Tag: news

Texas sex doll enthusiasts may be in for a blow after a religious group mounted a vigorous petition to block a Toronto-based “robot brothel” from setting up shop in Houston, reports ABC 13. 

“Our biggest concern is that this sex brothel with robots is gonna train men to become rapists,” said Micah Gamboah with the religious anti sex-trafficking group, Elijah Rising. “What’s next? Is it child robots? Where’s the line? Where is the boundary?“

It seems like the law is on the brothel’s side, however, after a stiff penal regulation against such businesses was ruled unconstitutional a decade ago. 

“As disgusting as some people may find it, I think under the law, it’s legal,” said attorney Steve Shellist, adding “As we sit here today those types of products being sold, used or rented is legal.” 

Toronto’s Kinkys Dolls is expanding their offerings of synthetic companions which are “ready for you in every position you would choose, they lubed warm [sic] and ready to play.” 

Their dolls – at least in Canada, go for $80 for 30 minutes of pure silicone ecstasy – though they do offer an outcall service for $250 an hour which we imagine includes some guy who waits in a van for you to “do your thing.” 

Each “doll” has a name, a look and price tag in the thousands of dollars, if you want to buy one. But customers can also “rent before they buy,” getting a room and a doll of their choice where they can “play and have fun” …”fulfilling fantasies without limitations,” according to the website.

According to their website: 

1. You come to our location, we located in a private location ,
we created a condo space inside a warehouse, where you will find everything you need.
 
2. You Choose the doll that you’ll like out of our selection (better to chose when you come).
 
3. You get your room and the doll you like. 
 
4. Pay and have fun! 

Gamboa’s group isn’t going to take this lying down, insisting: “We can’t allow these kind of public masturbation businesses to operate in our city.” 

Perhaps all Elijah Rising needs to do is erect posters showcasing Italy’s closed-down sex doll brothel, which lasted just 9 short days before authorities raided it for breaking Italian laws and concerns that the dolls were improperly cleaned between uses. 

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Submitted by James Miller of The Political Insider

Somewhere between the creation of the Magna Carta and now, leftists have forgotten why due process matters; and in some cases, such as that of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they choose to outright ignore the judicial and civil rights put in place by the U.S. Constitution. 

In NYT, law professors say Ford allegation should sink Kavanaugh even if untrue; if Kavanaugh somehow confirmed, should be impeached. Dem senator: ‘”Even if they were to ram this guy through, as soon as Democrats get gavels we’re going to want to get to the bottom of this.’

— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 21, 2018

In this age of social media justice mobs, the accused are often convicted in the court of public opinion long before any substantial evidence emerges to warrant an investigation or trial. This is certainly true for Kavanaugh. His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, cannot recall the date of the alleged assault and has no supporting witnesses, yet law professors are ready to ruin his entire life and career. Not because they genuinely believe he’s guilty, but because he’s a pro-life Trump nominee for the Supreme Court.

It goes without saying: to “sink Kavanaugh even if” Ford’s allegation is untrue is unethical, unconstitutional, and undemocratic. He has a right to due process, and before liberals sharpen their pitchforks any further they would do well to remember what happened to Brian Banks.

In the summer of 2002, Banks was a highly recruited 16-year-old linebacker at Polytechnic High School in California with plans to play football on a full scholarship to the University of Southern California. However, those plans were destroyed when Banks’s classmate, Wanetta Gibson, claimed that Banks had dragged her into a stairway at their high school and raped her.

Gibson’s claim was false, but it was Banks’s word against hers. Banks had two options: go to trial and risk spending 41 years-to-life in prison, or take a plea deal that included five years in prison, five years probation, and registering as a sex offender. Banks accepted the plea deal under the counsel of his lawyer, who told him that he stood no chance at trial because the all-white jury would “automatically assume” he was guilty because he was a “big, black teenager.”

Gibson and her mother subsequently sued the Long Beach Unified School District and won a $1.5 million settlement. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, long after Banks’s promising football career had already been tanked, that Gibson admitted she’d fabricated the entire story.

Following Gibson’s confession, Banks was exonerated with the help of the California Innocence Project. Hopeful to get his life back on track, he played for Las Vegas Locomotives of the now-defunct United Football League in 2012, and signed with the Atlanta Falcons in 2013. But while Banks finally received justice, he will never get back the years or the prospective pro football career that Gibson selfishly stole from him.

Banks’s story is timely, and it serves as a powerful warning to anyone too eager to condemn those accused of sexual assault. In fact, a film about Banks’s ordeal, Brian Banks, is set to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival next week.

Perhaps all the #MeToo Hollywood elites and their liberal friends should attend the screening – and keep Kavanaugh in their minds as they watch.

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Every year, the U.S. government spends trillions of dollars on a wide range of budgetary items.

While the largest categories of spending, such as entitlement programs or debt interest, do not offer lawmakers a lot of flexibility, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, the government does get to decide how discretionary spending – about $1.3 trillion in FY2019 – gets put to use.

DISCRETIONARY SPENDING OVER TIME

Today’s animation from data scientist Will Geary shows the evolution of U.S. discretionary spending from 1963 until today:

The U.S. budget is generally divided into three main categories:

Discretionary Spending: This category, depicted in the animation, is the optional part of the budgetary equation – it’s the aspect that most people talk about, as the allocation of funding towards different things like defense, education, and transportation can be changed by lawmakers.

