Tag: news

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

Just about every website owner I know is feeling personally victimized by the recent social media purge that has been going on.  But here’s an interesting fact: it isn’t, as is widely perceived, just conservative voices that are being silenced. It is dissenting voices.

It’s the voices of critical thinkers whose ideas run the gamut of philosophies who find that they no longer have much in the way of reach.

This social media purge affects everyone, even people who are not on social media. It does so in several ways:

1. Dissenting information is silenced which stifles discussion

2. Young people who are avid consumers of social media are being literally brainwashed because they only see one side of the story – any story

3. The social media purge harms websites that post non-establishment information because it stamps out their ability to reach readers who would be interested in their content.

4. The unfairly biased search results show people who are trying to learn more about a topic only one side of the information.

You don’t have to be on a Twitter feed to see how this is an overwhelmingly anti-American problem. Like it or not, social media is a monumental source of information these days, and when it’s censored to only show one point of view, the future of our republic is in peril. We are well on our way to peak censorship and this has been carefully orchestrated.

Non-establishment websites are in trouble.

Their website traffic is plummeting because they no longer show up anywhere near the top of search results. Their posts on social media are not presented to the public – or even the people who deliberately opted to “follow” them.  Here’s an example from my own page. I have more than 30K people who chose to follow my page, as you can see in the top image. But in the bottom image, you can see how many of those people were actually shown my post. And this was actually a more successful one than many.

And the same thing goes for social media like Twitter too. I have an email list and if I didn’t, I’d hardly reach anyone. (If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here.) And I really have to wonder – will our “offensive” websites one day just disappear, scrubbed from the internet permanently? It’s only a matter of time until the web hosting companies are being pressured to get in on the censorship game.

For the record, I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal. I try to veer away from any form of extremism and I make an effort to think a situation through before automatically aligning myself with a “side.” If anything, I’m a small l libertarian. My core beliefs are personal autonomy and freedom of association are to be sought in all cases that are not harmful to others.  And yet, somehow, that is threatening to some people.

Don’t think it’s limited to website owners. Twitter recently banned 70 million accounts, claiming they were “fake.” But there have been repeated accusations that conservative accounts have been at the very least “shadow-banned” if not all out deleted.

The most notable purge recently has been Alex Jones and Infowars.

Love Alex Jones, hate him, or feel utterly ambivalent aside from an occasional eye-roll, he has been the most notable victim to have been thoroughly erased from the public eye as far as the large social media outlets are concerned. He lost his voice on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Even his email service provider dumped him.

I’m not personally a huge fan of Jones, but I do believe what happened to him was collusion between social media giants. Big Tech got together and now Alex Jones has to find new ways to reach his very large audience. No one is going to stumble across him accidentally in a Google Search anymore. No one is going to see his videos embedded in another website anymore. Like him or not, he has the right to exist publicly.

Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist.

If nothing else, dissent is the American way.

A little allegory on becoming an unperson.

Think back to high school lit class when you read 1984 by George Orwell.

If it’s been a while, I’ll recap the pertinent parts of the plot from Spark Notes.

Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes…

…As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts…

…Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party.  (source)

The Ministry of Truth is control of all the things from which people could garner their opinions. They provide their own twist on history, current events, entertainment, education, and the arts. The people of Oceana believe them because there isn’t enough information to believe anything else. And questioning the Ministry is a thoughtcrime, punishable by horrible torture or worse. Part of Winston’s job is to turn anyone who doesn’t follow the Ministry line into an unperson and erase them from history as though they never even existed.

So who is behind this mass purge of dissenting voices?

There’s always a money trail to follow. Any time you wonder why or how something has occurred, look for the money. In this video by Ben Swann, an independent journalist who was mysteriously silenced for quite some time, he provides some important insight.

This is happening RIGHT NOW. We are living it. We are living in the world of 1984.

Rest assured, the way things are going, it isn’t long before we will see only what “they” – the people with the power and money to make it happen – want us to see.

Social pressure is also limiting free thought.

And not only do we have organizations limiting our views of things that would broaden our minds, there’s also the rampant social pressure that we’ve seen since the last election.

