Tag: finance

Vanity Fair Editors Relentlessly Attacked Over “Don’t-Run-Again-Hillary” Satirical Video

It appears the McResistance is on the warpath once again, and this time they're going after Vanity Fair, which to the surprise of many published a satirical video about Hillary Clinton's future prospects in the days just before Christmas with the caption, "Maybe it's time for Hillary Clinton to take up a new hobby in 2018" as part of a broader series on New Year's resolutions. 

"Take up a new hobby in the new year," suggested Vanity Fair writer Maya Kosoff. "Volunteer work, knitting, improv comedy – literally anything that will keep you from running again."

Editor John Kelly, meanwhile, suggested that Clinton "finally put away your James Comey voodoo doll." And added further with cheerful snark, "We all know you think James Comey cost you the election and he might have, but so did a handful of other things. It’s a year later and time to move on."

Editors from the magazine’s politics and business section, Hive, published the one-minute video entitled "Six New Year's Resolutions for Hillary Clinton" featuring themselves holding Champagne flutes while giving New Year's advice, which includes telling the former secretary of state and failed presidential candidate to give up and retire in 2018.

Though the video is fast approaching one million views via twitter, it more noticeably has evoked an avalanche of anger and outrage in the form of over 10,000 twitter comments – the overwhelming majority of which express shock and indignation, with repeat calls for Vanity Fair to remove the video. 

At the same time Hillary supporters including celebrities, journalists, and political commentators voiced their anger using the "#CancelVanityFair" hashtag which garnered over 30,000 tweets. And predictably it didn't take long for sexism to become the driving critique with Peter Daou, a former Clinton adviser, slamming the magazine for insulting “one of the most accomplished women in the history of the United States” while adding that he's long defended Clinton from such "sexist attacks."

But it appears the magazine caved by issuing a vague blanket apology, though the video hasn't been removed. A Vanity Fair spokesperson said, "It was an attempt at humor and we regret that it missed the mark." 

Of course, this didn't placate the trolls as "the resistance" thinks Hillary Clinton should remain uniquely immune from being the object of satire and didn't take the magazine to task over any other satirical videos in the same series. The New Year’s resolution video for Trump, for example, advises the president to delete his Twitter account and drink more Diet Coke in 2018. The Hive editors also took shots at Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Gary Cohn among others.

Meanwhile the creators of the video, which in its mockery is no harsher than your average Saturday Night Live skit, have been trolled relentlessly by Hillary supporters forcing at least one to lock her social media accounts. According to The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, "One of the reporters for Vanity Fair who appeared in the 'don't-run-again-Hillary' video, Maya Kosoff, has locked her account after being subjected to the most foul vitriol and abuse, endlessly, over several days."

Below are a handful of select tweets which capture the outrage over the simple satirical Hillary video… it appears the resistance mob will attack even Vanity Fair for crossing narrowly enforced boundaries. With such sensitivity 2018 is sure to be loads of fun.

via http://ift.tt/2DnvecA Tyler Durden

Hannity Promises To Expose CNN & NBC News In “EpicFail”

"Tick tock."

In a mysterious tweet yesterday evening to his 3.19 million followers, Fox News' Sean Hannity offered a preview of what is to come from his show next week, warning that he "will expose" CNN and NBC News for what he calls a "#EpicFail."

He followed up last night's tweet…

With another tonight, highlighting the "fake news" being spewed forth from various media entities…

We will just have to be patient to discover what he has in store for CNN and NBC, but as The Hill notes, Hannity has focused on what he calls "the destroy Trump fake news media" on most nights during his Fox News prime-time opinion program, particularly during his opening monologues that invariably include clips of CNN and MSNBC hosts and pundits going after the president in hyperbolic fashion.

Like many cable news hosts this week, Hannity is on vacation the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. He will return to the airwaves on Jan. 2.

The past year has been a good one for the 55-year-old staunch conservative, with his candidate of choice in Trump taking office, his move from 10 p.m. to the more-watched time slot of 9 p.m. and his finish on top of the cable news ratings race following the move, averaging 3.2 million viewers.

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The Herd Mind

Authored by Dan Sanchez via The Foundation for Economic Education,

The State is a state of mind; it is the herd mindset itself.

Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State.” This has long been the byword for anti-war, anti-state libertarians, and rightly so. But Bourne did not mean exactly what most libertarians take this phrase to mean. To understand the maxim’s original meaning, as Bourne used it in his great unfinished essay “The State,” one must understand his distinctions among three concepts that are often conflated: Country, State, and Government.

