Month: January 2018

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The Republicans’ delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russiagate investigation is giving weight to the presstitutes’ claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump coverup that is not believable. Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation.

Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the stupidity of Republicans. Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:

1) Republicans are very national security conscious. They don’t want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.

2) Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.

3) The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by neoconservatives who stress the alleged “Russian threat.”

4) The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East and against Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.

5) Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington’s expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby, undermining US power.

Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office. The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA’s media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate.

Once the investigation was under way, the presstitutes kept the scandal alive hoping to convince enough Americans that Trump must have done something—“where there is smoke, there is fire”—that justifies his removal. It worked against Richard Nixon, but not against Ronald Reagan, and Trump is no Reagan.

 

If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies.

Many Americans say they don’t need the House Intelligence Report, because they don’t believe the Russiagate BS in the first place. They miss the point. They need the report, because those responsible for this attempt at a coup must be identified, charged, and prosecuted for their act of high treason.

This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state.

Despite my recent postings, many people do not understand that the somewhat redacted FISA court document that has been declassified and released and explained by myself, William Binney, and former US Attorney Joe di Genova contains admissions by the FBI and DOJ that they improperly spied and obtained warrants from the court under false pretenses. In other words, we have it on the authority of the FISA court itself that the FBI and DOJ have admitted to the court their transgressions. When Department of Justice (sic) congressional liaison Stephen Boyd says the DOJ is “unaware of any wrongdoing,” he is lying through his teeth. The DOJ has already confessed its wrongdoing to the FISA court.

(See Lendman on Boyd’s claim that releasing the memo would harm national security and ongoing investigations. This is always the claim made when government has to cover up its crimes. )

When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to “mistakes” and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these “mistakes” and corrections that the FISA court document reveals.

In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States.

A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington’s cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all. Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America’s final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington. The constraints on Washington’s ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2FhJUuK Tyler Durden

They call them “deepfakes.”

It’s the term for pornography made using artificial intelligence-assisted technology to superimpose a person’s face on another performer’s body – essentially allowing the producer to create fake porn featuring celebrities, politicians or even average every people.

In a report published Wednesday, Motherboard recounted how they discovered a user on Reddit responsible for producing convincing porn videos featuring celebrities like Gal Gadot, Maisie Williams and Taylor Swift.

Pretty soon, the technology used to create “deepfakes” will be widely available enough to be used by extortionists and criminals with only a cursory understanding of how the software works. Another redditor discovered by Motherboard even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process.

Two months ago, the first redditor mentioned above created a subreddit dedicated to the practice.

In that short time, the subreddit has already amassed more than 15,000 subscribers. Within the community, the word “deepfake” itself is now a noun for the kinds of neural-network generated fake videos their namesake pioneered, according to Motherboard.

Another “deepfake” auteur created an app called FakeApp, a user-friendly application that allows anyone to recreate these videos with their own datasets. The app is based on deepfakes’ algorithm, but another user who goes by deepfakeapp created FakeApp without the help of the original deepfakes. While none of these people divulged their identity to Motherboard, the user known as Deepfakeapp said in a direct message that his goal with creating FakeApp was to make deepfakes’ technology available to people without a technical background or programming experience.

“I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks,” he said. “Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.”

Peter Eckersley, chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, fears the technology will soon reach the point where fakes are virtually indistinguishable for authentic videos.

“I think the current version of the app is a good start, but I hope to streamline it even more in the coming days and weeks,” he said. “Eventually, I want to improve it to the point where prospective users can simply select a video on their computer, download a neural network correlated to a certain face from a publicly available library, and swap the video with a different face with the press of one button.”

Fakes posted in the subreddit have already been pitched as real on other websites; a deepfake of Emma Watson taking a shower was uploaded by CelebJihad, a celebrity porn site that regularly posts hacked celebrity nudes, as a “never-before-seen video” purportedly from the user’s “private collection.”

 

Here’s an example of a “deepfake”

Other redditors have taken video trained from celebrities’ Instagram accounts and used it to convincingly fake Snapchat messages.

“Deepfakes” are hardly a new phenomenon. Last July, we reported on a project conducted by Stanford’s Matthias Niessner that managed to create several faked videos of former US President Barack Obama.

Soon, this technology could create problems for everybody, from governments, to corporations to the news media – which will now find it even more difficult to distinguish veritable “Fake News” from reality.

