Author: admin

As Trump gears up to take the oval office, vendors are already lining up to get a piece of his massive infrastructure projects, including his “Big, Beautiful, Powerful Border Wall.”  Ironically, one of the first vendors to publicly announce their interest in bidding on the border wall is none other than Mexican cement producer, Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua.  While Trump’s border wall has been fiercely protested by numerous senior elected officials in Mexico, including former President Vicente Fox, Grupo Cementos’ CEO admits “we can’t be choosy.”

A Mexican cement maker is ready to lend its services to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to build the wall he wants to erect on the southern border of the United States to curb immigration.

 

“We can’t be choosy,” Enrique Escalante, Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua (GCC) said in an interview. “We’re an important producer in that area and we have to respect our clients on both sides of the border.”

 

Based in Chihuahua, a large northern state bordering Texas and New Mexico, GCC is one of the biggest construction materials companies in Mexico. It generates around 70 percent of its sales in the United States, where it also has three plants.

 

Escalante said Trump’s plans to invest in energy and infrastructure in the United States augured well for the firm.

 

“For the business we’re in, Trump is a candidate that does favor the industry quite a bit,” Escalante said.

Luckily for Trump, and Grupo Cementos, the National Enquirer has already drawn up “construction plans & blueprints.”

Pro-Trump tabloid celebrating his victory/sending him a message? http://pic.twitter.com/5vhBkyINSg

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 23, 2016

Meanwhile, as TMZ points out, “Bikers 4 Trump” have already started building a commemorative border wall of their own just outside of Atlanta.  For the bargain price of $60 per brick, or $100 for two, you too can purchase a custom-etched brick for the wall.

Bikers 4 Trump tells TMZ they’ve been plugging away for a couple months on a brick border wall of their own, which they plan to move to the Mexican border should Trump ever get the real deal constructed.

 

We’re told they already have 200 bricks stacked in Atlanta next to State Hwy 49, and they feature names like Antonio Sabato Jr. and Joe Bonsall ?of The Oak Ridge Boys. Bricks have also been purchased in Scott Baio, Ted Cruz and Ted Nugent’s names — although none made their own donation.

And, lest you thought this was a joke, here is some video of the newly etched bricks hot off the press and bound for the Atlanta wall.

Welcome @DGallup to the wall! She is a 100% Disabled Vet & she ordered 2 Bricks @ https://t.co/cGkVjf2Psh#RETWEET http://pic.twitter.com/wli5ZcY9QP

— Bikers 4 Trump (@Bikers4Trump) August 15, 2016

What more is there to say?  The next 4 years are going to be surreal.

via http://ift.tt/2g5W9yR Tyler Durden

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

The lawlessness of the Obama Administration knows no bounds.

Not only has President Obama made every move he can through executive order to create and foster amnesty for illegal immigrants, but his Justice Department is now attempting to force people to hire undocumented workers.

Ironically, the agency on the other end of intimidation is the Denver County Sheriff’s Office.

Incredibly backwards…

via the Daily Caller:

Denver County’s sheriff office has been slapped with a fine by the Department of Justice (DOJ) because it refused to hire non-citizens as deputies.

 

From the beginning of 2015 through last March, the Denver Sheriff Department went on a major hiring binge, adding more than 200 new deputies. But those jobs ended up only going to citizens, because the department made citizenship a stated requirement on the job application. The department admitted as much in a new settlement with the U.S. government, which requires it to pay a $10,000 fine.

 

The department will also have to comb through all of its job applications from the past two years, identifying immigrants who were excluded from the hiring process and giving them due consideration.

How can counties, state agencies, small businesses or individuals be forced to hire in violation of the law, in order to comply with non-discrimination?

Obviously the system has a logical loop failure, either that, or someone wants this country to eat itself.

via http://ift.tt/2fqr6fv Tyler Durden

It’s no surprise that the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States is the National Security Agency.  These jobs are not all ‘codebreakers’ – why does the NSA employ so many mathematicians, second only to Wall St.?  

The biggest secret propaganda and sales tool used by experts in the modern world is the deliberate twisting and false presentation of data, specifically – numbers and ‘statistics.’  They do so in such a subtle way, that the argument leads into a heated debate about the inference of the obvious conclusions – NOT the calculation of the numbers themselves!  Very rarely are the methods of statistical calculations, data collection, formulations, and other operations ever questioned.