Mandatory Spending: Also known as entitlement spending, this category includes funding for programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s called mandatory spending because the government legally is committed to fulfilling these obligations, and it exists outside of the normal budget appropriations process.

Net Interest: This category is for payments on the national debt, also something that is necessary unless the country is willing to default on these obligations.

DISCRETIONARY SPENDING TODAY

As the animation shows, after adjusting for inflation (using 2009 dollars), discretionary spending has doubled since 1963.

In 1963, which was essentially the height of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending 73% on the military to make up the vast majority of the $547 billion (2009 dollars) in discretionary spending.

Meanwhile, in Fiscal Year 2019, the government has allocated $1.3 trillion (today’s dollars) to the budget:

Things haven’t changed much since 1963 in that defense still comprises the majority of spending – in fact, the only recent time periods where U.S. defense spending fell below 50% were roughly between 1977-1981 and 1999-2004.

American spending on defense dwarfs all other countries, but there are other categories that make up decent chunks of the discretionary budget as well.

While they seem small on the above chart, transportation (7%), education (7%), and veteran benefits (6%) are all actually categories that receive over $70 billion of annual funding – still a significant piece of change.

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Authored by Michael Hudson via Counterpunch.org,

Today’s financial malaise for pension funds, state and local budgets and underemployment is largely a result of the 2008 bailout, not the crash. What was saved was not only the banks – or more to the point, as Sheila Bair pointed out, their bondholders – but the financial overhead that continues to burden today’s economy.

Also saved was the idea that the economy needs to keep the financial sector solvent by an exponential growth of new debt – and, when that does not suffice, by government purchase of stocks and bonds to support the balance sheets of the wealthiest layer of society. The internal contradiction in this policy is that debt deflation has become so overbearing and dysfunctional that it prevents the economy from growing and carrying its debt burden.

Trying to save the financial overgrowth of debt service by borrowing one’s way out of debt, or by monetary Quantitative Easing re-inflating real estate, stock and bond prices, enables the creditor One Percent to gain, not the indebted 99 Percent in the economy at large. Therefore, from the economy’s vantage point, instead of asking how the banks are to be saved “next time,” the question should be, how should we best let them go under – along with their stockholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors whose hubris imagined that their loans (other peoples’ debts) could go on rising without impoverishing society and preventing creditors from collecting in any event – except from government by gaining control over it.

A basic principle should be the starting point of any macro analysis: The volume of interest-bearing debt tends to outstrip the economy’s ability to pay. This tendency is inherent in the “magic of compound interest.” The exponential growth of debt expands by its own purely mathematical momentum, independently of the economy’s ability to pay – and faster than the non-financial economy grows.

The higher the debt/income ratio rises, the more interest, amortization payments and late fees are extracted from the economy. The resulting debt burden slows the economy, causing defaults. That is what happened in 2008, and is accelerating today as debt ratios are rising for corporate debt, state and local debt, and student debt.

Neither legislators, academics nor the public at large recognize a corollary Second Principle following from the first: An over-indebted economy cannot be saved unless the banks fail. That means writing down the financial claims by the One to Ten Percent – in other words, the net debts owed by the 99 to 90 Percent. Wiping out bad debts involves writing down the “bad savings” that are the counterpart to these debts on the asset side of the balance sheet. Otherwise the economy will suffer debt deflation and austerity.

“Recovery” since 2008 has been much slower than earlier recoveries because debt deflation is siphoning off more and more personal and corporate income. To make matters worse, the bailout’s policy of Quantitative Easing to re-inflate asset prices has reduced rates of return for pension funds, insurance companies and employee retirement savings. This means that more state and local government income must be diverted to meet retirement commitments.

Something has to give, and it is not likely to be the savings of the donor class at the top of the economic pyramid. As a result, the economy at large is threatened with an exponentially expanding erosion of disposable income and net worth for most people and companies. Investment managers are warning of a financial meltdown, given today’s historically high price/earnings ratios for stocks and also for rental properties.

What is not acknowledged is that such a crisis is a precondition for today’s economy to recover from the rising debt/income and debt/GDP ratios that are burdening the United States, Europe and other regions. At least the United States has been able to monetize its budget deficits and subsidize banks to carry its rising debt overhead with yet new debt. The Eurozone has banned budget deficits of over 3 percent of GDP, imposing austerity that leaves the only response to over-indebtedness to be Greek-style austerity: depopulation, shrinking living standards, wipeouts of retirement income and pensions, mortgage defaults, shortening lifespans, and mass selloffs of public infrastructure to foreign financial appropriators.

None of this was spelled out in the September 15 weekend marking the tenth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure and subsequent rescue of Wall Street. President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their fellow financial lobbyists at the Federal Reserve and Justice Department are credited with saving “the economy,” as if their donor class on Wall Street was a good proxy for the economy at large. “Saving the economy from a meltdown” has become the euphemism for saving bondholders and other members of the One Percent from taking losses on their bad loans. The “rescue” is Orwellian doublespeak for expropriating over nine million indebted Americans from their homes, while leaving surviving homeowners saddled with enormous bubble-mortgage payments to the FIRE sector’s owners.

What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels. The perpetrators of the collapse have been rewarded, not penalized for lending more than could possibly be paid by NINJA borrowers and speculators whose mortgage applications were doctored by systemic fraud at Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Citigroup and their cohorts.