For Bourne, a Country (or Nation) is a group of individuals bound together by cultural affinity. A State is a Country/Nation collectively mobilized for attack or protection. As he distinguished between the two:

“Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects.”

The State and the Government 

And Government, according to Bourne, “is the machinery by which the Nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions” and “a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.”

What libertarians commonly refer to as “the State,” Bourne termed “the Government” instead. So, the way libertarians often interpret his famous aphorism is what Bourne would have expressed if he had written, “War is the health of the Government.” This also happens to be true, but it is not what he meant.

For Bourne, the State is not a distinct ruling body subsisting extractively on the ruled, i.e., a “gang of thieves writ large,” as the great Murray Rothbard incisively conceived it. Rather, he saw it as a certain orientation of a whole people: a spiritual phenomenon pervading an entire populace that animates and empowers such a ruling body. As Bourne expressed it:

“Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, con­crete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can en­vis­age the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is some­thing that must never be for­got­ten. Its glam­or and its significance linger be­hind the frame­work of Government and direct its activities.”

In peacetime, Bourne explained, the State is largely relegated to the background; individuals are then more concerned with their own affairs and purposes. But during the build-up to war, and especially following its breakout, the foreign enemy looms large in the public imagination. Hence, the Country is overtaken by war fever and develops what Garet Garett called a “complex of vaunting and fear.” This hybrid mania of boastful belligerence and timorous terror (“fight-or-flight”) causes the populace to regress from a civilization to a herd. The people seek safety in numbers: in a multitude unified for a single purpose (a “great end”) and directed by a single agency. The varied dance of individuals gives way to the uniform huddle and stampede of the unitary drove, with the Government as drover.

As Bourne wrote:

“The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.”

And in wartime, the “mystical conception” of the State “comes into its own” as the “herd-sense” becomes dominant in the Country and the “aggressive aspects” of the group come to the fore. This is what Bourne meant by, “War is the health of the State.” The dictum speaks to the flourishing of an ideal and the resulting transformation of a whole society, not merely the aggrandizement of a Government.

Yet, war is also the health of the Government, which is the single directing agency to whose banner the State-minded masses flock. Under the perceived exigencies of war, the people:

“…proceed to allow them­selves to be regimented, coerced, de­ranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction to­ward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come with­in the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The cit­i­zen throws off his con­tempt and indifference to Government, identifies him­self with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an au­gust presence, through the imaginations of men.”

Economically, this means that the manpower and resources of the Country undergo “mobilization”: a vast redirection away from the provision of individual consumer wants and toward the all-important war effort. In this way too, the Government swells in power and grandeur, as the consumer-directed market economy is supplanted by the Government-directed “War Economy,” or even “War Socialism” (Kriegssozialismus, as the Germans called it in World War I).

The "General Will"

In the fever of war, the individual will is sacrificed for the “General Will,” which ostensibly expresses itself through the Government. Individuals renounce their identities for the sake of uniting Voltron-like into a State, like the gestalt “Leviathan” pictured on the cover of Thomas Hobbes’s book by that name.

As Bourne put it:

“War sends the cur­rent of purpose and activity flow­ing down to the lowest lev­els of the herd, and to its re­mote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State be­comes what in peace­times it has vainly struggled to be­come—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.”

The herd is mobilized, not only against the foreign foe, but against any dissidents within the group who resist assimilation into the Borg-like hive- or herd-mind and who refuse to join the swarm or stampede into war: in other words, against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

 As Bourne explained:

“The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every­one and all feel­ing must be run into the stereo­typed forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling. (…) In this great herd-machinery, dis­sent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push to­wards military unity. Any interference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse to­wards crush­ing it.”

The State crushes dissent through Government policies restricting civil liberties, but also through private citizens acting as “amateur agents” of the Government: who berate skeptics into silence, report critics to the authorities for “disloyalty,” or even take the security of Herd and Homeland into their own violent hands. Remember that in Bourne’s framework, the Government is by no means identical with the State. As such, the State can animate a private citizen even more than it does an officeholder. As Bourne remarked:

“In every country we have seen groups that were more loyal than the King—more patriotic than the Government—the Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l’Action Francaise in France, our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the steer­ing wheel of the State straight, and they pre­vent the nation from ever veer­ing very far from the State ideal.”

This an extremely apt description of the Fox News types who castigate Barack Obama for his lack of “patriotism” and the insufficiency of his war-making. The spirit of the State dwells within Sean Hannity even more so than it dwells within the President of the United States. What is ironic is that a war-drumming jingo like Hannity usually imagines himself a paragon of manhood; yet his dull, stampeding herd mindset marks him out as less of a man, and more of a beast.