When we were recently looking at rental homes, a potential landlady asked me for whom I voted in the last election. I didn’t even bother looking at the place because that is not a standard question one asks of a new tenant. It certainly has nothing to do with my ability to pay the rent. It has nothing to do with my potential for keeping things clean and in good shape. I just left because no house is worth dealing with a person who clearly let me know she was not someone with whom I wanted to do business.

And that is only my personal example. Employers check the social media accounts of prospective employees to see if they approve of how the person thinks.  People who disagree publicly with powerful groups get doxxed. Dozens of stories have circulated about social pressure, lost friendships, disagreements, and mistreatment in the workplace that originated from differences in political beliefs.

How can people be expected to form accurate opinions without all the information? How can they do so when they’re under pressure for their livelihood or their ability to rent a home or when they fear for their privacy?

It’s pretty clear that there are those who don’t want people to form accurate opinions. They want to gently, quietly, insidiously get everyone on board by limiting our access to the variety of philosophies and theories that make the world go round.

By making free thought something that is frowned upon and erased, they silence us all.

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Is the FBI trying to goad President Trump into firing the man in charge of supervising the Mueller probe? That’s what Sean Hannity and a handful of  Trump’s Congressional allies think.

According to a report in Politico, Republicans in Congress are approaching a story about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein attempting to organize a palace coup with extreme caution, despite having twice nearly gathered the votes to remove him in the recent past.

On Friday, the NYT reported a bombshell story alleging that Rosenstein had tried to recruit administration officials to secretly tape conversations with the president in order to help justify removing Trump under the 25th amendment. Rosenstein vehemently denied the story, which was largely based on confidential memos written by former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. And others who were reportedly in attendance at meeting between McCabe and Rosenstein said the Deputy AG was being “sarcastic” when he suggested that the president be taped.

Meanwhile, Trump allies including Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan and Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz are saying that the story should be treated with suspicion. Jordan and Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows once filed articles of impeachment against Rosenstein. But now, both Meadows and Jordan intend to proceed with caution, telling Politico that he would like to see the memos that the story was based on.

House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, who led a charge to impeach Rosenstein this summer, have said they want to hear from Rosenstein and see documents allegedly describing the comments before they decide what to do. That’s awarded Rosenstein a courtesy they’ve never given him in the past.

“I think Rod needs to come before Congress this week and explain under oath what exactly he said and didn’t say,” Meadows said at the Values Voters Summit Saturday.

The newfound hesitation to oust Rosenstein highlights a cautious approach Trump allies have adopted as the Republican party barrels toward a potential bloodbath in the midterms. Some Republicans fear Trump firing Rosenstein now would only further energize Democrats making the case to voters that the president is corrupt and needs to be reined in by a Democratic House.

[…]

In a Friday interview, Jordan, one of Rosenstein’s fiercest critics in Congress, sidestepped questions about whether the House should revisit Rosenstein’s impeachment or try to hold him in contempt of Congress. Rather, he said, a more focused push to obtain sensitive documents from the Justice Department — which Trump’s allies say would expose anti-Trump bias and corruption the FBI — is the most urgent priority.

“I want to see those memos and evaluate them,” said Jordan, who has clashed publicly with Rosenstein over access to documents and accused him of threatening House Intelligence Committee staffers, an allegation Rosenstein denied.

Politico cites two possible explanations for lawmakers’ hesitation: Republicans are running out of time before members devote themselves full-time to their reelection campaigns. Republicans are worried that the story could have been intentionally planted to provoke Rosenstein’s firing in order to improve Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate AND the House (Trump actively moving to crush the Mueller probe would be quite the propaganda win for the Dems).

Sean Hannity took this latter theory a step further during his show on Friday evening, where he urged Trump not to fire Rosie and instead insisted that the story could have been a “trap”. He added that he had been told by “multiple sources” that the story was planted by unspecified “enemies of Trump.”

“I have a message for the president tonight,” Hannity said Friday night. “Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody…the president needs to know it is all a setup.”

Still, a handful of conservative commentators, including Laura Ingraham, urged Trump to fire Rosenstein immediately. And for Trump’s part, he hinted at a rally Friday night in Missouri that he planned to “get rid” of the “lingering stench” at the DOJ, which many interpreted as a hint that his firing is imminent.