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

The United States was a nation founded by immigrants, and immigration has always had a clear-cut path toward American citizenship. The United States was built by successive waves of immigrants who came to America in search of a better life. There is a difference between being an immigrant and being an illegal alien. Immigrants follow the rules of the nation they emigrate to and pursue a legitimate path toward permanent citizenship or toward legal employment in the country. Illegal aliens bypass all legal systems in place…rules designed to protect citizens of the country in numerous ways.

For the past 100 years, the United States has pursued a laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. Much of this was because American businesses and industries such as farming and mining, for example, wanted illegal aliens to come here. They wanted to pay them under the table, avoiding the taxes and withholding, and circumventing the minimum wage. The public was also complicit: turning a blind eye, provided that it didn’t directly affect them.

But it did…and year after year, tens of thousands of illegal aliens crossed our borders and started their new lives in America…at the expense of American citizens.

Now it has changed into something completely different:

Now it is a part of the socialist playbook based on Cloward and Piven, and Alinsky’s actions and doctrines to destroy the United States from within; it has become a global movement toward the goal of global governance.

This is not immigration, either in the U.S. or worldwide. It is the planned, systematic destruction of national identities and sovereignties. This is being accomplished in several manners:

1. The religious differences are so pronounced between these aliens who are Muslims and the citizens of the traditionally-Christian nations of Europe that underlying tensions are one step away from warfare between citizens and aliens.
2. Laws in these countries are being “restructured” to facilitate the insertion of these aliens against the host-citizens’ wills.
3. The efforts (globally) are coordinated and funded by a consortium of oligarchs and politicians who are utilizing the chaos, confusion, and instability to destroy the nations and push them toward global governance.
4. Armies of NGO’s (Nongovernmental Organizations) under the guises of “humanitarian efforts” or “political dialogue” are in reality “embassies” and front-man representatives to carry out the planned dissolution of national borders and recruit citizenry in the form of “5^th columnists” to destroy these nations from within.

The world of George Orwell’s “1984” solidifies more by the day: increased surveillance, decreasing freedoms, and tensions throughout the world to keep whole populations unbalanced while fueling the war machine with money…taxed monies…of the global Military Industrial complex.

Van Jones: “Top down, bottom up.”

Encouraging “revolutions” by the stupid, uncomprehending youth, who all believe the nonsense of “making a difference” when what they are doing is playing the parts of puppets in the globalists’ hands. Guess what?  The globalists will round up the “new Bohemians,” and shoot them in the back of the head in the end.

Hungary and Czechoslovakia are now the only nations with leaders that are standing up against the tide of the invasion of Europe: the planned and purposed insertion of illegal aliens into Europe’s nations. All of this is designed to destroy the homogeneity of the populations, destroy the borders, language, culture, and religions of the nations, and enable the removal of national boundaries…thus creating gigantic, corporate “continents” for “juntas” of oligarchs and politicos to rule over.

Gefira released a piece on 1/19/18 entitled The Incredible Shrinking Population: By 2080 Italians Will Be a Minority in Their Own Nation. The article points out that mass “migration” from Asia and Africa will overwhelm and overshadow a population that already has a lowered birth rate. The article is a “representative slice” of the whole pie, as this is being duplicated in every nation in Europe except for those two previously mentioned.

The President is enforcing the laws, and the illegals in the U.S. are being deported. There is another side to the seesaw that bears mention, however, as “every rose has its thorn.” The “thorn” here being this:

The illegals being deported from the United States are not “evicted” at a rate to make a dent, and the screws are tightening down on scrutinizing individual citizens: a step away from such things as a national ID card and a permanent police state.

The evil genius of the globalists is their capability to “seesaw” the game, and as they accomplish one thing (perhaps hidden), if it appears to be “good” or in opposition to their plans? Under closer scrutiny, it shows a hidden agenda, a purpose that seems good on the surface but upon closer examination can be changed to serve nefarious intentions.

Thus, it is with the fostered insertions of illegal aliens into the countries of Europe and the United States. The ironic part is that these aliens are unwitting tools whom the globalists could care less about and are just using. Once the world is under their rule, the aliens will be dealt with in the manner outlined with the “young revolutionaries” before…along with the rest of the citizens that cannot be made compliant in the global governance coming closer to fruition every day.

