Tag: news

The controlled airspace above Southwest Florida might become more congested now that the Trump administration has cleared the way for Lee County Mosquito District (LCMD) as one of ten state, local, and tribal governments as participants in the new Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration Pilot Program.

On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao named Lee County and nine others among 149 applicants for the UAS Integration Pilot Program that “will help tackle the most significant challenges to integrating drones into the national airspace,” according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) press release.

“Data gathered from these pilot projects will form the basis of a new regulatory framework to safely integrate drones into our national airspace,” said Secretary Chao.

Here is the full list of the ten selectees:

• Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Durant, OK

• City of San Diego, CA

• Virginia Tech – Center for Innovative Technology, Herndon, VA

• Kansas Department of Transportation, Topeka, KS

• Lee County Mosquito Control District, Ft. Myers, FL

• Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority, Memphis, TN

• North Carolina Department of Transportation, Raleigh, NC

• North Dakota Department of Transportation, Bismarck, ND

• City of Reno, NV

• University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK

“The enthusiastic response to our request for applications demonstrated the many innovative technological and operational solutions already on the horizon,” Secretary Chao added.

The Trump administration is expecting to stimulate economic development through the deployment of drones in agriculture, energy, public safety, media, infrastructure, and construction. Secretary Chao also plans to test detection and tracking of the drones and traffic-management systems in each of the ten selected regions.

“Our nation will move faster, fly higher and soar proudly toward the next great chapter of American aviation,” said President Donald Trump, who approved the program late last year.

According to CNBC, the pilot program allows Lee County to incorporate drones into their fleet of aircraft used to control Florida’s ubiquitous mosquito population. The pilot program could provide mosquito control drone operators with more relaxed federal regulations, such as enabling flights above the maximum allowable altitude of 400 feet.

“The pilot program could allow not only expanded use for observation and spraying but also potentially at higher altitudes or in more remote areas where visual contact might no longer be a requirement,” said Eric Jackson, a public information officer at the Lee County Mosquito Control District in southwestern Florida.

“We’ve been doing this for 60 years with aircraft dealing with mosquito issues, so I’m thinking that might have played a part (in our selection),” Jackson told CNBC, describing the region’s mosquito populations as a public health risk.”Our district relies heavily on aerial operations.”

Jackson said his department used drones for about a year to “take images of aquatic bodies to see where there’s a lot of vegetation.”

“Because where you have vegetation crowding out water, sometimes mosquitoes can grow in those,” he added.

Jackson told CNBC that the department hopes to acquire an advanced 1,500 lbs. drone in its surveillance and pest treatment operations fleet. The pilot program would relax current federal drone laws, allowing the mosquito control drone operator to fly above 400 feet, at night, and beyond the line of sight.

“We potentially could be using it more for surveillance and in more isolated areas for treatment missions,” Jackson said. “We’re trying to be as innovative as we can and as efficient as we can. And if this can be used safely, we’re open to anything.”

“Really, the whole point of this program is to be able to expand beyond the current regulations to see how this can be used,” he said.

“We have pilots in the air, and as the airspace becomes more crowded and people start flying above 400 feet and out of line of sight, [we asked ourselves] how can we make sure we have a seat at the table to where we can help draft these regulations to keep our pilots safe.”

While Lee County is simply one of the ten selectees for the drone pilot program, we are curious to see what the other nine municipalities will do with their new drones. So far, Jackson is hellbent in replacing his fleet of expensive aircraft and human pilots with inexpensive 1,500 lbs. drones.

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Via Priceonomics.com,

For many music fans across the country, there’s nothing quite like seeing live music: an exhilarating experience of listening, dancing, and joyfully connecting with an artist and fellow concertgoers. Some people more than others, though, seem to have a nearly insatiable appetite for concerts.

That raises the question: which cities in America have the most passionate fans of live music?

One way to answer that question is to look at the cities where people are interested in purchasing a concert ticket when an artist they like is coming to town. We decided to analyze data from Priceonomics customer SeatGeek, the live events ticketing platform, to see where people in America are tracking the most live music artists based on a “tracks per user” metric.

On SeatGeek, users can track any musical artist, team, or event to be notified of ticket availability. So, according to this data set, where are people following live music the most passionately? And where do the biggest fans of various music genres such as Country, Rap, and Electronic reside?

