Lenny Pozner, the father of a boy (Noah Pozner) killed in the Sandy Hook, sued James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, who cowrote the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” The book had claimed, among other things, that
“Noah Pozner’s death certificate is a fake, which we have proven on a dozen or more grounds.”
“[Mr. Pozner] sent her a death certificate, which turned out to be a fabrication.”
“As many Sandy Hook researchers are aware, the very document Pozner circulated in 2014, with its inconsistent tones, fonts, and clear digital manipulation, was clearly a forgery.”
Pozner said this libeled him, and in June a Wisconsin judge agreed, and granted Pozner summary judgment on liability; last month, the jury awarded Pozner $450,000 in damages.
Since then, there have been two requests submitted to Google under Leonard Pozner’s name, asking Google to deindex pages that contain copies of the libelous book, and Google has gone along with those requests. Google generally does remove from its indexes links to material that a court has found to be libelous, so Google searches for such material no longer find it.
As best I can tell, Google didn’t deindex these items; it gets such overbroad deindexing requests often, and generally sees through them. But I thought it was worth noting that there indeed has been an attempt to essentially vanish these criticisms from the searchable Internet.
On Monday, I e-mailed Pozner and his lawyer, with whom I had corresponded before, to confirm that the deindexing request submitted under Pozner’s name indeed came from him; I have not gotten a response so far. But I have no reason to think that it came from any source other than from Pozner or his associates.
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Massive Search After Air Force Member “Fell Out” Of C-130 Into Gulf Of Mexico
A major combined Air Force, Coast Guard, and Army search is underway over the Gulf of Mexico after a training exercise went wrong.
The Air Force said an airman only identified as a staff sergeant “exited a C-130 aircraft” over the Gulf of Mexico during a parachute training exercise Tuesday, after which the crew member disappeared from the airplane’s view and couldn’t be relocated.
“Search and recovery crews were immediately called to aid in locating the Airman from the 24th Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field at approximately 11:30 a.m. Tuesday,” an official military statement said.
US Air Force file image of C-130 aircraft.
It’s unclear if the missing airman was meant to exit the aircraft at that location, perhaps accidentally falling out prematurely, or if it’s simply that relocation efforts failed after the jump.
A CNN report described that the airman “fell out” of the plane, based on a Coast Guard statement:
The US Coast Guard is helping with the search for a missing Air Force airman who fell out of a plane during a jump training mission, Coast Guard Mobile Sector spokesman Juston Lee told CNN.
The missing staff sergeant deployed his parachute and fell about 1,500 feet into the Gulf of Mexico, he said. His name and age have not been released.
“The crew aboard the C-130 plane said the airman hit the water and was treading water, but when they turned back around to find him, they couldn’t see him” the Coast Guard statement described further.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is also reported to be assisting in the rescue operation.
Rescuers have expanded their search of a broad area south of Santa Rosa Island, Florida based on shifting currents in the area, a follow-up Coast Guard statement said.
Bitcoin price highs in 2017 were not the result of a single trader on an exchange, the CEO of payment company Circle claims. In a series of tweets on Nov. 4, Jeremy Allaire disputed recent research which claimed Bitcoin’s bull run to $20,000 was the result of efforts by a single wallet holder.
Circle CEO: Research fails to understand exchanges
The findings are currently featuring as part of the $1.4 trillion lawsuit against stablecoin Tether (USDT). Its issuance, researchers argue, coincided with Bitcoin price jumps.
For Allaire, however, the idea that one Tether trader engaged in manipulation on an exchange had no logic.
“Exchanges use omnibus wallets that pool all customer balances and transactions on and off the exchange. So an analysis that shows that ‘a single wallet’ was involved in flows from Bitfinex to other exchanges is meaningless. All it shows is that traders were trading,” he summarized.
Others, meanwhile, including Cointelegraph contributors, followed Allaire in disagreeing with the conclusion that entire markets were swayed by a single wallet.
“Wake up call; every market is ‘manipulated’. Everybody tweeting something about the price of a certain asset is ‘manipulating’ the market. Doesn’t mean you can’t make money,” trader Michaël van de Poppe summarized in a Twitter post on Monday.
“The entire premise seems to misunderstand how markets and stablecoins work,” he responded, calling the research “bad science.”
More Tether does not mean higher BTC price
The dispute comes as curious movements in Bitcoin price continue. As Cointelegraph reported, several recent jumps have sparked speculation, including one which induced the second-biggest daily gains in Bitcoin’s history.
In December 2017, Tether’s market cap was around $1 billion. But while Bitcoin’s price is now 50% lower, Tether’s market cap has increased four times over to current levels of $4.1 billion.
Therefore, the issuance of new USDT thus does not directly correspond to BTC/USD staying higher.
