The US Endgame? Creating A Climate That “Could Easily Be Transformed Into War”

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne)), via SHTFPlan.com,

Most readers have been watching, as the U.S. and Russia seem to be positioning themselves along Cold War lines.  The posturing is not confined to maneuvering military assets; it also runs along economic lines, in which most warfare is at least based if not a major or the sole impetus.  Each power has sought to cement its claims/presence in areas bordering the sphere of influence of, or the actual territory of the other power.  Such posturing can be dangerous and lead to an incident that escalates into the uncontrollable.

Recently the news media has been abuzz with the Russian fighter aircraft buzzing the U.S. in the face: first the incident with the two fighters coming within 30 feet of an American naval vessel, and another separate incident involving aerial theatrics around a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft (a Boeing RC-135 intelligence-gathering spy plane).  The U.S. responded in kind on April 20 by allowing a guided missile destroyer, the U.S.S. Cook to encroach upon Russian borders while conducting maneuvers near Poland.  The U.S. claimed that Russian aircraft were doing fly-by’s to intimidate the destroyer.

Unlike the puissant response by John Kerry, feigning anger and doing nothing with the Russian aircraft incidences of the past two weeks, Russia is not playing with the destroyer incident.  The Russian ambassador to NATO, Alexander Grushko is reported by Reuters to have made the following statement:

“This is about attempts to exercise military pressure on Russia.  We will take all necessary measures, precautions, to compensate for these attempts to use military force.”

This statement by Grushko was not limited to the incident with the Cook.  NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has affirmed in the past week the intention of NATO to deploy command and control centers in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.  Exercises are currently being planned and prepared in Estonia by NATO air assets, to include participation by Sweden and Finland, both non-NATO members.  The exercises are scheduled to commence on April 28.

Although the exercises are superficially being dubbed maneuvers to help with control of civilian airports and coordination with them during “an emergency situation,” in reality they are both posturing and stationing aircraft on Russia’s western flank.  Also, the mainstream media barely mentioned the fact that last month, NATO fighter aircraft approached a Russian aircraft carrying Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defense Minister who was en route to inspect military facilities and readiness in Kalingrad, toward Russia’s western border.

Much has also been mentioned by NATO of Russian “aggression and encroachment” regarding Ukraine, still beset by more than a year of fighting in its eastern region between Ukrainian forces and ethnic Russian separatists.  NATO has condemned Russia for supplying these separatists with equipment, materials, and personnel.  Russia has responded to this accusation by declaring eastern Ukraine to be mired in a civil war.

There are also underlying economic issues to all of this.  As mentioned in previous articles, the entire involvement of NATO wanting to “assist” Russia in her support of Syria was nothing more than an attempt to oust Assad.  This, in turn took a back seat to the desires of NATO and the U.S. to annex a portion of Syria in order to enable a natural gas pipeline from Qatar into Western Europe for the purpose of negating Russia’s Gazprom from supplying Western Europe with natural gas.  Basically, the Russians solidified Assad’s position, bombed the insurgents into submission, left supplies and advisers with Assad, and withdrew from the board.  The U.S. was left stultified with egg on its face.

Now the BRIC nations are starting their markets up in earnest, backing their currencies with gold and trading in Shanghai, China, and Moscow in Russia.  These two nations, incidentally are #1 and #3 respectively regarding gold production.  The former produced 490 tons in 2015, and the latter put out 295 tons that year.  The two nations account for 25% of the gold production for the world.  Those are staggering numbers.  In addition to production, China and Russia have been building up their reserves of gold astronomically.

They are ranked 5th and 6th respective to gold reserves.  The U.S. is listed as “#1” but this is another faux pearl attached to others on a string, such as phony employment numbers and the inflated GDP as reported by parrots of the media and business insider networks who are, in reality inside of the pockets of the administration and the Federal Reserve.

Another point of interest that may have a great effect is that Congress is in the midst of passing legislation to hold Saudi Arabia partially accountable for the 9-11 attacks.

The Saudis responded with informing the state department that they will call in assets and all accounts payable if that is the case.  This could really domino and also spell an immediate end to the Petrodollar.  Wouldn’t that be interesting?  Congress would hit the Saudis up with a bill, and the Saudis would pay us in “fiat” Federal Reserve notes, maybe cutting off the oil supply as well.  Payment of the bill then may as well be in toilet paper.

To summarize, akin to ancient Rome, the United States has over-extended herself.  She has created a climate that could easily be transformed into a war on a slight pretext.  Wars, as it is well known are also a means a nation can extricate itself from debt and financial responsibility.  The dying Petrodollar system has been on life support for some time, and it appears other nations such as the BRIC’s are taking the initiative to return to a true monetary standard.  This is the same gold and silver standard that the U.S. should never have left in the first place.

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“Erdogan Is The Father Of ISIS” – New Documentary Outlines Turkey’s Support Of The Islamic State

Is Turkey the support behind ISIS? A documentary released by RT lays out evidence that would lead to that conclusion… one we first exposed here, here, and here… and is interestingly timed given Europe's potential desire to regain some leverage over Erdogan.

