iftttwall

John only likes to support terrorists inside Syria and Neo-nazis inside The Ukraine. When it comes to war, the good senator from Arizona never shies away from one, unless of course it is being menaced by the man he hates most, President Donald John Trump.

Watch McCain, for the first time in his thousand year life, criticize American saber rattling against another country. Typically, ‘going down again’ John is all for it. In this case, he’d much prefer we BOMB MOSCOW, than all of N. Korea.

via http://ift.tt/2vhcx92 The_Real_Fly

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Today’s piece was originally supposed to be the second and last part of a short series on the Google memo, but in light of the author’s rapid termination, I’ve decided to add at least one other installment on the topic. As such, my analysis on how Spiral Dynamics fits into the whole drama will have to wait till another day.  

As everyone knows by now, Google went ahead and fired James Damore, the author of the now infamous memo on Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber. In yesterday’s piece I remarked about how shocked I was by the extraordinarily charged and hyperbolic language being used by so many of those who disagreed with what Mr. Damore wrote. Indeed, the language and mischaracterizations of the memo itself were so completely unhinged in many instances, it’s hard for me to believe that many of these people even read it in the first place.

First off, while I happen to agree with a lot of what he wrote, that’s besides the point. If you read the memo it’s obvious that the author went out of his way to avoid triggering people who are easily triggered. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions, it was written in a respectful and measured way. He goes out of his way to clarify what he’s saying so as not to be misunderstood. Here are just a couple examples of what I mean:

I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

 

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

Incredibly, people are calling this guy (who has a masters degree in Systems Biology from Harvard) a Nazi because he has a different opinion than the dogmatic prevailing consensus within what clearly is a Google echo chamber culture. He was politely trying to have a discourse about a topic he feels passionately about and did so in a respectful way. For that unforgivable act, he’s been deemed a misogynist Nazi and fired. I’m not the first person to note that by firing him for writing this, Google essentially proved his point regarding the company’s closed cultural and ideological environment.

Indeed, what Google did to this employee is a textbook example of “ritual defamation,” as Yale professor Nicholas Christakis explained in a recent tweet.

Firing by @google of employee https://t.co/4GRWLWizbW seems a Ritual Defamation as per @LairdMWilcox https://t.co/DLLvJysZst #googlememo http://pic.twitter.com/7aL5dm5Ue4

— Nicholas Christakis (@NAChristakis) August 8, 2017

Despite being fired, James Damore will be just fine. There are enough people completely sick and tired of the authoritarian left for him to have countless opportunities. I’m not so sure about Google. In fact, I’d expect many talented people at the company to start looking for new, less ideologically stifling jobs, and I think ten years from now the brain drain from Google will likely be obvious. Google has publicly demonstrated itself as a drab and intellectually dishonest place to work, and such a place cannot and will not attract the best and brightest in tech.

Not to mention the fact that when it comes to making money from ads, Google is perfectly fine with “perpetuating gender stereotypes” (the supposed reason they fired Mr. Damore). For example, take a look at this screenshot from the Google adwords page, Add Demographic Targeting to an Ad Group:

Target by gender. There you go. When it comes to Google making money, gender differences suddenly exist.

Google rushed to fire this guy so fast they didn't even stop to think how full of shit they are.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 8, 2017

Moving along, although Google executives clearly lack the maturity and wisdom to take the memo as an opportunity to have a productive and rigorous debate, plenty of other people have. One of the most interesting articles I’ve read in this regard was written by Scott Alexander and published at Slate Star Codex. He comes at the issue by explaining his view that many of the very real and observable differences in professions between men and women can be explained not by sexism or capacity, but by different interests at the population level between the genders. In other words, the whole “men tend to like to work with things, and women tend to like to work with people” observation that James Damore discussed in his memo.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece, but I highly recommend reading the entire thing:

Might girls be worried not by stereotypes about computers themselves, but by stereotypes that girls are bad at math and so can’t succeed in the math-heavy world of computer science? No. About 45% of college math majors are women, compared to (again) only 20% of computer science majors. Undergraduate mathematics itself more-or-less shows gender parity. This can’t be an explanation for the computer results.

 

Might sexist parents be buying computers for their sons but not their daughters, giving boys a leg up in learning computer skills? In the 80s and 90s, everybody was certain that this was the cause of the gap. Newspapers would tell lurid (and entirely hypothetical) stories of girls sitting down to use a computer when suddenly a boy would show up, push her away, and demand it all to himself. But move forward a few decades and now young girls are more likely to own computers than young boys – with little change in the high school computer interest numbers. So that isn’t it either.

 

So if it happens before middle school, and it’s not stereotypes, what might it be?

 

One subgroup of women does not display these gender differences at any age. These are women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that gives them a more typically-male hormone balance. For a good review, see Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People. They find that:

Consistent with hormone effects on interests, females with CAH are considerably more interested than are females without CAH in male-typed toys, leisure activities, and occupations, from childhood through adulthood (reviewed in Blakemore et al., 2009; Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005); adult females with CAH also engage more in male-typed occupations than do females without CAH (Frisén et al., 2009). Male-typed interests of females with CAH are associated with degree of androgen exposure, which can be inferred from genotype or disease characteristics (Berenbaum et al., 2000; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2006; Nordenström et al., 2002). Interests of males with CAH are similar to those of males without CAH because both are exposed to high (sex-typical) prenatal androgens and are reared as boys.

