The distorted minds of the illiberal left do not know boundaries. Their drug addled, satanic, lifestyles of decadence and hedonism have reduced them to feckless shells, idiots who advance via extortion, blackmail and other sorts of wanton corruption.
Here is a very rich and a very liberal woman — who enjoys the many superfluities of western lifestyle — blessed to be born in a nation that practices and promotes tolerance. But it’s her deep seated hatred for Americana that leads her down the deep and very dark cavernous hole that bends her liberalism to accept oppression.
Plainly, the hijab isn’t a symbol of Islam, but a beacon of oppression of an entire gender. By promoting it and telling others to wear it in solidarity with women who are being oppressed is like saying we should all wear chains and carry around bushels of cotton, back in the days of slavery, instead of fighting to end it.
As I’ve outlined over the past few months, this is a trend by western governments to break the people’s will — heavily promoting this as something that is trendy. These people are fucking cucks.
After budgeting just $1.1mm for the Wisconsin recount, Jill Stein got a bit of shock yesterday when the Wisconsin Election Commission gave her until 4:30pm today to deliver $3.5 million to fund an expedited recount effort in the state or walk away. Now, according to the Washington Post, Stein has just delivered the required sum which is roughly 54% of the $6.5mm she’s raised to date.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has delivered $3.5 million to the state of Wisconsin to guarantee a recount of the presidential vote there.
Stein faced a 4:30 p.m. Central Time deadline to deliver the money so a recount could start Thursday. The Wisconsin Elections Commission says it got a wire transfer shortly before Tuesday’s deadline.
As a reminder, here is the official timeline for the recount per the Wisconsin Election Commission:
Tuesday, the Stein, De La Fuente or both must pay for the recount. Once full payment is received, the commission will issue a recount order to all presidential candidates.
Wednesday, commission staff will hold a teleconference in the morning for all county clerks and canvass members to outline the process and rules of a recount. Since a 24-hour public meeting notice is required for the recount, each county must post its notice by Wednesday.
Thursday, recount begins in every Wisconsin county.
Dec. 12, all county canvass boards must be completed by 8 p.m.
Dec. 13, Elections Commission staff will prepare the official recount canvass certification by 3 p.m.
After missing the PA deadline yesterday, miscalculating the Wisconsin recount fee by just over 200% and facing a strong backlash from almost everyone, including those in her own party, we suspect Stein’s 15-minutes of fame are nearing an end.
* * *
As a reminder, here are all the particulars on Stein’s recount petition.
It’s official, the Wisconsin Election Commission just confirmed that a recount petition has been filed by Jill Stein just ahead of the 5pm deadline.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has received recount petitions from both the Stein and De La Fuente campaigns https://t.co/ksJ7dP35zm
Per a press release posted to the Commission’s website, the recount will start late next week after the appropriate personnel have been assembled and after Stein pays the recount fee. While no expectations were given for a completion date, the Commission noted that the federal deadline for all recounts is December 13th.
“The Commission is preparing to move forward with a statewide recount of votes for President of the United States, as requested by these candidates,” Haas said.
“We have assembled an internal team to direct the recount, we have been in close consultation with our county clerk partners, and have arranged for legal representation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice,” Haas said. “We plan to hold a teleconference meeting for county clerks next week and anticipate the recount will begin late in the week after the Stein campaign has paid the recount fee, which we are still calculating.”
The last statewide recount was of the Supreme Court election in 2011. At that time, the Associated Press surveyed county clerks and reported that costs to the counties exceeded $520,000, though several counties did not respond to the AP’s survey. That election had 1.5 million votes, and Haas said the Commission expects the costs to be higher for an election with 2.975 million votes. “The Commission is in the process of obtaining cost estimates from county clerks so that we can calculate the fee which the campaigns will need to pay before the recount can start,” Haas said. The Commission will need to determine how the recount costs will be assessed to the campaigns.
The state is working under a federal deadline of December 13 to complete the recount. As a result, county boards of canvassers may need to work evenings and weekends to meet the deadlines. “The recount process is very detail-oriented, and this deadline will certainly challenge some counties to finish on time,” Haas said.
As a reminder, the official count shows a narrow 22,177 vote lead for Trump, or just 0.7% of the total 2,975,313 votes cast in the state.
While we haven’t yet heard Trump’s thoughts on the recount, Jill seems to be very enthusiastic.