The $4.3 trillion that could have been used to save debtors was given to the banks and Wall Street firms whose recklessness and outright fraud caused the crisis. The Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps with insolvent banks did not restore normalcy or the status quo ante. What occurred was a financial revolution by stealth, reversing the traditional responsibility of creditors to make prudent loans.

Quantitative Easing saved creditors and the largest stockholders and bondholders by lowering the interest rates by enough to make it profitable for new loans to inflate asset prices on credit. This revived the value of collateral backing bank loans and bondholdings. “Saving” the economy in this way actually sacrificed it. That is why our “recovery” is only “on paper,” a result of calculating GDP to include bank earnings and hypothetical homeowner windfalls as rents are soaring.

Among Democrats, the most extreme tunnel vision denying that debt is a problem comes from Paul Krugman:

Writing that “The purely financial aspect of the crisis was basically over by the summer of 2009, ”he criticized what he called the “bizarre Beltway consensus that despite high unemployment and record low interest rates, debt, not jobs, was the real problem.”

This misses the point that 2009 was the real beginning for most of the nine million homeowners being foreclosed on and evicted from their homes. Consumers found themselves with less income “freely disposable” after paying their monthly FIRE sector nut off the top of their paycheck – housing charges, credit card charges, medical insurance, student debt, FICA withholding and tax withholding. Krugman says that he would have solved the problem by more deficit spending to pump enough money into the economy to enable debtors to keep paying the banks their exponential growth of interest claims.

We are still living in the destabilized, debt-ridden aftermath of such pro-bank advocacy. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy celebrates a book by Columbia professor Adam Tooze promoting the idea that “the economy” cannot exist without the credit (that is, debt) provided by the financial sector. True enough, but does it follow that rescuing the economy must involve rescuing Wall Street and enriching the banks at the expense of the rest of the economy. That conflation is an Orwellian rhetoric of deception that has been introduced to the discussion of how the economy was “rescued” by locking in today’s Great Debt Deflation.

At the neoliberal/neocon Brookings Institution, Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner joined with the Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke to explain that the public simply didn’t understand how successful they all were in saving not only the banks, but non-bank financial institutions. Unlike Sheila Bair, they did not point out that behind these institutions were the bondholders, the One Percent of savers who held the rest of the economy in debt. Bernanke wrote a Financial Timespiece producing junk statistics purporting to show that there was no underlying debt or financial problem at all, merely a “panic.” To paraphrase, he said: “The crisis was all in the mind folks. Nothing to see here. Keep moving on.” It is as if, as Margaret Thatcher liked to insist, There Is No Alternative.

Can this bailout without debt writedowns really bring prosperity? Can economies achieve growth by “borrowing their way out of debt,” by creating enough new credit to cover the interest charges out of capital gains from the asset-price inflation fueled by new bank credit. That is the logic that has guided the Federal Reserve’s net $4.3 trillion in Quantitative Easing, and the parallel credit creation by the European Central Bank under Mario “Whatever it takes” Draghi. Ellen Brown recently published a review, “Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk, noting that the ECB has become a major stock buyer. The beneficiaries are the stockholders who are concentrated in the wealthiest percentiles of the population. Governments are not underwriting homeownership or the solvency of labor’s pension plans, but are underwriting the value of collateral backing the savings of the narrow financial class.

The GDP accounts report the widening gap between low government bond rates and the cost of credit to banks compared to the higher rates paid by mortgage borrowers, credit-card holders and student loan customers as “financial services.” What is extracted from the economy is added to the GDP statistic instead of being treated as a subtrahend. This absurd practice reflects the degree to which Wall Street lobbyists have captured economic statistics. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) have been turned into a vehicle for deception. What is celebrated as growth of the GDP since 2008 has been mainly the growth in financial extraction, along with the health-insurance sector profiting from Obamacare.

Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, uses Orwellian doublethink to pretend that “Debt is Wealth.” He concludes a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

“An ability to recapitalize banks remains crucial and must be explained to a skeptical Congress and public,” so that wealthy bondholders and speculators will not suffer losses.

On a brighter side, Adair Turner pokes fun at the “Authoritative experts such as the IMF [who] explained how increased securitisation and trading activity made the financial system more efficient and less risky.” It was as if “options” and hedges can get rid of risk entirely, not shift them onto Wall Street victims such as the naïve German Landesbanks.

The aim of this week’s disinformation campaign is to prevent popular anger advocating what was done in classical antiquity. The ancients fought civil wars for land redistribution and debt cancellation. Today the demand should be for mortgage writedowns to bring their carrying charges in line with reasonable rent charges, limited to the former normal 25 percent of homeowner income – while rolling back the FICA wage withholding and allied taxes levied to bail out the creditor class.

An Athenian antecedent to today’s financial takeover

It is an old story, with a striking parallel in classical Athens. After losing the Peloponnesian war to oligarchic Sparta in 404, a Pinochet-style military junta – the Thirty Tyrants – was installed. During its eight months of terror its members killed a reported 1,500 democratic advocates whose land and other property they grabbed. Advocates of democracy took refuge in Thrace and other neighboring regions.

After the exiled democratic leaders reconquered Athens, they sought to restore harmony, going so far as to pay off all the debts that the oligarchic junta had run up to Sparta. To top matters, the subsequent 4thcentury obliged Athenian jurors and indeed, mayors in some Greek cities to swear an oath: “I will not allow private debts (chreon idiom) to be cancelled, nor lands nor houses of Athenian citizens to be redistributed.”