Focus on China “breaking” exchanges
A further theory about the 2017 activity centers on China. According to Elaine Ou, a Bloomberg contributor formerly with Bitcoin mobile wallet app Abra, exchanges were unprepared for the consequences of Beijing’s ban on crypto trading.
Citing research from crypto industry startup Chainalysis, Ou said Chinese investors had stockpiled Bitcoin using yuan in advance.
“Once the ban was in effect, the traders had no way to trade crypto back to yuan, so they shifted to using Tethers on overseas exchanges as a substitute for fiat currency (after all, the yuan is roughly pegged to the dollar),” she summarized.
The result, along with the initial coin offering, or ICO, phenomenon for exchanges was conspicuous. Ou added:
“Coinbase saw so much trading activity that the exchange ‘broke.’ And the idea that a lone whale fueled this yearlong Bitcoin bull run is more than a little silly.”
Ridgetop Police Chief Bryan Morris submitted his resignation on Friday. The Tennessee city is now without a police force and it’s all due to a disagreement over illegal ticket quotas.
In January, FOX 17 released explosivereports that implicated Ridgetop Mayor Tony Reasoner and Vice Mayor McCaw Johnson in a scheme to generate revenue for the city of just over 2,000 by directing the police department as a whole to write a minimum of 210 tickets each month. The officers pushed back and finally took it upon themselves to secretly record Reasoner and Johnson. The recordings were then handed over to FOX 17.
In the recordings, Reasoner and Johnson talk about repayments to the city after the police payroll was $54,000 higher than the revenue from citations. The pair hoped that if the police wrote more tickets, it would generate new revenue that would fund the entire police payroll.
Section 39-16-516 of the Tennessee criminal code bars politicians and state agencies from disciplining a police officer solely based on the officer’s ability to meet a ticket quota. The Ridgetop officers have argued that Reasoner and Johnson violated this law by demanding to see bi-weekly ticket reports from each officer. In one of the recordings, Johnson even attempted to leverage a raise for two officers and the rehire of another to encourage officers to meet the quota.
“Law enforcement is not about tickets. It’s about trying to cut down on crime. That is a local government taking advantage of its people. That’s not what we are here for,” Officer Shawn Taylor, who captured the secret recordings on Chief Morris’ behalf, declared at the time.
When asked by FOX 17 if he knew that ticket quotas were illegal, Reasoner replied, “Yes, we do. We know.” McCaw, after denying that he demanded the quota, added that he was merely interested in “revenue stream.”
The fight between the city officials and the police came to a head in June when officials voted to disband the department. After Robertson County Judge Bill Goodman blocked the city’s decision, the police department was scaled down from five officers to one—Morris.
Morris submitted his resignation on Friday afternoon, effectively leaving the city without a police department.
The city will now search for a replacement police chief. In the meantime, the Robertson County Sheriff’s Department will take over law enforcement operations in the city.
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Everyone raises their eyebrows when I say “I’m interested in bankruptcy law and First Amendment law,” but it makes a lot of sense if you think of newspapers in the middle of the Venn diagram.
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Whistleblower’s Attorney Vowed To ‘Get Rid Of Trump’ In 2017
The Democratic operative attorney representing the anti-Trump whistleblower vowed to “get rid of Trump” in 2017.
Whistleblower attorney Mark S. Zaid
Mark Zaid, the John Podesta, Clinton and Schumer-linked attorney who founded the anti-Trump nonprofit ‘Whistleblower Aid’ in 2017, tweeted “It’s very scary. We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters. We have to.“
He also bragged about his connections to John Podesta with an organization he set up for litigation.
Hilariously, Zaid describes himself as a “non-partisan” attorney “handling cases involving national security, security clearances, govt investigations, media, Freedom of Information Act, & whistleblowing, according to Breitbart‘s Aaron Klein, who noted that Zaid’s “Whistleblower Aid” organization is heavily tied to far-left activist organizations and Democratic policies.
Whistleblower Aid was founded in September 2017 in the wake of Trump’s presidency to encourage government whistleblowers to come forward.
The group did not sit around waiting for whistleblowers. Upon its founding, Whistleblower Aid actively sought to attract the attention of Trump administration government employees by reportedly blasting advertisements for its whistleblower services on Metro trains, using mobile billboards that circled government offices for 10 hours a day, and handing out whistles on street corners as a gimmick to gain attention.
When Whistleblower Aid was first formed, the main banner for the mission statement of its website contained clearly anti-Trump language.
“Today our Republic is under threat. Whistleblower Aid is committed to protecting the rule of law in the United States and around the world,” read the previous statement which can still be viewed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. –Breitbart
Ridgetop Police Chief Bryan Morris submitted his resignation on Friday. The Tennessee city is now without a police force and it’s all due to a disagreement over illegal ticket quotas.