This is used by governments, to paint a picture they want, in the case of the military, to ‘sell war’ – as outlined eloquently by mathematician Nassim Taleb:

When Pasquale Cirillo and I examined the historical accounts of wars for our statistical analysis of violence, we discovered huge holes –people take numbers for gospel, yet many accounts were fabrications. Many historians, political “scientists”, and others for fall for them, then get to write books. For instance we saw that the scientific entertainer Steven Pinker based his analysis of the severity of the An Lushan rebellion on a shoddy overestimation –the real numbers of casualties could to be lower by an order of magnitude. Much of Pinker’s thesis of drop in violence depends on the past being more violent; it thus gets further discredited (the thesis is shaky anyway as Pinker’s general assertions conflict with the statistical data he provides). Peter Frankopan, in his magesterial The Silk Roads, seem to get the point: estimations of casualties from the Mongol invasions were inflated as their accounts exaggerated the devastation they caused in order to intimidate opponents (war is not so much about killing as it is about bringing submission). Our main (technical) paper is here.  But it is not just the bullshitting of Steven Pinker: numbers for many wars seem to have been pulled out of a hat. Some journalist cites some person at a conference; it finds it way to Le Monde or the New York Times, and that number becomes fixed for future generations. For our attempt to build a rigorous method of quantitative historiography, we devised statistical robustness techniques: they consist in bootstraping “histories” from the past, considering the past a realization between the lowest and the highest estimate available, producing tens of thousands of such “historical paths” and evaluate how “robust” an estimator to changes in the aggregate. More depressingly, we found that no historian had bothered to do similar cleaning up work or robustness check –yet the statistical apparatus is there to help.

(In case you haven’t heard of Nassim Taleb this book is a MUST READ as a primer for any trader or investor to understand MATH as it pertains to the MARKETS:  Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  Taleb is no academic he runs a multi-billion dollar hedge fund).

Inflated numbers of enemy casualties, or deflated numbers of aggressor casualties, pose an obvious example of why such agencies would use bad math to display data in such a way as to further their argument, for one side or another.  But what other examples?  Why would Wall St. use such a strategy, considering their entire business is numbers?

Consider the example of the Fed and interest rate policy.  If the current interest rates are 1%, and the Fed hikes to 2%, that’s a 1% increase but in percentage terms, it’s a 100% increase!  If you had interest rate derivatives, you could with no leverage potentially earn a 100% return on your money, in a day (supposing it was a surprise and the market wasn’t already pricing in the hike). 

Another popular statistical misconception, is that of loss recovery.  Recovering from a loss is not linear.  For example, if your fund has a 10% loss, you need 11.11% just to break even.  This becomes more extreme, the deeper the loss hole.  If you start with 100 units, lose 10% of them – you have 90.  But to increase from 90 back to your original starting 100, you need 11.11 units, which is 11% just to get back your lost 10 units.  Yes!

And speaking about performance, let’s knock the industry standard performance capsule and its big gaping hole.  According to most reporting standards, such as prescribed by NFA, FINRA, and many others – funds report monthly performance based on a ‘snapshot’ of performance during that month.  This sounds reasonable until you actually calculate monthly performance numbers and see that it’s really only performance based on a 1 or 2 day period intra-month.  If there was a big profit or a big loss on the days taken as ‘snapshots’ that’s what will show in the capsule.

What’s misleading about this, it doesn’t represent to investors what happened DURING the month.  For many strategies, this is not relevant – but for some strategies, it is very relevant.  For example, imagine a scenario where there was a huge 30% loss and then recovery, and the month ended up being 2% positive.  It would seem to be a low-volatility fund, and likely attract conservative investors, like Pension funds.  They wouldn’t know about the intra-month risk, unless the manager told them (but why would they, it’s not in the required documents, and maybe THEY don’t even know about it).

However you add it up, the difference between balance and equity can be misleading.  Skipping the monthly performance capsules that 99% of Wall St. uses, if one has access to it, one can compare the balance and equity curves over time.  For those who don’t know, balance is closed positions, equity includes live trades.  So if a position is still open, the floating profit or loss will show up in the equity.  Take a look at this discrepancy:

The red line is the balance, yellow/orange line is the equity.  These lines must separate when trades are placed, otherwise an account would never lose or gain.  But how wide are these gaps, how frequent are they?  Absent of rigorous statistical analysis as done by Taleb in his war casualties paper, comparing these 2 lines is the most basic form of drawdown analysis.  What caused the lines to diverge?  What dates did they diverge on, and what forces caused them to converge?  These are questions astute investors should be asking.  