If no such pledge is needed today by public officials, it is because the financial administrators at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other regulatory agencies already have shown themselves to be so tunnel-visioned from graduate school through their employment history that they can be trusted to find debt writedowns as unthinkable as enforcing laws against criminal financial fraud to punish individuals rather than their institutions. Academia joins in the deception that financial engineering can sustain a geometric growth in debt ad infinitumwithout imposing austerity.The bailout aftermath has demonstrated that corporations are not really  “persons” if they cannot be given jail time.

The key financial principle is that this self-expansion of interest-bearing debt grows to absorb more and more of the economic surplus. The solution therefore must involve wiping out the excess debt – and savings that have been badly lent. That is what crashes are supposed to do. It was not done in 2008. That is why the status quo was not restored. A vast giveaway to the financial elites occurred, setting the rest of the economy on a road to debt peonage.

• It would have been nice to have read an article by Sheila Bair explaining the procedures that the FDIC had in place, ready to take over insolvent Citigroup and other banks in similar straits, saving all the insured depositors by taking over these institutions. No doubt as public institutions they would not have indulged in junk mortgages or, for that matter, takeover loans.

• It would have been nice to hear from Hank Paulson and perhaps Barney Frank on how they tried to get incoming President Obama to write down bad mortgages whose carrying charges were as far above the debtor’s ability to pay as they were above the going rental value for similar properties.

• It would have been nice to hear a mea culpa from Mr. Obama apologizing for representing the interest of his campaign donors by standing between them and his voters with pitchforks. Even an article by Tim Geithner or Eric Holder on how lucky they felt at getting such high-paying jobs after they left office from the financial sector they had overseen and “regulated.”

What is needed now is to follow up the primary policy perception that today’s financially dysfunctional economy cannot be saved without a bank crash. That means rolling back the enormous gains that the FIRE sector has made since 1980 at the expense of the “real” economy.  Banks have ceased to be an “engine of growth.” They are not making loans to create new means of production. They are lending to asset strippers, not asset creators. It is not hard to show this statistically. (I drafted an attempt in Killing the Host, and am now working with Democracy Collaborative to prepare a larger study.)

At stake is whether the U.S. and Western European economies are going to end up looking like those of Greece, Latvia and Argentina – or imperial Rome for that matter. Neoliberals applaud today’s victorious finance capitalism as the “end of history.” One such end has already occurred once, at the close of Roman antiquity. It is remembered as the Dark Age. Progress stopped as the creditor and landowning class lorded it over the rest of society. Trade survived only among the lords at the top of the economic pyramid. Today’s “End of History” dream threatens to unfold along similar lines. It is all about relative power of the One Percent.

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An elderly couple in Western Australia found themselves to be victims of a mortgage fraud that ultimately cost them about $200,000 and their marriage, when a door-to-door salesman on behalf of a real estate developer pushed them toward an overpriced home purchase – and one of Australia’s “big four” banks, Westpac reportedly modified the couple’s disclosed income in order to get them a loan that they shouldn’t have qualified for. Internal documents from Westpac shows that the bank’s staff inflated the income of the couple in order to approve a $464,000 loan in early 2012.

After the couple’s monthly income was changed from $4561.67 to $5797, modified using a one time bonus the husband received, the couple quickly started struggling to make repayments on the new property. They were also unable to find a tenant for the property for long periods, which exacerbated their financial situation.

Below is a photograph of internal documents from Westpac showing that the couple had been initially denied the loan in January 2012. The couple then was able to get the loan after Westpac employees made modifications to their income. Here’s the original denial:

And the modification:

LF Economics founder Lindsay David stated: “This is how the banks do fraud. (The tracker) is a basic timestamp style, it shows who touched what, and all of the employees on that list I believe are still working at Westpac.” He called Westpac a “chop shop” and continued, “You know how they get all the stolen cars, cut them up into pieces and put them back together? That’s why you have so many borrowers getting loans they can’t afford.

“The founder of Australia’s Banking and Finance Consumer Support Association, Denise Brailey, became an advocate for the couple for four years until they reached a settlement with Westpac, which she called “spectacular”, in 2016. The details of the couple’s settlement with Westpac are confidential. She stated: “They were in their 60s and 70s, [the salesman] told them they could get $20,000-$30,000 a year in extra income and they would be able to eventually go off the pension. That’s the spiel.”

The couple – unsophisticated real estate investors – agreed to $465,000 for the property without checking comparables in the area or getting any type of independent valuation. After Brailey convinced them to finally speak at a local real estate agent for a valuation, the property’s value was estimated to be just $330,000. After a formal complaint was filed with the Financial Ombudsman Service, Westpac insisted it had done nothing wrong and the couple wound up eventually selling the property for $290,000 which left them with about $200,000 in debt.

Brailey continued, telling news.com.au: “They’ve lost $150,000 to start with. The banks tell me this is the only way it works for (them) because everyone in between, the developer and the reps, they’ve all got to be paid a commission. They were in hospital three times, the stress on them was unbelievable. It led to the marriage collapsing.“

Brailey concluded that the banks, government and FOS were “all in unison like a big bloody club trying to convince the public that these people deserve what they get because they’re greedy, sophisticated investors. That makes me so angry because they’re not sophisticated at all. A sophisticated investor would go on to Google and (check property prices in the area). Who would buy a property sight unseen?”