Finally, below is Stein’s official petition filed with the Wisconsin Election Commission which includes all of her “evidence” of Russian election tampering from extremely credible and impartial sources like The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and NBC News.
Among other things, Stein’s petition cites the hacking of Arizona and Colorado voter registration databases, hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and high levels of absentee voters as the justifications for her recount request.
In August 2016, it was widely reported that foreign operators breached voter registration databases in at least two states and stole hundreds of thousands of voter records.
Around that time, hacker infiltrated the e-mail systems of the Democratic National Committee and a campaign official for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. These e-mails were then published online.
On October 7, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security issued a joint statement regarding these breaches. The statement reads, in pertinent part, as follows: “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USCI) is confident” that there have been “recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” It also states that “[t]here thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process” and that “similar tactics and techniques [have been used] across Europe and Eurasia…to influence public opinion there.” In the statement, DHS urges state election officials “to be vigilant and seek cybersecurity assistance” from that agency in preparation for the presidential election.
In Wisconsin, there is evidence of voting irregularities in the 2016 presidential election that indicate potential tampering with electronic voting systems. Specifically, there was a significant increase in the number of absentee voters as compared to the last general election. This significant increase could be attributed to a breach of the state’s electronic voter database.
The well-documented and conclusive evidence of foreign interference in the presidential race before the election, along with the irregularities observed in Wisconsin, call into question the results and indicate the possibility that a widespread breach occurred.
Of course, while Stein reiterates numerous allegations of foreign hacking that were well circulated, yet never officially linked to a specific source, before the election, her petition doesn’t offer a single shred of actual, tangible evidence that the election results in Wisconsin were in anyway tampered with.
Even her so-called “computer science expert” offers up nothing more than baseless theories on “plausible” explanations of how the Wisconsin results may have been hacked. Sure, because it’s just so impossible to believe that a flawed candidate with multiple ongoing FBI criminal investigations may have simply lost the election.
Perhaps Hillary could give us her opinion on whether or not questioning election results by throwing around wild accusations of vote tampering by rogue foreign states qualifies as a “direct threat to our democracy.”Certainly, she had very strong feelings about Trump refusing to blindly accept the election results during the last debate.
Today Wikileaks published in searchable format more than 60 thousand emails from private intelligence firm HBGary. As Wikileaks reported on its website, “the publication today marks the early release of US political prisoner Barrett Brown, who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 63 months in prison in connection with his journalism on Stratfor and HBGary. Coinciding with Mr Brown’s release from prison WikiLeaks is publishing a searchable index of the HBGary emails. WikiLeaks published the Stratfor emails in 2012.”
For those who missed it five years ago, the story behind the leak is fascinating.
The HBGary emails are from four email accounts of key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal. HBGary was founded in 2003 by Greg Hoglund to provide cyber security-related services to corporate clients. A separate entity, HBGary Federal, was managed by Aaron Barr to do similar work for government agencies and so had staff with security clearances and worked with companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (one of the contractors Edward Snowden worked for).
As was reported several years ago, in February 2011 Aaron Barr stated he had been investigating the internet activist group Anonymous and claimed to have uncovered the real identities of some of what he described as the leaders of the organisation. In retaliation Anonymous penetrated Barr’s organisation and took emails from the accounts of four key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal: Aaron Barr and Greg Hoglund, but also Ted Vera (then Chief Operating Officer at HBGary Federal) and Phil Wallisch, a former Principal Technical Consultant.
These emails and revelations from them started to be published on the internet, predominantly through the work of Barrett Brown and a crowd-sourced investigative journalism project he ran: Project PM. As a result, later that month Barr was forced to step down, HBGary Federal closed and HBGary, Inc. was sold to ManTech International. This would have been little consolation to Mr Brown, who a month later on 6 March 2012 had both his and his mother’s houses raided by the FBI, seeking “Records relating to HBGary, Infragard, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC chats, Twitter, wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.” Agents seized his laptops.
Barrett Brown’s work through Project PM was one of the first collaborative investigations into the US corporate surveillance industry. Looking into corporate firms that work hand-in-hand with the government to surveil on citizens, Mr Brown was one of the first to shed light on this unaccountable industry.