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America is living through stressful times.

According to the American Psychological Association, a majority of people from each generation would agree that their country is at a low point looking back on their lifetime experience.

 

As Statista’s Dyfed Loesche notes, this even applies to the generation of the over 72-year olds who witnessed such devastating events as the Japanese Attack on Pearl Habor and the ensuing Second World War.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Of all generations, it’s the Xers who are most pessimistic about this time and age, according to the findings published in the report State of our Nation from November 2017.

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Submitted by Leith Fadel via Al-Masdar News,

The Kurdish authorities in the Afrin Canton of Aleppo have called on the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Assad to defend the region from the attacking Turkish forces, the SBS News reported Thursday evening.

According to the SBS News report, a statement posted on the website for the Afrin authorities underscored the complexity of the Syrian war and the ongoing problems caused by the Turkish aggression in northern Syria.

“We call on the Syrian state to carry out its sovereign obligations towards Afrin and protect its borders with Turkey from attacks of the Turkish occupier … and deploy its Syrian armed forces to secure the borders of the Afrin area,” the statement said, as quoted by SBS News. A similar report was released by Al-Mayadeen TV on Wednesday; however, it was later denied by the official media wing of the  Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

 

Image via Al Masdar News

Meanwhile, as “Operation Olive Branch” entered its sixth day, Ankara’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has stated that Turkey has no intention of targeting or attacking troops of the Syrian Arab Army. Cavusoglu said this during an interview with journalists on Thursday. The Minister of Foreign Affairs said that Turkey wished to preserve Syria’s unity, and as such will not attack any Syrian Arab Army forces or equipment.

“While they do not attack us, we do not need to consider them as our target. Up to this day, we have not taken such actions,” Cavusoglu said. “Damascus knows that the YPG militias (People’s Protection Units) want to divide Syria. Whereas Turkey and Damascus as well as the opposition forces are all supportive of the territorial integrity of Syria within its current borders. We believe that the Syrian regime will not cooperate with terrorists,” the minister added.

Turkey considers the Kurdish YPG militias in Syria to be an affiliate of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is labeled a terrorist organization by Ankara. The Turkish offensive came in direct reaction to recent statements by the US and its Kurdish allies in northern Syria, that they would form a US-trained “border security force” consisting out of Kurdish troops, a move seen by many as a step towards secession of the Kurdish areas from Syria.

Despite Turkey claiming it seeks to “help” Syria in preserving its unity, the fact that its offensive entered Syrian soil without permission from Damascus, combined with the fact that Turkey has been actively supporting Syrian “moderate rebels” of the so-called Free Syrian Army for years now as part of Operation Euphrates Shield, have made Damascus very wary of the Olive Branch operation.

Meanwhile, after multiple accusations coming from Turkish officials this week that the US is supporting a “terror army” in northern Syria, the Pentagon has denied providing any training or arms to the Kurds located in the Afrin area in particular, according to a statement by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. speaking to reporters on Thursday.

“We haven’t trained or provided equipment for any of the Kurds that are in Afrin pocket. We are focused on the Euphrates River Valley operations to the South and to the East,” McKenzie said.

When asked about the plans about the weapons provided to the Syrian Kurds, McKenzie said, “We carefully track weapons that are provided to them.” And he said further, “We ensure that they to the maximum extent possible don’t fall into the wrong hands, and we continue discussions with the Turks on those issues,” he said.

Last Saturday, the Turkish Armed Forces launched the massive operation against the Kurdish forces in Afrin. Damascus has strongly condemned Ankara’s actions, with the Syrian Foreign Ministry calling them a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

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For years, many had speculated – for which they were promptly cast as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists – that when it comes to achieving illegal goals, including but not limited to creating “false flag” terrorism and political assassinations, few are as skilled and industrious as the CIA and Mossad. Especially Mossad.

Only, as so often happens, most (if not all) such “conspiracy theories” turn out to be truth, in this case exposed thanks to the work of Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, whose just published explosive book “‘Rise and Kill First: The secret history of Israel’s targeted killings” details such Israeli plans as the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat which included a plot to blow up passenger planes and football stadiums.

Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names.

The result is the first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored killings.