The separated couple then sold their original Western Australia home, using part of the proceeds to help pay down the remaining debt on their “investment” home.

The scariest thing about this situation is that it may be a microcosm of a much larger problem in the Australian mortgage market. An analyst from UBS, Jonathan Mott, has estimated that as much of $500 billion worth of Australia’s $1.7 trillion mortgage book could be made up of similar types of loans, often referred to as “liar loans”.  

Brailey called this couple’s case the “quintessential” kind “happening across Australia” and something she “see[s] every day of the week”.

Unlike the US, Australia hasn’t had a recession in decades, which has allowed pervasive fraud such as this to slip under the rug. However, with half a trillion in liar loans on the books, one wonders just how many of Australia’s “big four” banks will be left standing once the economic fairy tale finally ends.

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Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Two thirds of Americans get at least some of their news on social media. Google and Facebook receive well over 70% of US digital advertising revenues. The average daily time spent on social media is 2 hours. Just a few factoids that have at least one thing in common: nothing like them was around 10 years ago, let alone 20. And they depict a change, or set of changes, in our world that will take a long time yet to understand and absorb. Some things just move too fast for us to keep track of, let alone process.

Those of us who were alive before the meteoric rise of the hardware and software of ‘social’ media may be able to relate a little more and better than those who were not, but even that is not a given. There are plenty people over 20, over 30, that make one think: what did you do before you had that magic machine? When you walk down the street talking to some friend, or looking at what your friends wrote on Facebook, do you ever think about what you did in such situations before the machine came into your life?

From 10% to 75% in 10 years

We’re not going to know what the hardware and software of ‘social’ media will have done to our lives, individually and socially, for a very long time. But in the meantime, their influence will continue to shape our lives. They change our societies, the way we interact with each other, in very profound ways; we just don’t know how profound, or how, period. There can be little question that they change us as individuals too; they change how we communicate, and in such a way that there is no way they don’t also change our very brain structures in the process.

Someone who walks down a street talking to someone else 10, 100, 1000 miles away, or sees messages from such a person come in in virtual real time, experiences things that were not available ever in human history. Our brains must adapt to these changes, or we will be left behind. And while for the over-20, over-30 crowd this takes actual adaptation, for those younger than that it comes quasi pre-cooked: they’ve never known anything else. Still, their brains were formed in completely different times too. Think hunter-gatherers. And that’s just the human part of the brain.

There are too many aspects to this development to cover here. One day someone will write a book, or rather, many someones will write many books, and they will all be different. Some will focus on people’s lives being saved because their smartphones allow them to either receive or send out distress signals. Others will tell stories of teenagers committing suicide after being heckled on ‘social’ media. With yin comes yang. Millions feel better with new-found ‘friends’, and millions suffer from abuse even if they don’t kill themselves.

With new media, especially when it goes from 1 to 100 in no time flat, it should be no surprise that the news it delivers changes too. We went from a few dozen TV- and radio stations and newspapers to a few hundred million potential opinions in the US alone. The media are no longer a one-way street. The first effect that has had is that the chasm between news and opinion has narrowed spectacularly. If their readers post their views of what they read and see, journalists feel they have the right to vent their opinions too.

And then these opinions increasingly replace the news itself. The medium is again the message, in a way, a novel kind of way. A hundred million people write things without being restricted by due diligence or other journalistic standards, and we see journalists do that too. They will come up with lies, half-truths, innuendo, false accusations, and moreover will not retract or correct them, except when really hard-pressed. After all, who has the time when you post a hundred+ tweets a day and need to update your Facebook pages too?

Obviously, Donald Trump is an excellent example of the changing media environment. His use of Twitter was a major factor in his election victory. And then his detractors took to Twitter to launch a huge campaign accusing him of collusion with Russia to achieve that victory. They did this moving in lockstep with Bob Mueller’s investigation of that collusion accusation. But almost two years after the election, neither Mueller not the media have provided any evidence of collusion.

That, ironically, is the only thing that is actually true about the entire narrative at this point. Sure, Mueller may still have something left in his back pocket, but if he had solid proof he would have been obliged to present it. Collusion with a foreign government is too serious not to reveal evidence of. Therefore, it’s safe to conclude that in September 2018, Mueller has no such evidence. But what about the thousands of printed articles and the millions of Tweets and Facebook posts claiming collusion that were presented as true?

Funny you asked. What they prove is not collusion, but the changing media landscape. The anti-Trump echo-chamber that I’ve written about many times has been going strong for two years and shows no signs of abating. There are still lots of people posting a hundred (re-)tweets etc. daily who are being read by many others, all of them confirming their biases in a never fulfilled feeding frenzy.

This is not about Trump. And I’m not a Trump supporter. This is instead about the media, and the humongous difference interactivity has made. And about the fact that it hasn’t just added a hundred million voices, it has also altered the way traditional media report the news, in an effort to keep up with those hundred million.

The thing here that is about Trump, is that he’s everybody’s favorite meal ticket. He confirms everyone’s opinion, whether for or against him, by the way he uses media. And most importantly, they all make a lot of money off of him. The New York Times and WaPo and MSNBC would be in deep financial trouble without Trump. Like they were before he came along. Polarization of opinions saved them. Well, not the WaPo, Jeff Bezos can afford to run 1000 papers like that and lose money hand over fist. But for the NYT and many others a Trump impeachment would be disastrous. Funny, right?

