.

Case in point: The Sunday New York Times Magazine profile of one Jill Soloway, Hollywood producer / director and now memoirist of the book She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy (“out this week,” note that little detail.) Mx. Soloway (Mx. being the newest engineered intersectional salutation) runs a movie production company named Topple, best known for putting out the TV show Transparent, about an older man who decides he’d be happier pretending to be a woman, and all the good family feeling that such a decision might engender, so to speak.

Gender was complicated for Mx. Soloway, for whom puberty arrived late, but with the sudden appearance of large breasts. “Do other people’s memories of their teenage years include things like soccer competitions or blue ribbons?” they write. “All I have is the memory of being suddenly overwhelmed by becoming sex to others.”

Aha, the curse of large breasts. What a life-annihilating affliction.

And yes, you read that right. Mx. Soloway now insists on being addressed as “they” (The Timesobliges), invoking a linguistic hall-of-mirrors in which there are always two of you: the one located in space and the one in the mirror — shall we surmise? — or perhaps there is another explanation. One might goof on the narcissistic buffoonery of this stuff all the livelong day, but that would be tiresome and cruel, so I will just come to the point and tell you what is going on here, what it is all about.

It is about fashion, status, and prestige as has been the case in human social relations since earliest (hu)man put a banana leaf on its head, to the awe and wonder of others gathered ‘round. All three of those conditions depend on a person being special, a figure apart from the boring, moiling, deplorable mob of morons who agree to be hostage to their own biology. Biology is a disease to be overcome, and you can do that by asserting your will. For instance, in the case at hand of Mx. Soloway, you can get breast reduction surgery, cut off your hair, and wear baggy clothes. This does not make you a man, but it allows you to affect to renounce your “sexual assignment.” Anyway, who wants to be a man? (The enemy!)

Jill Soloway by Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Rather, you pretend to exist in a make-believe liminal realm in between, relieved of all the pain-in-the-ass tensions of being one or the other, and therefore, to some degree, the tensions of being a mature mammal. Is not the game of “pretend” the chief occupation of childhood, either a happy one or otherwise? And is not Hollywood all about the game of pretend? And so, in Hollywood, the most zealous pretenders acquire the highest prestige. The trick is to get other people to agree that your pretenses are bona fide (the Emperors New Clothes gambit).

One way to accomplish that is to elaborate a fantasy that has already been set in motion as a fashion statement. With good old-fashioned American Puritanism coming back into fashion under the guise of Maoist authoritarianism emanating from the campuses, nothing carries higher status than anathemizing human sexuality, working every angle to abolish it, to banish it from the world, and to punish those who object.

There are a few little problems with this.

One is, you’re still stuck with your actual biological sexuality, whether you like it or not. Every cell in the body is imprinted — except in rare instances of what used to be called “birth defects.” There’s no “returns” policy at the sexual assignment bureau. Accordingly, people who stop short of completely screwing up their bodies with genital amputation and radical hormone treatments are still subject to sexual promptings of the type associated with their cellular DNA. Mx. Soloway has demonstrated this in her own work, as The Times explains:

After the author [Mx S.] falls in love with a lesbian while still married, the two enthusiastically make a short comedy about female ejaculation. The Topple crew pitched in, building a giant vagina and helping with costumes. Mx. Soloway calls the film, inevitably, “If You Build It, She Will Come.”

One of The New York Times’s chief roles in our society has been to confer prestige on the people they chose to write about. The Times is a mighty churning engine of status-granting, locked in a feedback loop with the readership it is working to flatter so as to place them in the social hierarchy du jour. Unfortunately, what they have to work with du jour is cultural collapse, which is exactly what converts degeneracy into prestige. It’s an unappetizing process, and its products — supposedly “gender-fluid” adult mammals — have exactly such an unappetizing presentation. What is most fashionable these days is obviously unreal, and to become a fashion-victim of that can’t have a happy ending.

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Elizabeth Warren Savaged On Social Media As DNA Gambit Backfires

Elizabeth Warren just owned herself after releasing a DNA test confirming that she’s as little as 1/1024th Native American – about half the percentage of the average white person.