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Authored by Nicholas West via ActivistPost.com,

The global arms race for the latest weapons of war is a naturally escalating cycle of countries pursuing ways to dominate the battlefield of the future.

Increasingly, that battlefield is a matrix of soldiers with traditional weapons, robots, drones and cyberweapons. Until this point, command over this matrix has ultimately been in the hands of humans. Now, however, many of the trends in artificial intelligence-driven autonomy are enabling data collection, analysis and potentially combat to be done by algorithms.

Another key signpost has entered the roadmap toward a future of autonomous systems capable of engaging in combat without human oversight. The U.S. military announced the first ever successful unmanned aerial “kill” of another aircraft during a previously unreported training exercise.

The successful test late last year showed the U.S. Air Force that an unmanned vehicle like the MQ-9 has the ability to conduct air-to-air combat, much like its manned fighter brethren such as an F-15 Eagle or F-22 Raptor, according to Col. Julian Cheater, commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.

“Something that’s unclassified but not well known, we recently in November… launched an air-to-air missile against a maneuvering target that scored a direct hit,” Cheater said. Military.com sat down with Cheater here at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference outside Washington, D.C.

“It was an MQ-9 versus a drone with a heat-seeking air-to-air missile, and it was direct hit … during a test,” he said of the first-of-its-kind kill.

(Source: Military.com)

An Air Force Special Operations Command MQ-9 Reaper taxis. (U.S. Air Force photo/Dennis Henry)

The fact that the military has this capability should not be shocking, as it has been well documented on this website and others that the largest defense contractors in the world have developed a clear intention to create fully autonomous weapons systems.

However, previous research has indicated that robotics/A.I. is not yet up to even the most basic ethical tasks, yet its role in weapons systems continues.

Reason.TV recently weighed in on the consequences of handing over ethical responsibility to computers. Reason conducted a must-see interview with a former Army Ranger and current Defense Policy Analyst, Paul Scharre, who is trying to sound the alarm about an era of warfare fought completely by robotic systems. It seems the only question left is whether that day indeed has already arrived.

Paul Scharre’s book Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War is available on Amazon HERE.

H/T: Technocracy News and Trends

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This week The New York Times published an epic 10,000 word piece entitled “The Plot to Subvert and Election – Unraveling the Russia Story So Far.”

It’s essentially the Times’ summary of everything that can be definitively established thus far after two years of national obsession and inquiry into alleged Russian election meddling and influence that supposedly ushered Trump into the White House in 2016. 

The massive investigative piece has the following lede at the top: For two years, Americans have tried to absorb the details of the 2016 attack — hacked emails, social media fraud, suspected spies — and President Trump’s claims that it’s all a hoax. The Times explores what we know and what it means.

But what do we learn? Buried among the nearly 200 paragraphs of seemingly endless intelligence “claims” wherein the reader will be disappointed to find no smoking gun detailing any actual conspiracy of meddling and collusion, we find two specific paragraphs — which though contradictory — are incredibly revealing about the nature of the whole ‘Russiagate’ scandal.  

First, in paragraph 5 we are told by the Times journalists: 

President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

And as Moon of Alabama blog astutely observes, after one-hundred-and-seventy-eight paragraphs featuring repetition of “unproven intelligence claims, spin around a few facts and lots of innuendo” the same authors finally admit that Trump is actually right.

Near the end of an exhaustively long piece meant to chronicle the “evidence” that few are likely to ever read in full, we find this bombshell candid admission:

Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged showing that his campaign conspired with Russia in the election interference or accepted Russian money.

Enough said?… 

That’s right, after two years of almost 24/7 media coverage and frenzy over the Trump campaign and White House supposedly being under a perpetual Kremlin shadow of compromise, we have a 10,000 word piece by the “paper of record” attempting to tie all the “evidence” together which ultimately ends on a whimper.