The documentary takes place just days after the YPG took back the town of Shaddadi (a former ISIS stronghold), and what is revealed will most certainly go under reported, but is important nonetheless. The documentary points out that the connection between Turkey and ISIS is strong. Killed ISIS fighters left behind passports indicating that the fighters all came through Turkey, and by their own admission, interviewed ISIS fighters admit to coming through Turkey with no issue at all. The locals who were working under ISIS say that oil was refined and sold to Turkey in return for money and weapons, and YPG fighters who fight against ISIS find that much of the ISIS supplies come from Turkey.

Here are some key elements of the documentary:

Captured ISIS fighters admit that coming through Turkey was easy. The fighters believe this to be the case due to the fact that it has a common enemy with ISIS, the YPG (People's Protection Unit). The YPG is yet another rebel group fighting in the Syrian civil war, and Turkey views the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) who call for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey. The fighter alleges that Turkey's president Recep Erdogan wants ISIS to control Syria in order to grow the oil trade.

"The prophet told us to build a caliphate. I spoke with my friend about it, they told me to go to Istanbul. I went to Turkey, I got into the airport, went through passport control. The formalities were a breeze. Crossing the border wasn't hard either, it was like crossing the street. A man told me that Islamic State had erased the borders, that there were no borders. I'd heard of it, but I didn't quite get it until I saw it myself. If Turkey wanted to stop the refugee influx, it could have long ago."

Passports left behind by those killed during the battle show that the fighters came through Turkey.

The locals, and sadly, many of them children, spoke of the horror everyone had lived under during ISIS' two year control of the town.

 

 

The documentary then goes through a flat once occupied by what appears to be an ISIS accountant of some sort, the flat had all kinds of oil related documents.

ISIS would take oil from the Jabisah oil field near the town of Shaddadi in Northern Syria, to Raqqa, and ultimately to Turkey where they would sell it says Ghazi Hussein, a resident of Hasakah province, who witnessed the terrorists having Jabisah under their control.

One local estimated that ISIS made a million dollars a week.

YPJ (women's division of the YPG) fighters explained that all of the gear found on ISIS fighters is from Turkey, and are curious as to why nobody is connecting the dots yet.

One captured ISIS fighter even says that "Erdogan is the father of ISIS."

You can watch the full documentary below [warning: contains content that may be disturbing]

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The Woodstock Of Crony Capitalism

By Adventures in Capitalism

The Woodstock Of Crony Capitalism

It’s been a while since I’ve attended the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK:NYSE) annual meeting. Between the tedium of little kids asking questions about how to live life, to the feel-good nature of the thing, I simply got repulsed. Why do a bunch of hard-nosed capitalists choose to act like Ned Flanders for a weekend—in Omaha of all places? It’s illogical and completely artificial.

Then, a few weeks back, as friends asked if I was attending this year, I had a certain realization—all this play-acting is simply Buffett, the puppet-master at his most brilliant. As he plows capital into highly regulated industries, he has the upper hand because he has skillfully crafted the image of the Mid-Western grandfather that can do no wrong. He can cozy up to regulators and politicians and get what he wants—without the added costs and distractions of lobbyists and consultants. Who wouldn’t want to get their permits in half the time and with a fraction of the cost? Want to block a Canadian pipe-line that would compete with your cherished rail-road? Become the President’s “economic advisor.” Want to abuse tax loopholes? Bemoan that your secretary pays a higher tax rate than you. You want to obstruct solar energy in Nevada? Elon Musk is a foreigner, Omaha is as American as it gets. Your railroad has an atrocious safety record? Well, at least we don’t have to worry about global warming from that pipeline…

I can go on and on, but I went from disgusted to awestruck. In this horribly overregulated world of ours, Buffett has evolved into the apex predator. Why wouldn’t he? Over his career, he’s consistently gone where the opportunities were. He’s gone from investing in “cigar-butts” when few other investors knew how to look for companies trading for less than cash, to branded products with pricing power that could thrive during the increasing inflation of the 70’s and early 80’s to a diversified book of high return on capital businesses during the great bull market that began in 1982. Over this time, he realized that he could leverage his bets with an insurance business that not only gave him access to cheap capital, but removed the headaches associated with bond maturities and margin calls.

Over the past fifteen years, the US has undergone a massive increase in pernicious regulation. Therefore, it seems only natural that opportunities would exist in the most regulated sectors of the economy. If you can get your permits and deny those permits to others, if you can avoid environmentalists and NIMBYs, if you can dodge taxes, if you can charm the cliques in Washington, you have an opportunity to earn outsized profits—especially if you have an endless fire-hose of cheap insurance float to deploy.

Crony capitalism is highly lucrative and as a Berkshire shareholder, I’ve reaped the rewards. Now, I once again want to sit at the feet of the master. How do you make people like you to the point that they give you a free pass on whatever you want? When you call up a regulator, do you even talk about the issues? Or do you talk about your Ukulele skills and Omaha little league? You have to admire what he’s accomplished and I will be there to watch him amuse the petite bourgeoisie. I see a world that continues to become more regulated—where a cloistered elite uses special interest groups to crush opponents and destroy businesses. Either you’re calling the shots, or you’re getting abused like a peasant.

