Month: February 2014

Kane on Rothbard, Greenwald on Government Smear Campaigns


Last night on The
Independents, the controversial civil-libertarian
journalist Glenn Greenwald came on for a two-part interview about
his latest intelligence-world scoops, his concerns about traveling
to America, and more. Here’s part one:

Also on the show, pro wrestler Glenn “Kane” Jacobs explained how
he became a libertarian, and what paying taxes four times a year
does to the ol’ ideology:

No show tonight; Stossel‘s
in that timeslot. The Independents will be back on Friday
at 9 pm (6 pm ET) with a special show called “The Grouchy Oscars,”
featuring Kurt
Loder, Kyle Smith, Virginia
Postrel, and more. In the meantime you can visit the show’s
video
page for footage of past segments.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1cpX6Zs
via IFTTT

North Carolina Cop Shoots 70-Year-Old Man Pulling Out His Cane From Truck Bed

A public service annoucement from the North Carolina DMV: Don’t
let your tags expire, as if you do and get pulled over and behave
like a normal human instead of a properly trained servant, you can
and will get shot. And the officer will be right to have done
it.


Raw Story tells the story:

WCNC reported that
Deputy Terrence Knox pulled over 70-year-old Bobby Dean Canipe
Tuesday evening on Highway 321 after noticing his white Ford pickup
truck had expired tags. Knox said that he told Canipe to stay in
the vehicle, but the man disobeyed the order.

“The driver of the vehicle, 70-year-old Bobby Dean Canipe of
Lincolnton, exited the vehicle and reached into the truck bed, and
rose what Deputy Knox perceived to be a long barreled weapon,” York
County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Trent Faris said at a press
conference on Wednesday.

Knox fired several shots at Canipe, who was hit once in
the lung. He was transported to Carolinas Medical Center in
Charlotte, and was expected to recover.

Several shots! Kind of a shame he might live to frighten
another officer down the line, I suppose.

The York County Sheriff’s Office followed standard procedure and
placed Knox on paid administrative leave following the shooting.
However, the department has already come to the conclusion that the
deputy acted appropriately by shooting Canipe.

“The situation is very unfortunate. It does appear at this time
that Deputy Knox’s actions were an appropriate response to what he
believed to be an imminent threat to his life,” Faris remarked.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1cVIRPe
via IFTTT

Meanwhile, More Russian Military Vehicles Amass In The Crimean

While the IMF is promising a massive bailout to the Ukraine, and NATO is using the harshest language it can possibly muster to halt Russia in its tracks, Putin is doing what he does best: employing brute force (as seen below), and using even harsher language, to wit: RUSSIA: WEST MUST STOP MAKING PROVOCATIVE STATEMENTS ON UKRAINE.

In photos:

 

And clips:

Source: Euronews


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1eAj0sI Tyler Durden

Yellen Testifies Before The Senate: Live Stream

Two weeks ago, Janet Yellen’s testimony to the Senate, following her remarks to the House, were delayed due to inclement weather. Now that it is no longer snowing, she is back behind the mic at the Senate Banking Committee, where she will deliver the same identical prepared remarks as she did last time, but obviously with a different Q&A. Watch it live here.


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cc30CM Tyler Durden

NATO Calls Ukraine Developments “Dangerous And Irresponsible”, Urges Russia Not To “Escalate Tension”

Russian tat. And now, NATO tit.

  • NATO CHIEF SAYS ACTIONS BY ARMED GROUP IN CRIMEA “DANGEROUS AND IRRESPONSIBLE”
  • NATO URGES RUSSIA NOT TO DO ANYTHING THAT WOULD “ESCALATE TENSION OR CREATE MISUNDERSTANDING”

And the lie of the day:

  • U.S., NATO HAVE NOT DRAWN UP ANY CONTINGENCY PLANS FOR HOW THEY WOULD RESPOND IF RUSSIA INTERVENED IN CRIMEA-NATO’S TOP MILITARY COMMANDER
  • THERE IS NO REASON FOR NATO AND RUSSIA TO COMPETE OVER THE FUTURE OF UKRAINE-NATO COMMANDER

Actually, there is, which is precisely why Putin will smile when reading the latest NATO pleadings.


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cc31qo Tyler Durden

Spot The Adjustment To The Seasonal Adjustment

Recall how the prevailing excuse for all economic data missing in the past two months have been attributed to inclement weather which mysteriously has not been captured in seasonal adjustments? Well, something curious happened in today Durable Goods report.

As we noted previously, the reason why stocks posted a bounce when the report came out was the stronger than expected bounce in Durable Goods, and especially the Durable Goods ex transports print which rose 1.1% on expectations of a modest drop. It is here that a somewhat puzzling observation can be made. First, the Non-seasonally adjusted number in the series posted a $5 billion decline from December into January, in other words a 3.2% drop compared to the 1.1% seasonally adjusted change. But it is not the sequential data that is notable but the annual change which is where the seasonal adjustments are most obvious.

What happened in that set of data is that while the NSA Durables ex transport posted a tiny 0.4% increase, amounting to $533 million, the SA series showed a far more sizable $1.9 billion increase. This can be seen on the chart below.

Why is this curious? Because in all recent prior years, the year-over-year change was a lower increase in the SA data compared to the NSA.

