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Liberal Hampshire College Stops Flying American Flag – “Symbol Of Fear”

After the presidential election, the liberal Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts made the decision to lower its U.S. flag on campus to half-staff due to, at least according to president Jonathan Lash, “a range of views on campus, including people whose experience growing up have made the flag a symbol of fear, which was strengthened by the toxic language during the campaign.”

According to CBS Boston, the “gesture” quickly sparked outrage on campus among veterans and their families which ultimately resulted in someone removing the flag on Veterans Day to burn it.

He said the trouble started with a gesture meant to help provoke “meaningful and respectful dialogue” on campus–a stance he outlined in a post on the college’s Facebook page. In that post, he said the Board of Trustees decided to fly the flag at half-staff due to the “environment of escalating hate-based violence” in the wake of the election.

 

Lash said the gesture was also meant to be an “expression of grief” over deaths around the world, including those of U.S. service members. Unfortunately, the move didn’t work as planned, and many–especially veterans and families of veterans in the Hampshire College family–saw it as being disrespectful of the tradition of expressing mourning on a national level.

 

“Frankly, doing that, it didn’t help,” he said. “Flying the flag at half-mast just created more controversy.”

 

Tuesday afternoon, the school posted on its Facebook page to say they were temporarily suspending comments because their staff was about to go on holiday, and could not keep up with the huge volume.
Hampshire College

 

Of course, university president Jonathan Lash points out that extensive therapy sessions will be required with the “triggered” snowflakes on campus before the “symbol of fear” can be flown on campus again.

The plan now that the flag is down is for group discussions with faculty, staff, and students about the issues, but there is no timeline for when the flag might fly again.

 

“We intend to go forward with that, and then reconsider how we fly the flag going forward,” Lash said.

 

“When President Obama ordered national flags at half-staff to recognize the victims in Paris, something we completely agreed with, there were a number of people on campus that said ‘Yes, but, what about the hundreds of people being killed  by terror in Syria and Lebanon and Pakistan?’ and asked that the school find some way to recognize victims globally,” said Lash. “So we periodically lowered the flag to recognize victims of violence.”

 

He said the school will focus on completing those group conversations before putting the flag back up.

Will this madness never end?

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Trump Gives Hillary a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Or Does He?

 

Hold your real assets outside of the banking system in one of many private international facilities  –>    http://ift.tt/2cyFwvQ;

 

 

 

 

Trump Gives Hillary a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Or Does He?

Written by Nathan McDonald (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

 

 


 

 

One news headline, that has many of those who supported Trump throughout his candidacy pulling their hair out in rage this weekend, is the one that stated Trump would not prosecute Hillary Clinton for her illegal use of a private email server during her time as the Secretary of State.

 

 

At face value, this is quite frustrating and annoying, as it goes against one of Trump’s campaign promises to hold Hillary accountable for some of her past crimes committed which broke many laws that others of lesser position have been charged for.

 

 

What people are missing is a strategic play that Trump has initiated and enacted. Trump has extended hardcore Hillary-supporting liberals an olive branch and offer of peace that he himself never actually possessed.

 

 

The reality is, the President of the United States DOES NOT and CANNOT legally prosecute anyone. This is not his job and not within his power. Donald Trump stating that he will not prosecute Hillary Clinton should come as no shock to anyone, as he cannot even do this!

 

 

In the process, he has gained an advantage and looks presidential. Meanwhile, his recently appointed Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is free to act as if he is not being “politically” motivated or influenced. He is fully in his right to pursue charges against Hillary if he deems it appropriate.

 

 

Given the fact that Jeff Sessions is known as the number one constitutional attack dog, it is likely that he WILL do the right thing and go after Hillary for her past crimes.

 

 

Also, what this does is defuses the possibility of President Obama pardoning Hillary Clinton in the 57 days he has remaining, an opportunity that is less likely to be used if Trump himself takes a soft stance against Hillary in the short time that remains for Obama to act.

 

 

The lying mainstream media, who has recently come out with a full blown assault on the alternative media and are flailing about in their dying gasps, is doing everything they can to try and put a wedge in between Trump and his supporters. The spin on this story is just another example of this, as they know the facts just as well as I do.