For a full education on statistical analysis, checkout Fortress Capital’s Introduction to Foreign Exchange.  For a pocket guide designed to make you a due diligence expert, checkout Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex for only $6.11 on kindle, or get some awesome financial books here.

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A new study just released by the USDA, offers a very detailed look at exactly how participants in the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (SNAP, aka Food Stamps) spend their taxpayer-funded subsidies.  Unfortunately for taxpayers, the amount of money spent on soft drinks and other unnecessary junk foods/drinks is fairly staggering.  But, we suppose it’s a nice taxpayer funded subsidy for the soda industry…so score one for Warren Buffett and the Coca Cola lobbyists.

Per the study, nearly $360mm, or 5.4% of the $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on soft drinks alone.  In fact, soft drinks represent the single largest “commodity” purchased by SNAP participants with $100mm more spent on sodas than milk and $150mm more than beef.

Soft drinks were the top commodity bought by food stamp recipients shopping at outlets run by a single U.S. grocery retailer.

 

That is according to a new study released by the Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency responsible for running the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program.

 

By contrast, milk was the top commodity bought from the same retailer by customers not on food stamps.

 

In calendar year 2011, according to the study, food stamp recipients spent approximately $357,700,000 buying soft drinks from an enterprise the study reveals only as “a leading U.S. grocery retailer.”

 

That was more than they spent on any other “food” commodity—including milk ($253,700,000), ground beef ($201,000,000), “bag snacks” ($199,300,000) or “candy-packaged” ($96,200,000), which also ranked among the top purchases.

Even worse, when we added up all of the commodities that would typically be considered “junk food” (i.e. soft drinks, candy, cakes, energy drinks, etc.), we found that roughly $950mm, or just over 14% of the aggregate $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on unnecessary, unhealthy products.

As CNS News points out, the study was conducted by IMPAQ international and analyzed the sales of a single national retail chain back in 2011. 

The dollar amount that food stamp recipients spent on soft drinks and other commodities comes from data a retailer provided to a data analysis company the federal government hired to find out what kind of foods people on foods stamps—and Americans not on foods stamps—were buying.

 

“The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) awarded a contract to IMPAQ International, LLC, to determine what foods are typically purchased by households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) benefits,” the study explained. “This study examined point-of-sale (POS) food purchase data to determine for what foods SNAP households have the largest expenditures, including both SNAP benefits and other resources, and how their expenditures compare to those made by non-SNAP households.”

 

“POS transaction data from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011 from a leading grocery retailer were examined for this study,” the report said.

It’s a good thing democrats re-branded Food Stamps as the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”….otherwise we would have confused it for a blatant waste of taxpayer money on sodas and energy drinks.

via http://ift.tt/2ftdgfv Tyler Durden

Having exploded higher in the run-up to the election, market expectations of the correlation between stocks within the S&P 500 have completely collapsed since to new record lows.

Simply put, massive systemic overlays were placed ahead of the election event, and were forced to be unwound increasingly aggressively as the post-Trump rally caught everyone offside (the unwind would mean relatively heavy selling of Index protection relative to single-name protection).

As a reminder, implied correlation measures the relative demand for macro overlays (index hedges) vs micro risk (individual stock hedges/concerns). The higher it is, the more systemically worried investors are and the more traders believe a high correlation 'event' is due (typically the high correlation event is a big downturn in stocks).

As The Wall Street Journal reports, sectors and styles in the S&P 500 index have started to move independently after seven years of depressed volatility and tighter correlations.

While the S&P 500 climbed to a record for a second day on Tuesday, “there are elements of a bull market and a bear market at the same time,” said Andrew Wilkinson, chief market analyst at Interactive Brokers.

“You’re seeing pressure on different sectors. In a typical bull market, you’re going to get all stocks going higher.”

 

“It makes it very interesting for the stock picker and the active manager who’s on his game,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

 

The relationship between growth and value stocks in the benchmark equity measure has also decoupled, with the rolling correlation between the two groups sliding since voting day, FactSet data show. A Republican sweep of the U.S. presidency and Congress has boosted the inflation outlook, pushing investors into value names. Before the election, investors crowded into growth companies in 2015 amid a sluggish economy and then poured money into low-volatility equities in the first half of this year.