 

Females with CAH do not provide a perfect test of androgen effects on gendered characteristics because they differ from females without CAH in other ways; most notably they have masculinized genitalia that might affect their socialization. But, there is no evidence that parents treat girls with CAH in a more masculine or less feminine way than they treat girls without CAH (Nordenström et al., 2002; Pasterski et al., 2005). Further, some findings from females with CAH have been confirmed in typical individuals whose postnatal behavior has been associated with prenatal hormone levels measured in amniotic fluid. Amniotic testosterone levels were found to correlate positively with parent-reported male-typed play in girls and boys at ages 6 to 10 years (Auyeung et al., 2009).

 

The psychological mechanism through which androgen affects interests has not been well-investigated, but there is some consensus that sex differences in interests reflect an orientation toward people versus things (Diekman et al., 2010) or similar constructs, such as organic versus inorganic objects (Benbow et al., 2000). The Things-People distinction is, in fact, the major conceptual dimension underlying the measurement of the most widely-used model of occupational interests (Holland, 1973; Prediger, 1982); it has also been used to represent leisure interests (Kerby and Ragan, 2002) and personality (Lippa, 1998).

 

In their own study, they compare 125 such women and find a Things-People effect size of -0.75 – that is, the difference between CAH women and unaffected women is more than half the difference between men and unaffected women. They write:

 

The results support the hypothesis that sex differences in occupational interests are due, in part, to prenatal androgen influences on differential orientation to objects versus people. Compared to unaffected females, females with CAH reported more interest in occupations related to Things versus People, and relative positioning on this interest dimension was substantially related to amount of prenatal androgen exposure.

 

What is this “object vs. people” distinction?

 

It’s pretty relevant. Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women (ie without CAH) in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.

 

So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.

 

Somebody armed with this theory could pretty well predict that women would be interested in going into medicine and law, since both of them involve people, talking, and helping. They would predict that women would dominate veterinary medicine (animals, helping), psychology (people, talking, helping, sometimes children), and education (people, children, helping). Of all the hard sciences, they might expect women to prefer biology (animals). And they might expect men to do best in engineering (objects, machines, abstract systems, sometimes danger) and computer science (machines, abstract systems).

 

I mentioned that about 50% of medical students were female, but this masks a lot of variation. There are wide differences in doctor gender by medical specialty. For example:

 

A privilege-based theory fails – there’s not much of a tendency for women to be restricted to less prestigious and lower-paying fields – Ob/Gyn (mostly female) is extremely lucrative, and internal medicine (mostly male) is pretty low-paying for a medical job.

 

But the people/thing theory above does extremely well! Pediatrics is babies/children, Psychiatry is people/talking (and of course women are disproportionately child psychiatrists), OB/GYN is babies (though admittedly this probably owes a lot to patients being more comfortable with female gynecologists) and family medicine is people/talking/babies/children.

 

Meanwhile, Radiology is machines and no patient contact, Anaesthesiology is also machines and no patient contact, Emergency Medicine is danger, and Surgery is machines, danger, and no patient contact.

 

Here’s another fun thing you can do with this theory: understand why women are so well represented in college math classes. Women are around 20% of CS majors, physics majors, engineering majors, etc – but almost half of math majors! This should be shocking. Aren’t we constantly told that women are bombarded with stereotypes about math being for men? Isn’t the archetypal example of children learning gender roles that Barbie doll that said “Math is hard, let’s go shopping?” And yet women’s representation in undergraduate math classes is really quite good.

 

I was totally confused by this for a while until a commenter directed me to the data on what people actually do with math degrees. The answer is mostly: they become math teachers. They work in elementary schools and high schools, with people.

 

Then all those future math teachers leave for the schools after undergrad, and so math grad school ends up with pretty much the same male-tilted gender balance as CS, physics, and engineering grad school.

 

This seems to me like the clearest proof that women being underrepresented in CS/physics/etc is just about different interests. It’s not that they can’t do the work – all those future math teachers do just as well in their math majors as everyone else. It’s not that stereotypes of what girls can and can’t do are making them afraid to try – whatever stereotypes there are about women and math haven’t dulled future math teachers’ willingness to compete difficult math courses one bit. And it’s not even about colleges being discriminatory and hostile (or at least however discriminatory and hostile they are it doesn’t drive away those future math teachers). It’s just that women are more interested in some jobs, and men are more interested in others. Figure out a way to make math people-oriented, and women flock to it. If there were as many elementary school computer science teachers as there are math teachers, gender balance there would equalize without any other effort.

 

I’m not familiar with any gender breakdown of legal specialties, but I will bet you that family law, child-related law, and various prosocial helping-communities law are disproportionately female, and patent law, technology law, and law working with scary dangerous criminals are disproportionately male. And so on for most other fields.

 

This theory gives everyone what they want. It explains the data about women in tech. It explains the time course around women in tech. It explains other jobs like veterinary medicine where women dominate. It explains which medical subspecialties women will be dominant or underrepresented in. It doesn’t claim that women are “worse than men” or “biologically inferior” at anything. It doesn’t say that no woman will ever be interested in things, or no man ever interested in people. It doesn’t say even that women in tech don’t face a lot of extra harassment (any domain with more men than women will see more potential perpetrators concentrating their harassment concentrated on fewer potential victims, which will result in each woman being more harassed).