We found that the city with the most passionate live music fans is Oklahoma City, followed by Salt Lake City and Denver. Knoxville, TN has the most country music fans, while Miami is home to the biggest rap fans. And Tulsa, a city of just 400,000 people, has the most passionate pop music fans in the country.

For this analysis, we looked at anonymized SeatGeek data up to March 2018 to see which live music artists and genres people are tracking. The study includes data from the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., and for music genre data, we looked at the 100 most popular artists on SeatGeek.

So, which metro area has the most passionate users when it comes to “tracking” live music events? The following chart shows the cities where SeatGeek users track the most live concert events.

Data source: SeatGeek

The metropolitan area with the most passionate live music fan base is Oklahoma City, where the typical user tracks almost 21 different artists to see when they are coming to town. And fortunately for the city that has the the most dedicated live music fans in America, OKC just welcomed a new 4,000 seat theater that attracts major artists to the city.

Salt Lake City and Denver round out the top three, with major metros like San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC, and Atlanta making the top 20.

Oklahoma City might have the most die-hard fans of live music overall, but slicing the numbers by country, electronic, pop, rock, and rap music tells a different story.

First up: which metro areas have the biggest appetite for country music?

Data source: SeatGeek

Knoxville has the highest percentage of country music fans in the United States, even beating out Nashville (which came in a very respectable third). On the other end of the spectrum, Miami, Los Angeles and New York were the cities that had the fewest people that tracked country music. Someone in Knoxville is more than four times as likely as someone in Miami to be a fan of country music.

Next, let’s look at a completely different genre, electronic music. The below chart shows the cities where people are the most and least passionate about this type of music based on their tracks:

Data source: SeatGeek

This list is nearly the opposite of where people like country music!

New York, Miami and San Francisco have the most people tracking electronic music in the country. Someone in Louisville, however, is only half as likely to follow electronic music as someone in New York City. Louisville, Memphis and Knoxville are the places that like electronic music the least.

A lot of people across the country like pop music, as the word is short for “popular” after all. But in which cities do people favor pop music over other genres?

Data source: SeatGeek

Tulsa is the metro in the United States with the most users who follow pop music stars to see when they’ll be coming to town. On the other hand, Atlanta, GA has the fewest users tracking the live music schedules of pop stars. That said, Atlanta still has a lot of people that like pop music — those fans just have other interests as well.

A very similar picture emerges for cities that are interested in Rock music. In every city, a pretty high percentage of people track Rock concerts:

Data source: SeatGeek

Salt Lake City has the highest percentage of rock music fans in the country, followed by Denver and Seattle. Atlanta, New Orleans and Greensboro are one third less likely to follow rock concerts on SeatGeek.

Finally, we turn our attention to rap music. Of the top 100 most followed artists on SeatGeek, 44% of them are rap artists (Drake being the most popular, followed by Eminem). The chart below shows the cities where people track rap artists at the highest and lowest rates:

Data source: SeatGeek

Miami, Los Angeles, and Atlanta are the metropolitan areas that have the most rap fans. On the other hand, the cities that favored country and pop music like Tulsa, St. Louis and Knoxville have the fewest people tracking rap artists.

Now it is official: Oklahoma City has the fans with the biggest appetite for live music of any city in the country. Fans in Knoxville like country music at the highest rates, while people in Miami tend to enjoy electronic music. Everyone across the country likes pop, rock, and rap, but fans in Tulsa, Salt Lake City, and Miami do so at the highest rates respectively.

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If you’re a company that wants to work with Priceonomics to turn your data into great stories, learn more about the Priceonomics Data Studio.

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A researcher at the University of Chicago has just confirmed what many investors and tech industry employees have long suspected: China, Russia and other large authoritarian governments inflate official GDP figures by anywhere from 15% to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data.

The paper, published by Luis Martinez, an assistant professor of public policy at the school, explains how the differences in GDP between his modeling and the government’s official reporting cannot be explained by subtle differences in methodology

The working paper, by Luis R. Martinez of the University of Chicago, also found that authoritarian regimes are especially likely to artificially boost their gross domestic product numbers in the years before elections, and that the differences in GDP reporting between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries can’t be explained by structural factors, such as urbanization, composition of the economy or access to electricity.

Martinez received his data from a novel source – albeit one that readers might not bee surprised about given the burgeoning space race between Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other billionaire founders: Martinez focused on satellite imagery that tracks changes in the level of nighttime lighting within and between countries over time.