The HBGary revelations that came out through the work of Barret Brown and others showed that HBGary and related companies were involved in plans to spread disinformation and to attack watchdog organisations, including WikiLeaks and US Chamber Watch. For example, the emails revealed a plan to form a group called Team Themis with a number of companies from the industry to “ruin” WikiLeaks by submitting false documents in the hope they would be published, as well as discrediting WikiLeaks staff and supporters, including journalist Glenn Greenwald. HBGary was also bidding to fulfil a tender from the US Air Force to assist it in manipulating social media to spread propaganda about the Air Force.
As Wikileaks adds, “Barrett Brown was indicted on felony counts due to his journalistic work on the HBGary emails and other related corporations. He has been in prison ever since, often being put into solitary confinement and having his communications restricted. The HBGary emails largely disappeared from the internet. Today the HBGary emails are safe for all to search in honour of Mr Brown’s work and in celebration of his release.”
* * *
While many of the leaked emails and their contents have been released previously, in light of the recent witch hunt to brand an entire swath of the media as “fake news”, or just as bad “Russian propaganda”, it is worth reminding readers of one of the most memorable discoveries to emerge from the hack.
One particular presentation from December 2010, titled “The Wikileaks Threat” outlined a proposal to Bank of America from Palantir and HBGary to sabotage WikiLeaks on multiple fronts, a response plan to what some believed at the time could be a release of highly damaging Bank of America’s internal documents by WikiLeaks. The powerpoint suggested launching cyberattacks on WikiLeaks servers, spreading misinformation about its insecurity, and even pressuring journalists who support the site, specifically focusing on Glenn Greenwald, the man who presented Edward Snowden to the world.
In a nutshell, the 24-slide document (presented in its entirety below), was a thoroughly developed program meant to discredit and destroy Wikileaks, through an extensive disinformation campaign. What is notable are the details that Palantir presented as part of this campaign, which are a generic framework for creating any such campaign. They are laid out on a slide titled “Potential Proactive Tactics” and are as follows:
Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.
Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.
Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt amongst moderates.
Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.
And there you have it: a generic disinformation campaign, in this case one prepared by Palantir and HBGary against Wikileaks, but one that is structurally the same in virtually every other instance. So the next time readers encounter a similar attempt to “destroy” a source of information, look at the slide above and ask if what you are seeing is just a rehash of an old, familiar discrediting campaign.
Today Wikileaks published in searchable format more than 60 thousand emails from private intelligence firm HBGary. As Wikileaks reported on its website, “the publication today marks the early release of US political prisoner Barrett Brown, who was detained in 2012 and sentenced to 63 months in prison in connection with his journalism on Stratfor and HBGary. Coinciding with Mr Brown’s release from prison WikiLeaks is publishing a searchable index of the HBGary emails. WikiLeaks published the Stratfor emails in 2012.”
For those who missed it five years ago, the story behind the leak is fascinating.
The HBGary emails are from four email accounts of key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal. HBGary was founded in 2003 by Greg Hoglund to provide cyber security-related services to corporate clients. A separate entity, HBGary Federal, was managed by Aaron Barr to do similar work for government agencies and so had staff with security clearances and worked with companies such as Booz Allen Hamilton (one of the contractors Edward Snowden worked for).
As was reported several years ago, in February 2011 Aaron Barr stated he had been investigating the internet activist group Anonymous and claimed to have uncovered the real identities of some of what he described as the leaders of the organisation. In retaliation Anonymous penetrated Barr’s organisation and took emails from the accounts of four key people from HBGary and HBGary Federal: Aaron Barr and Greg Hoglund, but also Ted Vera (then Chief Operating Officer at HBGary Federal) and Phil Wallisch, a former Principal Technical Consultant.
These emails and revelations from them started to be published on the internet, predominantly through the work of Barrett Brown and a crowd-sourced investigative journalism project he ran: Project PM. As a result, later that month Barr was forced to step down, HBGary Federal closed and HBGary, Inc. was sold to ManTech International. This would have been little consolation to Mr Brown, who a month later on 6 March 2012 had both his and his mother’s houses raided by the FBI, seeking “Records relating to HBGary, Infragard, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, LulzSec, IRC chats, Twitter, wiki.echelon2.org, and pastebin.com.” Agents seized his laptops.
Barrett Brown’s work through Project PM was one of the first collaborative investigations into the US corporate surveillance industry. Looking into corporate firms that work hand-in-hand with the government to surveil on citizens, Mr Brown was one of the first to shed light on this unaccountable industry.