What’s more, the DNA expert she used, Stanford University professor Carlos Bustamente, “used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American” as opposed to, say, DNA from a Cherokee Indian which Warren has claimed to be throughout her career. 

Adding to the absurdity are two major corrections by the Boston Globe (which has become the media mouthpiece of Warren’s 2020 damage control efforts of late), letting readers know that “Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative. It should be 1/1,024,” and later updating it to “between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.”

The reactions to Warren’s botched “reveal” have ranged from tenderfoot to savage

And a Benny Johnson superthread…

The Daily Caller‘s Benny Johnson laid out the Elizabeth Warren fraud in a 10-part tweetstorm which, in a rational world, would end the debate. 

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It’s Official: 2018 Federal Deficit Largest Since 2012

The federal government finished the 2018 fiscal year—it ended on September 30—a whopping $779 billion in the red, the largest annual budget deficit since 2012.

The current fiscal year is likely to see an even larger deficit, potentially in excess of $1 trillion.

The Treasury Department’s final data for the 2018 fiscal year, released Monday, shows that the deficit was driven by a combination of higher spending and additional borrowing. The latter was necessary to finance the former, of course, though last year’s tax cuts contributed to the widening gap between how much money the federal government takes in and how much it spends.

Tax revenues were flat during 2018 and corporate tax collections fell by $76 billion, Treasury reported.

On it’s own, the fact that American companies were able to keep $76 billion out of the government’s hands is cause for celebration. Those funds will certainly be put to more productive uses because they won’t be funneled to Washington. Trump’s corporate tax cuts brought the United States in line with the rest of the world, thereby increasing U.S. competitiveness in a global market.

But tax cuts without spending cuts are a recipe for disaster. While the Treasury’s data for fiscal year 2018 looks backwards, the trajectory for the future is the bigger story.

The $779 billion deficit for fiscal year 2018 was up 17 percent from the $666 billion deficit recorded in fiscal year 2017. The data show that the deficit is growing faster than the economy as a whole. In 2017, the federal deficit was equal to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but grew to 3.9 percent of GDP in 2018.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, current policies have the United States on course for a $2 trillion deficit before the end of the next decade.

“It’s an unsustainable fiscal course that will lead us to debt overtaking the size of the entire economy in as soon as a decade, and not long after topping all-time highs as a share of the economy not seen since World War II,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for balancing the budget, in a statement.

Driven by old-age entitlements and surfing on a wave of retiring boomers, the federal government will continue to pile on more debt unless serious structural reforms are undertaken. A new analysis from longtime congressional budget aide Brian Riedl, now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a free market think tank, shows that Social Security and Medicare will run a $100 trillion deficit over the next 30 years. With the country already facing a national debt of more than $20 trillion, massive annual deficits in future years are likely to drive-up the cost of borrowing and cause America’s already astronomical debt to grow at a faster pace, he warns.

That this latest increase in the deficit happened during a period when Republicans had full control of the federal government reveals that they were never very serious about balancing the budget. Even now, they refuse to recognize the problem. Democrats, meanwhile, are promising to spend even more on entitlements, if and when they return to power.

Almost nothing about the current state of affairs in Washington suggests that policy makers are prepared to deal with this looming catastrophe. Today’s news is a reminder that the reckoning is coming, regardless of whether our elected officials are ready for it.

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Peter Schiff: The Next Economic Crash Will Be “Far More Painful” Than The 2008 Recession

Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff is sounding the alarm after this week’s market selloff, saying Wall Street and the U.S. economy are on the verge of a recession.

“I think as Americans lose their jobs, they are going to see the cost of living going up rather dramatically, and so this is going to make it particularly painful,” Schiff said.

“This is a bubble not just in the stock market, but the entire economy,” he told Fox News Business. 

Schiff is predicting a recession, accompanied by rising consumer prices, that will be “far more painful” than the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

As SHTFplan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, President Donald Trump blamed the recent stock market woes on the Federal Reserve and the rising of interest rates.