But it is not just correlations between individual stocks that is crashing. The correlation between bonds and stocks has collapsed back to its norms…

Which, as we noted previously, is raising notable concerns over a risk-parity fund blow up. As BofA warns: "Latent risk remains worth monitoring, as (i) leverage is still near max levels across a variety of risk parity  parametrizations, (ii) bond allocations are historically elevated, and (iii) markets continue to be sceptical of a 2016 Fed hike."

If BofA is correct, it would mean that a day which sees a -4% SPX drop and +1% bond rally (good diversification) would generate no selling pressure, "underscoring the critical role played by bond-equity correlation in governing the severity of risk parity unwinds."

 

However, a troubling scenario is one where even a relatively benign 2% selloff of the S&P coupled with just a 1% selloff of the 10Y could result in up to 50% deleveraging, which in turn would accelerate further liquidations by other comparable funds, and lead to a self-fulfilling crash across asset classes.

 

Which incidentally sounds like precisely the scenario that could happen when the Fed tries to raise rates, and is also why asset classes continue to move without fear of any rate hike, as they now realize – very well – just how trapped the Fed truly is. That said, in short order, we will see if the Fed, for once, has the intestinal fortitude to actually raise rates in the face of the extreme volatility awaiting equities in the event they do… we doubt it.

As RBC's Charlie McElligott notes, the classic risk-parity pain-trade ensues— developed mkt sovereign bonds, stocks, EM, credit and commodities (ex-crude) all under the cosh right now at the same time (shocker–a strategy built on a core concept of ‘negative correlation btwn bonds and risk stocks’ is going to be exposed in a regime change of this magnitude).

And as the chart below shows, Risk Parity funds are plunging…

As is clear, he massive decoupling between stocks and risk-parity funds is not unpredented… but has not ended well in the past (for stocks).

via http://ift.tt/2giM3xe Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michale Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Could you survive on just $2.50 a day?  According to Compassion International, approximately half of the population of the entire planet currently lives on $2.50 a day or less.  Meanwhile, those hoarding wealth at the very top of the global pyramid are rapidly becoming a lot wealthier.  Don’t get me wrong – I am a very big believer in working hard and contributing something of value to society, and those that work the hardest and contribute the most should be able to reap the rewards.  In this article I am in no way, shape or form criticizing true capitalism, because if true capitalism were actually being practiced all over the planet we would have far, far less poverty today.  Instead, our planet is dominated by a heavily socialized debt-based central banking system that systematically transfers wealth from hard working ordinary citizens to the global elite.  Those at the very top of the pyramid know that they are impoverishing everyone else, and they very much intend to keep it that way.

Let’s start with some of the hard numbers.  According to Zero Hedge, Credit Suisse had just released their yearly report on global wealth, and it shows that 45.6 percent of all the wealth in the world is controlled by just 0.7 percent of the people…

As Credit Suisse tantalizingly shows year after year, the number of people who control just shy of a majority of global net worth, or 45.6% of the roughly $255 trillion in household wealth, is declining progressively relative to the total population of the world, and in 2016 the number of people who are worth more than $1 million was just 33 million, roughly 0.7% of the world’s population of adults. On the other end of the pyramid, some 3.5 billion adults had a net worth of less than $10,000, accounting for just about $6 trillion in household wealth.

And since this is a yearly report, we can go back and see how things have changed over time.  When Zero Hedge did this, it was discovered that the wealth of those at the very top “has nearly doubled” over the past six years, and meanwhile the poor have gotten even poorer…

Incidentally, we tracked down the first Credit Suisse report we found in this series from 2010, where the total wealth of the top “layer” in the pyramid was a modest $69.2 trillion for the world’s millionaires. It has nearly doubled in the 6 years since then. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest have gotten, you got it, poorer, as those adults who were worth less than $10,000 in 2010 had a combined net worth of $8.2 trillion, a number which has since declined to $6.1 trillion in 2016 despite a half a billion increase in the sample size.

If these trends continue at this pace, it won’t be too long before the global elite have virtually all of the wealth and the rest of us have virtually nothing.

Perhaps you are fortunate enough to still have a good job, and you live in a large home and you will sleep in a warm bed tonight.

Well, you should consider yourself to be very blessed, because that is definitely not the case for most of the rest of the world.  The following 11 facts about global poverty come from dosomething.com, and I want you to really let these numbers sink in for a moment…

So how did we get here?

Debt is the primary mechanism that takes wealth from ordinary people like you and me and puts it into the hands of the global elite.