The HBGary revelations that came out through the work of Barret Brown and others showed that HBGary and related companies were involved in plans to spread disinformation and to attack watchdog organisations, including WikiLeaks and US Chamber Watch. For example, the emails revealed a plan to form a group called Team Themis with a number of companies from the industry to “ruin” WikiLeaks by submitting false documents in the hope they would be published, as well as discrediting WikiLeaks staff and supporters, including journalist Glenn Greenwald. HBGary was also bidding to fulfil a tender from the US Air Force to assist it in manipulating social media to spread propaganda about the Air Force.
As Wikileaks adds, “Barrett Brown was indicted on felony counts due to his journalistic work on the HBGary emails and other related corporations. He has been in prison ever since, often being put into solitary confinement and having his communications restricted. The HBGary emails largely disappeared from the internet. Today the HBGary emails are safe for all to search in honour of Mr Brown’s work and in celebration of his release.”
* * *
While many of the leaked emails and their contents have been released previously, in light of the recent witch hunt to brand an entire swath of the media as “fake news”, or just as bad “Russian propaganda”, it is worth reminding readers of one of the most memorable discoveries to emerge from the hack.
One particular presentation from December 2010, titled “The Wikileaks Threat” outlined a proposal to Bank of America from Palantir and HBGary to sabotage WikiLeaks on multiple fronts, a response plan to what some believed at the time could be a release of highly damaging Bank of America’s internal documents by WikiLeaks. The powerpoint suggested launching cyberattacks on WikiLeaks servers, spreading misinformation about its insecurity, and even pressuring journalists who support the site, specifically focusing on Glenn Greenwald, the man who presented Edward Snowden to the world.
In a nutshell, the 24-slide document (presented in its entirety below), was a thoroughly developed program meant to discredit and destroy Wikileaks, through an extensive disinformation campaign. What is notable are the details that Palantir presented as part of this campaign, which are a generic framework for creating any such campaign. They are laid out on a slide titled “Potential Proactive Tactics” and are as follows:
Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.
Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.
Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.
Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt amongst moderates.
Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.
And there you have it: a generic disinformation campaign, in this case one prepared by Palantir and HBGary against Wikileaks, but one that is structurally the same in virtually every other instance. So the next time readers encounter a similar attempt to “destroy” a source of information, look at the slide above and ask if what you are seeing is just a rehash of an old, familiar discrediting campaign.
While it has not been officially confirmed by the Trump transition team, moments ago the NYT reported that – in what had previously been leaked on several occasions on various other outlets most notably the WSJ – former Goldman banker and Soros employee, Steven Mnuchin “a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience” is expected to be named Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary as soon as Wednesday.
Steven Terner Mnuchin at Trump Tower in Manhattan this month
From the NYT:
Mnuchin, 53, was the national finance chairman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. He began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he became a partner, before creating his own hedge fund, moving to the West Coast and entering the first rank of movie financiers by bankrolling hits like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar.”
As Treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin would play an important role in shaping the administration’s economic policies, including a package of promised tax cuts, increased spending on infrastructure and changes in the terms of foreign trade. He could also help lead any effort to roll back President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and opening to Cuba by reimposing sanctions on Tehran and Havana.
As the NYT adds, his selection fits uneasily with much of Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric attacking the financial industry. Mr. Trump, in a campaign ad intended as a closing argument, portrayed the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as the personification of a global elite that the ad said had “robbed our working class.” But, the NYT notes, Mnuchin has said that he agrees with Mr. Trump’s priorities, and he was an early supporter of a candidate who clearly prizes loyalty.
When Mr. Trump won New York’s Republican presidential primary in April, Mr. Mnuchin attended the victory party. The next day, he accepted Mr. Trump’s invitation to become the campaign’s national finance director. A number of Mr. Mnuchin’s friends made comments to various publications expressing shock at the decision. Mr. Mnuchin was unfazed. “Nobody’s going to be, like, ‘Well, why did he do this?’ if I end up in the administration,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in August.
Some more details for those unfamiliar with Mnuchin:
Mr. Mnuchin, the son of a Goldman Sachs partner, joined the firm after graduating from Yale University. He worked there for 17 years, rising to oversee trading in government securities and mortgage bonds. After leaving Goldman in 2002, he founded Dune Capital Management, a hedge fund named after the dunes near his beach house in the Hamptons.
He also started investing in the movie business and bought a house in Bel-Air. He is engaged to the actress Louise Linton, who would be his third wife. He told The Times in May that he has focused in recent years on the “West Coast economy,” although he added that he was not turning his back on Wall Street.