Bourne's Legacy 

Randolph Bourne was not a libertarian, but a dissident progressive. Still, we libertarians can learn a great deal from him. For instance, perhaps our terminology, as penetrating and illuminating as it is, has led us to focus too much on the herdsmen in office who drive, shear, milk, and butcher us, and not enough on the more fundamental problem: our society’s bovine propensity to become a manipulable herd in the first place, especially when spooked. Occasionally thinking in terms of Bourne’s typology can be a useful corrective in this regard.

Bourne’s terminology and analysis also shed light on the all-important question of how to achieve liberation. The State lives in the minds of the Government’s victims. Simply overthrowing a Government will only spook the herd even worse. The State will not only survive such an overthrow, but it will likely even feed off of it, as the panicked herd acts even more herd-like in the crisis, granting new herdsmen even more tyrannical power than the old ones had.

The State is a state of mind; it is the herd mindset itself. As such, it can only be overthrown in the battleground of the mind. Once the State is spiritually dethroned and the populace fully transfigures from herd to civilization, the “Government,” like a shepherd without a flock, will no longer even merit its designation. It will then merely be a heavily armed, but even more heavily outnumbered, gang of rustlers writ small.

Accomplishing this becomes ever more urgent as Americans are driven into ever more calamitous wars. It is increasingly apparent that breaking the spell of the State that turns men into beasts may be the only way we can avoid being driven to self-destruction by alarmist warmongers and their terrorist symbionts, like buffalo being stampeded off a cliff by herd-spooking hunters.

 

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Top Russian General Accuses US Of Training ISIS At Syrian Border Base

From ISIS To US-Backed "New Syrian Army" – "They Change Their Spots" Russia Alleges

According to a new Reuters report, the chief of the Russian General Staff has accused the United States of hosting a training facility for ISIS fighters in Syria along the Syria-Iraq border. Al-Tanf base on Syria's southeast side has been under the control of the US-backed "New Syrian Army" and their US special forces advisers since the area was captured from ISIS in August of 2016.

Russia has previously called the base a 100km wide “black hole” operated by the US wherein an assortment of unaccountable armed groups and militants can operate freely. That American troops have long been deployed there was previously confirmed through multiple photographs and videos released early in the summer of 2017 which showed US elite soldiers on active patrols with Syrian rebel factions associated with the Free Syrian Army (or FSA, elements of which were more recently renamed the New Syrian Army).


Photos above and below were made public last summer which shows ongoing training of "New Syrian Army" fighters by US military advisers. Russia now alleges ISIS members have sought the protection of the base and area under its control. Russia's top general said this week, "They are practically Islamic State. But after they are worked with, they change their spots and take on another name." The images were originally published through Hammurabi’s Justice News, a news outlet affiliated with Maghaweir al Thowra (MaT) – a faction which is the latest incarnation of the US-created New Syrian Army. Via the Long War Journal


Image produced by Maghaweir al Thowra (MaT) – the latest incarnation of the US-created New Syrian Army.

The head of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, made the allegations in an interview on Wednesday with Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, saying that the US base is illegal (and presumably the other roughly up to 10 or more known bases) as the Americans have no right to violate Syrian sovereignty and have not been invited to be there by Damascus in the first place. Russian military officials have recently indicated that the Syrian Army has essentially cut off the area and isolated US-backed forces' ability to expand. If true this raises significant doubts concerning how the presumed "anti-ISIL" mission of US coalition forces are valid or relevant, or how a direct US military presence in the remote southeast region could be justified.

Early this month Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the Islamic State had been destroyed and no longer holds cities or significant territory, though insurgent pockets remain. And at the same time the Russian "mission accomplished" announcement was being widely reported, the Pentagon said US forces would stay in Syria "as long as we need to, to support our partners and prevent the return of terrorist groups." Meanwhile, this week Russia has moved forward with plans brokered with the Syrian government to maintain two permanent Russian military bases on the Mediterranean – the naval station at Tartus and Khmeimim airbase outside of Latakia.

General Gerasimov told the Russian newspaper that the defense ministry possessed drone and satellite footage confirming large numbers of ISIS-affiliated fighters at the US base at Tanf. "They are in reality being trained there,” Gerasimov said, and continued “They are practically Islamic State. But after they are worked with, they change their spots and take on another name. Their task is to destabilize the situation."

Thus the allegation appears to be that as ISIS loses territory and is rooted out of various pockets in the east, its fighters then conveniently declare their allegiance to US-backed FSA/New Syrian Army factions, after which they enter training programs hosted by US advisers. 