 

It just says that sometimes, in a population-based way that doesn’t necessarily apply to any given woman or any given man, women and men will have some different interests. Which should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes with men or women.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m pleased Mr. Damore wrote this memo, because this conversation is long overdue. I hope people aren’t afraid to say what they think, because our cultural hostility toward debate is getting ridiculously dangerous. If people aren’t allowed to write a thought provoking memo in a polite manner questioning corporate policies without being fired, we’ve lost an essential component to any halfway decent civilization — the ability to have a conversation without name calling and career destruction. If we’ve truly lost that, we are doomed.

Fortunately, I do not think that’s the case, and I don’t think the SJW mindset of Google executives resonates at all with the vast majority of Americans irrespective of where they reside on the political spectrum. If you actually read the memo, it’s quite obvious that his intent was not to offend or insult anyone or any group. He was just a guy with a view that doesn’t fit into the Google echo chamber and he wanted to spark a conversation about it. For that, he was burned at the stake. Hopefully, the rest of us find that unacceptable.

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

After a slow and steady march higher in the wake of the ‘great recession’ nearly a decade ago, a note today from Rent Cafe shows that average rents in the United States may have finally stalled in July at $1,350 per month after posting a paltry sequential gain of just 0.1%.  

Rents are still steadily climbing across the country, but that growth is finally slowing – and in a big way. In July, national rents grew a meager 0.1% over the month and just 2.6% from the same period in 2016, according to recent data from Yardi Matrix.

 

This national slowdown is thanks, in large part, to the huge influx of new apartments that has hit the scene in the past year – as well as the thousands more expected by the end of 2017. This year is expected to mark the biggest jump in apartment construction in the last two decades, with nearly 347,000 new units entering the market – a 21% increase over last year’s numbers.

 

Of course, this should come as little surprise to our readers as softening apartment rents, particularly in the massively over-priced, millennial safe-spaces of New York City and San Francisco, have been a frequent topic of conversation for us over the past several quarters…here are just a couple of recent examples:

• NYC Real Estate Bubble Bursts As Apartment Sales Crash 20%
• New York Real Estate Prices Plunge In 4Q As Listing Days and Discounts Soar
• San Fran Home Sales Crash To Lowest Level Since 2008 As Pricing Reset Gets Underway
• “It’s About Time For Recession” Property Manager Warns As Rents Drop “For First Time In Career”

As we pointed out several months ago, just like almost any bubble, stagnating rents are undoubtedly the symptom of a massive, multi-year supply bubble in multi-family housing units sparked by, among other things, cheap borrowing costs for commercial builders.  Per the chart below, multi-family units under construction is now at record highs and have eclipsed the previous bubble peak by nearly 40%.

 

But, while rents are certainly slowing – and construction is indeed playing its part – the impact isn’t spread evenly across all markets as Rent Cafe notes that 64% of the new supply is limited to the nation’s top 20 metro areas.  Therefore, it’s not terribly surprising that the worst performing rental markets so far this year also happen to be the most expensive and the ones that have attracted the most capital for new developments. 

Incoming apartment supply isn’t just lowering national average rents; it’s also making some of the country’s most historically pricey markets just a little bit more affordable. “The huge number of apartments entering the market benefits all renters – but especially those in the country’s more expensive areas,” said Doug Ressler, Senior Analyst for Yardi Matrix. “More apartments mean more choices – and, ultimately, more bargaining leverage for the renter.”

 

Take Manhattan, for example. The exclusive NYC borough has long been the most expensive place to live in the nation, but thanks to a recent 3.1% dip in rents year-over-year and the huge inventory expansion, it’s slowly becoming more accessible to the region’s growing population. With more than 7,000 units to be delivered in 2017, rents in the area now run $4,054 – a huge downturn from the $4,154 rents seen at the start of the year.

 

With so many new units hitting the market, Ressler says some communities are forced to offer serious amenities in order to stay competitive. “These new apartment communities often come with upscale amenities, including 24/7 fitness centers, yoga studios, rooftop farms and pet spas,” he said. “Some even offer concessions, like a month of free rent or free gym memberships. These perks aren’t limited to overly-popular markets such as NYC or San Francisco, either. Minneapolis is also seeing tons of new, top-notch apartments added to its rental market, as is Nashville and Orlando.”

 

Meanwhile, areas with stronger job markets and better overall affordability are still seeing demand growth which, combined with a lack of capital investment, is driving rents considerably higher.

Midland, Texas, is a prime example of this. Texas has added more than 319,000 jobs over the last year, and unemployment is at record lows. Midland came in with the second-lowest unemployment rate in the state, with just 3.5% of residents without jobs in June. This healthy economy has led to serious population growth over the past few years, and more than 25,000 people have moved to the area since 2010. Apartment construction has been unable to keep up with this growth – and the subsequent rising demand – and rents have skyrocketed in the city. The average Midland apartment now costs $1,180 per month – a whopping 18.1% higher than this time last year. Nearby Odessa is also seeing a similar problem. The city’s rent has grown 13.4% over the year, hitting $1,013 in July.