 

 

Yet, the facts still remain just the same. As I’ve always said, do your own research and stop and think about the news you are reading before you allow it to influence you.

 

 

The MSM and the elites who control them are the same ones who have religiously attacked us in the precious metals community for decades. We know their tricks well and we will be here, exposing them every step of the way, for as long as we can in this eternal fight for freedom and liberty.

 

 

 

Please email with any questions about this article or precious metals HERE

 

 

 

 

Trump Gives Hillary a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Or Does He?

Written by Nathan McDonald (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)


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Nassim Taleb Rages At The Bullshit Statistics Of War In Syria

Authored by Nassim Ncholas Taleb, originally posted at Medium.com,

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.

It hit me that I needed to look into the estimates of Syrian refugees in Lebanon –here again numbers are flying without much rigor, swelling upwards from report to report. But we can assess the bias: they are potentially overstimated. For, at a certain municipality in Lebanon, I was told that the number of refugees in the town, while large, was considerably lower than what was used by the bureaucrats of the U.N. The real number is about a third of what is published. While this is very optimistic for Lebanon (there should be fewer refugees than claimed, so let us worry less about the stability of the place), it is not good for the economics and funding of U.N. agencies and the lifestyle of their bureaucrats.

Now, the real number of casualties in the Syrian war. We hear half a million people died in Syria. We are also told that many are “murdered” by Putin, Assad, and Catherine the Great (who came down to bully the Ottomans in the Levant after her invasion of the Crimea). It is easy to verify that much of the information we get about “butcher” of Damascus are suspicious: some Saudi-Qatari funded P.R. firms in Washington and London have shown evidence of hyperactivity. Just as the number of hospitals in East Aleppo where Al-Qaeda is based (and from where it shells civilians in other parts of the city), just as the number of hospitals per capita there appears to me several times that in the rest of the world (every day we hear that the Russians have destroyed another hospital, yet the State department spokesman John Kirby could not place or name any of the five hospitals he was recently discussing). I see propagandists and Al Qaeda apologists such as Charles Lister (at the Salafi-funded Middle East Institute) throw numbers that get cited –yes, some idiot will cite numbers from the Al Qaeda propagandist Charles Lister, and may eventually be cited in turn by some decent newspaper, hence get fixed for posterity. I once saw a serious American journalist and former friend tweeting a macabre picture as a testimony of Assad’s murders: it turned out that the picture of “dying children victims of Assad” was from Libya four years earlier, and appears to be promoted by a Qatari-funded P.R. firm. Her reaction was unapologetic: “Don’t you think Assad is capable of these crimes?”

Trust none of what you hear, some of what you read, half of what you see goes an old trader adage. As a trader and quant/mathematical statistician, I have been taught to take data seriously, trust nobody’s numbers, and avoid people naive enough to engage in policy based on lurid but questionable pictures of destruction: the fake picture of a dying child is something nobody can question without appearing to be an asshole. As a citizen, I require that the designation “murderer” be determined in a court of law, not by Saudi-funded outlets?—?once someone is called a murderer or butcher, all bets are off. I cannot believe governments and bureaucrats could be so stupid. But they are.

 

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Blistering Demand, Record Indirects, Surging BTC In 7 Year Auction

After 4 consecutive poor-to-passable auctions, moments ago the Treasury sold $28 billion in 7 Year paper in what can only be defined as a blockbuster auction.

The High Yield of 2.215% stopped 1.6 bps through the When Issued, the biggest “stop through” in over a year. The Bid to Cover likewise saw a surprising spike in demand, jumping from 2.491 to 2.683, the highest since April 2014, and well above the 6 month average.

The internal also were gangbusters, with Indirects taking down a record 72.65%, leaving only 9.36% to Directs and 18% to Dealers, the second lowest on record.

In sum: on the day in which the 10Y hit the highest yield since July 2015, if the market was looking for a clearing yield at which both foreign and domestic buyers would come out of the woodwork for US paper, somewhere around 2.2% in the belly of the curve – if only at this moment – appears to be the answer for now.