Another thing that is obvious is that one thing still sells above all others: sex. The smear campaign against Julian Assange has been successful in one way only, and it’s been a smash hit: the rape allegations. Completely false, entirely made up, dragged out as long as possible, and turning millions, especially women, against him.

The accusations against Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh haven’t been around long enough to be discredited. Maybe they will be, maybe they won’t. But read through newspaper articles, watch TV shows, follow Twitter, and you see countless voices already convinced ‘he did it’. And that ‘it’ is often labeled ‘rape’, though that’s not the accusation.

But it’s part of the Anti-Trump train, and the echo-chamber has gone into overdrive once again. Even if everyone understands that a 36-year old accusation must be handled with care. The accusing woman’s lawyer says the FBI must investigate, and everyone says: FBI! FBI!. Conveniently forgetting that the FBI has been far from impartial with regards to Trump, and the White House is not exactly waiting for another FBI role.

What’s wrong with waiting till you know the facts? Why judge a situation you know nothing about other than a woman accuses a man of assault 36 years ago, and doesn’t remember time, location etc.?

And that’s the thing all along, isn’t it? That people, both readers and journalists, all 200 million Americans of them, think they have acquired the right to judge any person, any situation they read a few lines about, just because they have purchased a smartphone. A faulty notion fed on a daily basis by the fact there are millions who think just like them.

We may want to rethink the terms ‘social’ media and ‘smart’ phone. They sound good, but they don’t cover the true nature of either. It’s hard to say where all this is going, but the sharply increasing polarization of society is certainly not a good sign. People feeling they have the right to accuse others without knowing facts, people building a Russiagate narrative without evidence, these are not things a society should welcome, whether they’re profitable or not.

Meanwhile, there are two people (there are many more, of course) who were banned from the platforms so many others use to draw baseless conclusions and spout empty accusations. And we miss them both, or we should: Alex Jones and Julian Assange. Have they really used ‘social’ media in worse ways than those 200 million Americans? Or were they banned because millions of Americans were following and reading their non-mainstream views?

We better get a grip on this, and on ourselves, or we won’t get another chance. What we have seen so far is that it’s not that hard to shape people’s opinions in a world with information overload. And that process is about to get a whole lot more intense. Until all you’re left with is the illusion that your opinion is actually your own.

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It appears Senator Chuck Grassley has had enough. In a statement issued tonight, the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman says he’s giving Christine Blasey Ford and her legal team a deadline of 10pm tonight to respond to panel’s testimony offer.

As The Hill reports, the committee announced on Friday that the Monday hearing — where both Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, had been invited to speak — was being called off.

Instead, Grassley said in a statement Friday that he is giving Ford’s lawyers until 10 p.m. on Friday to respond to the GOP request for her to testify on Wednesday.

“I’m providing a notice of a vote to occur Monday in the event that Dr. Ford’s attorneys don’t respond or Dr. Ford decides not to testify,” Grassley says.

“In the event that we can come to a reasonable resolution as I’ve been seeking all week, then I will postpone the committee vote to accommodate her testimony. We cannot continue to delay.”

If they do not, or if Ford declines to testify, Grassley said the Judiciary Committee will vote Monday on Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Democrats lambasted the GOP maneuver.

All 10 Democrats on the Committee wrote a letter to Grassley saying “the Committee majority’s treatment of Dr. Ford has unquestionably been worse than the disgraceful treatment that Anita Hill received 27 years ago.” Hill accused now-Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991 and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were criticized for their handling of the situation.

President Trump tonight reconfirmed his support for Kavanaugh and said he expected him to get confirmed.

Meanwhile, social media is alive with #WhyIDidntReport tweets of abused women explaining why they did not report their abuse, as if in some way this provides cover for Ford’s lack of reporting or remembering the event until many years later.

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The US labor market has recently been faced with two distinct and opposing trends.

On one hand, with unemployment at a record low, there is an (alleged) overheating in the labor market, where there are now 1.1 job openings  for every unemployed worker. Furthermore, amid a record number of workers quitting their jobs, bargaining power is starting to shift in the worker’s favor as wages recently posted their highest increase since the financial crisis. As a result, employers are finally bidding up wages and offering more generous benefits to retain workers.

On the other hand, as a result of the sad state of the US fiscal situation, profiled most recently by Goldman, employees are growing increasingly disenchanted about their long-term retirement benefits, while the chaos over the US healthcare system has prompted many workers to reconsider healthcare benefits as a key variable in job selection.

Nowhere are these two trends more visible than in a recent worker survey conducted by Bank of America – in which the bank asked respondents what the top 3 factors they look for when considering a job – and which showed a distinct variation by the youngest, Millennial, generation compared to its predecessors.

As one would expect, the survey revealed that pay/salary was at the top of the list across all respondents but what followed varied by generation and gender, with some surprising shifts. Baby Boomers reported preference for traditional benefits such as healthcare and retirement benefits.

However, for Millennials and Generation X, it was less clear cut. While traditional benefits still ranked high on their lists, younger workers reported greater importance of other non-monetary “lifestyle” benefits such as flexible hours and workplace perks (e.g. free meals/snacks, bring pets to work). Meanwhile, of all factors, Millennials put surprisingly low weight on retirement benefits while healthcare benefits was on par with flexible hours.

Broken by gender, the survey revealed that women placed greater importance to healthcare benefits and flexible hours while men put more emphasis on workplace perks and company equity.