The Koch Brothers spend hundreds of millions on elections. Soros spends similarly on fringe groups that break windows and overturn cars. Neither really accomplishes his goals. Buffett gets what he wants. In Davos, they chug bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild and plot how to pillage small nations. At Berkshire, we will eat Dilly bars and plot how to pillage the middle class. Capitalism is beautiful and crony capitalism is the end product of politicians who prostitute the laws. I don’t have the power to change the current rules, but I can certainly learn to thrive within them.

This is a long-winded way of saying that after a few years of sitting out the meeting, I’ll be there. If you want to grab a drink, email me and I’ll tell you where I am. Beer with friends is fun—free beer at someone else’s party is the true definition of value investing.

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What Happens If Everybody Pulls Their Money Out Of The Bank Today?

For every dollar that you have in the bank there is actually 0.00061 dollars available…in other words, there's 6 cents for every $100 dollars of deposits that you have at the bank.

As Mike Maloney explains in this brief clip, we live in an economic system that is made complicated by design. Basically, it’s set up so most people don’t even try to understand it.

Got Gold?

 

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Have We Found Gun Laws That Could Reduce U.S. Gun Deaths by Over 90 Percent? Not Really

A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last month comes to a startling, and pretty ridiculous, conclusion: that nationwide application of just three gun laws all at the same time would reduce American gun mortality by well well over 90 percent. (They predict those laws could could get our national firearm death rate down to 0.16 per 100,000 from 10.1 in the year they studied.) That’s a level lower than we’ve ever seen as far as gun death statistics reach.

That conclusion (as is likely the point with studies like this) was a real headline-maker, with CNN declaring “Study: 3 federal laws could reduce gun deaths by more than 90%“; Ars Technica alerting us “Three laws could cut US gun deaths by 90%, study says”; and PBS asking “Could these 3 laws reduce gun deaths by 90 percent?”

The study was written by Bindu Kalesan (of Boston University Department of Medicine), Matthew E Mobily (Epidemiology Department at the Mailman School of Public Health), Olivia Keiser (Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Bern), Jeffrey A Fagan (Columbia Law School and Department of Epidemiology), and Sandro Galea (Boston University School of Public Health).

The researchers looked at just three years of gun death data, 2008-10, derived from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System. Data for the years before and after were available for examination had they cared to do so to check the robustness of their conclusions.

The authors examined 25 firearm state laws relevant to firearms in place in 2009, and controlled for “state-specific characteristics such as firearm ownership for 2013, firearm export rates, and non-firearm homicide rates for 2009, and unemployment rates for 2010.”

That rather random selection of years for data or estimates which theoretically were available for the actual years they studied is also interesting and a little peculiar, other statistical reseachers have told me.

I asked Dr. Kalesan about the particular choices of years to study and other variables to control for, which seemed rather random to this layman. Her emailed response: 

This dynamic state of multiple laws makes it very difficult to obtain annual changes quantitatively equally between different states. This is the reason that we chose one year of gun laws (2009 laws) and two years of firearm fatality rates (the 2008 and 2010 firearm fatality rates). We consider year 2009 to be a momentous year, due to passing of the first radical pro-firearm legislation, where the Obama administration allowed carrying of guns in national parks, replacing the Reagan administration law that prohibited open carrying in national parks and wildlife refuges. This year represents the beginning of a turning point in the strengthening of pro-gun legislation in the US. Since we used only a slice of the data, we restricted the study to specific covariates and did not use a large number of social variables that may also pose statistical issues such as multicollinearity. 

Let’s walk through what the study claims to have found, and how it claims to have found it.

Most state level gun laws, they found, do not seem to be associated with reduced firearm mortality, with 16 of the 25 laws they examined either seeming to have no discernible effect or to increase firearm mortality (more on which later).

But the headline grabbing part is they insist that three of the nine laws they claim do reduce firearm deaths do so in an almost shockingly huge way, such that:

Projected federal level implementation of universal background checks for firearm purchase could reduce national firearm mortality from 10.35 to 4.46 deaths per 100,000 people, background checks for ammunition purchase could reduce it to 1.99 per 100,000, and firearm identification to 1.81 per 100,000.

That’s amazing, especially since the first thing a layman might think is, hm, if those laws would have that effect nationally, should it stand to reason they they could be seen to have had that effect, or something close to it, in the states where they actually exist, and if it is a genuine effect they’d continue to do so in years beyond the small handful the researchers looked at?

That seems to not be true.

Looking at 2014 gun death data for states (using their own classifications) that have universal background checks (which they say nationally would lead to a 4.46 death rate per 100,000 people), we find that of those seven states, only two of them had a gun death rate lower than that—Hawaii with 2.6 and Rhode Island with 3.0—and that two of them, Pennsylvania and Maryland, had gun death rates more than twice that.

To be more sure of causation, one ought to go back and see what their gun death rates were before the background check laws were passed. Not to mention the likely overreach involved in such a bold conclusion from a mere seven states, five of which have now higher death rates than they claim those laws would deliver to the nation.

Their even bolder claims about background checks for ammunition laws and firearm identification (meaning ballistic fingerprinting or microstamping of guns) look even more obviously unlikely. There were only three states with the former on which they based their wild claim: Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Their respective gun death rates, those three states with laws this study asserts would, if imposed nationally, bring down the national gun death rate to 1.99?