An excerpt from the book published in the NYT , details how when former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was defense minister, he ordered the Israeli army to shoot down a passenger plane carrying hundreds of innocent people Arafat was thought to be on. Arafat was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the time. Although the plan was eventually called off, it was allegedly one of a list of plans to to assassinate the Palestinian leader.

Bergman spoke to hundreds of intelligence and defense officials and studied classified documents which have revealed a “hidden history, surprising even in the context of Israel’s already fierce reputation.”

“I found that since World War II, Israel has used assassination and targeted-killing more than any other country in the West, in many cases endangering the lives of civilians,” Bermen chillingly wrote, in the process unleashing a whole new series of conspiracies theories, many of which will certainly also be confirmed.

In another assassination attempt in October 1982, Mossad set its sights on a plane which was carrying 30 wounded children, victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre by Phalange militia in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.  

According to the book, Tsomet, the Mossad unit which recruits assets overseas, had heard Arafat would take a plane from Athens to Cairo. Caesarea, the Mossad unit responsible for targeted killings, sent two operatives to wait at Athens airport. F-15 fighters were placed on alert. Mossad eventually realized the man was not Arafat, but his brother – who was bringing wounded Palestinian children to Cairo for medical treatment.

As Bergmen explains, he first heard of that assassination plan in 2011, but his source made him promise to wait until a second person came forward with the story. In another case detailed in the book, fighter jets surrounded a commercial flight from Jordan to Tunisia, while in another incident, they disrupted a Boeing 707’s communications, Haaretz reports.  

In addition to Mossad’s apparent penchant for covering up a single assassination among dozens of innocent victims, there is an even more bizarre revelation.

Bergmen writes of an assassination attempt inspired by the movie The Manchurian Candidate. Israelis reportedly sought to turn a Palestinian prisoner into a trained killer. The only problem is that this backfired when, five hours after being released, the prisoner turned himself into the police and explained everything.   

Then there was plain old mass murder: another plan was to take out all of the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership by setting up bombs inside a Beirut stadium where the group were planning to celebrate the anniversary of their first operation against Israel. According to the book, the Israelis also set up cars rigged with explosives outside the stadium, set to detonate minutes after the first explosion to target survivors as they were trying to escape.

The operation was cancelled at the last minute, after a group of officers and the defense minister demanded it be called off.

“You can’t just kill a whole stadium,” an officer remembered telling then-Prime Minister Menahem Begin. “The whole world will be after us.”

Smart.

Meanwhile, Israel’s vendetta with Arafat continued and in 1982, Sharon created a special task force named Salt Fish to take out the PLO leader. He appointed special operations experts, Meir Dagan, who later became head of Mossad, and Rafi Eitan, who was then adviser to the defense minister on counterterrorism matters. The group even debated killing Israeli journalists who were going to interview Arafat in Lebanon in 1982, with the consensus being that, yes, it was worth carrying out such an operation. However, Mossad lost the group on the way to the meeting.

“The feeling was that it was something personal for Sharon,” Air Force commander in Chief Major General David Ivry told Bergmen.

One can almost see why.

Still, despite their best efforts, Arafat continued to evade Mossad’s relentless assassination attempts, in no smart part thanks to the occasional normal human being.

Uzi Dayan, the operation’s commander, told Bergman Arafat was saved by two things, “his interminable good luck and me.”

He explained that he was concerned about civilians being killed in an assassination, and clashed with Eitan over it, who would get angry over missed opportunities. Dayan even withheld intelligence from Eitan to prevent civilian casualties.

Eitan would remind Dayan that he did not have the authority to decide whether or not to drop a bomb. But Dayan nonetheless found a way to take a hand in the decision-making. “All I had to do was to report when the target was ripe from the intelligence point of view,” he said. “So from that point on, each time we knew that bombing would lead to massive civilian casualties, we reported that the target wasn’t ripe from the intelligence angle.”

Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, and running more than 600 pages, Rise and Kill First makes the case that Israel has used assassination in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack. It also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to eventually kill Arafat, an act its officials have consistently denied

* * *

It wasn’t just Arafat: poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target’s life. Armed drones. Exploding cell phones. Spare tires with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Islamic holy men: these were the techniques Israel used to carry out at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed, they add up to far more than any other Western country, the book says.

Bergman, the author of several books, also says that the Israeli secret services sought to interfere with his work, holding a meeting in 2010 on how to disrupt his research and warning former Mossad employees not to speak with him.