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The Fake Epidemic of Fake News: New at Reason

The outrage over fake news is based on fake news about fake news.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Fake news on social media has gotten so bad that it threatens democracy itself, according to President Obama and a host of other deep thinkers. Why, a recent study by Buzzfeed concludes that fake news beat out real news during the past three months of the election. And we all know how that turned out.

There are at least two problems with this. First, the epidemic of fake news is overstated. Second, fake news is far from new.

The Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney took the trouble to look beyond the headline about the Buzzfeed analysis. Turns out the “analysis” was not at all rigorous. It compared only the Facebook engagement metrics—the number of shares, reactions, and comments—for a small handful of stories.

View this article.

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Dow Overtakes Gold Year-To-Date For First Time As Precious Metal Pounding Continues

For the first time in 2016, the total return of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is above that of gold year-to-date (up 11.80%).

 

The convergence since the election of Donald Trump is almost unprecedented as gold dumps 16% (from Trump night highs) and Dow futures up 8.5% from Trump night lows.

 

A number of technicians have pointed at the two-year average price as support…

 

As Claudio Grass concluded earlier, while many market participants will keep looking for clues in FOMC statements, one’s investment decisions shouldn’t be based on questions such as “will the Fed hike rates next month” or “will there be a short term correction in the gold market” – that is simply superficial and ignores the major fundamental problems the system is facing. With so many question marks hanging over the global economy, we believe holding gold is of paramount importance. Gold stored in physical form outside the banking system is the only viable form of insurance in this dangerous market environment. Our case for gold is to consider the long haul. Whether or not there could be another gold market correction is not the issue. We believe gold’s secular bull market has by no means ended. There is probably still a long, long way to go.

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Judge: Obama Administration’s New Overtime Rules an Overreach

ObamaIf you want to change federal overtime requirements, then go to Congress and change the law. That’s what a federal judge said (give or take 20 pages of text) Tuesday evening when granting a temporary injunction to halt the implementation of the Obama administration and the Department of Labor’s rule drastically increasing the number of people who would qualify for overtime pay under federal law.

The background: President Barack Obama’s administration decided earlier in the year it would executively update the policies of employees covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. This law sets thresholds for employees who work salaried jobs and are exempt from overtime laws. One of the thresholds is salary; the Department of Labor decided it would double the minimum salary in order to drastically increase the number of workers who qualified for overtime. They changed the minimum threshold from $23,360 a year to $47,476 a year, which would have affected more than 4 million workers.

Not so fast, said Judge Amos Mazzant, of the Eastern District of Texas. In response to a challenge and a request for an injunction from 21 states, he ruled against the administration, meaning the law will not take effect on Dec. 1 as planned.

As Mazzant explained in his ruling, while the Department of Labor does have leeway to make adjustments and updates to the rules, it can’t do so in such a way that goes against the law’s intent. The law doesn’t use pay levels to determine who is exempt from overtime, though there are minimum pay levels written in the law. It actually uses job duties to determine who qualifies for overtime. The new rule completely ignores the emphasis on job duties and therefore conflicts with Congress’ intent with the law. Mazzant notes:

[N]othing in the EAP exemption indicates that Congress intended the Department to define and delimit with respect to a minimum salary level. Thus, the Department’s delegation is limited by the plain meaning of the statute and Congress’s intent. Directly in conflict with Congress’s intent, the Final Rule states that “[w]hite collar employees subject to the salary level test earning less than $913 per week will not qualify for the EAP exemption, and therefore will be eligible for overtime, irrespective of their job duties and responsibilities.” With the Final Rule, the Department exceeds its delegated authority and ignores Congress’s intent by raising the minimum salary level such that it supplants the duties test. Consequently, the Final Rule does not meet Chevron step one and is unlawful. The Department’s role is to carry out Congress’s intent. If Congress intended the salary requirement to supplant the duties test, then Congress, and not the Department, should make that change.

He noted that the rule essentially creates an exemption determination based on salary alone, thereby ignoring a chunk of the law.