For 2014 (again, not a year they studied, but if those laws have causative effects we should see them moving forward as well) 9.0, 3.2, and 5.3 respectively. (Again, no looking at numbers and trends  before those allegedly powerful death-reducing laws passed, and no wondering if maybe three states aren’t a big enough sample on which to base their headline-grabbing conclusion.)

And what about those firearm identification laws which would, if imposed nationally, allegedly lead to a 1.81 gun death rate? Again only three states have them, in this case Maryland, New York, and California. And those states respective 2014 gun death rates were 9.0, 4.2, and 7.4. All quite a bit higher than 1.81.

According to the generally pro-gun control researcher Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy & Research, those states weren’t even enforcing those “firearm identification laws in a meaningful way in the years this study looked at.”

Dr. Kalesan in an email acknowledged that the question of law existing vs. law enforced is “a chronic challenge to this type of work….However, the passage of a law is associated with a range of hard-to-measure actions on the part of law enforcement, many in anticipation of the law being fully implemented, that in and of themselves may well result in changes, even if not directly linked to the law itself.”

She and her co-authors believe it is perfectly plausible to assume that anticipation on the part of would-be killers or self-killers that in the future a new handgun they buy would be microstamped has enormous effects on how many people die from guns.

The study itself says: 

We showed that federal-level implementation of the three most strongly associated laws— universal background checks for firearm purchase, background checks for ammunition, and requiring firearm identification by either microstamping or ballistic fingerprinting—would substantially reduce overall national firearm mortality…..On the basis of our model, federal implementation of all three laws could reduce national overall firearm mortality to 0·16 per 100000.

That’s down from 10.1 per 100,000 according to their own study, an amazing reduction of well over 90 percent. That sounds like a causal claim to me, but in an email despite the above language of the study itself Dr. Kalesan said that “We specifically state that this is a cross sectional study. It does not imply causation.” 

To the lay reader, those sort of conclusions all seems preposterous on its face. But these are scientists, doing statistical analysis, in a very famous scientific journal. Even this layman realizes that if there other influences that increased gun deaths beyond what they otherwise would be, that could explain why we don’t actually see those death-reducing effects in our complicated confusing reality.

“The question of what is or is not ‘plausible’ is ultimately an empiric question,” Dr. Kalesan wrote when I asked the basic, well, doesn’t this seem just utterly implausible? (Other pro-gun-control researchers feel the same, such as David Hemenway of Harvard’s School of Public Health who told the Washington Post that “That’s too big — I don’t believe that…These laws are not that strong. I would just be flabbergasted; I’d bet the house if you did [implement] these laws, if you had these three laws and enforced them really well and reduced gun deaths by 10 percent, you’d be ecstatic.”)

Kalesan writes:

….it strikes us as plausible indeed that background checks for purchase of ammunition—effectively making sure that we limit ammunition in the wrong hands— may in fact substantially reduce the gun death rate. In line with this, we found a somewhat smaller reduction in gun death rates for background checks for firearm purchases. The cumulative effect of three different laws, where we currently have at least effective federal laws, may very well be possible…..

However, we are very careful in the paper to note that we believe that this is a long-term effect and thus will take several years to occur after passing and implementation of the laws. We note in the paper: “Assessment of the effect of legislative policies is akin to assessment of the effect of natural experiments or real-world data. We expect the fall in mortality to be a long-term effect and might take years to occur.”

In Reason‘s February issue I wrote a wide-ranging survey of how gun social science applies to gun policy debates, “You Know Less Than You Think About Guns.”  The authors of this Lancet study are, as I was in that story, dubious of attempts to figure the effect of gun laws on gun deaths that rely on “an arbitrary legislative strength score” or “the effect of a select few laws.” 

They looked at 25 different laws separately then, and found nine that they conclude have some association with reduced firearms deaths:

state licence to sell firearms, keeping and retaining of sales records, at least one store security precaution, firearm identification, reporting of lost or stolen firearms, universal background checks for all firearms, safety training or testing requirement to purchase firearms, law enforcement involvement in obtaining of permits, and background checks for the purchase of ammunition.

The same techniques find that nine other common gun laws are associated with increased firearm deaths. In most cases, the causal connection that leads these laws to increase gun deaths would require some imagination to guess.

Obviously most of the laws listed below are obviously intended to increase gun safety, such as the specific closing of the “gun show loophole” (that is, applying background check laws to gun shows but not all gun sales) and “assault weapon bans.”

Still, here are a list of gun laws the study associates with increased gun deaths:

a requirement for the dealer to report records to the state for retention, allowing police inspection of stores, limiting the number of firearms purchased, a 3-day limit for a background-checks extension, background checks or permits during gun shows in states without universal background-check requirement (ie, closure of the gun show loophole), integrated or external or standard locks on firearms, a ban or restrictions placed on assault weapons, law enforcement discretion permitted when issuing concealed-carry permits, and stand-your-ground.

Not that this would be warranted either, but I saw no headlines crowing that social science in a prominent journal has proven that giving cops a say in issuing concealed carry permits, assault weapon bans, and laws limiting numbers of firearms purchased has been “proven by science” to lead to more gun deaths.

