Tag: news

For months now we’ve been writing about the mysteriously rising subprime delinquencies afflicting auto ABS structures despite repeated confirmations from the Fed and equity markets that ‘everything is awesome’ (see “Auto Bubble Burst Begins As Subprime Delinquencies Soar To 2009 Levels” and “Signs Of An Auto Bubble: Soaring Delinquencies In These 266 Subprime ABS Deals Can’t Be Good” for a couple of recent examples).  Shockingly, as confirmed by the chart below from UBS strategist Matthew Mish, 2016 vintage subprime auto ABS structures are even underperforming 2007/2008 vintage securitizations.

 

Now, Mish is back with more survey data explaining the who/what/when/where/why’s of spiking loan delinquencies. 

Ironically, survey results suggest that households making over $100,000 per year are 2.5x more likely to default on loan payments over the next 12 months than those making under $40,000…because making more money just means you can afford more debt, right?

First, the survey evidence suggests the rise in consumer default perceptions has occurred primarily in the middle and upper household incomes cohort. And those consumers concerned with missing a payment are highest in the upper income category (household incomes of $100k+). In particular, the most elevated readings occur at the lower ends of the middle and higher income categories (i.e., 50-74k and 100-149k, respectively.

 

Of course, the most ‘shocking’ results of the survey suggest that our precious snowflake millennials are over 5x more likely to default than folks aged 45 and above.  That said, we suspect that many of those defaults may come from student loan debt...which is totally bogus because higher education should be ‘totes free’, right?

 

In another shocking discovery, people with the most debt were also found to be most at risk of default…who knew?

 

Oddly, however, households who reported being able to cover their monthly expenses were more at risk of default than households burning through cash each month…sounds like these folks have picked up some valuable lessons from Tesla on how to burn through cash without defaulting…

 

Finally, this last chart was intended to shed light on why certain households are more likely to default but, in the end, the “no specific reason” category dominated responses leading UBS to conclude that people are just far more comfortable defaulting on debt, in general, in the post-crisis era.

This mosaic seems quite consistent with the reported concerns earlier around limited positive cash flow (income vs expenses) and the broader reality that real median wage growth has been largely non-existent in recent years (and for several decades) despite rising debt levels. However, the most commonly cited reason continues to be ‘no specific reason’. While difficult to prove decisively other survey results on the millennial generation specifically seem to be consistent with the thesis that US consumer willingness to default (or the lack of stigma associated with bankruptcy) may have increased further in the post-crisis era.

 

To summarize the UBS survey results, increasing delinquencies are being driven by millennials who graduated college with massive student debt balances, but were making decent money so they levered up even more to buy a house (or 2), a couple of cars and a timeshare.  That said, now that the earnings growth they expected has failed to materialize, their sense of entitlement has taken over and they’ve decided to socialize their debt burdens while completely ignoring the stigmas associated with such actions.

via http://ift.tt/2pcK6Hj Tyler Durden

Authored by Taylor Lewis via Mises Canada,

Mr. Trump has gone to war.

It seems like only yesterday the braggart billionaire denounced former president George W. Bush for lying about the presence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq in order to goad us into invasion. “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said, to whoops and hollers during a primary debate in South Carolina.

Well, that was fun while it lasted. Somewhere between taking potshots against saber-rattling on Twitter, Trump turned his back on his non-interventionist self and sent nearly 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles crashing into Shayrat Airfield in Homs, Syria.

The casus belli? Paying back Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for using sarin gas on his own people, killing scores of civilians, including children. The pictures of young ones choked to death on poisonous fumes understandably rattled the president. Before approving the airstrike, Trump told reporters, “that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing.”

The damage inflicted to the Syrian airbase was minimal, but that didn’t stop a deluge of plaudits from Washington’s eminences. The capital city’s establishment—editors, politicians, news anchors, mega-donors, think tank operators, intellectuals, corporate heads—all congratulated Trump for stepping firmly into his role as commander-in-chief and acting decisively.

The Senate’s twin warmongers, senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, released a joint statement heralding the attack. A handful of Democrats celebrated Trump’s strike, including some of his biggest critics. The press, which has been relentless in its unfavorable coverage of the president, had a collective orgasm over the destruction.

“For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world,” exclaimed CNN host and noted plagiarist Fareed Zakaria. “This seemed like a very different Donald Trump. More serious–and clearly moved emotionally. Frequently invoked the Almighty.” tweeted commentator Matt Lewis. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent Trump critic, defended the president, penning a post titled “Trump Was Right to Strike Syria.”

By far the strangest praise President Trump received was from former-NBC heavyweight, now MSNBC wrap-up anchor Brian Williams.

Despite being a vehement Trump detractor, Williams was awed by the missile launch. “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two UN Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” he said on his show “The 11th Hour.”

 

Then came the wonderstruck: “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’ They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them what is a brief flight over to this airfield.”

Williams finding transcendent beauty in Pentagon-released videos showing cruise missiles flying effortlessly through the air like elegantly guided kites, emitting trails of soft clouds, all against the backdrop of a night sky punctuated by flashing images of the American flag, was too much for his fellow liberals. Even some conservatives were unnerved.