 

Finally, here are the top 10 most and least expensive rental markets in the U.S. at the end of July 2017.  To our complete lack of surprise, New York and California continue to dominate the expensive list while Southern and Midwestern markets continue to provide the best value…perhaps this is why all those domestic migration studies show a mass exodus from the cities on the left to the cities on the right?  Just a hunch…

via http://ift.tt/2wssp7d Tyler Durden

We first introduced readers to the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) crisis last summer in a post entitled “Dallas Cops’ Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid.”  For those who have managed to avoid this particular storyline for the past 15 months, here is a brief recap of how it all started from our original post on the topic:

The Dallas Police & Fire Pension (DPFP), which covers nearly 10,000 police and firefighters, is on the verge of collapse as its board and the City of Dallas struggle to pitch benefit cuts to save the plan from complete failure.  According the the National Real Estate Investor, DPFP was once applauded for it’s “diverse investment portfolio” but turns out it may have all been a fraud as the pension’s former real estate investment manager, CDK Realy Advisors, was raided by the FBI in April 2016 and the fund was subsequently forced to mark down their entire real estate book by 32%.  Guess it’s pretty easy to generate good returns if you manage a book of illiquid assets that can be marked at your “discretion”.

 

To provide a little background, per the Dallas Morning News, Richard Tettamant served as the DPFP’s administrator for a couple of decades right up until he was forced out in June 2014.  Starting in 2005, Tettamant oversaw a plan to “diversify” the pension into “hard assets” and away from the “risky” stock market…because there’s no risk if you don’t have to mark your book every day.  By the time the “diversification” was complete, Tettamant had invested half of the DPFP’s assets in, effectively, the housing bubble.  Investments included a $200mm luxury apartment building in Dallas, luxury Hawaiian homes, a tract of undeveloped land in the Arizona desert, Uruguayan timber, the American Idol production company and a resort in Napa.

 

Despite huge exposure to bubbly 2005/2006 vintage real estate investments, DPFP assets “performed” remarkably well throughout the “great recession.”  But as it turns out, Tettamant’s “performance” was only as good as the illiquidity of his investments.  We guess returns are easier to come by when you invest your whole book in illiquid, private assets and have “discretion” over how they’re valued.

 

In 2015, after Tettamant’s ouster, $600mm of DPFP real estate assets were transferred to new managers away from the fund’s prior real estate manager, CDK Realty Advisors.  Turns out the new managers were not “comfortable” with CDK’s asset valuations and the mark downs started.  According to the Dallas Morning News, one such questionable real estate investment involved a piece of undeveloped land in the Arizona desert near Tucson which was purchased for $27mm in 2006 and subsequently sold in 2014 for $7.5mm.

 

Then the plot thickened when, in April 2016, according the Dallas Morning News, FBI raided the offices of the pension’s former investment manager, CDK Realty Advisors.  There has been little disclosure on the reason for the FBI raid but one could speculate that it might have something to do with all the markdowns the pension was forced to take in 2015 on its real estate book.  At it’s peak, CDK managed $750mm if assets for the DPFP.

The sudden implosion of the fund left active-duty Dallas police and firemen wondering whether that pension check they had been counting on to fund their retirement was about disappear for good.  All of which sparked a mass exodus of Dallas police and firefighters eager to lock in their payout rates before they were slashed by the DPFP board (see:  Dallas Police Resignations Soar As “Insolvent” Pension System Implodes).

 

Now, despite the passage of a plan designed to ‘save’ the pension by the Texas legislature back in May, a record 72 officers decided to quit the force in July.  Apparently they were not convinced that the legislature’s plan is going to work.

Meanwhile, the steady outflow of officers for over a year now is leading to what many in Dallas are calling a public safety crisis.  Per the local Dallas CBS affiliate:

Dallas Police Association President Mike Mata and others sounded the alarm months ago: Now, by the end of this month, Mata says 72 Dallas Police officers will leave: 70 percent of them are retiring and the other 30 percent are going to make more money at other departments. “We’re losing some of our most experienced detectives: The investigator you want to come out and solve that homicide, that you need to come out and solve that sexual assault.”

 

Adam McGough, chairman of the Dallas city council’s public safety committee, is also expressing concern. “That’s the first of this number I heard of it. Anytime we have large numbers of officers leaving, it’s concerning.”

 

Mata says, “We’re at a critical state and we’re not solving the problems that are going to help correct this. That’s why I’m a little disappointed in the city manager’s budget.”

Apparently these officers can’t wrap their heads around how an incremental $40 million contribution from the City of Dallas will solve their pension’s $3 billion funding shortfall…they aren’t the only ones.

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

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper,

There’s a new kind of “privilege” in town, and if you suffer from it, you can’t help it any more than you can help your skin color or your gender. (Although, of late, gender seems to be completely open to debate and have nothing to do with biology.) If you are an intelligent person, you have “cognitive privilege” according to an op-ed in the Daily Iowan.

Well, that’s just really not fair, is it?

With all the “privileges” out there that need to be kept in check, may God help you if you are white, male, attractive, and smart. You are public enemy #1 to the social justice set, you privileged scumbag.