Mr. Mnuchin was part of a group that bought the failed California mortgage lender IndyMac from the government in 2009. He became chairman of the company, renamed OneWest, which was ultimately sold to CIT, the nation’s largest small-business lender, in 2015 for more than twice the price the group had paid.
During his tenure, OneWest faced allegations that it had foreclosed improperly on some borrowers. Fair-housing groups also filed a complaint with the federal government, alleging that OneWest was not meeting its legal obligation to make loans in minority neighborhoods.
Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Trump have known each other for years — not always under the best of circumstances. Mr. Mnuchin’s company helped to finance construction of a Trump project in Chicago. In 2008, Mr. Trump sued Dune and other lenders to extend the loan terms. The parties ultimately settled
* * *
Even though the nomination is still unofficial, moments ago CBS’ reproter Charlie Keye tweeted that it can also confirm that “Trump has chosen financier Steven Mnuchin as his nominee for Treasury Secretary.”
Just now. @CBS News has confirmed President-elect Trump has chosen financier Steven Mnuchin as his nominee for Treasury Secretary.
Yesterday’s short-lived correction in US bank stocks did nothing to tarnish the shocking exuberance of the month of November. With just 5 down days in the month (so far), US Financials added over $275 billion in market capitalization in November – the greatest gain in the index’ history.
Following September’s bank bloodbath, Trump’s win and the subsequent surge in interest rates sparked a buying panic unseen before in bank stocks…
The only thing is…
The yield curve and credit markets are not following suit…
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), says he has not met with anyone from the Trump transition team and does not know if he was being considered for the position of director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) or for Secretary of Energy. A source that said they worked for the Trump transition team earlier told Reason that Massie’s name had come up in talks about the OSTP position.
“This is all just speculation,” Massie explained. “But from my end, I would consider either of those positions if I was approached.”
Massie stressed that before he made any decision he would assess where he could “provide the most value” and whether that was from the legislative branch or the executive branch.
“My thing here in Congress is we need to restore the balance of government, and reassert legislative authority,” Massie said, pointing out that Trump would not do that because it wasn’t his role.
“That’s the role of our leaders here in the House,” Massie continued, “so because he’s going to be aggressive and try and get his agenda complete, I don’t hold that against him. At the same time there’s a role for Congress to play, and right now that’s the role I’m in, which is, OK, how are we going to pay for all this?”
Massie told Reason he believed the primary role for the director of the OSTP, also known as the president’s science advisor, would be “to separate the pseudo-science from the science” since the president is likely to be approached by a lot of different people seeking money for a variety of ideas.
“I think it takes an in-depth analysis of a lot of different proposals that are brought to the president to determine which ones have merit, scientific, or economic,” Massie explained. “Somebody that can do the math, and the analysis, or assemble a team that can do that.”
Massie said he believed one of Trump’s biggest assets during the transition is that people underestimate him, comparing the president-elect to Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin, a businessman who unsuccessfully ran against Mitch McConnell in the 2014 Republican senate primary before winning the 2015 governor’s race. Massie says no one was expecting Bevin to win the general, and that he was trailing in four or five independent polls taken before the election.
“Then when he came in office, he’s been by all measures at least by Republican measures a very successful governor in the first 11 months,” Massie explained. “What he did was he assembled an incredibly talented cabinet.”
“So many people underestimated Governor Bevin when he came in, based on the campaigns and the expectations set by his opponents,” Massie continued, “that when he came in he so far exceeded all these expectations. I think you’ll see the same with Trump.”
Massie predicted that Trump would be “way more serious than anyone in the media predicted, and I think he’s going to be vey competent.”
In July, Massie said he believed Trump was better than 90 percent of his fellow members of Congress. Massie told Reason he believed Trump was showing himself to be better “in understanding how the country works, in connecting to people outside of the belt way, in terms of organizing groups that work, versus the dysfunction that you see here in Congress.” Massie suggested a lot of that dysfunction came from Congress being full of people who are “ill-equipped” to organize anything. “Trump has experience with organizing people and talent and producing results,” said Massie. “And I think Donald Trump’s better than 90 percent of my colleagues at doing that.”
The Trump transition team’s press information has not yet responded to a request for comment.
When Jill Stein was the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. president, the networks only gave her 36 seconds of coverage.