In a rare interview, infamous China watcher Michael Pettis explains that China’s recent figures pertaining to GDP growth – which put the rate of growth at just under 7% – could be off by as much as 3 or 4 percentage points.

Martinez explains his methodology in a video, which can be watched in full here.

 

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If the U.S. economy is performing so well, then why can’t 51 million households in the United States “afford basics like rent and food”?

A stunning new report that was just put out by the United Way ALICE Project shows that the gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country is perhaps the biggest that it has been in any of our lifetimes.  In some of the wealthiest areas of the nation, homes are now selling for up to 100 million dollars, but meanwhile tens of millions of families are barely scraping by from month to month.  Many believe that this growing “inequality gap” is setting the stage for major societal problems.

In general, the U.S. economy seems to be performing better than expected so far in 2018, but the ranks of the poor and the working poor just continue to grow.  The following comes from CNN…

Nearly 51 million households don’t earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a studyreleased Thursday by the United Way ALICE Project. That’s 43% of households in the United States.

The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in poverty, as well as the 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what’s needed “to survive in the modern economy.”

If 43 percent of all Americans cannot even afford “the basics”, what does that say about the true state of the U.S. economy?

Of course the biggest reason why so many American families are struggling is the lack of good jobs.

In America today, 66 percent of all jobs pay less than 20 dollars an hour.

66 percent.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

You cannot support a middle class family on 20 dollars an hour.  As a result, many Americans are working more than one job, and in many households both the mother and the father are working more than one job.

Housing costs account for the biggest item in most family budgets, and the fact that housing costs have just continued to soar is putting a huge amount of financial stress on hard working families.  Just today we learned that there is a tremendous rush to buy homes as mortgage rates rise rapidly…

Today, according to the latest Freddie Mac mortgage rates report, after plateauing in recent weeks, mortgage rates reversed course and reached a new high last seen eight years ago as the 30-year fixed mortgage rate edged up to 4.61% matching the highest level since May 19, 2011.

But while the highest mortgage rates in 8 years are predictably crushing mortgage refinance activity, they appears to be having the opposite effect on home purchases, where there is a sheer scramble to buy, and sell, houses. As Bloomberg notes, citing brokerage Redfin, the average home across the US that sold last month went into contract after a median of 36 only days on the market – a record speed in data going back to 2010.

If you will remember, we witnessed a very similar pattern just before the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008.

History is repeating itself, and we never seem to learn from our past mistakes.

Housing prices in some cities are absolutely obscene right now, and many working families find themselves completely priced out of the market.  That has some people asking one very simple question…

Many San Francisco renters I met while reporting an article on affordable housing lotteries had responded to the region’s housing crisis by putting up with great discomfort: They crammed in with family; they split apartments with strangers. Some even lived out of their cars.

Why, lots of readers wanted to know, didn’t they simply move away instead?

Yes, some people are moving, and this is something that I plan to do an article about very soon.

But for most hard working families, moving across the country simply is not an option.  Moving out of state is very expensive, it can be very difficult to find a similar job in an entirely new area, and many families are very dependent on the social networks where they currently live…

People who struggle financially often have valuable social networks — family to help with child care, acquaintances who know of jobs. The prospect of dropping into, say, Oklahoma or Georgia would mean doing without the good income and the social support. Those intangible connections that keep people in places with bad economies also keep people in booming regions where the rent is too high.

In the end, moving is just not an option for a lot of people.

We need to structure our economic system so that it works for all Americans – not just a few.  Unfortunately, it is probably going to take another major crisis before people are ready for such a restructuring.

And such a crisis may not be that far away.  In fact, even Pope Francis is now warning about the dangers of derivatives…

In a sweeping critique of global finance released by the Vatican on Thursday, the Holy See singled out derivatives including credit-default swaps for particular scorn. “A ticking time bomb,” the Vatican called them. The unusual rebuke — derivatives rarely reach the level of religious doctrine — is in keeping with Francis’s skeptical view of unbridled global capitalism.

“The market of CDS, in the wake of the economic crisis of 2007, was imposing enough to represent almost the equivalent of the GDP of the entire world. The spread of such a kind of contract without proper limits has encouraged the growth of a finance of chance, and of gambling on the failure of others, which is unacceptable from the ethical point of view,” the Vatican said in the document.