In January, FOX 17 released explosivereports that implicated Ridgetop Mayor Tony Reasoner and Vice Mayor McCaw Johnson in a scheme to generate revenue for the city of just over 2,000 by directing the police department as a whole to write a minimum of 210 tickets each month. The officers pushed back and finally took it upon themselves to secretly record Reasoner and Johnson. The recordings were then handed over to FOX 17.
In the recordings, Reasoner and Johnson talk about repayments to the city after the police payroll was $54,000 higher than the revenue from citations. The pair hoped that if the police wrote more tickets, it would generate new revenue that would fund the entire police payroll.
Section 39-16-516 of the Tennessee criminal code bars politicians and state agencies from disciplining a police officer solely based on the officer’s ability to meet a ticket quota. The Ridgetop officers have argued that Reasoner and Johnson violated this law by demanding to see bi-weekly ticket reports from each officer. In one of the recordings, Johnson even attempted to leverage a raise for two officers and the rehire of another to encourage officers to meet the quota.
“Law enforcement is not about tickets. It’s about trying to cut down on crime. That is a local government taking advantage of its people. That’s not what we are here for,” Officer Shawn Taylor, who captured the secret recordings on Chief Morris’ behalf, declared at the time.
When asked by FOX 17 if he knew that ticket quotas were illegal, Reasoner replied, “Yes, we do. We know.” McCaw, after denying that he demanded the quota, added that he was merely interested in “revenue stream.”
The fight between the city officials and the police came to a head in June when officials voted to disband the department. After Robertson County Judge Bill Goodman blocked the city’s decision, the police department was scaled down from five officers to one—Morris.
Morris submitted his resignation on Friday afternoon, effectively leaving the city without a police department.
The city will now search for a replacement police chief. In the meantime, the Robertson County Sheriff’s Department will take over law enforcement operations in the city.
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Everyone raises their eyebrows when I say “I’m interested in bankruptcy law and First Amendment law,” but it makes a lot of sense if you think of newspapers in the middle of the Venn diagram.
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Going Against The Wall Street Crowd Has Never Been More Profitable
Six years ago, back in 2013, we presented what we then viewed (and still view) as the best trading strategy of the New Abnormal period, when we said that buying the most shorted names while shorting the names that have the highest hedge fund and institutional ownershipis the surest way to generate alpha, to wit:
… in a world in which nothing has changed from a year ago, and where fundamentals still don’t matter, what is one to do to generate an outside market return? Simple: more of the same and punish those who still believe in an efficient, capital-allocating marketplace and keep bidding up the most shorted names.
Fast forward to today, when Bank of America confirms once again that with just one exception, the historically unvolatile 2017, going long the most shorted names and shorting the most popular ones has continued to be not only the most consistently profitable, alpha-generating strategy, but that in 2019 YTD, the top 10 crowded stocks underperformed the 10 most neglected stocks by 23%, the most on record!
One simplistic reason for this – besides the ones we enumerated six years ago – is that the most overowned stocks are generally clustered in either high growth or defensive/yield/low beta, leaving a broad swathe of high quality cyclical and value stocks neglected and inexpensive.
In the aftermath of the September quant quake, which sent growth stocks tumbling and value stocks soaring…
… and subsequent divergence in this formerly ironclad pair trade, which has also seen momentum stocks tumble to their lowest level in over two years as the recent turmoiling whiplash below the market’s surface crucified any moomentum-chasing funds…
… legacy popular, i.e. “hedge fund dinner” longs have gotten crushed, while the most shorted names have seen a tremendous rally in the past 3 months. This has also resulted in Goldman’s Hedge Fund VIP and “most concentrated” baskets getting pummeled in 2019.
It’s also why yesterday BofA speculated that with most funds underperforming the market and 29% underperformign their benchmark, “we could see a beta-chase into year-end if fund managers essentially “shoot for the moon”, driven by value stocks, to wit:
The recent market rotation from Momentum into Value should continue if macro data stabilizes – note that valuation dispersion is the highest we have seen since the financial crisis: we are seeing cycle-lows in relative multiples for Value stocks. Moreover, the fact that only 29% of funds are outperforming benchmarks could amplify the rotation if funds chase the Value rally. Active funds are still underweight Value at 0.89x.
There is another, more credible reason why such a contrarian strategy continues to be the best performing one: technicals, specifically crowding, and massive lazy bets among Wall Street professionals which, when unwound once a poorly-researched thesis collapses, result in a major overshoot in the opposite direction that is a gift to those who had the trade on.