Buried in this 10k-word NYT piece: “no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump’s] campaign conspired with Russia.” This is a pattern: ample words for Trump-Russia innuendo; quiet acknowledgment of no evidence. And 0 words on what has been debunked. https://t.co/rew5FLEfKD pic.twitter.com/igNIxEXuHr

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 20, 2018

The Times began by citing “a mountain of evidence” in paragraph 5, but ends with: “Mr. Trump’s frustration with the Russian investigation is not surprising. He is right that no public evidence has emerged…”

Journalist Aaron Maté rightly concludes, “This is a pattern: ample words for Trump-Russia innuendo; quiet acknowledgment of no evidence. And 0 words on what has been debunked.”

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Authored by EconomicPrism’s MN Gordon, annotated by Acting-Man’s Pater Tenebrarum,

Happy Destiny

There’s great elation flowing from the various economic bureaus down through President Trump. They bring us good tidings. If you haven’t heard, here in the USA, we live, work, and play in the dazzle and delight of an economy in which GDP growth exceeds the unemployment rate.

The president has clearly had a hand in job creation. 🙂 Seriously, there can be no doubt that aggregate economic activity has increased as a result of the measures the government has implemented, including deregulation, tax cuts and increased deficit spending. Note that the latter is offsetting the salutary effects of the other measures in the long run, even though government spending is added to GDP and therefore provides a near term boost to official “growth”. It is just difficult to tell how much of this growth consists of genuine wealth creation and how much of it is simply masking capital consumption. [PT]

The last time we drank of elation this cool and sweet was in the pre-iPhone stone ages. Back when George Dubya was President. And when Lehman Brothers was still one of the titans of Wall Street.

Indeed, getting back to this agreeable place has been a long, hard trudge along the road to happy destiny.  But step by step, day by day, a paradise lost has been returned to Eden. Thank you, Ben Bernanke.

By all official accounts, things have never been better.  GDP, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is growing at an annual clip of 4.2 percent.  The unemployment rate, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sits at just 3.9 percent.  But that’s not all…

Pot stocks have become the new bitcoin.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after a six month hiatus, is marking new all-time record highs.  And, most importantly, the Dodgers are tops in their division going into the final week of the regular season.  What’s not to like?

Potting it – marijuana stock Tilray rises to a price/sales ratio of 846 intraday. Such moves have  become a regular occurrence in bubble-land. [PT]

Another recent standout is this 5-day move from $1.50 to $10 in the stock of NBEV on the mere announcement that it may begin offering drinks spiked with marijuana additives. There is actually an important takeaway from this for investors. Such moves happen only in the final stage of major bubbles. This means that a) yes, it clearly is a bubble, b) it is on borrowed time and c) you can be certain the unwinding phase will be harrowing. [PT]

Discrepancies

The panoramic vantage from the present summit is both extraordinary and astonishing.  Here, standing at the heights of a quasi-centrally planned economy, we see distortions and discrepancies. There are pie charts and bar graphs displaying contrived and downright fabricated economic data. The garbage outputs are very much at odds with the reality of the situation.

The results are bizarre evidence of the determination of the central planners to depict a world that’s unfolding in accordance with an intelligent plan. A supposed reality where not only does your neighbor get rich… but you do too. Truly, it’s a laugh and a half, the whole thing.

A succinct summary of the situation. [PT]

For starters, the growth is being extracted from the future via massive infusions of corporate, consumer, and government debt. To dismiss this, is to stretch the truth considerably. To understand that GDP is, in effect, a measurement of the rate at which we’re all going broke, makes the spectacle of a 4.2 percent rate of GDP growth an absolute howler.

On top of that, the 3.9 percent unemployment rate is downright ludicrous, if one is in the mood for statistics without any common decency. What good is a 3.9 percent unemployment rate when the labor participation rate is at a 40 year low?If the unemployment rate is really at a record low, why are wages stagnating?

These discrepancies help explain the outlandish circumstances all but the crème de la crème of the wealth spectrum find themselves in. It is nothing less than a charade. What to make of it?

Middle class problems emerge from all sides. [PT]

The Burden of the American Worker

The general burden of the American worker is the daily task of squaring the difference between the booming economy reported by the government bureaus and the dreary economy reported in their biweekly paychecks.

There is sound reason to believe that this task, this burden of the American worker, has been reduced to some sort of practical joke.  An exhausting game of chase the wild goose.