Gerasimov further indicated that some 400 militants recently left a town in the southern al-Hasakah Province for al-Tanf, launching an offensive on the Syrian forces from the eastern bank of Euphrates, after the main ISIS forces were routed there. Russia has over the past months accused the US coalition of essentially relocating ISIS fighters in order to allow their redeploying to locations where they could attack and pressure Syrian and Russian aligned forces.

In one major instance related to the coalition and SDF victory over ISIS in Raqqa, a bombshell investigative report produced by no less than BBC News confirmed that Russia has certainly had reason to be suspicious of the Pentagon's motives and strategy inside Syria. According the November BBC report:

The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let hundreds of Islamic State fighters and their families escape from Raqqa, under the gaze of the US and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city. A convoy included some of IS's most notorious members and – despite reassurances – dozens of foreign fighters. Some of those have spread out across Syria, even making it as far as Turkey.

And concerning the latest accusations of US-ISIS complicity in al-Tanf, Gen. Gerasimov further said the pattern continues: "The most important is that we have been seeing the militants advancing from there for several months. When the control [of the Syrian forces] loosened, as many as 350 militants left the area." He further said of the Russian-Syrian fight against ISIS in the area, "We took timely measures…they have suffered a defeat, these forces were destroyed. There were captives from these camps. It is clear that training is underway at those camps."

And he continued, "Instead of the New Syrian Army, mobile ISIS groups, like a jack in the box, carry out sabotage and terrorist attacks against Syrian troops and civilians from there." And though the pretext for the Tanf base’s creation was "the need to conduct operations against ISIS" – the rapid recent demise of ISIS proves that the Americans have ulterior motives, according to the Russian general.

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has heightened his rhetoric of late regarding uninvited foreign forces operating on Syrian soil. He said last week in a televised interview which was subsequently posted to multiple Syrian official social media channels: "Those who work with foreigners against their army are traitors." Assad has also on multiple occasions promised to return all of natural Syria to the control of the Syrian government and army.

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“$1MM Per Minute In Salaries, $22BN Per Year In Vacation Pay” And Other Fun Facts About The Federal Workforce

The folks at Open The Books decided to take a deep dive into the salaries of 1.97 million federal employees, using data collected from the Office Of Personnel Management and the USPS via FOIA requests, and the endless examples of excessive pay and pure waste are sure to make you sick, if not downright suicidal.  Here are just some of the key takeaways as summarized by OTB:

1. The federal government pays its disclosed workforce $1 million per minute, $66 million per hour, and $524 million per day. In FY2016, the federal government disclosed 1.97 million employees at a cash compensation cost of $136.3 billion.

 

2. Over a six-year period (FY2010-2016), the number of federal employees making $200,000 or more has increased by 165 percent; those making $150,000 or more has grown by 60 percent; and those making more than $100,000 has increased by 37 percent.

 

3. On average, federal employees are given 10 federal holidays, 13 sick days, and 20 vacation days per year. If each employee used 13 sick days and took 20 vacation days in addition to the 10 federal holidays, it would cost taxpayers an estimated $22.6 billion annually.

 

4. In FY2016, a total 406,960 employees made six-figure incomes – that’s roughly one in five disclosed federal employees. Furthermore, 29,852 federal employees out-earned each of the 50 state governors receiving more than $190,823.

 

5. At 78 out of the 122 independent agencies and departments we studied, the average employee compensation exceeded $100,000 in FY2016.

 

salaries

 

6. With 326 employees at a total cash compensation of $28.8 million, we found a federal agency in San Francisco – Presidio Trust – paid out three of the top four federal bonuses including the largest in the federal government in FY2016. The biggest bonus went to an HR Manager in charge of payroll for $141,525.

 

7. Together, the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employ more than half of the disclosed federal workforce. As the largest civilian employer within the federal government, the USPS employed 32 percent of all disclosed federal employees, totaling 621,523 people on payroll in FY2016. The VA employed the second most employees with 372,614 or 19 percent of the disclosed federal workforce.

 

8. Only one-third of the 35,000 lawyers in the federal workforce work at the Department of Justice. The entire staff of federal lawyers earned $4.8 billion in FY2016.

 

9. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) employed 3,498 police officers at a total cost of $172 million in FY2016. When asked about corresponding crime statistics, the VA was unable to provide any information on the number of crimes or incidents.

 

10. There are an additional 2 million undisclosed employees at the Department of Defense and in the active military. Their estimated cash compensation value, combined with $1 billion in undisclosed bonuses and $125 billion in hidden pension data, amounts to roughly $221 billion in undisclosed federal cash compensation per year.