 

And more to the point, here is the same chart showing just the difference between the two year over year data sets. Spot the outlier:

 

What does this mean? Simply, in January, the Department of Commerce decided to apply a far greater than historically applicable seasonal adjustment, boosting and skewing the data far more than history suggests it should, and giving the seasonally adjusted number the benefit of about $2.3 billion in extra “oomph” solely due to the discretion of the person applying a far stronger than deserve seasonal adjustment!

Sure enough, had an inline adjustment been applied, the Durable Goods ex Transports seasonally adjusted number would have been a decline sequentially, and in fact would have printed at -0.3%. Precisely in line with expectations. But that would hardly be enough to send the headline kneejerk algos into a momentum buying spree, which in a market that was threatening to drop on the overnight newsflow was not acceptable…

So much for seasonal adjustment not adjusting for the impact of the “harsh” January weather.


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1eAc1zV Tyler Durden

British Agents Have Seen Your Penis

Have a seat, agents. The show is about to begin.If you’ve used webcam chats via
Yahoo, there’s a chance that Great Britain’s surveillance agency,
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has collected still
images of you in bulk, including images of your junk you might have
flashed at some lucky person on the other end.

The latest documents leaked by Edward Snowden are about a
program called Optic Nerve, which bulk-collected screenshots of
Yahoo chats and stored them in databases, one image every five
minutes. The images were used in for experiments with automated
facial recognition to try to monitor terrorism suspects. The
Guardian
reports:

The agency did make efforts to limit analysts’ ability to see
webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar
usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large
numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they
were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar
Yahoo identifiers to your known target”.

Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ’s huge
network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed
into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into
NSA’s XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the
tool which identified Yahoo’s webcam traffic.

One of the big problems on GCHQ’s end was that the images were
full of wangs and butts and boobs:

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo
webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains “undesirable nudity”.
Discussing efforts to make the interface “safer to use”, it noted
that current “naïve” pornography detectors assessed the amount of
flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives
by incorrectly tagging shots of people’s faces as pornography.

GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the
collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest,
but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software
had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent
many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.

The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the
eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective
Optic Nerve users that “there is no perfect ability to censor
material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable
about such material are advised not to open them”.

Yahoo condemned the program and claim they didn’t know it was
going on:

“We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported
activity,” said a spokeswoman. “This report, if true, represents a
whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy that is
completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world’s
governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the
principles we outlined in December.

Read the full story
here.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1eA8HF7
via IFTTT

Nick Gillespie Interviews Wired’s Louis Rossetto

In 1971 a young writer named Louis Rossetto
co-authored a cover story in The New York Times
Magazine announcing that young people were turning
against the played-out politics of right and left. “Liberalism,
conservatism and leftist radicalism are all bankrupt philosophies,”
the piece proclaimed. In 1993, he launched
Wired. Rossetto sat down with Reason TV Editor Nick
Gillespie to talk about Wired’s vision, the promise of the
digital revolution, and why, “in its death throes, the megastate is
going to make a lot of mess.”

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1cbZOXT
via IFTTT

Another Recessionary Print: Core CapEx Posts First Annual Decline Since 2012

Today’s durable goods report appears to have been liked by the momentum-igniting algos, because despite the prior month’s negative revision (nobody cares about those), the January Seasonally adjusted number posted a modest beat of expectations, with the headline number declining only -1.0% compared to the expected drop of -1.7%. This more than offsets last month’s revision from -4.3% to -5.3%, but again all that matters for kneejerk reactions is the current print. We will have more to say about this shortly.

For now the only number that matters is the capital goods orders nondefense aircraft, aka core capex. It is here that while the sequential print was a modest increase of of 1.7%, compared to expectations of a -0.2% decline, it is the annual number that is of interest. We focus on this, because as can be seen on the chart, the annual change just posted its first annual decline in a year: in the past any such decline would mark the start of a recession, except of course for in 2012 when the New Normal central planning, and the trillions in Fed liquidity injections, made the business cycle as we know it meaningless.

So much for that $1+ trillion in QE: it is good to know that it went to stock buybacks and dividends… if not so much to actually investing in future growth.

 

And some of the other “spotty” charts. First: Core Capex Shipments:

Then Durable Goods:

And Durable Goods ex transports.

We can only conclude that it has been snowing for a long time.


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1fLk0yO Tyler Durden

Iniital Weekly Claims Surge To Highest Of The Year

According to the meteorologists interpreting last week’s initial claims report, it must have snowed a lot in the week ended February 22, because while no states had any numbers estimated, the initial claims for the past week jumped by 14K, to 348,000 – the highest weekly number in all of 2014, and the biggest miss of expectations of 335K in a month, with the prior week’s print revised as usual higher by 2K to 336K.

Curiously while the Oracles attribute the seasonally adjusted number to seasonal factors (the NSA print actually dropped from 321K to 311K), the DOL itself said there were no special factors in last week’s claims figures. So someone is lying. What is not lying, is that as the chart below clearly shows, the weekly claims level is now back to levels last seen in July of 2013 and is continuing to deteriorate. A lot of snow must have fallen in the past 7 months to explain this.


    



via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1cV5Km0 Tyler Durden