How is it that the economy’s been growing for nearly a decade straight, but  workers have on average seen no meaningful increase in their income?  Have workers really been sprinting in place this entire time?  How did they end up in this ridiculous situation?

Some workers have permanently vacated the official statistics. They are not considered to be unemployed, but they are certainly not working. There is a whole host of reasons for this which aggregate statistics cannot tell us anything about, but it is a good bet that e.g. the vast skills mismatches that have emerged in the labor market can be largely blamed on the previous boom inter alia spurring malinvestment in human capital. [PT]

The fact is, for the American worker, America’s brand of a centrally planned economy doesn’t pay. The dual impediments of fake money and regulatory madness apply exactions which cannot be overcome. There are claims to the fruits of one’s labors long before they have been earned.

The economy, in other words, has been rigged.  The value that workers produce flows to Washington and Wall Street, where it is siphoned off and misallocated to a cadre of officials, cronies, and big bankers. What is left is spent to merely keep the lights on, the car running, and food upon the table.

Should a lowly wage earner expect or deserve any more? Certainly, they deserve the rewards and dignity of hard work, saving money, and paying their way. But what do we know?  We still cut our own grass with a push mower, drink our coffee black, and pay our utility bills with hand written checks.

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Ten years after the financial crisis, with the bull market now the longest on record, “black swan” fund Universa Investments chief investment officer, Mark Spitznagel, spoke on Bloomberg TV and said that “we are going to continue to see deeper and deeper [crashes], simply by virtue of the fact that the degree of interventionism is larger and larger.”

In other words, trading for “the end of the world”… but not expecting it to come tomorrow. In fact, his advice to traders is simple: “you mustn’t fight the Fed. What you must try to do is sort of jiu-jitsu the Fed. You need to sort of use the Fed’s force against it.”

Easier said than done?

For most, yes: founded in 2007, Universa quickly rose to fame the very next year when it made huge profits in the crash of 2008. On the other hand, as the WSJ wryly notes, “being skeptical and making money on that view are two different things.” Fellow financial crisis standout John Hussman, who predicted both the 2000 and 2008 bear markets, is convinced an even worse one is coming, yet his own fund has performed dismally since 2009, eroding its crisis gains and then some.

This is where Universa stood out.

Unlike John Paulson, David Einhorn and Steve Eisman who made stellar returns during the crisis but have failed to repeat their success since, Spitznagel has enjoyed several mini-bonanzas along the way. During the ETFlash Crash of August 2015, his fund reportedly made a gain of about $1 billion, or 20%, in a single, unforgettable day.

But was that performance repeatable, and could it beat the market in the long run… and certainly before the inevitable crash?

To be sure, as the WSJ’s Spencer Jakab writes, “talk is cheap in investing punditry and predicting a decline without saying when it will happen is cheapest of all.” Yet Universa’s stance warrants attention, and not only because it backs its views with billions of dollars: Spitznagel isn’t betting on some unpredictable event causing a crisis but instead a predictable one—an eventual blowback from unprecedented central-bank stimulus.

And while so far the “final crash” has yet to come, what has made the “fat tail” fund unique – recall that Universa is advised by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb of “Black Swan” fame, and best known for his prediction that six sigma “fat tail”, or black swan, events happen much more frequently than they should statistically – is that it has not only not lost money, but has actually outperformed the S&P in the past decade:

According to a letter sent to investors earlier this year and seen by the WSJ, a strategy consisting of just a 3.3% position in Universa with the rest invested passively in the S&P 500, had tripled the money, generating a compound annual return of 12.3% in the 10 years through February, better than investing in just the S&P 500 itself. It also was superior to portfolios three-quarters invested in stocks with a one-quarter weighting in more-traditional hedges such as Treasurys, gold or a basket of hedge funds.

This is how the fund described its performance:

In our ten-year life-to-date, a 3.33% portfolio allocation of capital to Universa’s tail hedge has added 2.6% to the CAGR of an SPX portfolio (the SPX total CAGR over that period was 9.7%). To put this in perspective, this is the mathematical equivalent of that same 3.33% allocated to a ten-year annuity yielding about 76% per year. In contrast, each of the other risk mitigation strategies actually subtracted value over the same period, regardless of their allocation sizes.