I have written about derivatives extensively in the past, and Pope Francis is 100 percent correct when he says that they are a ticking time bomb which could absolutely devastate the global financial system at any moment.

We don’t know exactly when it will happen, but we do know that such a crisis is coming at some point.

Sadly, most of the population is completely asleep, and they will be completely blindsided by the coming crisis when it does finally arrive.

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One of the most destructive consequences of the Federal Reserve bailing out banks, equityholders and capital markets in the aftermath of the GFC with a coordinated multi-trillion liquidity injection by the world central banks that made the rich richer and the poor poorer while crushing the middle class, has been an unprecedented growth in income and wealth inequality, the backlash to which were such historic events as Brexit in the UK and the completely unexpected – by the “experts” – election of Donald J. Trump, in the United States.

Of course, when it comes to income inequality among American households, outcomes have varied widely across the 50 U.S. states. The impact of international competition gets a lot of the blame, along with automation, in states that have fared the worst. That has contributed to a backlash against free trade on the national level, resulting in the current multi-front trade war wages by the administration.

But in which states has income polarization been most acute and where has the middle class been crushed the most?

For an answer, we look at a recent study by the IMF, “Hollowing Out: The Channels of Income Polarization in the United States“, which shows that middle-income households have shrunk as a proportion of the population since the 1960s. The study found that those earning between 50 percent and 150 percent of the median income represented just 48 percent of total households in 2016, compared with 58 percent in 1968; in other words for better or worse, the middle class has shrunk.

Unfortunately, it’s for the “worse” and as the IMF writes, a majority of households “left” the middle class not because they became richer; on the contrary. Of those families leaving the middle-income group, the proportion falling into the low-income ranks, which the IMF describes as downward hollowing out or polarization, was greater than those advancing to upper income levels. And as noted above, the 50 states haven’t felt these effects uniformly.

To find where this “Hollowing-Out” was most acute at the state level, the IMF created indices for each of the states for 2000-2016 to highlight these differences. The chart below, breaks down the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia into three groups, based on how severely their middle class has experienced downward income hollowing out during 2000-2016.

The states shown below in deep red are where Income polarization, and the hollowing out of the middle class, was most severe; logically the lighter the shading, the less the adverse impact of “downward hollowing out.”

Commenting on its findings, the IMF noted the following:

Take Nevada and Arkansas, for example, two states that had the greatest increase in polarization during 2000-2016. In these states, education played only a small countervailing role as technology and international trade lowered living standards for some middle-income households.

On the other extreme, take for example, Massachusetts and New Mexico. Technology and international competition have had less impact on income polarization in these two states than in Nevada and Arkansas. Meanwhile, education has done more to keep households in the middle class, making Massachusetts and New Mexico among the states that have experienced the smallest increases in income polarization during 2000-2016.

The IMF’s surprising conclusion is that while “technological progress and globalization have had positive effects, generating higher living standards, more productivity and faster growth”, something which an institution that is at the forefront of enabling globalization would have no choice but to say, the IMF also, unexpectedly admits, that “our work shows that they also have had important, and sometimes detrimental, side-effects on income distribution and household welfare.” The bolded text is problematic for the globalists, because once you’ve lost the IMF, you better make sure that there are real crocodiles in that moat separating your castle from the peasants.

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Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Only small scale systems can sustainably impose “skin in the game” – consequences, accountability and oversight.

Several conversations I had at the recent Peak Prosperity conference in Sonoma, CA sparked an insight into why societies and economies thrive or fail: It All Boils Down to Scale. In a conversation with a Peak Prosperity member who goes by MemeMonkey, MemeMonkey pointed out that social / economic organizations that function well at small scales (i.e. localized) fail when scaled up and centralized (i.e. globalized).

I was immediately struck by the impact of scale on markets (Capitalism) and the state (Socialism), an ideological spectrum I’ve written about recently.

Both markets and governance function well at a small scale because those making the decisions must absorb the consequences of their actions/choices.

In large-scale centralized systems, those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid who wield the greatest influence are typically immune from the consequences of their (self-serving) decisions.

Indeed, the entire point of centralized hierarchies is to buffer top decision-makers from the consequences of their actions and choices.

This ties directly into Nassim Taleb’s most recent popularization of the critical role played by participants having “skin in the game,” i.e. exposure to the consequences of their actions and choices.

In a small localized group, it’s basically impossible for anyone, even those at the top of the local welth-power pyramid, to escape the consequences of extractive activities that disupt the local ecosystem.