Do the statistical techniques used in this Lancet study support any actual reasonable confidence in the conclusion? Can it possibly be the case that background checks for ammo and microstamping would reduced our gun homicide rates to one lower than we pretty much have ever seen in any state anywhere ever?

Aaron Brown, author of Financial Risk Management for Dummies who uses statistical analysis in his work, examined the study at my request and found some interesting wrinkles, to start with that by their measures a combination of suggested gun laws would result in a negative gun death rate. Brown also notes that we have had federal background check laws, and wonders if Kalesan et al. are on to something, “why did we not see the predicting soaring gun death rate when the laws were enforced?”

Brown found lots of analytical curiosities that should have given the researchers pause. For example, “Why would record keeping and retention rules cut gun death rates by 21% in Alaska, but raise them 66% in Florida (the 95% confidence intervals are listed as reduction of 15% to 26% in Alaska, and an increase of 47% to 88% in Florida). Essentially all the rules have wildly varying effects by state in their model, this is not even an extreme example. So not only is it absurd that these minor rules could make such huge differences, but it’s doubly absurd that they have wildly different effects in different states.”

On the microstamping point, Brown, like Johns Hopkins’ Webster above, notes that the laws weren’t even in practical effect during the years the researchers looked at, but if they were, given that the three states supposedly with the laws “comprise 20% of the US population, and their gun death rates obviously wouldn’t be affected by a federal law duplicating their (alleged) state law, there would be a national rate of 1.4 per 100,000 even if the other 47 states and the District of Columbia go their rates down to zero.”

Another of the many problems with the study, Brown notes, “is they have only 51 states and they use 29 independent variables. What that does is make every variable look highly significant, but in mixed directions. That’s why they find such gigantic and highly statistically significant effects in both directions, from laws that couldn’t have anywhere near those impacts.”

Brown provided a laymen’s example analogous to how the Lancet researchers tried to prove their point.

A guy claims, “Women are all worse drivers than men.” You say, “What about Danica Patrick who was third in the Indy 500?” He replies, “Except for Go Daddy girls.” You say, “What about Aubrey McClendon who drove his car into an embankment?” He comes back, “Except for energy company CEO’s.” Now a few of these kinds of qualifications might be reasonable, but suppose there are only 51 drivers, and it takes him 29 qualifications before you can’t think of any women who drive better than men, adjusting for his qualifications. Obviously there’s no information there.

Looking at so many different laws at once allows the researchers to believe that certain laws would have had amazing gun death reducing effects by simultaneously assuming that other ones had improbably amazing gun death increasing effects. As Brown notes:

It’s the multivariable problem. Let’s say you checked only one law. 25 states have the law and have 9 gun deaths per 100,000, and the 25 that don’t have 10 gun deaths per 100,000. You might guess that the law cuts gun deaths by 10%. It wouldn’t be proof, maybe low violence states pass more gun laws rather than the other way around, or maybe it’s random noise, but it does suggest that the law might work. You can’t get too crazy with one variable.

But let’s say you checked 50 laws instead of one. You could come up with a model that predicted every state’s gun death rate exactly, by saying some laws had a gigantic positive effect, and some a gigantic negative effect. You’d just choose the effects carefully so they offset in every state. But if you the picked the three biggest negative effects, they would predict that passing those three laws and no others would reduce the gun death rate far lower than any one actual state.

The overarching problem is that this sort of statistical analysis cannot in a certain sense prove what these sort of studies think they are proving minus more understanding of reality.

You can observe, Brown explains, that “states with some particular gun law have lower gun death rates. That suggests the law might reduce gun deaths….Now a statistician will ask, how many states have the law? If it’s only one state, there’s a 50% chance it would have a below median gun death rate even if the law makes no difference. So it’s no evidence at all. Two states is still a 25% chance. Only if you have five states (1 chance in 32 if the law makes no difference) or more and all have below median gun death rates do you have a conventionally significant result (the probability of the result is less than 5% if the law doesn’t affect gun death rates)….”

But the raw statistical fact of statistical significance doesn’t tell you much causal except that you’ve observed the correlation of law and result successfully. But there is so much more work to be done, because you don’t have any idea if the law caused the lower death rates, or if, maybe, places that have low gun death rates are more likely for some reason to pass such laws. You’d need to check what happened both before and after the laws were passed, which this study doesn’t do. And you’d need a plausible story by which the correlation could imply causation.

“This study in particular has no logical case,” Brown says. “They show that if you assume some gun laws cause big increases in gun death rates and come cause big decreases, and which laws do which vary by state, you can choose numbers so that your predicted gun death rates match the data pretty well.”

This study was pretty widely shellacked even from a community of researchers who staunchly believe in the importance of tough gun laws. Besides the critiques from Webster and Hemenway quoted and linked above, another Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research faculty member (an institution generally pro-gun control), Cassandra Crifasi, bluntly told PBS: “To put it lightly, I was surprised to see a paper of this quality, or lack of quality, in a journal like the Lancet.”.

But I suspect for many the news headlines crowing about gun laws and 90 percent cuts in gun deaths and scientific studies in reputable journals accomplished what I’m always darkly suspicious is the real point of “social science” like this: to get it stuck in the heads of people only half-paying attention that “science has proven” that we need tougher gun laws and that they’ll do only and amazingly great things. But it is simply not reasonable to believe that it’s true or close to true.