“I think the Fed is making a mistake. They’re so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy,” Trump told reporters on his way to a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Trump said that the United States’ central bank is solely responsible for the worst stock market selloff since February, saying the Federal Reserve “has gone crazy.”

Schiff said it isn’t entirely the Fed’s fault, however, because they have been acting “irrationally” for a very long time while slowly adding nails to the economy’s coffin.

“What is crazy is for the Fed to believe that they can raise interest rates without pricking their own bubble,” he said.

“All bear markets start off as corrections. I think this one is probably a bear market. It’s long overdue,” Schiff said on FOX News Business. 

Schiff said investors are on the edge of a precipice that foresees a bear market far worse than the stock market crash of 2008.

“This is a bigger bubble than the one that blew up in 2008, and the crisis that is going to ensue is going to be far larger,” he said.

Schiff, along with other market experts, has criticized the government as well, for their obvious role in all economic crises. He’s warned about rising interest rates, the disaster the trade war will have, and the skyrocketing global debt which will all compound into a massive financial problem that’s inevitable.

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For Female Inmates, Talking Back is More Likely to End in a Trip to Solitary

|||Karen Foley/Dreamstime.comPrisons are more likely to give women serious punishments for minor infractions, according to a new collaborative report from NPR, The Social Justice News Nexus, and The Chicago Reporter.

In California, Vermont, and Rhode Island, for example, women were anywhere from two to three times as likely to receive disciplinary action for such infractions as “disrespect,” “disobedience,” and “derogatory comments” against corrections officers and inmates. Depending on the state, such infractions meant longer prison time, restrictions in family visits, loss of shopping privileges at the prison commissary for items such as food and women’s hygiene products, or even solitary confinement.

One former inmate, Celia Colon, told NPR that she received a disciplinary ticket for “reckless eye-balling” after she made a face when an officer gave an order. The led to an unspecified amount of time in solitary confinement.

Maggie Burke, a former warden at Illinois’ Logan Correctional Center, told investigators that corrections officers tend to “discipline based on emotion rather than on safety and security.” Are facilities truly being made safer, she asked, if women who “talked back” are being put in solitary? A November 2016 audit of her old facility found that an overuse of solitary confinement helped exacerbate poor mental health conditions among the prisoners. Suicide attempts at the prison had increased from one a month to 10.

About 61,000 people were kept in solitary confinement in 2017 for up to 22 hours a day. Though the number has declined over the past five years, mental health professionals argue that those unfortunate enough to experience this punishment are essentially victims of torture. Many prison reformers argue that it violates the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.”

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Sears Finally Entered Bankruptcy. The Struggle to Save It Was a Noble One: New at Reason

Today’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing for Sears Holdings has generated a lot of discussion about why the century-old retailer has finally failed.

Edward Lampert took control of Kmart when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2003. When Kmart announced its acquisition of Sears in 2004, press coverage described Sears as “broken” and “mired in a retail slump.” It is now 2018. That’s 14 years (for Sears) or 15 years (for Kmart) of patience and determination and hard work and rigorous analysis trying to rebuild a business that started out with bankrupt Kmart.

What has happened during those 14 or 15 years? Since 2005, Sears Holdings contributed more than $4.5 billion to fund long-established pension plans supporting Sears retirees whose careers at the company predated Lampert’s arrival. That compares favorably to General Motors, which went bankrupt in 2009 after the financial crisis in part because of its obligations to retirees. Sears management also kept open a lot of stores for a long time, hoping they’d turn around along with the economy and the company’s transformation. That kept a lot of Sears and Kmart employees working. That was a long-term bet that didn’t work out. A short-term mindset would have immediately closed more stores.

It wasn’t out of altruism. If Sears Holdings had managed to succeed better, the beneficiaries wouldn’t have only been pensioners and employees, but also shareholders, including Lampert. But interests were basically aligned, contrary to portrayals of Lampert looting the company through “financial engineering.”

Lampert could have quit and cut his losses years ago. Some have seen his failure to do so as hubris.