I’ll let the author, Dan Williams, explain cognitive privilege because I couldn’t possibly do it justice in a summary:

We now know that intelligence is not something we have significant control over but is something we are born with. We are living in a society in which success is increasingly linked to one’s intelligence. This is not to say that intelligence is the only factor that is important. All that is implied is that below a certain threshold of intelligence, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. These opportunities are being shifted upward to jobs that require heavier cognitive lifting or else are being replaced by robots. Thus, the accident of having been born smart enough to be able to be successful is a great benefit that you did absolutely nothing to earn. Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart. (source)

So, in other words, if you’re not that smart, your job may be taken by a robot, and that isn’t your fault. I assume that this will eventually lead to the assumption that if you cognitively “disabled,” the world probably owes you something. Because we’re all about “fairness” in the United States, right? RIGHT?

Furthermore, if you are smart, in the wise (cough) words of former President Obama, “You didn’t build that.”  You just hit the genetic lottery and should be humbled (and perhaps a little embarrassed) as opposed to proud.

Will this be the next thing that kiboshes people who deserve it from getting a job? “We wanted to hire her, but she is smart. We have already exceeded our quota of cognitively privileged individuals, so we’ll have to go hire that dumb guy or we’ll be breaking labor laws.”

Sometimes there is so much ridiculous stuff out there that you all must just think, “She has to be making this up.” Oh, that I was so creative. Nope, this is the society in which we dwell, with one ridiculous outrage on top of another.

Disregard the fact that you could do something about your lack of cognitive privilege.

Of course, none of this takes into account the possibilities we all have to improve our lots in life. Between libraries and the internet, opportunities abound to learn more about basically any topic you want. Perhaps you won’t end up being a neurosurgeon, but what is stopping you from being an expert on some other topic that perhaps takes a brain with common sense as opposed to book sense?

If we all devoted our time to improving ourselves, instead of watching reality television and walking around with our faces and thumbs firmly engaged with our cell phones, perhaps the “cognitive privilege” of those who do focus on learning would not provide so great a disparity amongst our opportunities.

So much of this is a choice about how we spend the hours in our days. It’s about our drive and the habits we intentionally develop.

Williams doesn’t want you to feel too guilty if you are intelligent. Just the right amount of guilt will do:

The purpose of pointing out someone’s privilege is to remind them of the infinite number of experiences that are possible and the very large number of experiences that are actual [sic] that they know very little about. The purpose is to enlarge their moral consciousness, to make them more sympathetic to people who are less fortunate than they are.

 

Feelings of guilt are natural when coming to consciousness of one’s place in the scheme of things — and noticing that one has been conferred benefits through sheer accident — but guilt is an impediment to social-justice action, not a motivator (guilt slides easily into resentment).(source)

Okay, isn’t that possibly the worst kind of condescension that ever existed? You know how feminists always talk about men with whom they work “mansplaining” something to them and how it infuriates them? Wouldn’t “smartsplaining” and moral sympathy be every bit as infuriating to one without “cognitive privilege?”

I don’t know about you, but if I had a “disability” the last thing in the world I would want is sympathy.  Particularly if my disability was that I was stupid, I wouldn’t want the intellectual elite fawning over me superciliously.

Privilege is just the other side of the “ism” coin.

A while back, I wrote an article called The Great American Butthurt and it was all about how much I loathe any word ending in “ism.”

Words to express our affront are being made up left and right by the mere addition of “ism” to the ends of what were formerly perfectly neutral words. It seems like pundits can take basically any word and add “ism” to the end of it and that means they’re being slighted. The list of isms could go on and on, but instead of promoting more equality, all they’re doing is promoting more division. Isn’t that divisionism?

 

Personally, I’m affronted by the constant barrage of affronts. When did we, as a nation, become such weenies? How is it that such a collection of whiners has become the vocal majority? Certain people are constantly offended and demand the attention of others so they can express the epic level of their personal offendedness.

 

So vast is the recent level of Great American Butthurt that no mainstream news outlet is complete without breathlessly exposing a secret “ism” each day. These secret “isms” are called “microaggressions,” defined as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

 

Oh my gosh. SHUT UP ALREADY. (source)

How can our country ever again expect to be united when we are constantly divided by a never-ending series of isms and privileges? What if we just stop labeling everyone and everything and just be human beings with choices and personal responsibility for those choices?

I’m not denying that racism and sexism exist – of course, they do – but why would people spend so much time focusing on some perceived negative instead of focusing on the positive aspects of self-improvement? I’m also not denying that being an intelligent person makes it easier to succeed, but there are plenty of very bright people who can’t make a go of it.

When everything is an ism or a privilege, doesn’t that take away from the true, serious issues that exist? If everyone is so busy competing for victimhood, don’t the actual victims get drowned out in the roar? And if everyone is angry at everyone else for accusations about isms and privileges, it’s a pretty good bet folks will never be able to get along.

Success isn’t about your privileges or your lack of isms. It’s about your drive. It’s about the choices that you make.

We can get out there and make opportunities happen or we can complain about it. Guess which decision will make you more successful?

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

Another day, another line of drivel from California Democratic Party Rep. Maxine Waters.