So where is all the money going?  As it turns out, federal employees working in “the beltway” and California receive 22% of all federal compensation dollars.  Meanwhile, employees located in just the top 10 states received 41% ($55.5 billion).  Of course, out of that top 10, only two states, Georgia and Texas, consistently vote ‘red’ in national elections which may help to explain why the Trump administration has struggled with leaks from a variety of agencies since moving into the White House.

The growth in the number of federal employees earning over $150,000 per year is simply mind numbing.  Keep in mind, these salaries are doled out regardless of whether or not these employees take advantage of their 8 weeks of paid time off every year. 

There are now 29,852 federal employees who out-earn every governor of the 50 states, receiving more than $190,823 each. Over a six-year period (FY2010-2016), the number of federal employees making $200,000 or more has increased by 165 percent, those making $150,000 or more has grown by 60 percent, and those making more than $100,000 has increased by 37 percent.

 

Of the roughly 2 million disclosed federal employees, 406,960 made six figures in cash compensation in FY2016. Additionally, 24,799 federal employees earned $200,000 or more while 3,154 made $300,000 or more. The top-paid federal employee overall, Dr. David Harpole, made $403,849 as a thoracic and cardiac surgeon for the Department of Veterans Affairs. This department employs more top earners than any other department or independent agency

As if the above isn’t bad enough, things get really disturbing when you learn that various agencies employee an army of “Interior Designers” making up to $150,000 per year…

The Department of State displayed the most egregious trends in regards to interior designers, doling out – on average – $122,093 to each of its 24 interior designers. The highest-paid interior design employees, however, worked for the Department of Treasury, earning $132,438, on average. In all, the federal government paid 40 interior designers more than $100,000 each.

…and an even larger army of “Gardeners” making up to $160,000.

Perhaps it’s time for a career change?  Here’s an idea…you could pick up a job mowing the lawn at the State Department for 40 hours a week at a salary of $141,555 and then use the other 128 hours of every week to get an Interior Design gig at Treasury for $152,687…all the while collecting two pensions and making nearly 5x the average American household yet still working less hours despite having two jobs…

Here is the full report from Open The Books:

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Five Things Professors Actually Said In 2017

Via Campus Reform,

Most Americans expect college professors to be beacons of knowledge and wisdom, or at least to exercise more maturity than their teenage students.

Every year, however, Campus Reform comes across professors who unashamedly make outrageous, preposterous, and downright absurd remarks in their classrooms and on social media, denigrating conservatives and their viewpoints.

In 2017, President Trump’s first year in the Oval Office brought academic rage to new heights as professors frequently blasted the Commander-in-Chief and berated his voters, traditional conservatives, and anyone who does not embrace progressivism.

Here are five things that professors actually said in 2017:

1) Prof suggests Texans deserve hurricane for supporting Trump

A University of Tampa professor was so upset about the outcome of the 2016 presidential election that he publicly suggested that Texans deserved Hurricane Harvey because the state voted Republican last year.

“I don’t believe in instant Karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas,” Professor Ken Storey tweeted in August. “Hopefully this will help them realize the GOP doesn’t care about them.”

Shortly after the controversial remarks, the university announced that it had fired the professor.

2) Prof says House GOP ‘should be lined up and shot’

An Art Institute of Washington professor was so furious about the House GOP’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare that he said GOP lawmakers “should be lined up and shot” for their actions.

“They should be lined up and shot,” Professor John Griffin wrote on his Facebook page. “That’s not hyperbole; blood is on their hands.”

3) Prof calls whites 'inhuman assholes,' says 'let them die'

In June, Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams made national headlines after appearing to suggest that the first responders should have let the victims of the congressional shooting "fucking die” because they are white.

“It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system. #LetThemFuckingDie,” Williams wrote in a Facebook post, including the hashtag as an apparent reference to an op-ed with the same title that he had shared two days earlier.

Following his controversial remarks, Williams was placed on leave but is slated to return to teaching in 2018.

4) Prof says Otto Warmbier 'got exactly what he deserved'

A University of Delaware professor claimed that Otto Warmbier, a young American who died after being held in a North Korean prison camp, “got exactly what he deserved.”

Professor Katherine Dettwyler made her remarks on her personal Facebook page and in the comments section of an article published by National Review.

Dettwyler maintained that Warmbier behaved like a “spoiled, naive, arrogant U.S. college student who never had to face the consequences of his actions” when he visited North Korea, and that he had a “typical mindset of a lot of the young, white, rich, clueless males” she teaches.

5) Drexel prof blames 'whiteness' for Texas massacre

George Ciccariello-Maher, an assistant professor at Drexel University who made headlines by calling for “white genocide” last year, was at it again in 2017.