But what it took was guts, writes Ira Stoll.

View this article.

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Italian Cabinet Approves 2019 Budget, Sends Plan To Brussels

Italy’s cabinet on approved the country’s expansionary 2019 budget bill late on Monday, Prime Minister Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said. Conte told reporters the budget “keeps our promises while keeping public accounts in order”, adding that the government had sent the budget framework to the European Commission in Brussels for its review.

Commenting on the budget, Italy’s Economy Minister Tria said the budget measures are all fully covered and budget allows “early retirement and basic income tools.”

Tria also said that a 2.4% budget is “normal” for a Western country (indicatively, today the US reported a 3.9% budget deficit), adding that the expansionary budget is necessary to counter the slowdown of the economy in the next year and said that concerns that the budget would spark a crisis in Europe are “totally unfounded.”

Tria said that he “thinks” he will be able to explain the budget to Brussels, which is expected to oppose the Italian proposal vocally, and also denied denies plans to resign after the budget is approved in Parliament.

Meanwhile, Italy’s deputy PM and interior minister Savlini said the budget does not include tax increases. He also said that he is “satisfied” with the 2019 budget and added that the early retirement bill will create some 400,000 jobs, while €500MM would be saved from lower migrant spending. Italy’s other deputy PM Di Maio said the budget “cuts privileges” to fund income for the poor, adding that citizens income would start in Q1 2019.

And now we await Brussels’ response response: the question is whether the EU will reject the budget outright which could unleash another bout of Italian bond volatility, or if it will be a long, drawn out process of back and forth negotiations which eventually culminates in the departure of Italy’s populist government as yields and “lo spread” blows out, as Brussels seeks to make another example of the upstart populist government.

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Gold Extends Gains As Bonds, Stocks, Dollar Slide

Sorry…

China started off hopefully and ended ugly overnight…

But Europe managed gains, riding the coat-tails of US pre-market algos…

Saudi stocks plummeted to 6-month lows…

And while US equities were down overnight, they ramped into the US open and then chopped up and down – generally higher for Dow and S&P and lower for Nasdaq – all day… until the Saudi headlines hit and sparked selling and an ugly close…

 

Trannies and Small Caps outperformed as Nasdaq notably lagged…ugly close…

 

The S&P was glued at its 200DMA all day, The Dow could not hold above its 100DMA, Nasdaq was unable to break above it 200DMA and Small Caps continue to be ugly…

 

VIX dipped a little today at front-end (remains above 20) but the term structure remains inverted…

 

The spike in volatility has been mostly in equity while other assets displayed a smaller increase…

 

Stocks continued to catch down to global central bank balance sheets, EM risk, and global systemically important banks…

 

Treasury yields were incredibly quiet today ending the day practically unchanged across the curve…

 

10Y Yields traded in an exceptionally tight 2bp range all day…

 

Among the lowest range days of the year…

 

But there was on bond that moved…

 

While the dollar drifted to 2-week lows… (the dollar has now flip-flopped higher and lower for 8 straight days)

 

Offshore Yuan trod water, finding upside resistance at the Yuan Fix…

 

The Turkish Lira rose for the 7th straight day…as Pastor Brunson arrived back on American soil.

 

Cryptos had a sudden spike overnight amid selling in Tether and remain marginally higher from Friday’s close…

 

Despite dollar weakness (and Saudi threats), crude and copper slipped lower on the day and PMs higher…

 

WTI Crude spiked at the open after the Saudi threat op-eds but faded all day and dipped when the CNN headlines hit late on…

 

Gold and Silver were bid during the Asia session and started to fade as Europe opened…

 

Gold tested its 100DMA (briefly)…

And Silver closed above its 50DMA for the first time since June…

And as a reminder, specs are about as short gold and silver as they have ever been (as of last Wednesday)…

 

Fear and Greed “off the lows” but still at “extreme fear”…

Finally we note that today’s disappointing retail sales data sent US “hard” economic data reeling back near one-year lows…

And as Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg notes, don’t fall for the “storm” excuse…

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