Speaking on "The Breakfast Club" radio show yesterday morning, Daily Caller's Amber Athey reports that Waters was asked if it was time for black people to form their own party.

“No, not at this point,” Waters said. “You have to show that you’re willing and you’re able to put the numbers together and exercise your influence.”

 

“We still are not voting our influence yet,” she continued.

 

“What we should do is organize our power, exercise our power, particularly in the Democratic Party because that’s where most of us are.”

Waters then suggested that when black people are “strong enough” they may branch out into their own party.

After black people fully participate in politics, she said, “then you can raise that kind of question–whether we are strong enough to talk about organizing another party.”

Watch the full interview below…

We can only imagine the public outrage and hurt feelings if a white Congressman suggested that what America needs is an all-white political party? Oh and while on that topic, what does Waters think the Congressional Black Caucus does?

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Two weeks ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission declared that the virtual tokens issued during an initial coin offering, an increasingly popular funding mechanism for blockchain startups, are considered securities and are therefore subject to a litany of regulatory strictures, including the need to register any pending offerings with the agency.  

The SEC’s decree was expected to slow the pace of new ICOs, as startups scrambled to hire legal counsel and figure out how, exactly, to comply with the new rules, as we reported. However, blockchain analysts reasoned that the agency’s ruling was a good thing for the market’s long-term health, and that the increased scrutiny would help confer more legitimacy on the shady ICO market, which is fraught with hacking attacks and scams. SEC oversight benefits entrepreneurs by encouraging more risk-averse investors to buy their tokens. It helps investors by weeding out fraud.

However, it seems we underestimated the market’s willingness to simply ignore the whims of US regulators. Despite being the world’s largest economy and one of the largest markets for crypto assets, the New York Times is reporting that “the cautionary words of American regulators have done little to chill a red-hot market for new virtual currencies.”

“…even after the commission said it was looking closely at projects that may violate its rules, programmers are still embarking on new offerings at a torrid pace. Most of the offerings have little legal oversight and some appear to conflict with the commission’s basic advice.

 

‘The broader detail and the silences in the report should give many people pause and that doesn’t seem to have happened yet,’ said Emma Channing, the general counsel at the Argon Group, which helps projects in the industry raise funds. ‘I don’t understand why everyone isn’t as concerned as I am.’

 

Since the guidance was released on July 25, 46 new coin offerings have been announced and an additional 204 are moving toward fund-raising, according to data Tokendata.io.”

Despite the SEC’s ruling, the ICO market remains on track to surpass all historical VC investment in the blockchain space by year end, which stands at $1.7 billion since 2010, according to a team of analysts at Pitchbook. In the eight years since the debut of Bitcoin, only Coinbase, Circle and 21 have raised more than $100 million.

July was the best month for ICOs to date, according to NYT.

“July was the biggest month for coin offerings, with 34 projects raising $665 million, Tokendata.io data shows – or twice as much money as was raised in the first five months of the year combined.”

However, data from Goldman Sachs puts the total for July closer to $300 million, which would make July the second-best month after June. However, ICOs have surpassed angel and seed-stage funding for all internet companies since the beginning of the summer.

The decentralized nature of digital currencies allows blockchain companies to – using Pitchbook’s phrasing – “maximally leverage regulatory arbitrage.” Why should startups with a hot ICO waste money on lawyers when they can just move to Switzerland?

As the NYT explains, companies can try to avoid the SEC by blocking US investors from participating in an ICO…

“Other projects have tried to work around regulators by prohibiting American investors from buying their coins, which they have done by barring anyone who tries to buy the coins from an internet address associated with the United States.”

…but the relative ease with which US investors can circumvent these limitations still risks angering the agency, which could go after a company for non-compliance – even if it’s based in a foreign country – if US investors are found to have participated.

“Several lawyers said that the commission is unlikely to care about the steps taken to keep out American investors if Americans still end up buying the coins.

 

‘Just blocking IP addresses is irrelevant,’ said Patrick Murck, a partner at the law firm Cooley, referring to internet protocol. ‘There’s only one thing that is relevant, and that is whether a US investor bought in your sale.’”

While Switzerland’s regulatory climate remains accommodative for blockchain companies – it recently opened the door to the crypto-asset management industry by allowing a local private bank to begin handling digital currencies – Singapore, another crypto haven, has said it would adopt many of the same restrictions imposed by the SEC, according to the NYT.

Ultimately, the real reason so many firms have hesitated to comply with the SEC is because they view compliance as a greater business risk than non-compliance. To use a metaphor: Nobody wants to be the first person to jump into murky water – there could be sharks or other dangers lurking beneath the surface.

“Mr. Murck said that even teams that do make an effort to comply with the regulators are going to be in treacherous waters because of the lack of clear definitions and law regarding virtual currencies.”

 

“There are still open questions after the SEC report,” he said. “There’s uncertainty and risk in the space, even for people who are taking a professional approach to it.”  

But after the waters have been tested, companies will have a clearer picture of the risks involved, and perhaps be more willing to comply.