However, as NewsBusters’ Mike Ciandella details, as soon as she launched a campaign to contest the presidential election and demand a recount of ballots in several key states, the evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC managed to find 7 minutes and 26 seconds of coverage for her in just four days.
That’s more than 12 times as much coverage as in the entire campaign.
On November 26’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Lester Holt began a story on the recount by implying that the election may not be over yet, “if you thought the presidential election was behind us, word came today from the Hillary Clinton campaign that it will back the state-wide election recount effort put on by third party candidate Jill Stein in three key battle ground states.”
Holt then turned the story over to correspondent Kristen Welker, who led by saying that the recount was prompted when “a group of computer scientists, including a voting rights lawyer, said they found voting irregularities in three states.”
Despite this drastic uptick in coverage, Stein admitted that her team was working without proof.
“Let me be very clear,” Stein told CBS Evening News’s Anna Werner during a November 24 interview, “we do not have evidence of fraud. We do not have smoking guns. What we do have is an election that was surrounded by hacking.”
Today through Tuesday, December 6, Reason is running its annual webathon. We’re asking readers of this site to make tax-deductible donations in dollars and Bitcoin to Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes our award-winning journalism in video, audio, and print form. Different giving levels come with different levels of swag, which you can read abouthere.
All school killings are horrifying and yet they are made somehow even more terrible when you know the place in question. Monday’s attempted mass killing at Ohio State University, in which the would-be mastermind ended up being the only death, was particularly harrowing for me because my older son had just graduated from the place this past spring (thankfully, he was sitting just a few feet from me when the news reports started coming in).
Jesus, really, what kind of world are we living in? Another day, another mass attack, right? The world is getting more dangerous, according to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. No, but it seems that way, which is good enough for partisans of the right and the left who are constantly looking for ways to lock down your freedom.
Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the apparent assailant who was shot to death after running at people in his car and wielding a butcher knife, was born in Somalia and was Muslim, so the right is already shouting about how this proves we need to kick out all immigrants, especially Muslims, and wall off (or is it wall in?) America. Never mind that native-born Americans commit 90 percent of terrorism-related murders and that the odds of being killed in such an event come in around 1 in 3.6 million. Donald Trump and a host of conservative types know what they know:
Trump has recommended “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”—a plan that his own running mate called “offensive and unconstitutional.” More recently Trump has said the moratorium should apply to all visitors from countries “compromised by terrorism,” a category that arguably includes most of the world.
At Reason, we’ve got our default settings too, and we wear them on our sleeves and every issue of the magazine: We believe in “Free Minds and Free Markets.” As libertarians, we think the starting point should always be in favor of individual liberty to live how you want; to eat, smoke, drink, and marry whom you want; to dress how you want; and on and on.
But we’re not mindless automatons running the same script over and over. We work to engage the world and discover new facts and frameworks that change how we might think about things. The right can’t internalize the idea that crime has gone down as immigrants have gone up any more than the left can deal with more guns correlating with less crime. I write as the world’s most reluctant and worst shot—I’ve fired real guns a few times in my life and am lucky when I hit the sky or the ground—but I’m in favor of strong Second Amendment rights. That’s less than simply because they are in the Consitution and more because I can recognize that over the past quarter-century gun laws have been vastly liberalized (as liberals never stop to remind us) and violent gun crime and murder have decreased by half.
One good reason to support Reason’s journalism is that in a world of knee-jerk media and politicians, we don’t immediately use every current event as fodder to simply push a longstanding agenda. This results in some great journalism you won’t see anywhere else, especially at places that are already cranking up their basic immigrants-are-evil and more-gun-control stories even before basic facts are known.
Last January, for instance, Reason’s Brian Doherty published an in-depth analysis of new research that purportedly showed that more guns equal more crime and that more gun laws equalled less gun violence. That’s plausible enough. What Doherty did was the opposite of what the media and pols do when they encounter something that either confounds or confirms their bias: He actually worked through the new information to see how it holds up.
What we really know about the costs and benefits of private gun ownership and the efficacy of gun laws is far more fragile than what…the president would have us believe.
More guns do not necessarily mean more homicides. More gun laws do not necessarily mean less gun crime. Finding good science is hard enough; finding good social science on a topic so fraught with politics is nigh impossible. The facts then become even more muddled as the conclusions of those less-than-ironclad academic studies cycle through the press and social media in a massive game of telephone. Despite the confident assertions of the gun controllers and decades of research, we still know astonishingly little about how guns actually function in society and almost nothing at all about whether gun control policies actually work as promised.