In early November, the academic pinned the blame for the Texas massacre that killed 26 people on what he called “whiteness” and “entitlement.”

“Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres, of other forms of violence,” Ciccariello-Maher said in an interview with Democracy Now!, asserting that “whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.”

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One-Third Of The 2016 Spike In U.S. Homicides Came From Just 5 Chicago Neighborhoods

Authored by Thomas Lifson of American Thinker,

The full evil of the anti-cop hysteria pushed by left wing groups like #BlackLivesMatter will take many years to be understood, in no small part because of political and media support for the notion that racism on the part of cops is the sole cause for disproportionate numbers of black perpetrators in our crime statistics.

But every now and then, a statistic appears that cannot be easily dismissed. Jared Sichel of The Daily Signal brings one such figure to our attention.

Murders in the U.S. rose nearly 9% last year, and one-third of that increase came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the FBI’s annual 2016 publication, Crime in the United States.

 

While violent crime (homicide, rape, assault, and robbery) also rose nationwide from 2015 to 2016 — over 4% — the data show the increase was not uniform, but rather concentrated in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

Chicago

(Chart per HeyJackAss!)

Other big cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, DC, saw meaningful declines in violence. So there is no broad trend, but rather local factors that must be accounted for. For instance:

Interestingly, the paper’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis claimed that areas where homicides spiked had a “lighter street presence by police following officers’ high-profile killings of young black men.” (snip)

 

In Baltimore, violent crime rates were going down until 2015, when police officers “pulled back from a more proactive approach” following widespread city riots after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while being transported in a police van on April 1, 2015, and died one week later.

But for the real statistical weight affecting overall crime stats, one has to look at Chicago, where the police have been under severe restrictions and where gang activity is out of control:

In Chicago last year, homicides jumped to 771, 58% higher than in 2015, and more than the number of murders in Los Angeles and New York combined. Half of that increase, the analysis showed, came from just five neighborhoods, and is largely attributable to gang warfare. In a “roughly four-mile radius of West Garfield Park,” for example, there are at least 30 gangs. (snip)

 

In Chicago, as in Baltimore, police became less proactive following protests against the fatal 2014 shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with first-degree murder.

 

A FiveThirtyEight analysis found that in Chicago and other cities with high-profile deaths of black men involving police officers, a “pullback in policing was accompanied by a sharp increase in gun violence.”

All the anti-cop self-righteousness in the world won’t save one victim from gang violence. The BLM protestors, along the with hands up-don’t shoot crowd have been enablers of horrific violence that mostly is claiming black lives. Progressive politics often involves sacrificing the powerless for the purported greater good, even as the poseurs claim to be their righteous protectors.

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Is This Why The Status Quo Disdains Bitcoin? – The “Wrong People Are Getting Rich”

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The wrong people–rebels, outsiders, nerds and techies– got on the cryptocurrency boat while their insider/rentier "betters" blew it and are now raging bitterly onshore.

The psychology of money, wealth and speculative manias is endlessly fascinating. Most of what's written on these subjects focus on the process of building wealth as if it were a quasi-science rather than a psychologically driven process. Only speculative manias attract a psychology-based analysis, usually characterized as some variant of the madness of the herd running off the cliff en masse.

But money and wealth are nothing but more sedate reflections of the same dynamics that drive speculative manias. Much has been written about cognitive biases and thinking fast and slow, but these explorations do not exhaust the psychology underpinning money, wealth and speculative manias.

Few things have unleashed the Monster Id of wealth and money quite like bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies. Compare the speculative manias of the dot-com era (1995 – 2000) and the housing bubble (2002 – 2007) with the crypto-mania: in the first two manias, the status quo embraced the mania as rational and justified: the Internet would continue growing for decades, housing never goes down, etc.

But the status quo has not embraced cryptocurrencies with the same ardor–why? Instead of endless justifications for valuations, the status quo is filled with reports that 97% of all economists view bitcoin as a bubble, and endless articles decrying the bitcoin bubble as a fools game that will deservedly burst, and soon.

Why did the status quo embrace irrationally exuberant bubbles in the 1990s and 2000s, but views the exuberance of cryptocurrencies with disdain? I think this is a fruitful topic to explore, largely because nobody seems to be asking this question.

Here are my suppositions:

1. The status quo reviles cryptocurrencies because the wrong people are getting rich.

2. The status quo reviles cryptocurrencies because the usual insiders (Wall Street and its politico leeches) didn't get on board early, and they're deeply offended that they missed the boat.