Mazzant is not ruling that it is bad or wrong to want to alter the salary threshold required to qualify for overtime (though it will most certainly have very bad consequences for those many workers, who will see hours cut back and opportunities for advancement dry up as these types of positions are eliminated). Instead, the judge merely ruled that the administration overstepped its authority. It doesn’t have the power to make this change on its own.

That the judge’s decision is entirely about the administration not following proper procedures makes the upset responses like this one from Politico a bit puzzling:

Liberal groups were swift to denounce Mazzant’s decision. “This is an extreme and unsupportable decision and is a clear overreach by the court,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, who helped the Labor Department develop the regulation. Eisenbrey called it “a disappointment to millions of workers who are forced to work long hours with no extra compensation” and “a blow to those Americans who care deeply about raising wages and lessening inequality.”

If the incoming Donald Trump administration decided it would change the rules to lower the salary level necessary to be exempt from overtime, I doubt Eisenbrey would think it would be “overreach” for the court to tell Trump he couldn’t rewrite the law in such a fashion. That’s perhaps something worth thinking about, because if Mazzant allowed Obama to executively change the rules this way, then there’s no reason a President Trump couldn’t change it in the other direction.

You can download and read the ruling for yourself here.

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Why Reshore Manufacturing? It’s The Only Way To Avoid Defective Pirated Parts

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Reshoring the entire supply chain so it can be trusted is the low-cost solution once you add up the total lifecycle cost of a hopelessly counterfeit global supply chain.

There are two basic arguments against bringing manufacturing that was transferred overseas (offshored) back to America (reshoring):

1. It's too costly

2. The supply chain is now in China/Asia and it's not possible to source the parts needed to bring manufacturing back to America.

I beg to differ on both counts: nothing is more costly and destructive to profits than defective, pirated parts made overseas. Counterfeits made to look like legitimate parts are highly profitable to the counterfeiter and immensely damaging and dangerous to the manufacturer and end-user.

In a global economy burdened with massive overcapacity, the only way to maintain profit margins is to lower costs by cutting corners: in effect, defrauding customers by delivering deceptively reduced quantity and quality, and/or defrauding the end-producer by shipping low-cost counterfeit parts that mimic legitimate products.

Gordon Long and I discussed this systemic reality in Bankers Crippling the Global Supply Chain (34:50).

Bloomberg/Businessweek recently outlined the scope of fake parts and the impossibility of rooting them out of global supply chains: The Dangerous Game Behind Fake Ball Bearings:

Everything from shoe polish to medication to car parts is pirated. Estimates of the scale of the problem range from $461 billion — 2.5 percent of global trade — the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development says, to some $1.8 trillion, according to calculations last year by the International Chamber of Commerce. And while makers of luxury goods — among the most prominent counterfeited products — lose profit from the trade, there's little risk to consumers. In the case of more mundane stuff like bearings, forgeries can be dangerous as well as costly.

"Many people believe piracy is limited to handbags and other similar products, but the more serious issue is industrial companies," said Ann-Charlotte Soederlund, co-founder of the Global Anti-Counterfeiting Network, an umbrella organization of fake-fighters around the world. "The effects can be immensely larger than the consequence of a fake handbag."

Knock-off building materials have been shown to catch fire. Counterfeit electronics have caused military equipment to fail. And SKF says a sham bearing in a swimming pool pump sparked a fire that burnt a house to the ground.

Forgeries of its products typically originate in China, often from factories where legitimate competitors make their products, Aastroem said. Workshops there buy unmarked bearings, stamp them with the SKF brand and put them in packaging designed to look genuine, the company says. From China, the bearings are shipped worldwide to customers who often believe they are buying legitimate parts.

How expensive are defective products returned as a result of counterfeit parts failing? How costly is the damage done to brands that depend on quality for their pricing power? How expensive is it to field hundreds of quality-control personnel and investigators, all of whose efforts are the equivalent of shoveling sand against the tide?

Gordon and I discussed the practically endless list of costly products that have to be replaced or repaired (often more than once) due to defective/ failed parts.