For example, should overfishing destroy the local fisheries, even the leaders no longer have access to fish.

Should the leadership pursue a conflict with a neighboring tribe, the leaders are just as likely to be killed or maimed as any participant (and very possibly more likely to be killed/injured, as leaders are naturally high-value targets).

History offers many examples of leadership that suffered the consequences of their poor choices/strategies. In the catastrophic Roman defeat at Cannae, roughly a third of Rome’s entire political leadership elite was killed in combat. This is the acme of “skin in the game,” a point Taleb makes by noting that our political leadership is free to pursue wars of choice with zero risk of being killed on the battlefield. No wonder it’s so “cost-free” for leaders of highly centralized hierarchies to pursue disastrous policies: they evade any of the consequences or blowback.

In a conversation with fellow Peak Prosperity scribe Davefairtex, Dave described the centrality of the reward structure of cheating: approximately 20% of the populace experiences an outsized positive brain-chemistry reward (dopamine release) when they get away with some form of cheating–passing off a lie or deception or successfully concluding a fraud or scam.

A similar percentage of humanity is genetically predisposed to experience outsized brain-chemistry rewards for detecting and revealing cheating.

Dave also noted that human groups (and primate groups including monkeys, chimpanzees, et al.) become very agitated when group standards of fairness are flouted.

Cheating–broadly speaking, what’s known as the “free-riding problem,” as cheaters get a free ride on the work of everyone who abides by the rules and fulfills their duties– pays dividends.

Males who father children via a secret tryst with a married woman pass on their genes without having to support their offspring or the mother. Cheaters who reap unearned wealth from the group benefit by slicing off some of the income and wealth of everyone else in the group.

So there are powerful incentives to cheat and equally powerful incentives to ferret out and expose cheaters, lest the group dissolve and everyone is tossed out to face the world (and potentially hostile groups) alone.

This conversation made me realize this is partly why small-scale markets and groups succeed: cheaters must work in a small theater where their actions are more easily observed and exposed. It’s therefore much more difficult to get away with systemic cheating in small-scale organizations.

Compare this to the vast centralized hierarchies that are the controlling dynamics of our socio-political-economic system (i.e. our Mode of Production). Cheaters at the top of the wealth-power pyramid hire slick attorneys to evade consequences, or they buy political influence/protection, in effect legalizing cheating by those at the top of the pyramid in systemic ways.

Once we grasp the critical role played by scale, we conclude that centralized hierarchies cannot function effectively because their scale makes it too easy and too rewarding for those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid to cheat and evade consequences.

Only small-scale markets and structures of governance can succeed in the long run because only these small scale systems can sustainably impose “skin in the game”– consequences, accountability and oversight.

State-issued currency (“money”) is the perfection of a centralized system: here is the Venezuelan national currency the bolivar, a once-stable currency obliterated by Venezuela’s political-economic elite:

*  *  *

My new book Money and Work Unchained is $9.95 for the Kindle ebook and $20 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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We doubt the thousands of McDonald’s cashiers and grill workers would agree with this Barclays Plc trader’s assessment that his job as a vice president at the British bank was comparable to working at a fast food restaurant.

During the second day of a trial on charges he conspired with traders at other banks to rig a benchmark interest rate, 39-year-old Carlo Palombo told the jury that being a vice president at Barclays is “the equivalent to the guy that serves you in McDonald’s,” Bloomberg reports.

Which is ironic because both McDonalds cashiers and bank traders have suffered a similar fate…

The prosecutor in the case, James Waddington, took issue with Palombo’s analogy, asking if “that’s a comparison that works.”

Palombo clarified: What he meant to say is that, like being an employee at a McDonald’s franchise, vice president is a relatively junior position.

“Vice president is not what everyone thinks it is,” Palombo replied. “It is junior.”

Barclays traders Colin Bermingham and Sisse Bohart are also on trial in the case, which was brought by the UK Serious Fraud Office, as well as Achim Kraemer from Deutsche Bank AG.

In an attempt to demonstrate just how different the positions of “bank vice president” and McDonald’s employee” are, Waddington told the jury that Palombo earned 1 million pounds ($1.35 million) in 2007.

“You weren’t paid 400,000 pounds for being a tea boy, were you?” Waddington asked.

“It’s ridiculous, but I was,” Palombo replied.