Long before Donald Trump came along and just started making shit up all the time, the 21st century had already entered an era of “truthiness,” of things being held as true because they confirmed what we wanted to believe was true. George Bush invaded Iraq on bad information and nobody—not even the president himself—realized at the time that Barack Obama was only kidding when he said he’d have the most-transparent administration ever. In such a world where basic reality is up for grabs, Reason magazine, Reason.com, and Reason TV are more needed than ever. Unlike most of the media, you can trust us to be tethered to facts and to show our math, to explain our logic and rationale for believing what we believe and laying out the best policy for this or that issue. And as important, you can also count us to be finding the future as it exists among us. To get a better sense of what I’m talking about, listen for a bit to our recent interview with the libertarian activist Cody Wilson, who blew people’s minds by 3D printing the world’s first gun and has elaborated his philosophy of freedom in the new book, Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free.
Because as important as it is to call bullshit on the press and current pols, it’s even more important to show what I and the rest of Reason hold to be a self-evident truth: We can make the world a better or worse place based on how we live.
Today through Tuesday, December 6, Reason is running its annual webathon. We’re asking readers of this site to make tax-deductible donations in dollars and Bitcoin to Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes our award-winning journalism in video, audio, and print form. Different giving levels come with different levels of swag, which you can read abouthere.
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While speculation swirls over Trump’s pick for the next Treasury Secretary, with eyebrows raised after the President-elect unexpectedly met with Goldman COO Gary Cohn earlier in the day, one of the more interesting names to have emerged in the running for the top economic post is that of John Allison, former CEO of the bank BB&T and of the libertarian non-profit think tank the Cato Institute.
What makes Allison’s candidacy especially notable is that he happens to be a prominent critic of the Federal Reserve, as well as an advocate of the gold standard. Allison has said his “long-term ambition” for monetary policy “would be to get rid of the Federal Reserve and get back to a private banking system.” He also accurately portrayed the Fed by saying that it is “a scary organization because there’s no control.”
In a 2014 paper authored by Allison for the Cato Journal, he said he “would get rid of the Federal Reserve because the volatility in the economy is primarily caused by the Fed.” Allison said that simply allowing the market to regulate itself would be preferable to the Fed harming the stability of the financial system.
“When the Fed is radically changing the money supply, distorting interest rates, and over-regulating the financial sector, it makes rational economic calculation difficult,” Allison wrote. “Markets do form bubbles, but the Fed makes them worse.”
Allison said he would want to see rules that would constrain or define the Fed’s ability to change interest rates in response to economic conditions because of what he called “a very difficult mess.” Both Allison and Trump have said low interest rates create or exacerbate asset bubbles.
Allison also suggested that the government’s practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished and the US should go back to a banking system backed by “a market standard such as gold.”
Additionally, the libertarian ex-CEO also argued for higher capital reserves of up to 20% of assets at banks and has also argued that the government should repeal three of the broadest banking regulations.
“We should raise capital standards, but it is even more important to eliminate burdensome regulations — including Dodd-Frank, the Community Reinvestment Act, and Truth in Lending,” Allison wrote. “About 25 percent of a bank’s personnel cost relates to regulations. Banks cannot pay the regulatory costs and have high capital standards.” This is similar to Trump’s desire to roll back regulation — including Dodd-Frank — on financial institutions, though he has since backtracked somewhat.
Speaking after his meeting with Trump, Allison said it “looked like a job interview and also I think a sincere effort to get a little advice” according to Bloomberg. He told Fox News that his meeting also included Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and talked about how to accelerate economic growth.
“It was a very interesting conversation: Two old business guys talking about business, in a certain sense”
In an interview with CNBC, Allison said “I would certainly consider it, but I would have to reflect on it,” when asked whether he wants to be Treasury secretary. He hedged further by saying “It’s a very exciting job, but I’m in a very nice place in my career.”
Sadly, despite his libertarian leanings, Allison told CNBC that eliminating the Fed and returning to a gold standard “probably aren’t realistic in practice” adding that “how we get back to an international commodity-based standard, I’m not sure. I think it would be desirable in some ways, because it would impose some discipline on government”
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In any case, the wait for Trump’s Treasury pick may be almost over. As reported late on Monday, VP-elect Pence told reporters “there will be a number of very important announcements” on Tuesday. Another Cabinet announcement will be made Tuesday afternoon, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said on CNN.