Indeed, never has the power of positioning been more important than in 2019, when as BofA recently calculated, the overlap between positioning by mutual funds and hedge funds reached an all time high, and as a result, “positioning has been a big driver of returns in 2019” (we discussed this topic far more extensively back in April in “BofA Finds The Secret Recipe How To Consistently Beat The Market“)
To be sure, BofA also lays out its own three reasons why it believes that positioning has never been more important, and these include:
crowding has become more extreme – the overlap between long-only (LO) funds and hedge funds (HF) is at record levels, and has been for much of this year; the relative valuation of momentum (what’s working) vs. forward P/E (neglected and inexpensive) is more than two standard deviations above average;
a violent rotation from Growth to Value surfaced a few months ago,
de-risking has been de rigueur: the aggregate net exposure of HFs has dropped from 56% to 40% this year as investors grapple with recession concerns. Add a few fund redemptions to the mix, and we can see the blueprint for a positioning-driven market.
And while BofA’s reasoning is correct, the big picture still stands: for anyone who wants to consistently make money in this broken market in which nothing is as it seems, and in which the vast majority is always wrong, the best way to do that is to do what we said back in 2013, namely to always bet against the crowd on both the long and short side.
The bottom line: when we said 6 years ago to buy the most hated names while shorting the most loved ones, we were right. As shown by BofA, this is how much alpha this strategy has returned in subsequent years:
2014: +17.8% (12.3% from shorts, 5.5% from longs)
2015: +12.6% (3.9% from shorts, 8.7% from longs)
2016: +7.5% (13.4% from shorts, -5.9% from longs)
2017: -10.6% (-9.5% from shorts, -1.1% from longs)
2018: +5.0% (0.4% from shorts, 4.6% from longs)
2019 YTD: 23% (10.1% from shorts, 13.3% from longs)
The question now is whether this apparently still obscure trade will finally stop generating alpha if more investors put it on. On the other hand, since by definition there will always be stocks that are “most crowded” and “most shorted”, this may be a strategy that is limited to those who are relatively small and nimble and can avoid moving the entire market. Which incidentally may be the latest reason why this is a market where smaller, contrarian traders will be rewarded even as the “whales” who trade based on idea dinner recommendations are doomed to fade into obscurity.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) says he will not be reading the impeachment transcripts as the House of Representatives takes action against President Donald Trump.
“I’ve written the whole process off,” he told CBS News. “I think this is a bunch of B.S.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee chair dismissed the news that Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, revised his impeachment inquiry testimony the day before it was to be released. In his appended response, Sondland admitted to a September 1 conversation in which he told one of the top advisers to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that U.S. military aid to that country “likely” hinged on Zelenskiy announcing a corruption investigation directed at former Vice President Joe Biden and his family.
The Trump administration released the military aid—which it froze this summer without explanation—on September 11. President Donald Trump is currently the subject of an impeachment inquiry amid accusations that he withheld the congressionally authorized military aid package in an attempt to strongarm Zelenskiy into probing Biden, his political rival in the 2020 election. Trump has repeatedly denied those allegations.
“I now recall speaking with [Andriy] Yermak,” wrote Sondland. “I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.” Per congressional testimony, the statement in question refers to Trump’s request that Zelenskiy publicly announce investigations into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden sat on the board, and into a widely debunked theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind 2016 U.S. election interference.
Sondland said he “presumed” the aid was frozen in exchange for Trump’s demand, because he otherwise lacked a “credible explanation,” although he maintains that he “did not know (and still does not know) when, why, or by whom the aid was suspended.” The change in testimony marked an about-face for the ambassador, who sought to confirm in his sworn deposition on October 17 that he “did not and would not ever participate” in any such efforts to leverage diplomatic relations in service of influencing an upcoming election.
Lindsey Graham has been a public skeptic of the impeachment process, although he has expressed a willingness to hear evidence of a quid pro quo outside of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president. During that conversation, Trump appeared to allude to the aid package multiple times, but never mentioned it by name.
“If you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing,” Graham toldAxios last month. Sondland’s admission certainly provides fodder for that. And it’s only bolstered by the testimony of William B. Taylor, the current ambassador to Ukraine, who told investigators on October 22 that a national security adviser alerted him to Sondland’s activities.
Graham now says that he won’t read those transcripts, casting doubt on his purported openness towards a nonpartisan evaluation. The senator has consistently railed against Democrats for what he says is a politically motivated sham, though one wonders what motivates Graham when he refuses to even consider available evidence.
The public nature of that evidence is also relevant to Graham, who has lambasted House Democrats for conducting the initial interviews behind closed doors. Never mind that it was his own party, led by then-Speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio), who set those rules in 2015, knowing that a president under impeachment scrutiny would be the subject of many public hearings following the initial testimonies. And never mind that Graham himself supported the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton based on private interviews conducted by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
One thing is clear: Graham has bemoaned the Democrats’ lack of transparency, only to shield his eyes once the curtain was lifted. It makes you wonder if Graham’s complaints have been anything more than political theater all along.
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