What has been commoditified in the global supply chain is not quality or reliability– what's been commoditified is pirated, defective parts that look exactly like legitimate parts.

There is a solution that's a lot cheaper than shoveling sand against the counterfeit tide: bring the entire supply chain back to America where production can be verified and the parts tested and ID'd/ labeled with technologies that cannot be counterfeited as easily as the parts.

Come home, America, is not just a political slogan: it's simply good business.

If you want to lose your brand, your pricing power and your customers, by all means, rely on a global supply chain filled with defective parts that cannot possibly be detected. Reshoring the entire supply chain so it can be trusted is the low-cost solution once you add up the total lifecycle costs of a hopelessly counterfeit global supply chain.

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Hey Boomers, Give Thanks To the Millennials We’re Like Totally Ripping Off!

How bad are baby boomers—who rightly rebelled against their parents’ repressive ways—ripping off millennials, i.e., The Next Big Thing in American Culture?

Over at The Daily Caller, Mark Tapscott does the math (and it’s not that fancy “New Math” that some of us were taught a million years ago, either):

More than half of the nation’s 25 most generous state and local public pension systems received Ds when graded by the non-profit government watchdog Truth In Accounting (TIA) on their ability to pay promised benefits to a rising flood of Baby Boomer retirees.

That’s very bad news for millennials because unfunded pension benefits often mean higher taxes for productive workers. Millennials who are now moving up career ladders and earning higher incomes make up the biggest portion of the taxable workforce now and will represent 75 percent of it by 2030 when the tail end of the Boomer generation is entering retirement.

I write not simply as the parent of one millennial and another whatever-the-next-gen-is-being-called and as a late-era baby boomer born in 1963. The public-sector pension problems discussed by Tapscott and TIA are of course dwarfed by similar dynamics undergirding the nation’s primary old-age entitlements, Medicare and Social Security. There are plenty of reasons to be pissed off about these programs, but here are four (using numbers from 2014):

Some of these numbers have changed a bit in the past couple of years, but as with the public-sector pensions, they still add up to a world of hurt for younger, poorer Americans who are getting robbed systematically to maintain older, wealthier people’s standards of living. It’s well past time to shift from Bismarckian entitlement systems in general and away from age-based welfare systems. Our society should provide a social safety net for Americans who cannot take of themselves regardless of age (we do some of this) and we should help people who are knocked down get back on their feet. This is all copacetic with a limited-government, libertarian worldview. We should not be robbing Peter, Jr. to pay Paul, Sr. and we don’t need to be (go here for ways to end generational warfare waged via federal entitlements).

And we also don’t need to break the budgets of states and municipalities via public-sector pensions, either. Earlier this year, the research arm of Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website), helped inspire legislative action in Arizona that protects both pensioners and, more important, future taxpayers in the Grand Canyon State. It’s a model that can be widely copied and implemented, too.

From a summary of what it does:

  • Cost of living increases (COLA) will be based on the consumer price index for Phoenix and capped at 2 percent and will be pre-funded (which is currently not happening).
  • New hires will be able to choose between defined contribution plan (like a 401(k)-style savings plan) or a hybrid defined benefit plan rather than the traditional pension system.
  • New hires will have the salary cap for pension calculations reduced from $265,000 to 110,000 per year, seriously limiting incentives for finding ways to “spike” pensions with bonuses or unused vacation time to jack up what retiring employees will be receiving.
  • The eligibility age for new hires will be increased from 52.5 to 55.
  • New employees will have to pay 50 percent of plan costs if the plan doesn’t meet return assumptions.
  • Employers (that is to say, the government) will be forbidden from having “pension holidays,” where they stop paying into pension funds when they are overperforming (which then turns into a crisis when pensions later underperform).
  • The Reason Foundation calculates savings of $1.5 billion over 30 years and a reduction of retirement costs for new employees by 20 to 43 percent.
  • Financial risks borne by the taxpayers should be cut in half, and the accrual of new debt for pension liabilities should be reduced by a third.

More here.

In 2015, Reason TV laid out “3 Reasons To Cut Public Pensions NOW!”:

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