The 3.33% portfolio allocation size to Universa was chosen because it is (and has always been) the approximate effective allocation size recommended in practice at Universa (relative to a client’s total equity exposure). The 25% portfolio allocation size to the other risk mitigation strategies was chosen to be meaningful and realistic for an average investor (relative to their total equity exposure). That turned out to be insufficient for any of those strategies to provide a level of downside protection anywhere close to the level Universa provided.

There is no magic to this outperformance: Spitznagel has traditionally buys put options, especially when they are cheap, like now for example, when despite bubbling trade wars, Donald Trump’s legal peril and sputtering emerging markets, have failed to dent the market’s ascent to new all time highs.

By pointedly ignoring headlines and embracing long stretches when his fund loses small sums for months on end, he draws on similar patience and conviction.

As shown in the chart above, Spitznagel’s small crash bets have paid off repeatedly, offsetting the “theta bleed” associated with a portfolio such as his. 

Which may also explain why Spitznagel is so happy: it isn’t because he sees an imminent crash, though he doesn’t rule it out. It is because almost no one else is preparing for one.

“I spend all my time thinking about looming disaster,” says Mark Spitznagel, chief investment officer of hedge fund Universa Investments, who predicts a major decline in asset prices but can’t say when. He admits that the bull market could keep going for years. “Valuations are high and can get higher.”

Another quirk: in 2017, when volatility dropped to all time lows, buying crash insurance was seen by many as throwing away money. But Spitznagel said he was “like a kid in a candy store” because volatility, and hence options prices, were so subdued. At least they were until February of this year, when the VIX underwent a record explosion, soaring from the single digits to an all time high handing Universa’s clients another outsized return with a true market hedge.

Just sitting out the market in the long run is costly, which is why optimists triumph. Universa’s typical client suspects that the end may be nigh but wants to stay fully invested anyway. The occasional windfall, such as the one in 2015, is icing on the cake.

Ultimately, the math behind Spitznagel’s investing philosophy is a simple bet on human nature: investors are “more confident after a long stretch of smooth sailing and hefty gains for markets, that is when the odds of something going horribly wrong are highest.”

And with the S&P at all time highs, Spitznagel has to be delighted: after all, both investor confidence, and the odds of that “horribly wrong” moment are just as high.

“This is a very good time for us,” he said. Now all he needs is a crash.

A copy of Universa’s decennial letter is below.

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Prior to being cut off from the internet, phone and most visitors, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave an interview on the future of surveillance and how technological advances are changing humankind. 

Provided to RT by officials with the World Ethical Data Forum in Barcelona, Assange’s outlook on where humanity is headed is – to put it lightly, dystopian. He says that it will soon be impossible for any human being not to be included in global government databases collected by federal officials and state-like entities alike. 

This generation being born now… is the last free generation. You are born and either immediately or within say a year you are known globally. Your identity in one form or another –coming as a result of your idiotic parents plastering your name and photos all over Facebook or as a result of insurance applications or passport applications– is known to all major world powers.

A small child now in some sense has to negotiate its relationship with all the major world powers… It puts us in a very different position. Very few technically capable people are able to live apart, to choose to live apart, to choose to go their own way,” he added. “It smells a bit like totalitarianism – in some way. -Julian Assange

Assange also predicts that AI will be able to automate hacking activities, dramatically increasing the scale of hostile activities through cyberspace. 

There is no border [online]. It’s 220 milliseconds from New York to Nairobi. Why would there ever be peace in such a scenario?” he said. “[Entities online] are creating their own borders using cryptography. But the size of the attack surface for any decent-sized organization, the number of people, different types of software and hardware it has to pull inside itself means that it is very hard to establish.

I don’t think it’s really possible to come up with borders that are predictable enough and stable enough to eliminate conflict. Therefore, there will be more conflict.

Watch: 

 

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The housing market indicated that a crisis was coming in 2008.  Is the same thing happening once again in 2018? 