He also claimed that President George W. Bush adopted many Israeli techniques after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and President Barack Obama launched several hundred targeted killings.

Bergman raises moral and legal concerns provoked by state-sponsored killing, including the existence of separate legal systems for secret agents and the rest of Israel. But he presents the operations, for the most part, as achieving their aims. While many credit the barrier Israel built along and inside the West Bank with stopping assaults on Israeli citizens in the early 2000s, he argues that what made the difference was “a massive number of targeted killings.”

One of Bergman’s most important sources was Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for eight years who died in early 2016. Toward the end of his career, Dagan fell out with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly over launching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said intelligence techniques such as selling the country faulty parts for its reactors — which Israel and the U.S. were doing — weren’t enough.

 

Ex-Mossad Chief Meir Dagan in 2014

Finally, we may have to wait for part 2 of the book to learn how many of Mossad’s other clandestine operations leading to “massive civilian casualties” – with several key prominent examples springing to mind – were not stopped from taking place.

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Authored by Daniel Weldon via Campus Reform,

University of Florida students walked around campus Tuesday with fake menstrual blood on their pants to protest the lack of free feminine hygiene products on campus.

On January 15, a student government committee rejected a proposal to provide free menstrual products to female students through the mandatory Activity and Service Fee, expressing concerns about applying mandatory fees paid by all students towards “funding that would only benefit the female half of the UF student body.”

A student group called “Gatters Matter, Period.,” which began circulating a petition in support of the proposal last fall, responded by organizing a “bleed-in” protest during which roughly two-dozen students stained the back of their pants red, according to The Alligator.

“This is a part of reproductive justice,” Shannon Matthew, who was among the first students to join the protest, told the Alligator. “I’m not ashamed of my period, and I don’t think anyone should be.”

A Facebook event page for the “Are You Seeing Red?” demonstration explains that participants wore “washable dye on our bums, as if we didn’t have a pad and the blood bled through.”

The organizers provided “supplies” for those in need of them, but encouraged students to “bleed-in how ever [sic] you want as well.”

Following the protest, the proposal was discussed at a meeting of the full Student Senate, where the Alligator reports that Senate President Ian Green announced that a decision had been made to provide free menstrual products at the student union starting in February, though he could not offer details about funding because the arrangement had been worked out by Student Body President Smith Meyers, who was unavailable for comment.

During the meeting, some senators pointed out that free menstrual products are already available on campus through the Field and Fork Pantry.

Students are allowed to take up to three bags of menstrual products per week – each containing eight tampons, five liners, and five pads – but student activists retorted that the option is too limited.

“Heteronormativity is rampant on this campus,” complained Sophia Ahmed, one of the organizers of the “bleed-in” protest.

“Today I held a little protest for free menstrual protects. If you saw my butt that was evidence. And I say menstrual not feminine because menstruation should not be gendered. Some men get periods.”

Two student senators, Branden Pearson and Emily Dunson, told The Alligator that they are working to alleviate just such concerns, and hope to secure funding for free menstrual products at several on-campus locations by April 2018.

They estimate that the project will cost just under $5,000, and speculated that the pilot program could eventually be expanded to include roughly 60 gender-neutral restrooms.

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In a second shocking blow to the Russia-collusion-conspiracy-believers, after Twitter found no evidence of meddling in the UK’s Brexit vote, Bloomberg reports that Facebook found there was “insignificant overlap” between Russia-based targeting of ads and those of Trump’s campaign.

Earlier today, Twitter reported that it had examined 13,000 Brexit bots and found that only 1% could be conclusively linked to Russia, and that most of these bots have already been suspended.

And now, as Bloomberg reports, Facebook told a Senate panel that it has detected “only what appears to be insignificant overlap” between targeting of ads and content promoted by a pro-Kremlin Russia group and by the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

The social-media company said it “does not believe it is in a position to substantiate or disprove allegations of possible collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign, as part of a written response to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday evening by the panel.

The company answers aren’t likely to quell concerns from lawmakers that the companies may not have found all of the abuse of its networks by Russians or taken enough steps to prevent future actions.

Facebook said it has no evidence that the Russian Internet Research Agency, which disseminated fake news and ads, targeted its efforts based on U.S. voter registration data.

Their targeting was “relatively rudimentary, targeting broad locations and interests,” the company said.