In my recent article entitled “Why Donald Trump Must Shut Down The Federal Reserve And Start Issuing Debt-Free Money“, I discussed how the Federal Reserve was designed to entrap the U.S. government in an endless debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape.  And that is precisely what has happened, as the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

In that very same year, the federal income tax was instituted, and that is a key part of the program for the global elite.  You see, the income tax is how wealth is transferred from us to the government.  And then a continuously growing national debt is how that wealth is transferred from the government to the elite.

It is a very complicated system, but at the end of the day it is all about taking money from us and getting it into their pockets.

And at this point more than 99.9 percent of the population of the world lives in a country with a central bank, and almost every nation on the planet has some form of income tax.

It is a global system that is designed to create as much debt as possible, and I recently shared with my readers that the total amount of debt in the world has hit a staggering all-time record high of 152 trillion dollars.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the global elite have used various forms of debt to turn the rest of the planet into their debt slaves.

As debt levels race higher and higher all over the planet, the elite are using the magic of compound interest to grab a bigger and bigger share of the pie.

Given enough time, those at the very top would have virtually everything and the rest of us would have virtually nothing.  The middle class is shrinking all over the globe, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor continues to grow at an astounding pace.

But the vast majority of people out there have no idea how money, debt, taxes and central banks really work, and so they have no idea that this is purposely being done to them.

The truth is that we don’t have to have this much global poverty, and if we correctly identify the root causes of this poverty we can start working on some real solutions.

via http://ift.tt/2fT4d8b Tyler Durden

Russia has conducted successful intercontinental ballistic missile tests intended for its Barguzin “nuclear-train” program. 

The tests for Russia’s “railway-based combat rocket system” took place on Plesetsk cosmodrone two weeks ago, Interfax reports and were “fully successful” according to a military source, which would “pave the way for further flight tests.” The tests were held to test the missiles’ launch readiness, Russian press added. 

A BZhRK with a Molodets missile erected to launch position

The mobile weapons platform, made up of several train carriages designed to conceal the launchers of six Yars or Yars-M thermonuclear ICBMs and their command units, are expected to enter service between 2018 and 2020.

After first announcing the return of the nuclear trains, which had previously been banned, in 2014 Russia’s military then confirmed the trains are expected to be put into service in 2019. The nuclear trains, dubbed Berguzin after the strong eastern wind that blows over the Lake Baikal, aim to counter US’s Conventional Prompt Global Strike project, which would give the Pentagon the capability of launching attacks and precision strikes at any target in the world in one hour.

The Berguzins, which act as mobile platforms to transport and launch nuclear missiles, will be able carry up to 6 RS-24 Yars missiles, the International Business Times reported.  According to RT, Yars missiles can reportedly carry four warheads for a total yield of between 0.4 and 1.2 megatons.  While the missiles are less destructive than their predecessors, the Molodets missiles, they are more accurate, have a greater range and weigh roughly half as much. The lighter weight means that trains on which they are loaded do not require reinforced wheel-sets to carry the load.

This makes it harder for enemy spy satellites to identify the trains, as the carriages can be easily disguised as refrigerator cars. Once the trains are deployed, Russia will be in possession of 36 megatons of mobile and ready-to-fire nuclear missiles.

The commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Colonel-General Sergei Karakayev, said the state-of-the-art Barguzin complex would outstrip its Soviet predecessor in all respects, including accuracy and range. Once launched, the complex will be in service until 2040.

During Soviet times, the Strategic Missile Forces had three divisions of rail-mobile missile systems “Molodets” (NATO reporting name SS-24 “Scalpel”). They were stationed in the Kostroma, Perm and Krasnoyarsk regions.

There were 12 “nuclear trains” in total, each carrying three missiles. The complexes entered service in 1987, just a few years prior the collapse of the USSR. The West dubbed the Soviet weapon “ghost trains.” The rail mobile missile complexes were disposed of from 2003 to 2005 without extending their life.   The “Molodets” nuclear trains were part of the START-2 Treaty for arms reductions.

The new Barguzin project does not have a goal to revive the erstwhile Soviet military project. This is an entirely new development. One of the obvious advantages of Barguzin trains is their mobility, although Soviet rail-mobile missile complexes were too heavy. It is worthy of note that the development of such systems does not come contrary to the START-3 agreement.

Russia’s latest advancement in its nuclear weapons technology comes shortly after the Kremlin announced the deployment of nuclear-capable missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave, as was reported previously. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that the Russian military needs to respond to what he described as Nato’s aggressive moves.