I critiqued last year an earlier shoddy study from the American Journal of Public Health claiming universal background check and permit requirements to legally obtain a gun in Connecticut proved such laws can or will reduce gun homicides by 40 percent.

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Why The Hard-Sell For The “Self-Driving” Car?

Via EricPetersAutos.com,

Why the hard-sell for self-driving cars?

This week, Ford and Volvo announced they are forming a “coaliton” – along with Google – to push not only for the development of self-driving cars, but for federal “action” (their term) to force-feed them to us.

Why?

The reasons are obvious: There’s money – and control – in it.

To understand what’s going on, to grok the tub-thumping for these things, it is first of all necessary to deconstruct the terminology. The cars are not “self-driving.” This implies independence.

And “self-driving” cars are all about dependence.

The “self-driving” car does what it has been programmed to do by the people who control it. Which isn’t you or me. Instead of you controlling how fast you go, when to brake – and so on – such things will be programmed in by … programmers. Who will – inevitably- program in parameters they deem appropriate. What do you suppose those parameters will be?

“Safety” will be the byword, of course.

 

But the point being, you will no longer have any meaningful control over (ahem!) “your” car. You’ll pay for the privilege of “owning” it, of course. But your “ownership” will not come with the right to control what you “own.”

It will be a tag-team of the government and the car companies who control (and thereby, effectively own) “your” car.

And thereby, you.

Not only will how you drive (well, ride) be under their control, they will also know where and when you go. It will be easy to keep track of you in real time, all the time. And if they decide they don’t want you to go anywhere at all, that’s easy, too. Just transmit the code and the car is auto-immobilized.

You only get to go when you have their permission to go. It will be a very effective way of reducing those dangerous “greenhouse gas” emissions, for instance.

 

If this all sounds paranoid, consider the times we live in. Reflect upon what we know for a fact they are already doing.   

For instance, making the case – in court – that we (the putative “owners” of “our” vehicles) ought to be legally forbidden from making any modifications to them. The argument being that such modifications could potentially affect various “safety” systems and they do not want to be held liable for any resultant problems that may occur.

This argument easily scales when applied to the self-driving car, which we will be forced to trust with our lives at 70 MPH.

For at least 30 years now – since the appearance of anti-lock brakes back in the ‘80s – the focus of the car industry has been to take drivers and driving out of the equation. To idiot-proof cars. This is easier – and more profitable – than merely building cars that are fun to actually drive.

How much profit margin has been added to a new car via (6-8) air bags? We pay more for the car, more to repair the car (and so, more to insure the car).

This also scales.

 

The technology that will be necessary to achieve the “self-driving” car is very elaborate and very expensive.

Thus, very profitable.

Which by itself would be fine… provided we could choose. But we will be told. Like we’re told we must have 6-8 air bags and all the rest of it.

This is the “action” Ford and Volvo and Google are seeking.

I personally have no doubt that, in time, they will make it illegal to own a car that is not “self-driving.” Well, to actually drive the thing. Static museum displays may still be permitted.

Tesla, the state-subsidized electric car – already has the necessary “self-driving” technology and Elon Musk is pushing it, hard. He says it’s a gotta-have because people cannot be trusted to drive themselves. There’s a clue for you as to the mindset of our masters.

But the current price of the least expensive Tesla is just under $70,000.

This is not economically viable when the average family’s income is in the neighborhood of $50,000. And keep in mind, that means half the people to the left of average make less than $50,000.

They cannot afford to buy $25,000 cars.

But maybe they can afford to rent them.

This appears to be where we are headed. The perpetual rental. It makes sense, too – from an economic point-of-view. Why buy that which you don’t really own because it’s not under your control? It would be absurd to buy the bus that you ride to work in. It is arguably just as absurd to buy the car you are driven to work in, too.

 

The object of this exercise appears to be perpetual debt-servitude as well as placing almost everyone fully and finally under the complete control of the powers that be. Who are no longer just the powers in government. The distinction between state power and corporate power is so blurry now as to be almost impossible to parse. The two are effectively the same thing, working hand in hand for their mutual benefit.

Remember Il Duce:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Sadly, there is no push back. Or doesn’t seem to be. The cattle appear to like the idea of being herded. It is depressing.

The passivity and acceptance of it all.

Must be something in the water.

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“There’s Some Crazy Stuff Going On In New York” As Rental Glut Finally Hits The Bottom Line

As a natural consequence of the Manhattan luxury real-estate slowdown that we’ve documented previously (here and here), REIT’s that have exposure to the Big Apple are starting to feel the impact to their bottom line.

According to reports, REIT Equity Residential, the U.S.’s biggest publicly traded multifamily landlord, fully intended to increase net effective rents in Manhattan during the first quarter, but a glut of new supply provided renters some leverage, and ultimately the company was forced to not only scrap the rent increases, but to give an estimated $600,000 in concessions in order to secure tenants, reducing growth in the area by 50 basis points.

There is one word to describe the NY rental market right now: glut.