So the Russia collusion conspiracy hangs by the most tenuous of partisan threads… and remember just this week, some of the most infamous faces from the ‘Russians-did-it’ gang – Rep Schiff and Sen Feinstein – demanded Twitter, facebook crackdown on still-active “Russian Bots” that were spreading #ReleaseTheMemo content…

There’s just one problem – internal Twitter sources confirm that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag has been pushed by actual Americans. 

a knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

In short, according to this source, who would not speak to The Daily Beast for attribution, the retweets are coming from inside the country.

We are nearing peak cognitive dissonance.

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Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

In Part 1 we noted that the real evil of Bubble Finance is not merely that it leads to bubble crashes, of which there is surely a doozy just around the bend; or that speculators get the painful deserts they fully deserve, which is coming big time, too; or even that the retail homegamers are always drawn into the slaughter at the very end, as is playing out in spades once again. Daily.

 

Given enough time, in fact, markets do bounce back because capitalism has a inherent urge to grow, thereby generating higher output, incomes, profits, wealth and stock indices. That means, in turn, investors eventually do recover from bubble crashes—notwithstanding the tendency of homegamers and professional speculators alike to sell at panic lows and jump back in after most of the profits have been made—or even at panic highs like the present.

Instead, the real economic iniquity of central bank driven Bubble Finance is that it destroys all the pricing signals that are essential to financial discipline on both ends of the Acela Corridor. And as quaint at it may sound, discipline is the sine qua non of long-term stability and sustainable gains in productivity, living standards and real wealth.

The pols of the Imperial City should be petrified, therefore, by the prospect of borrowing $1.2 trillion during the upcoming fiscal year (FY 2019) at a rate of 6.o% of GDP during month #111 through month #123 of the business expansion; and doing so at the very time the central bank is pivoting to an unprecedented spell of QT (quantitative tightening), involving the disgorgement of up to $2 trillion of its elephantine balance sheet back into the bond market.

Even as a matter of economics 101, the forthcoming $1.8 trillion of combined bond supply from the sales of the US Treasury ($1.2 trillion) and the QT-disgorgement of the Fed ($600 billion) is self-evidently enough to monkey-hammer the existing supply/demand balances, and thereby send yields soaring.

But that’s barely the half of it. All the laws of economics, which are now being insouciantly ignored by the stock market revilers, are also time and place bound. That is to say, deficit finance in a muscle-bound Welfare State/Warfare State democracy like the US is always a questionable idea.

After all, it is virtually guaranteed based on the budgetary doomsday forces now at work that by 2030 the public debt will approach $40 trillion compared to the $930 billion level where it stood when the Gipper took office in January 1981. In a half century, therefore, the GDP—swollen by inflation notwithstanding—will have grown by 8.5X versus a 43X eruption of the debt.

Even then, that’s the long-trend of the thing: The cyclical context is the far more preposterous part. The very idea of running a 6.0% of GDP deficit at the tail end of what would be the longest business expansion in recorded history is just plain insane. Yet as the Donald and his feuding band of Capitol Hill Republicans stumble from one bi-weekly CR (continuing resolution) fix to the next, they exude complete obliviousness to the fiscal time-bomb strapped to their chests.

Admittedly, the Dems are far worse. Even as they appropriately champion the cause of the Dreamers for the wrong reason (i.e. in pursuit of Democrat voters rather than the real economic need for additional workers and Tax Mules), their true agenda at the moment is stasis and parity. That is, no change (stasis) whatsoever in the $2.5 trillion entitlement monster, but a dollar for dollar increase (parity) in domestic appropriations to match the $80 billion per year defense increase demanded by the GOP hawks (which is most of the GOP).

Our point is that prior to the final betrayal of sound money incepting with Greenspan’s arrival at the Fed in 1987, politicians of both parties had a healthy fear of deficits because in the absence of massive monetization by the central banks, rising deficits tended to cause “crowding out” and soaring interest rates.

In effect, even the quasi-honest monetary policies of the 1953-1987 period generated counter-vailing constituencies for fiscal rectitude. Thus, when interest rates rose, the lobbies for small business, homebuilders, Savings and Loans, farmers and capital goods suppliers predictability brought their political heft to bear in behalf of fiscal restraint.