The results support the view that a shift in preference by younger generation for greater nonmonetary compensation is one of the many explanations for the slow pace of wage growth this cycle.

The survey also asked respondents about their views on labor market conditions. Consistent with other consumer surveys, the US worker generally was feeling good about their job prospects. The share of respondents reporting it is easier to find or switch a job increased in August compared to when we asked in May with Baby Boomers showing the greatest improvement.

However, roughly 1/3 of respondents reporting they have multiple paying jobs, suggesting that some workers may still be having a difficult time finding a full time job to meet their financial demands, explaining the “shadow slack” in the labor market. As one would expect, Millennials are more likely than their older counterparts to have multiple paying jobs. One explanation could be that Millennials are more likely to engage in gig economy which includes mostly part time jobs.

Finally, the survey also looked at the breakdown of economic outlook by both geography and income.

On the former, the outlook for the economy edged higher in the South since the survey was launched in March. Also, respondents from the the pro Trump-heavy South have consistently shown greater optimism than rest of the regions. In other regions confidence has ebbed and flowed but the plurality of respondents remains positive on the outlook with 43% of respondent in the Northeast and 42% of respondents in the West and Midwest expecting the economy to improve over the next 12 months.

Meawnhile, when looking at economic optimism by income, BofA founds that the bottom income cohort, those with annual income lower than $50k, are and have been the least optimistic since the start of the survey with only 39% reporting in the latest reading that they expect the US economy to improve in the next year. Alternatively, optimism has improved for the top income and the $50k-$75k cohorts over the duration of the survey with 53% and 50%, respectively, reporting favorable expectations in the latest reading while responses from consumers reporting income of $75k-$125K has edged modestly lower to sideways.

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

I watch Yellowstone very closely, because an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could end life as we know it in America in a single moment. 

A full-blown eruption of Yellowstone could potentially dump a suffocating layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep on almost the entire country, and it would instantly render about two-thirds of this nation completely uninhabitable. 

So yes, when Yellowstone starts rumbling there is a reason to pay attention, and right now Yellowstone is starting to rumble in ways that are unprecedented.  That doesn’t mean that an eruption is imminent, but without a doubt what is currently taking place is more than just a little bit alarming.

Let’s start with what happened on Saturday.  An eruption of Ear Spring sent “plumes of water up to 30 feet in the air”, and it was being reported that “debris and rocks flew into the sky”…

On Saturday, Ear Spring erupted plumes of water up to 30 feet in the air, endangering visitors as debris and rocks flew into the sky.

The last known eruption on that scale occurred in 1957, though several smaller eruptions were observed in 2004.

Ear Spring is one of the hottest pools in Yellowstone National Park and contains water above the boiling point up to 200 degrees.

If you are not familiar with this particular hot spring at Yellowstone, you can find the basics on Wikipedia right here.  When a supervolcano that could ultimately kill billions of us starts flinging “debris and rocks” into the sky, that should have made front page headlines all over the planet, but it didn’t.

This was the very first time since 2004 that Ear Spring has erupted, and it was only the 4th eruption in the last 60 years.

But that wasn’t the end of the activity at Yellowstone.

On Monday, Steamboat Geyser erupted “for an hour and fifteen minutes”…

Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park erupted on Monday  for an hour and fifteen minutes. The spectacular stream of water and steam can reach heights of 300 feet, making it the tallest of any active geyser in the world. The most recent eruption was the geyser’s nineteenth in 2018, making this Steamboat’s most active calendar year since 1982, and exciting visitors and scientists alike.

Everybody at Yellowstone was extremely excited by this eruption, but there is no reason to celebrate.

From September 2014 to March 2018, Steamboat Geyser was completely dormant.

But now it has suddenly sprung to life and has erupted a total of 19 times since March 15th.

Is anyone else besides me alarmed by this?

Then on Tuesday, it was being reported that the ground was “rising and falling by six inches every 10 minutes” and “spouts of water shot from the ground” as a new geyser formed…

On Tuesday, spouts of water shot from the ground west of Pump Geyser and north of Sponge Geyser, also ejecting large amounts of hot steam.

The new feature, which is eight-foot diameter, continues to show increased signs of activity after geologists observed the ground rising and falling by six inches every 10 minutes.

Geologists have also observed new geysering and boiling at hot spring Doublet Pool and North Goggles Geyser, located in the Upper Geyser Basin.

Okay, so we have multiple new geysers forming, Steamboat Geyser has sprung to life after being dormant for three years, and Ear Spring is flinging debris and rocks into the air.

And the experts are telling us that there is no reason for concern?

I don’t think so.

Scientists assure us that Yellowstone will erupt again one day, and if it happens during our lifetimes, most of us living in the United States will end up dead.

You see, the truth is that a full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would not just devastate the Northwest.  It would truly be a global catastrophe that could ultimately kill billions of people.  The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles…

I would like to try to describe for you what a full-blown eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would mean for this country.

Hundreds of cubic miles of ash, rock and lava would be blasted into the atmosphere, and this would likely plunge much of the northern hemisphere into several days of complete darkness. Virtually everything within 100 miles of Yellowstone would be immediately killed, but a much more cruel fate would befall those that live in major cities outside of the immediate blast zone such as Salt Lake City and Denver.