“As ridiculous as it sounds, a coffee boy at Barclays gets paid 400,000 pounds a year.”

Palombo replied that his earnings had nothing to do with the case.

“People do get paid a lot money” in banking, Palombo said.

“If you want to have a conversation about income inequality, then let’s have a conversation about it.”

Palombo said that, though he was relatively junior on the desk, his trading made the bank a lot of money. He denied trying to influence Euribor, but did admit that he made requests for a preferred rate to the case desk, which he said was part of his responsibilities as a member of the team.

“I made the requests for the book and for the team,” he said. “I made the requests on the instruction of the team.”

“If there was anything perceived to be wrong about this, these requests would’ve been made in secret, these requests would’ve been made in non-public ways,” he said.

Palombo, who hails from Milan, joined Barclays in the summer of 2002 and worked on several teams before joining the euro short-end book as a junior trader.

We imagine the jurors – all of whom, we’re sure, possess a nuanced understanding of what a trader does and how banking works – will see through Palombo’s clumsy analogy to grasp his underlying argument that he wasn’t the one calling the shots on Barclays euro short-end desk…and therefore shouldn’t be responsible for any fraud.

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Authored by Tim Pearce via The Daily Caller,

The University of Michigan (UM) is reviewing 11 school programs for potential Title IX violations resulting from favoring one gender over the other.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Mark Perry drew the university’s attention to the programs, pointing out each could be in violation of federal law, as well as the Michigan State Constitution and UM’s Nondiscrimination Policy.

Campus clubs such as the “Girls in Engineering, Math and Sciences Camp,” “Girls in Science and Engineering Camp” and “Girls Code Camp” favor the female gender over all others, Perry pointed out in an email to Pamela Heatlie, UM associate vice-provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs and senior director for Institutional Equity and Title IX coordinator.

Women graduating from high school and entering college are generally of higher academic standing than men when it comes to STEM fields and classes, according to The College Board’s 2016 data.

Therefore, if any gender should be given preferential treatment, it should be men, Perry posits.

Perry was “inspired” by the national club formerly known as the Boy Scouts for becoming “gender inclusionary” and changing its name to Scouts BSA to reflect its progressive step forward, he noted in an AEI blog post.

“If, like the Boy Scouts, UM is really committed to offering programs that are truly welcoming to students of all genders after ending its previous gender apartheid practices, then perhaps those programs would respectfully consider name changes that would communicate publicly our institution’s commitment to full gender equity, fairness and justice,” Perry wrote to Heatlie.

“I am doubtful that most boys will ever really feel welcome in a program that was historically girls-only and exists today with a name that reflects that history of gender apartheid and gender discrimination against them,” Perry noted.

UM spends more than $11 million annually on the salaries and benefits of employees hired to ensure campus diversity, equity and inclusion.

As one commenter on Perry’s site rightly points out (and critical to what Perry is actually highlighting): “It’s OK to discriminate as long as you do it to the approved group(s).”

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The White House is pushing back against calls to fire communications staffer Kelly Sadler after insensitive comments about John McCain promptly leaked to the press.

After the cancer-stricken Arizona Senator urged the Senate to reject Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA director, calling her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality “disqualifying,” Sadler reportedly said “[i]t doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.“

Instead of firing Sadler, the White House went on the offensive – as several senior officials, including chief of staff John Kelly and Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway have held closed-door meetings to lay down the law to junior staffers whose jobs are all at risk. 

On Monday, President Trump came out with a serious warning for White House leakers, tweeting “leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!”

The so-called leaks coming out of the White House are a massive over exaggeration put out by the Fake News Media in order to make us look as bad as possible. With that being said, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 14, 2018

“It’s an honor and a privilege to work for the president and to be part of his administration. And anybody who betrays that I think is a total and complete coward and they should be fired,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier in the week. “We’ve fired people over leaking before.”

Rumors have been circulating over who is responsible for the leak, and chatter about aides looking for the exits has picked up, though previous declarations of crackdowns did not yield shake-ups or end the leaks.

…

National Security Adviser John Bolton said that some leakers were “national security risks” and said Kelly was organizing an effort to cut them down. –Business Insider

“The president has to have advisers around him who can have open candid discussions and then not read about him the next day in the newspapers or watch them on television,” Bolton said in an appearance on Fox News Radio.