Read the full pitchbook report on ICOs below:

PitchBook 3Q 2017 Fintech Analyst Note ICOs by zerohedge on Scribd

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Authored by Gaius Publius via Down With Tyranny blog,

An entirely false but constantly sold view of the American electorate

In an April 2016 piece, in the middle of the Democratic primary, I wrote this about modern independent voters and the upcoming general election:

If you look at the swell of new voters in both parties, the increase is for the "change" candidate, not the one promising to retain and refresh the status-quo. The presidential candidate who wins this election will be the one who best appeals to the new "radical independent"…

 

Today's independents aren't "moderates" who want conventional, faux-centrist policies and less "gridlock." Political partisans want less gridlock around issues of disagreement, because it advances individual party agendas and careers in addition to those issues. But in the main and with a few important exceptions — women's health and rights, racial justice, gun violence — both parties have agreed and cooperated on broad policy goals.

 

Leaders of both parties, for example, broadly believe in the current military style of policing. Both believe in a justice system that coerces defendants into plea bargains, guilty or innocent. Both believe in the "importance of Wall Street to the economy" and that big financial institutions should be defended, not broken up. Both parties have offered and enacted a long and strong diet of lower taxes, spending austerity, war and more war. We've had these policies, delivered in a fully bipartisan way, for decades….

 

Today's independents, in contrast, are done with that.

This led to a prediction that "to win, Clinton must win Sanders independents. If she fails, she is likely to lose. The problem for Clinton is, how to do that."

And indeed, Clinton did lose.

There's more to say, obviously, about why Clinton lost. But it's certainly true that, if 2016 were not a "change year" election, Clinton would have won by a mile. For example, if Clinton were running for a second term in 2012 instead of Obama, she'd have had no problem beating the Republican. It's only in a "change year" election — 2008, for example — that a status quo candidate has trouble against a "change" candidate; and indeed, Clinton was defeated by that year's "change" candidate, Barack Obama.

In 2016, instead of sailing to victory Clinton was nosed out in a squeaker. Even if that win was stolen it could only have been stolen if it were close. To use a football analogy, the refs can't throw the game to your opponent if you're winning by four touchdowns. In a hostile stadium with hostile refs, best not be barely ahead with two minutes to go.

In the Center of Nowhere

Confirmation of part of this analysis — that Clinton's attempt to win by wooing "centrist" voters sloshing undecidely between the parties was an error — comes from a 2016 book, Democracy for Realists, by political scientists Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. As Eric Levitz writes in a recent New York Magazine article,

"The notion that there is an easily identifiable, median political ideology in America derives from the 'spatial model' [i.e., linear] of the electorate, which first gained prominence in the middle of the 20th century."

This "spacial model" of the electorate should be familiar to every American, since it's sold by every mainstream media outlet. This model posits a single line of policy choices — arrayed in just two dimensions from "left" to "right" — with voters arrayed somewhere along it as well. Thus there are "left" policy choices, "right" policy choices, and voters in a kind of bell-shaped curve arrayed along it as well. "Left" voters prefer "left" policies, "right" voters prefer "right" policies, with the vast majority of voters somewhere in the middle.

Bartels and Achen, as quoted by Levitz, describe the linear analogy this way (my emphasis):

[T]he political “space” consists of a single ideological dimension on which feasible policies are arrayed from left to right. Each voter is represented by an ideal point along this dimension reflecting the policy she prefers to all others. Each party is represented by a platform reflecting the policy it will enact if elected. Voters are assumed to maximize their ideological satisfaction with the election outcome by voting for the parties closest to them on the ideological dimension, Parties are assumed to maximize their expected payoff from office-holding by choosing the platforms most likely to get them elected.

 

[T]his framework is sufficient to derive a striking and substantively important prediction: both parties will adopt identical platforms corresponding to the median of the distribution of voters’ ideal points.

In other words, if it is assumed that most voters are on the "left," the party to the "right" will drift that way. If it is assumed most voters are on the "right," the "left" party will similarly move. And if voters are in the "center," both parties will tend to move there with them.

What Bartels and Achen discovered was something that should have been obvious from the start — that this is just not the case. What they discovered is that there is no political "center" in modern America.

As Levitz writes:

A 2014 study from Berkeley political scientists David Broockman and Douglas Ahler surveyed voters on 13 policy issues — offering them seven different positions to choose from on each, ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. On only two of those issues — gay rights and the environment — was the centrist position the most common one. On marijuana, the most popular policy was full legalization; on immigration, the most widely favored proposal was “the immediate roundup and deportation of all undocumented immigrants and an outright moratorium on all immigration until the border is proven secure”; and on taxes, the most popular option was to increase the rate on income above $250,000 by more than 5 percent. Meanwhile, establishing a maximum annual income of $1 million (by taxing all income above that at 100 percent) was the third most common choice, boasting four times more support than the national Republican Party’s platform on taxation.

 

When pundits implore Democrats not to abandon the center, they do not typically mean that the party should embrace legal weed, much higher taxes on the rich, and mass deportation. More often, such pundits call on Team Blue to embrace a combination of moderate fiscal conservatism, a cosmopolitan attitude toward globalization, and moderate social liberalism — in short, to become the party of Michael Bloomberg (minus, perhaps, the enthusiasm for nanny-state public-health regulations). The former New York mayor is routinely referred to as a centrist in the mainstream press, despite the fact that his policy commitments — support for Social Security cuts, Wall Street deregulation, mass immigration, and marriage equality — when taken together, put him at the fringes of American public opinion[.]