“Russia is doing what is necessary to protect itself amid Nato’s expansion toward its borders,” Mr Peskov said adding that “the alliance is a truly aggressive bloc, so Russia does what it has to do. It has every sovereign right to take necessary measures throughout the territory of the Russian Federation.”

According to overnight press reports, Moscow also deployed new anti-ship missiles on Pacific islands controlled by Russia but also claimed by Japan. Bal and Bastion missile systems have been stationed on the islands, called the southern Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan, the Boyevaya Vakhta (Combat Duty) newspaper of Russia’s Pacific Fleet reports.

The disagreement over the islands, seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, has kept the two countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending their wartime hostilities.

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Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan recently signed an executive order forbidding Maryland public schools from beginning classes before Labor Day. Governor Hogan’s executive order benefits businesses in Maryland’s coastal areas that lose school-aged summer employees and business from Maryland families when schools start in August. However, as Governor Hogan’s critics have pointed out, some Maryland school districts, as well as Maryland schoolchildren, benefit from an earlier start to the school year.

Governor Hogan’s executive order is the latest example of how centralized government control of education leaves many students behind. A centrally planned education system can no more meet the unique needs of every child than a centrally planned economic system can meet the unique needs of every worker and consumer.

Centralizing education at the state or, worse, federal level inevitably leads to political conflicts over issues ranging from whether students should be allowed to pray on school grounds, to what should be the curriculum, to what food should be served in the cafeteria, to who should be allowed to use which bathroom.

The centralization and politicization of education is rooted in the idea that education is a right that must be provided by the government, instead of a good that individuals should obtain in the market. Separating school from state would empower parents to find an education system that meets the needs of their children instead of using the political process to force their idea of a good education on all children.

While many politicians praise local and parental control of education, the fact is both major parties embrace federal control of education. The two sides only differ on the details. Liberals who oppose the testing mandates of No Child Left Behind enthusiastically backed President Clinton’s national testing proposals. They also back the Obama administration’s expansion of federal interference in the classroom via Common Core.

Similarly, conservatives who (correctly) not just opposed Clinton’s initiatives but called for the abolition of the Department of Education enthusiastically supported No Child Left Behind. Even most conservatives who oppose Common Core, federal bathroom and cafeteria mandates, and other federal education policies, support reforming, instead of eliminating, the Department of Education.

Politicians will not voluntarily relinquish control over education to parents. Therefore, parents and other concerned citizens should take a page from the UK and work to “Ed-Exit” government-controlled education. Parents and other concerned citizens should pressure Congress to finally shut down the Department of Education and return the money to American families. They also must pressure state governments and local school boards to reject federal mandates, even if it means forgoing federal funding.

Parents should also explore education alternatives, such as private, charter, and religious schools, as well as homeschooling. Homeschooling is the ultimate form of Ed-Exit. Homeschooling parents have the freedom to shape every aspect of education — from the curriculum to the length of the school day to what their children have for lunch to who can and cannot use the bathroom — to fit their child's unique needs.

Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education emphasizing the ideas of liberty should try out my homeschooling curriculum. The curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes courses in personal finance and public speaking. The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Parents interested in Ed-Exiting from government-run schools can learn more about my curriculum at ronpaulcurriculum.com.

via http://ift.tt/2fsRN6t Tyler Durden

In a late evening press release on Thanksgiving Eve, The US Navy admits that 134,386 sailors’ private inrfomation has been hacked from a HP Enterprise laptop…

On Oct. 27, 2016, the Navy was notified by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services (HPES) that one of the company’s laptops operated by their employee supporting a Navy contract was reported as compromised.

 

After analysis by HPES and a continuing Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigation, it was determined Nov. 22, 2016, that sensitive information, including the names and Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of 134,386 current and former Sailors were accessed by unknown individuals.

 

“The Navy takes this incident extremely seriously- this is a matter of trust for our Sailors,” said Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Robert Burke. “We are in the early stages of investigating and are working quickly to identify and take care of those affected by this breach.”

 

The Navy will notify those affected Sailors in the coming weeks by multiple means including phone, letter and email.

 

For those affected by this incident, the Navy is working to provide further details on what happened, and is reviewing credit monitoring service options for affected Sailors.

 

At this stage of the investigation, there is no evidence to suggest misuse of the information that was compromised.

Probably the Russians?

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