Meanwhile, the White House communications team has canceled its daily staff meeting following the leak. Instead, a smaller group of staffers met on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday instead of the 30 participants usually in attendance. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the leaks were coming from “a couple of bad actors,” and that they will fire anyone who continues to leak to the press. 

“I think it is disgusting and some of the most shameful behavior that you could ever engage in,” Sanders told “Fox and Friends.” “It’s an honor and a privilege to work for the president and to be part of his administration. And anybody who betrays that I think is a total and complete coward and they should be fired.”

Kellyanne Conway said in a Monday appearance on Fox News that there may be a staff shakeup at the White House, so watch out leakers…

Conway ends interview by remarking that she expects White House personnel changes as a result of the sort of leaks Trump denounced on Twitter this afternoon pic.twitter.com/TAiweTNd6W

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2018

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Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

When historians of the future finish their meal of rat à la moutarde at the campfire, and pass around the battered plastic jug of wild raisin wine, they will kick back and hear the griot sing of John Brennan, the fabled chief of an ancient order called the CIA, and how he started the monkey business aimed at bringing down the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness, chief of chiefs in the land once known as America.

Alas, the hero’s journey of Brennan, ends in a jail cell at the storied Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, where he slowly pined away between games of ping-pong and knock-hockey, dreaming of a cable network retirement package that never was…

One gets the feeling more and more that Mr. Brennan is at the center of this ever-mushrooming matrix of scandals around the 2016 election.

“Bigger Than Watergate?” the headline in today’s New York Times asks? The mendacity of this once-proud newspaper is really something to behold. Take the following paragraph, for instance:

     “Depending on what is eventually proven, the core scandal could rival Watergate, in which a “third-rate burglary” of Democratic National Committee headquarters ultimately revealed a wide-ranging campaign of political sabotage and spying to influence the 1972 presidential election and undercut perceived rivals. In the current case, a hostile foreign power sought to sway the 2016 election and there is evidence that at least some people in Mr. Trump’s circle were willing to collaborate with it to do so.”

You have to really wonder how the Times editors overlooked the other relevant details in the current case pertaining to goings-on initiated by Mr. Brennan and involving obviously criminal misbehavior among the US Intelligence services, and especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in their effort to un-do the election that put the Trump creature in the White House instead of the enchantress known as Hillary. I did like the trope “a hostile foreign power.” Apparently they were too embarrassed to just say “Russia,” since by now it has become the most threadbare hobgoblin in all of US political history.

Rumors are flying that the long-awaited (so long it is nearly forgotten) Department of Justice Inspector General’s report contains a rather severe interpretation of what actually has been going on for the last couple of years in this farrago of charge and countercharge that the legacy news media has been doing its best to garble and deflect — namely, that the highest officers of the government conspired to tamper with the 2016 election.

The latest twist is news — actually reported by the Times Thursday — that the FBI placed a “mole” inside the Trump campaign. If the mole discovered anything, then it is the only morsel of information that hasn’t been leaked in two years, which leads the casual observer to infer that the mole found really nothing.

On the other hand, a great deal is already known about the misdeeds surrounding Hillary and her supporters, including Mr. Obama and his inner circle, and some of those incriminating particulars have been officially certified — for example, the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on recommendations of the Agency’s own ethics committee, with overtones of criminal culpability. There is also little ambiguity left about the origin of the infamous Steele Dossier. It’s an established fact that it was bought-and-paid-for by the Democratic National Committee, which is to say the Hillary campaign, and that many of the dramatis personae involved lied about it under oath.

Many other suspicious loose ends remain to be tied. Those not driven insane by Trumpophobia are probably unsatisfied with the story of what Attorney General Loretta Lynch was doing, exactly, with former President Bill Clinton during that Phoenix airport tête-à-tête a few days before FBI Director Jim Comey exonerated Mr. Clinton’s wife in the email server “matter.”

One can see where this tangled tale is tending: to the sacred chamber known as the grand jury. Probably several grand juries. That will lead to years of entertaining courtroom antics at the same time that the USA’s financial condition fatefully unravels. That event might finally produce the effect that all the exertions of the so-called Deep State have failed to achieve so far: the discrediting of Donald Trump. Alas, the literal discrediting of the USA and its hallowed institutions — including the US dollar — may be a much more momentous thing than the fall of Trump.

Personally, I won’t be completely satisfied until the editors of The New York Times have to answer to charges of sedition in a court of law.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2LeqNpi Tyler Durden