Note that this analysis is multi-dimensional. Even a two-dimensional representation couldn't do it justice.

Why Do Democrats Pursue Non-Existent "Centrist" Voters?

If there are no voters in the political "center," a strategy based on winning them is likely to fail. So why pursue them? Perhaps because voters aren't what the Democratic Party – or either American political party these days – is pursuing. Perhaps it's because what both parties are actually pursuing – is money.

Levitz seems to agree. In his article he quotes David Broockman, the study's co-author, as saying this in an interview:

When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want …

 

Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want — that’s what we tend to call moderate — versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want.

From this we can easily draw three conclusions:

• The only "center" in modern American politics consists of policies the people who finance elections want to see enacted.
• The mainstream media and both political parties regularly labels these policies "centrist."
• The way to be called "moderate" by the mainstream press is to advocate for "centrist" policies.

And yet, one can easily predict a series of "change year" elections stretching far into the future in which "centrist" candidates will fail again and again, since America's economic problems show no signs of being fixed anytime soon.

This is not because the means of fixing those problems don't exist, though, and aren't readily at hand. Levitz closes by saying:

On most of these [economic] issues, effective policy responses aren’t unknown — they’re just considered politically untenable. We know how to reduce inequality and eradicate poverty: you redistribute pre-tax income from the rich to the poor. When America expanded the welfare state, its poverty rate went down; when it scaled back the safety net, the opposite occurred. Nordic social democracies devote more resources to propping up the living standards of their most vulnerable citizens than most other countries, and their poverty rates are among the lowest in the world, as a result.

 

We know how to reduce student debt: You have the government directly subsidize the cost of higher education. And we know to reduce medical costs while achieving universal coverage — you let the state cap reimbursement rates, and subsidize the medical costs of the sick and the poor until everyone can afford basic medical care, (as they do in virtually every other developed nation on Earth). And while we can’t be certain about exactly what it will take to avert ecological catastrophe, we know that the more rapidly we transition our energy infrastructure toward renewable fuels, the better our odds will be.

It just means that voters' desire to see them fixed will go unfulfilled by any party running a "status quo" candidate.

Radical Independents Are Here to Stay

The day of the "radical independent" is here. Yet by not selling themselves as proponents of economic reform in addition to reform on the numerous "rights" or "identity" issues, the Democratic Party is abandoning the demographic it needs to start winning elections again.

Has anything changed recently with the introduction of the Democrat's "Better Deal" campaign? Richard Eskow convincingly argues no. It may be time to admit that the reason we have Republicans in power — in a majority of states as well as the federal government — owes less to Vladimir Putin than it does to mainstream Democrats themselves.

Americans have not much ability to "fix" Vladimir Putin. Do American have the ability to "fix" the Democratic Party, to cure it of its need to pursue money instead of voters? Perhaps, but not if the Party doesn't want to be fixed.

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It seems that the USA Today has just dropped the official Trump-Russia collusion bombshell of the day after reporting that, according to Trump’s Chief Counsel John Dowd, Trump and Special Counsel Mueller apparently exchange “messages back and forth” on the reg.

“He appreciates what Bob Mueller is doing,” Trump’s chief counsel John Dowd told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday. “He asked me to share that with him and that’s what I’ve done.”

 

Trump’s legal team has been in contact with Mueller’s office, and Dowd says he has passed along the president’s messages expressing “appreciation and greetings’’ to the special counsel.

 

“The president has sent messages back and forth,’’ Dowd said, declining to elaborate further.

Of course, after Trump’s rather ‘complicated’ relationship with Comey ended with a nasty separation and a series of Congressional hearings, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume that Democrats on the various Congressional intelligence committees aren’t going to be terribly happy about this new revelation.  That said, Dowd confirmed that “all communication with Mueller have been proper”…which we’re sure Democrats will take at face value.

Dowd has said all communications with Mueller have been proper.

 

“We get along well with Bob Mueller; our communications have been constructive,’’ the attorney said. “But it is important that our communications remain confidential. It’s important that there not be any breakdown in that trust.’’

 

Of course, this is a rather interesting development in light of the fact that the mainstream media has been speculating for weeks now that Trump may be looking to unilaterally fire Mueller…a move which Dowd says has “never been on the table.”

For weeks, Washington political circles have been on high alert for the possibility the president could try to get rid of Mueller or otherwise wrest control of the Russia probe he denounces as a “hoax.”

 

Yet in a sign that forcing out the former FBI director overseeing the federal Russia investigation is politically untenable, a growing number of government officials have moved to tamp down any talk of ousting Mueller – including, apparently Trump himself.

 

“That’s never been on the table, never,’’ Dowd said of the possibility Trump might try to remove the special counsel. “It’s a manifestation of the media. My dealings with Bob Mueller have always been cordial, respectful — the way it should be.”

Meanwhile, our cynical side can’t help but think that if one were to want to raise suspicions among Democrats as to Mueller’s true impartiality thus causing “conflict of interest” rumblings on the left…this could be a clever approach to get rid of Mueller without be blamed.

Then again, it could all be nothing more than professional “back and forth” between a Special Counsel looking for answers and a White House happy to oblige…as shocking, and uninteresting, as that may sound.

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