In March, Manhattan tenants were offered sweeteners, such as a month’s free rent or payment of broker’s fees, on 14 percent of all new leases, up from 4.8 percent a year earlier, according to a report by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Bloomberg writes that property owners had to whittle an average of 2.2 percent from their asking rents to reach a deal, as the vacancy rate rose to 2.42 percent, the highest for March in nine years of record-keeping, the firms said.

New York City just turned very quickly and more deeply than we expected. We had to join the concession party to close deals.” Chief Operating Officer David Santee said during the Q1 earnings call, also adding that with the city accounting for 20% of the firm’s revenue “if you can’t achieve 3 or 4 percent rate growth here, then it’s going to impact your bottom line.”

And it certainly is impacting the bottom line, as the firm lowered full year guidance for funds from operations to $3.05-$3.15 a share, down from an earlier forecast that had an upper range of $3.20.

 

A major culprit for the sudden cooling in the market appears to be the dropoff in well-paying, read banker, jobs and salaries: “The challenge in New York is the disparity between the luxury apartments that have been delivered and will be delivered” and the salaries paid in the city, Santee said. “There are many jobs in the $90,000 to $100,000 range, but it takes $130,000 a year in New York City to afford a one-bedroom apartment.”

Whatever the reason, EQR shares took a hit on the news.

As CFO Mark Parrell added on the call, the weaker-than-expected performance of New York City properties means the high end of the company’s original revenue guidance for the year is “unattainable.” He added that the real estate investment trust said in its earnings report that it expects revenue growth from properties open at least a year to be no higher than 5 percent, compared with the 5.25 percent upper limit it projected previously.

The good news: “other than New York, demand is very robust,” Santee said. Alas, with rent inflation soaring at over 8% now, or 4 times higher than wage growth…

 

… we doubt demand will be “very robust” for a long time.

Meanwhile, as more than 6,700 newly built apartments in Manhattan are listed for rent, with most of the units falling in the luxury, or top 10% tier of the market, where the median rent fell 3.5% in March from a year earlier, oversupply will continue to be an issue for developers and REIT’s alike.

At Equity Residential’s Prism building, a rental-and-condo tower near Madison Square Park built in partnership with Toll Brothers Inc. and completed last year, the new owner of a condo listed it for lease at $800 less than Equity Residential’s units there, Santee said.

“There’s some crazy stuff going on in New York” the COO concluded. We expect more “craziness” as the cooling of the entire US economy has finally entered the Tri-state area.

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Italy’s Bank Bailout Fund Already One Third Empty After First Bank Rescue

When one month ago, Italy was scrambling to unveil a “last resort” bad bank bailout fund (which eventually received the name Atlante, or Atlas, for the Titan god who was condemned to hold up the sky for eternity, only in this case he is holding up Italy’s €360 billion in bad loans), many wondered why the rush? While the explicit purpose of the fund was to allow Italy to bailout insolvent banks without the involvement of the state which is expressly prohibited by the Eurozone, the scramble appeared erratic almost frentic, and was one of the reasons why Italian bank stocks tumbled in early February.

The question: “Does someone know something?”

It turns out the answer was yes, because as we learn today, “Atlas” is about to become the proud new owner of around 90% of Italy’s Popolare di Vicenza after investors only bought a fraction of the mid-tier bank’s €1.5 billion IPO, Reuters reports

Popolare di Vicenza, which was due to announce the outcome of the public share offer later on Friday, said earlier in the day that it had raised €4.25 billion, at the lower end of a 4-6 billion euro range it had initially targeted, from 67 mostly domestic financial institutions.

And if the low take-up for the Popolare di Vicenza share sale is confirmed, Atlas is about to see nearly a third of its fire-power invested in a single bank.

Alessandro Penati, chairman of the Quaestio investment firm which manages the fund, said Atlante would aim to sell any stake it may get in Vicenza after 18 months. Good luck with finding buyers unless the ECB is openly monetizing bank stocks by then, which at the rate Mario Draghi is going (and especially if he listens to advice from JPM) is a distinct possilbity.

“Atlante has the financial resources to fully support Popolare Vicenza’s capital increase,” said Penati. The fund will probably buy most of the shares as institutional investors showed little interest.

According to Reuters, it was not immediately clear whether Popolare di Vicenza, which must raise the cash to comply with capital requirements set by the European Central Bank (ECB), would have enough free float to list on the market next week as planned. The minimum free float required to list is 25 percent of the share capital, but the Milan bourse can make exceptions.

Meanwhile, Atlas’ Penati said his fund was set up as a backstop investor to avoid banks like Popolare di Vicenza being wound down and triggering a crisis for the whole industry. What he didn’t say is that “backstop investor” also means owning over 90% of the bank. 

The fund targets an annual return of around 6 percent and will spend 70 percent of its cash to invest in cash calls at ailing banks, he said. He added that the rest would be used to buy junior tranches of bad debt from banks at a higher price than that offered by funds specialised in distressed securities, but not at book value – meaning banks would have to book further writedowns.

Traders said that contributed to pushing bank share prices down on Friday, with UniCredit dropping 5 percent.

One big problem for Italian banks is that they are saddled with €360 billion of NPLs but are reluctant to sell them at a discount because that would erode their capital.