3. Until the advent of bitcoin futures trading, the usual insiders had no means to skim profits from the exuberance.

To me, these dynamics go a long way in explaining the 97% of the status quo's visible loathing of bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies.

In other words: why embrace some manias but not all manias? Answer: some manias make the usual insiders filthy rich, others don't. The dot-com mania generated billions of dollars in profits for Wall Street and the rest of the financier-politico leeches (i.e. the rentier class) via IPOs (initial public offerings), insider deals and vast fees generated by trading the mania with other peoples' money.

The housing bubble generated billions of dollars in profits for Wall Street via the issuance of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), CDOs and other exotic financial instruments based on mortgages and related securities, and realtors (and the rest of the housing industry) banked billions in commissions, fees and other skims.

In both cases, Average Joe and Jane reckoned the manias were their ticket to untold wealth. A relative few Average Joes and Janes did strike it rich, usually by being early employees of companies that went public, and a few others managed the impossible, i.e. buying low and selling high and then exiting the casino with their winnings.

But the vast majority of the Average Joes and Janes were fodder for the chipping machines of Wall Street and the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) insiders and elites. Far more people lost money in the period between 1997 and 2003 than won big and kept their winnings. Millions of people gambled on the housing bubble expanding forever and lost everything.

Now compare that to the cryptocurrency mania: Wall Street and the rest of the financier-politico leeches (the rentier class) have virtually no insider skims in the cryptocurrencies–is it any wonder they hate bitcoin with a passion that correlates to their inability to rake in billions of low-risk fees from the mania?

The psychology of FOMO (fear of missing out) is well known; the indignation of those who didn't get on board before the ship sailed is less well noted. The financier/rentier class has a very high opinion of its own moxie and intelligence, and the fact that they missed the boat entirely on bitcoin et al. is like a knife of wounded pride plunged directly into their greedy hearts.

Those who can see past their own wounded pride are busy investing in blockchain applications and cryptocurrency funds, while those who cannot let go of their wounded pride are raging daily against the bitcoin bubble, and praying nightly to their evil gods for its collapse, to prove themselves right after all.

Every day that bitcoin doesn't crash to zero is a day of pain for those whose pride was wounded by missing the cryptocurrency boat.

Even worse–if that's possible for those whose greed is insatiable–the wrong people have gotten rich–techies, nerds, outsiders, rebels, etc.

It's as if the crypto-rabble rebels just blew up the Financial Empire's Death Star and got away with it.

Interestingly, few balk when privileged insiders mint fortunes for doing essentially nothing but exploiting their privileges. The corporate media heaps fatuous praise on insiders who reap billions of dollars from others' labor and ideas via IPOs, leveraged buyouts, etc. because of course these rentiers are our bosses and overlords.

It's dangerous for a mere peasant in the Corporate-State Feudal System (i.e. the status quo) to speak truth to power against the Financial Aristocracy that issues the paychecks.

You can bet that if a Wall Street insider had bought bitcoin in size for $100 each, said insider would be justifying today's valuations and arguing for higher valuations ahead, just as he/she did in the dot-com and housing manias.

So it all boils down to this: the wrong people–rebels, outsiders, nerds and techies– got on the cryptocurrency boat while their insider/rentier "betters" blew it and are now raging bitterly onshore, not just resentful but indignant that this mania didn't enrich insiders like it should have.

So sorry about your Death Star. I guess this doesn't bode well for your bonus and promotion in the Imperial hierarchy.

*  *  *

I'm offering my new book Money and Work Unchained at a 10% discount ($8.95 for the Kindle ebook and $18 for the print edition) through December, after which the price goes up to retail ($9.95 and $20). Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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The Anatomy Of Hillary Clinton’s $84 Million Money-Laundering Scheme

Authored by Dan Backer via Investors.com,

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of my client, Alabama engineer Shaun McCutcheon, in his challenge to the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) outdated "aggregate limits," which effectively limited how many candidates any one donor could support.

Anti-speech liberals railed against McCutcheon's win, arguing it would create supersized "Joint Fundraising Committees" (JFCs). In court, they claimed these JFCs would allow a single donor to cut a multimillion-dollar check, and the JFC would then route funds through dozens of participating state parties, who would then funnel it back to the final recipient.

Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer claimed the Supreme Court's McCutcheon v. FEC ruling would lead to "the system of legalized bribery recreated that existed prior to Watergate." The Supreme Court, in ruling for us, flatly stated such a scheme would still be illegal.

The Democrats' response? Hold my beer.

The Committee to Defend the President has filed an FEC complaint against Hillary Clinton's campaign, Democratic National Committee (DNC), Democratic state parties and Democratic mega-donors.