Hot volcanic ash, rock and dust would rain down on those cities literally for weeks. In the end, it would be extremely difficult for anyone living in those communities to survive. In fact, it has been estimated that 90 percent of all people living within 600 miles of Yellowstone would be killed.

Experts project that such an eruption would dump a layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep up to 1,000 miles away, and approximately two-thirds of the United States would suddenly become uninhabitable. The volcanic ash would severely contaminate most of our water supplies, and growing food in the middle of the country would become next to impossible.

In other words, it would be the end of our country as we know it today.

The rest of the planet, and this would especially be true for the northern hemisphere, would experience what is known as a “nuclear winter”. An extreme period of “global cooling” would take place, and temperatures around the world would fall by up to 20 degrees. Crops would fail all over the planet, and severe famine would sweep the globe.

In the end, billions could die.

Such a disaster would probably come with little or no warning, and the same is true with most other natural disasters.  That is why it is so imperative for all of us to be prepared in advance.

Hopefully nothing like this will happen while any of us are alive, but without a doubt we are living at a time when our planet is becoming increasingly unstable.  In one recent 30 day period, the number of global earthquakes was more than 50 percent above normal.  Major changes appear to be happening to our planet, and that could mean that all of our lives are about to change in a major way.

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Steve Bannon – who claims to have helped President Trump draft the battle plan for the ongoing trade war, says that Trump’s strategy is to make the conflict “unprecedentedly large” and “unbearably painful” for Beijing, according to an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post. 

The ultimate goal, says Bannon – is not just to force China to give up its “unfair trade practices,” but to “re-industrialize America” since manufacturing used to be the core of the nation’s power. Bannon also criticized the “Made in China 2025” plan for Beijing to catch up with the West in 10 key tech sectors – saying that Chinese firms were relying in generous government support to reduce future technological reliance on the West.

Bannon, who claimed to have helped Trump draw up the trade war plan, said that in the past, tariffs had been limited to imports of between roughly US$10 billion and US$30 billion but the sheer magnitude of the more than US$500 billion in question this time had “caught Beijing off guard”.

“It’s not just any tariff. It’s tariffs on a scale and depth that is previously inconceivable in US history,” Bannon said.

He said Beijing had relied on “round after round of talks” to take the momentum out of the US punitive measures, but the delaying tactics would not work.

“They always want to have a strategic dialogue to tap things along. They never envisioned that somebody would actually do this.” –SCMP

Bannon says he and Trump were convinced that the US would win a trade war, and that Chinese elites were worried about the same, with “so many senior Chinese officials exhausting all channels” in order to move their money out of China and snap up West Coast and New York real estate.

“Why [does there have] to be massive capital controls placed on Chinese money? Otherwise all will flee to midtown Manhattan … They want to buy real assets in the US. That shows you a dramatic lack of confidence in their own economy.”

Bannon says he first discussed the idea of a trade war five years ago with then-senator Jeff Sessions, and that the plan to crush Beijing in trade had been at the top of their campaign strategy. 

“This is where Jeff Sessions and I sat in 2013 as we were trying to imagine what the 2016 presidential election would look like,” Bannon said in his “Breitbart Embassy” townhouse near the Capitol Building in Washington. “We made trade the top issue, when trade was not even among the top 100 issues of the others.” –SCMP

While Trump and Bannon have had a public falling out since his January firing – with the President criticizing the former Breitbart executive chairman for letting journalist Michael Wolff into the White House for material on his book Fire and Fury, the President and Bannon were back in contact in May according to the Wall Street Journal. 

During his first meeting with Trump in 2015, both men agreed that the Washington and Wall Street establishment would “side with China” in the upcoming trade war, and that the two decided to alter the international trade regime to “dramatically reduce [the US] trade defecit” and re-industrialize America; particularly in the so-called rust belt. 

Bannon added that Trump would “never back down in the trade war [with China]” despite anticipating that the policy would face “massive resistance domestically and internationally” because of “Western elites” who are working with China to make themselves rich. 

“Our factories got shipped out of here. Wall Street made a fortune. The private equity made a fortune. Right now President Trump’s focus is on stopping it,” said Bannon. 

Apart from imposing the unprecedented tariffs, the Trump administration would use Section 301 of the Trade Act to press China on intellectual property rights and stop Beijing from forcing American companies to transfer their technology to Chinese partners, the former chief strategist said.

Section 301 authorises the US president to retaliate against any action that violates an international trade agreement or is unjustified, unreasonable or discriminatory, and that burdens or restricts US commerce.

Bannon said Washington should also retain some ability to “cut off” some key parts of the supply chain with China when necessary – as it did in the case of Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE.

Trump banned sales of American technology to the company in July, almost bankrupting it and putting up to 100,000 highly paid Chinese jobs in danger before lifting the ban. –SCMP

“It is very important to the Chinese audience [to remember] the case of ZTE. The central theme of Made in China 2025 is that the Chinese are trying to get off the supply chain – the component parts of the supply chain – of the West. The Chinese are very vulnerable there. Their government should never allow them to get into a situation with all this aggressiveness in their trade policies.”

In the end, SCMP notes, Bannon says that the trade war and US tariffs are about more than just the economy and rebuilding American manufacturing: 

“The elites and the media are trying to convince you that this inexpiable leaving of the factories and jobs is but a law of physics. The opposite is actually true – it is the human action which did it. It can be reversed and it will be reversed,” he said, adding “[The] tariff is about human dignity and human pride … Not everyone wants to work for an insurance company.”

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