Another big problem is that the very same Atlante, announced earlier today that it has only manged to raise €4.25 billion from 67 Italian and international intuitions, a tiny fraction of what will ultimately be required.  While analysts say Atlante should have enough money to buy between 20 billion and 35 billion euros of gross non-performing loans, for now it has about one fifth to one ninth of that amount. And as of this moment it has €1.5 billion less.

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Patrick Buchanan: At Last, America First!

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America.

The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back.

Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured by his five-state sweep Tuesday, confirms it, as does his foreign policy address of Wednesday.

Two minutes into his speech before the Center for the National Interest, Trump declared that the “major and overriding theme” of his administration will be — “America first.” Right down the smokestack!

Gutsy and brazen it was to use that phrase, considering the demonization of the great anti-war movement of 1940-41, which was backed by the young patriots John F. Kennedy and his brother Joe, Gerald Ford and Sargent Shriver, and President Hoover and Alice Roosevelt.

Whether the issue is trade, immigration or foreign policy, says Trump, “we are putting the American people first again.” U.S. policy will be dictated by U.S. national interests.

By what he castigated, and what he promised, Trump is repudiating both the fruits of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy, and the legacy of Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism.

When Ronald Reagan went home, says Trump, “our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which ended in one foreign policy disaster after another.”

He lists the results of 15 years of Bush-Obama wars in the Middle East: civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans killed, trillions of dollars lost, a vacuum created that ISIS has filled.

Is he wrong here? How have all of these wars availed us? Where is the “New World Order” of which Bush I rhapsodized at the U.N.?

Can anyone argue that our interventions to overthrow regimes and erect democratic states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen have succeeded and been worth the price we have paid in blood and treasure, and the devastation we have left in our wake?

George W. Bush declared that America’s goal would become “to end tyranny in our world.” An utterly utopian delusion, to which Trump retorts by recalling John Quincy Adams’ views on America: “She goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

To the neocons’ worldwide crusade for democracy, Trump’s retort is that it was always a “dangerous idea” to think “we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming Western democracies.”

We are “overextended,” he declared, “We must rebuild our military.” Our NATO allies have been freeloading for half a century.

NAFTA was a lousy deal. In running up $4 trillion in trade surpluses since Bush I, the Chinese have been eating our lunch.

This may be rankest heresy to America’s elites, but Trump outlines a foreign policy past generations would have recognized as common sense: Look out for your own country and your own people first.

Instead of calling President Putin names, Trump says he would talk to the Russians to “end the cycle of hostility,” if he can.

“Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave,” sputtered Sen. Lindsey Graham, who quit the race to avoid a thrashing by the Donald in his home state of South Carolina.

But this writer served in Reagan’s White House, and the Gipper was always seeking a way to get the Russians to negotiate. He leapt at the chance for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik.

“Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war,” says Trump, “unlike other candidates, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.”

Is that not an old and good Republican tradition?

Dwight Eisenhower ended the war in Korea and kept us out of any other. Richard Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, negotiated arms agreements with Moscow, and made an historic journey to open up Mao’s China.

Reagan used force three times in eight years. He put Marines in Lebanon, liberated Grenada and sent FB-111s over Tripoli to pay Col. Gadhafi back for bombing a Berlin discotheque full of U.S. troops.

Reagan later believed putting those Marines in Lebanon, where 241 were massacred, to be the worst mistake of his presidency.

Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition. It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East.

The New York Times headline declared that Trump’s speech was full of “Paradoxes,” adding, “Calls to Fortify Military and to Use It Less.”

But isn’t that what Reagan did? Conduct the greatest military buildup since Ike, then, from a position of strength, negotiate with Moscow a radical reduction in nuclear arms?

“We’re getting out of the nation-building business,” says Trump.

“The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” No more surrenders of sovereignty on the altars of “globalism.”

Is that not a definition of a patriotism that too many among our arrogant elites believe belongs to yesterday?

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Caught On Tape: The Last Minutes Of Life Of A Bumbling ISIS Fighter

Amid pay cuts and sex-slave incentives, it appears not only is ISIS fighters' enthusiasm flagging but their IQ appears to be dropping too. As the following rather shockingly comical clip via VICE News shows a cluster of shambolic and frenzied ISIS extremists were 'caught on tape' as they struggle to fire rockets at Kurdish pashmerga troops near Mosul, Iraq.

As NY Post reports, the footage shows the chaos inside an improvised armored carrier as the fighters shout at each other while bullets fly.

 

“Careful not to shoot at our brothers!” one yells. “Where is my magazine?” another shouts.

One asks for a rocket launcher.

“The rockets for firing at people or armored vehicles?” one of the discombobulated men asks.

When someone on the vehicle fires his assault rifle, another yells at him: “The bullet casings are hitting us! Be careful, Abu Abdullah!”

When one finally fires a rocket, all hell breaks loose and debris lands inside the open-air carrier.

“Good job, but you roasted us, too!” one yells. “What is wrong with you, Abu Hajaar?”

“I need a rocket for firing at people!” one of them pleads.

Finally, their carrier is hit and the men jump out of the burning vehicle.

“The driver has died!” one yells.

The jihadist whose headcam caught the pandemonium is eventually mortally wounded by the enemy forces.

“I’ve been shot!” he yells as the rest of his comrades retreat.

Source: NYPost.com

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