No more. The Fed’s massive and relentless suppression of yields has eliminated the counter-vailing constituencies for fiscal rectitude and, at length, vaporized the politicians’ fear of deficits.

And understandably so. The public debt is up by 220% from the pre-crisis peak (Q4 2007), while interest expense has risen by only 20%.  With the debt rising 10X faster than its service cost, why would anyone expect the politicians to do anything but kick-the-can?

And worst still, why would they not loose all historical memory that might otherwise warn of the extreme dangers posed by radically expanding the deficit at the tail end of the weakest business cycle in modern history?

Indeed, the Fed’s culpability for the nation’s imminent fiscal catastrophe is doubly evident when the full extent of the above chart’s false price signals is dissected.

To wit, not only has the Fed driven the weighted average cost of the Federal debt to under 1.7% and therefore into negative yield territory when inflation is factored in; it is also the case that its massive debt monetization has further minimized the true cost of the public debt owing to the so-called “profit remittance” to the Treasury.

That is, the Fed collects upwards of $125 billion from the yield on its $4.4 trillion of Treasury and GSE notes, but pays essentially nothing for its liabilities, which are printed from thin air. The Fed’s gross interest income less several billion of operating costs and $25 billion of IOER payments to the banks (an inducement to the banks to keep their excess reserves idle and not lend them out at lower than the Fed’s target funds rate) is therefore returned to the Treasury in a round robin of monetary hocus pocus.

As shown below, after the explosion of the Fed balance sheet from $900 billion at the time of the Lehman meltdown to $4.4 trillion, these payments to the US Treasury soared, reaching a peak of $117 billion in FY 2015. Accordingly, more than 25% of the carry cost of the Federal debt in recent years has been hidden. That is, off-set by this bogus monetary round trip of treasury interest payments to the Fed which mostly come back as profits remittance.

As a practical matter, the bars in the chart below will be heading toward the zero-bound in the next couple of years as IOER payments to the banks continue to soar (as the Fed raises its target funds rate);  and as it is also forced to book “loss provisions” against its annual profits as interest rates rise and the market-to-market value of its $4 trillion+ balance sheet declines sharply.

So suddenly, the current $300 billion interest cost on the public debt will get hit with a double whammy. The weighted average yield on the Federal debt will rise by 200-400 basis points in the years ahead, and the huge off-setting Fed remittance will disappear.

Accordingly, we project that the net interest expense will double to $600 billion within three years and soar past $1 trillion per year well before 2027.

In the face of soaring debt service costs and rising bond market yields, the politicians will finally panic. Having experienced exactly that up close and personal during the early 1980s when the 10-year yield touched nearly 16%, we are quite sure that the old time deficit panic will make a belated resurrection in the Imperial City.

We are also quite sure that it will be too late. In the wake of the GOP’s asinine tax bill and the spending spree now underway, the public debt will soon be growing by $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion per year. Under normalizing interest rates, that alone with add $50 billion to $75 billion per year to the interest tab.

Alas, that happens to be a bigger number than any conceivable package of annual spending cuts or tax increases for which a majority on Capitol Hill could be mobilized.

In short, by the time that rising interest rates and soaring debt service payments are permitted to perform their fear-inducing function among the politicians, there will be no imaginable way to stop the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine.

And that is the real cost of systematically falsifying yields and prices in the bond market.

In part 3 we will address the false signals being broadcast to the Wall Street end of the Acela corridor. But here’s the spoiler alert: Like the case of interest on the public debt, the relevant metrics are bound by both the laws of economics and the time and place in which they are measured.

At the present time, the S&P 500 is trading at the absurd multiple of 26.3X what are estimated to be reported profits for 2017. Yet the sell-side stock peddlers say not to worry because the one-year forward multiple on ex-items earnings is still only in the high teens.

So what!

The business cycle has not been outlawed and this one has at best a few quarters or even a year or two to go. So forward earnings are irrelevant nonsense. They are an interim place holder before the 30% to 50% hit to profits happens when the US economy finally experiences its next rendezvous with recession.

The very idea that you would value the market based on a timeless forward PE multiple is complete baloney, of course. Yet that’s exactly where the Fed’s drastic financial repression and destruction of honest price discovery has led.

That is, to valuation multiples on a trend-adjusted basis that have shot the moon, and to a bubble peak that is desperately searching for its relief pin.

Data Courtesy: St. Louis Fed

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