As Fox News reported, we documented the Democratic establishment "us[ing] state chapters as straw men to circumvent campaign donation limits and launder(ing) the money back to her campaign." The 101-page complaint focused on the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) — the $500 million joint fundraising committee between the Clinton campaign, DNC, and dozens of state parties — which did exactly that the Supreme Court declared would still be illegal.

HVF solicited six-figure donations from major donors, including Calvin Klein and "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, and routed them through state parties en route to the Clinton campaign. Roughly $84 million may have been laundered in what might be the single largest campaign finance scandal in U.S. history.

Here's what we know. Campaign finance law is incredibly complex and infamous for its lack of clarity. As I've explained before, its complexity is a feature, not a bug. Major political players with the resources to hire the very few attorneys who practice campaign finance law benefit from the complexity that keeps others out. Perhaps HVF's architects thought so too, and assumed that if no one understands what's happening, no one would complain.

Here's what you can do, legally. Per election, an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party's main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits — it's legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfers to their national party.

Here's what you can't do, which the Clinton machine appeared to do anyway. As the Supreme Court made clear in McCutcheon v. FEC, the JFC may not solicit or accept contributions to circumvent base limits, through "earmarks" and "straw men" that are ultimately excessive — there are five separate prohibitions here.

On top of that, six-figure donations either never actually passed through state party accounts or were never actually under state party control, which adds false FEC reporting by HVF, state parties, and the DNC to the laundry list.

Finally, as Donna Brazile and others admitted, the DNC placed the funds under the Clinton campaign's direct control, a massive breach of campaign finance law that ties the conspiracy together.

Democratic donors, knowing the funds would end up with Clinton's campaign, wrote six-figure checks to influence the election — 100 times larger than allowed.

HVF bundled these megagifts and, on a single day, reported transferring money to all participating state parties, some of which would then show up on FEC reports filed by the DNC as transferring the exact same dollar amount on the exact same day to the DNC. Yet not all the state parties reported either receiving or transferring those sums.

Did any of these transfers actually happen? Or were they just paper entries to mask direct transfers to the DNC?

For perspective, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza was prosecuted and convicted in 2012 for giving a handful of associates money they then contributed to a candidate of his preference — in other words, straw  man contributions. He was sentenced to eight months in a community confinement center and five years of probation. How much money was involved? Only $20,000. HVF weighs in at $84 million — more than 4,000 times larger!

So who should be worried? Everyone involved — from the donors themselves to Democratic fundraisers to party officials who filed false reports and, ultimately, to Clinton campaign and HVF officials looking at significant legal jeopardy.

Don't take my word for it. Our complaint is built entirely on the FEC reports filed by Democrats, memos authored by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook, and public statements from Donna Brazile and others.

The only question that matters: Was the law broken? If the answer is yes, then the corrupt Clinton machine should be held accountable.

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McCain Associate Subpoenaed Over Trump Dossier

Several months ago it emerged that the Republican sponsor behind the Fusion GPS Trump project was hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a fact which surprised many who expected that John McCain would be the GOP mastermind looking for dirt in Trump’s past. However, a new and credible McCain trail has emerged in the annals of the “Trump Dossier” after the Washington Examiner reported that the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to an associate of John McCain over his connection with the salacious dossier containing unverified allegations about Trump and his ties to Russia, which many speculate served as the illegitimate basis for FISA warrants against the Trump campaign – permitting the NSA to listen in on Trump’s phone calls – and which the president yesterday slammed as “bogus” and a “crooked Hillary pile of garbage.”

In the latest twist, committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wants to talk to David Kramer, a former State Department official and current senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, about his visit to London in November 2016. During his trip, at McCain’s request Kramer met with the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, to view “the pre-election memoranda on a confidential basis,” according to court filings and to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to McCain. McCain then took a copy of the dossier to the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. But the FBI already had the document; Steele himself gave the dossier to the bureau in installments, reportedly beginning in early July 2016.


David Kramer

While McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier, his associate Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview. In the session, the Washington Examiner reports, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele’s dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.

Now, he is under subpoena which was issued Wednesday afternoon, and directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.

As the ongoing government probe slowly turns away from Trump’s “collusion” with the Russians and toward the FBI “insurance policy” to allegedly prevent Trump from becoming president by fabricating a narrative of Russian cooperation with the Trump, knowing Steele’s sources will be a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation:

“If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical.”

There is another reason to know Steele’s sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair. As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators’ views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.

Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: “It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheing, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?“

On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now… and as the Examiner’s Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek Steele’s sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.

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