For several years, the housing market has been one of the bright spots for the U.S. economy.  Home prices, especially in the hottest markets on the east and west coasts, had been soaring.  But now that has completely changed, and home sellers are cutting prices at a pace that we have not seen since the last recession.  In case you are wondering, this is definitely a major red flag for the economy.  According to CNBC, home sellers are “slashing prices at the highest rate in at least eight years”…

After three years of soaring home prices, the heat is coming off the U.S. housing market. Home sellers are slashing prices at the highest rate in at least eight years, especially in the West, where the price gains were hottest.

It is quite interesting that prices are being cut fastest in the markets that were once the hottest, because that is exactly what happened during the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008 too.

In a previous article, I documented the fact that experts were warning that “the U.S. housing market looks headed for its worst slowdown in years”, but even I was stunned by how bad these new numbers are.

According to Redfin, more than one out of every four homes for sale in America had a price drop within the most recent four week period…

In the four weeks ended Sept. 16, more than one-quarter of the homes listed for sale had a price drop, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage. That is the highest level since the company began tracking the metric in 2010. Redfin defines a price drop as a reduction in the list price of more than 1 percent and less than 50 percent.

That is absolutely crazy.

I have never even heard of a number anywhere close to that in a 30 day period.

Of course the reason why prices are being dropped is because homes are not selling.  The supply of homes available for sale is shooting up, and that is good news for buyers but really bad news for sellers.

It could be argued that home prices needed to come down because they had gotten ridiculously high in recent months, and I don’t think that there are too many people that would argue with that.

But is this just an “adjustment”, or is this the beginning of another crisis for the housing market?

Just like a decade ago, millions of American families have really stretched themselves financially to get into homes that they really can’t afford.  If a new economic downturn results in large numbers of Americans losing their jobs, we are once again going to see mortgage defaults rise to stunning heights.

We live at a time when the middle class is shrinking and most families are barely making it from month to month.  The cost of living is steadily rising, but paychecks are not, and that is resulting in a huge middle class squeeze.  I really like how my good friend MN Gordon made this point in his most recent article…

The general burden of the American worker is the daily task of squaring the difference between the booming economy reported by the government bureaus and the dreary economy reported in their biweekly paychecks. There is sound reason to believe that this task, this burden of the American worker, has been reduced to some sort of practical joke. An exhausting game of chase the wild goose.

How is it that the economy’s been growing for nearly a decade straight, but the average worker’s seen no meaningful increase in their income? Have workers really been sprinting in place this entire time? How did they end up in this ridiculous situation?

The fact is, for the American worker, America’s brand of a centrally planned economy doesn’t pay. The dual impediments of fake money and regulatory madness apply exactions which cannot be overcome. There are claims to the fruits of one’s labors long before they’ve been earned.

The economy, in other words, has been rigged. The value that workers produce flows to Washington and Wall Street, where it’s siphoned off and misallocated to the cadre of officials, cronies, and big bankers. What’s left is spent to merely keep the lights on, the car running, and food upon the table.

And unfortunately, things are likely to only go downhill from here.

The trade war is really starting to take a toll on the global economy, and it continues to escalate.  Back during the Great Depression we faced a similar scenario, and we would be wise to learn from history.  In a recent post, Robert Wenzel shared a quote from Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson that was pulled from his book entitled “Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946”…

[T]here came another folly of government intervention in 1930 transcending all the rest in significance. In a world staggering under a load of international debt which could be carried only if countries under pressure could produce goods and export them to their creditors, we, the great creditor nation of the world, with tariffs already far too high, raised our tariffs again. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of June 1930 was the crowning folly of the who period from 1920 to 1933….

Protectionism ran wild all over the world.  Markets were cut off.  Trade lines were narrowed.  Unemployment in the export industries all over the world grew with great rapidity, and the prices of export commodities, notably farm commodities in the United States, dropped with ominous rapidity….

The dangers of this measure were so well understood in financial circles that, up to the very last, the New York financial district retained hope the President Hoover would veto the tariff bill.  But late on Sunday, June 15, it was announced that he would sign the bill. This was headline news Monday morning. The stock market broke twelve points in the New York Time averages that day and the industrials broke nearly twenty points. The market, not the President, was right.

Even though the stock market has been booming, everything else appears to indicate that the U.S. economy is slowing down.

If home prices continue to fall precipitously, that is going to put even more pressure on the system, and it won’t be too long before we reach a breaking point.

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