The Williams remark, despite its macabre underpinning, was revealing. Our political elites derive great meaning from war. Trump’s domestic agenda has been pure buffoonery to kingmakers along the Potomac. But launching missiles at an airbase of a country that poses no risk to U.S. citizens? Well, now, that’s a serious endeavor, undertaken by only the most consequential of individuals.

Why is this? Why do media chatter mouths and political sycophants sublimate war to a status of near-holy importance? Hemingway said there is “nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying” in modern warfare. Men “die like a dog for no good reason.” So what good is there in waxing eloquently on the honor and sacrifice demanded by war?

It’s too easy to chalk it up to pecuniary concerns; though it is the case that many American conflicts have been fomented by financial interests.

But reading the perennial “Return to National Greatness” column by quintessential meaning-seeker David Brooks, you get a sense that the cheerleaders of American military might seek something bigger than just kicking up sand in Mesopotamia. They want vindication for Pax Americana–a sense that their nation’s existence matters in world events and that they themselves play a small part in that preeminence.

It reminds me of Hannah Jelkes’s rumination in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. When comforting the manic Rev. Shannon back to sanity and faith, Jelkes pinpoints the provenance of his problem: “The oldest one in the world–the need to believe in something or in someone—almost anyone—almost anything…something.”

The pundits who gaze admiringly at flaring rockets scorching black sky, who bask in the aura of prestige emanating from a man acting alone to destroy, who flatter those with resolve to respond without second-guessing in less-than-clear circumstances, they all yearn for deliverance from modernity’s restless monotony.

In an interview with Vox.com last year, author Sebastian Junger outlined why returning veterans are recalcitrant to adapting back to American society. When soldiers travel overseas, they tend to revert back to our ancient lifestyle of close-knit living and communal priorities. When they return, they have to assimilate back into to a “fragmented, alienated society.” Junger explains: “I wasn’t a soldier, I’m not a veteran, but the impression I get from talking to them is that their sense of purpose and their sense of devotion to a common good is foremost in their minds in combat.”

That sense of purpose is similarly felt by those enraptured by the pound of war drums. Thanks to mass media, you don’t have to pick up a gun and blast a few jihadists to experience the ennobling glories of battle. You can pontificate about it on TV, read about it in a book, and watch as your tax dollars fund a fusillade that levels a town.

Without an identity rooted in shared ethnicity, religion, or history, the next best thing that brings people together is a fight to the death. With no God to worship, men invariably worship the feeling of their own supremacy, reflected in their capacity for engineered extermination. This, I think, is at the heart of the bloodlust exhibited by the Washington class.

They have nothing to believe in but they’re own slaughter.

via http://ift.tt/2oEVv1Z Tyler Durden

Ever wonder why the number of registered food stamp recipients has seemed to steadily grow ever since the tech bubble collapsed in 2000, irrespective of the economic cycle?  Ever question why it was possible that anyone with a pulse could afford a $500,000 house in 2006 even though the number of people who apparently couldn’t manage to cover basic food necessities continued to surge?

 

Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that there are armies of state employees all around the country whose sole purpose in life is to recruit new participants to sign up for taxpayer subsidized programs so they can extract as much funding from federal coffers as possible.  And when they run out of new recruits, these same state employees just ‘fudge’ the data to make sure the funds from Uncle Sam keep rolling in…which is exactly what just earned the State of Wisconsin a $7mm fine courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (WDHS) has agreed to pay the United States $6,991,905 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act in its administration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Department of Justice announced today. Until 2008, SNAP was known as the Food Stamp Program.

 

“This settlement reflects the Justice Department’s commitment to ensuring that taxpayer funds are spent appropriately so that the public can have confidence in the integrity of programs like SNAP,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Chad A. Readler of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

 

Although the federal government funds SNAP benefits, it relies on the states to determine whether applicants are eligible for benefits, to administer those benefits, and to perform quality control to ensure that eligibility decisions are accurate. USDA requires that the states’ quality control processes ensure that benefits are correctly awarded, are free from bias, and accurately report states’ error rates in making eligibility decisions. The USDA reimburses states for a portion of their administrative expenses in administering SNAP, including expenses for providing quality control. The USDA also pays performance bonuses to states that report the lowest and the most improved error rates each year, and can impose monetary sanctions on states with high error rates that do not show improvement.

And, per the above, while the federal government may rely on the States to “perform quality control,” unfortunately such measures tend to directly conflict with goals  to extract every penny worth of federal subsidies possible….which results in this:

As part of the settlement, WDHS admitted that, beginning in 2008, it utilized the services of Julie Osnes Consulting, a quality control consultant, to review the error cases identified by WDHS quality control workers. WDHS further admitted that based on instructions from Julie Osnes Consulting it implemented several improper and biased quality control practices, including:

1. Finding a basis for dropping error cases from the review by discouraging beneficiaries from cooperating with information requests and pursuing unnecessary information;
2. Selectively applying requirements and policies to overturn and reduce errors;
3. Asking beneficiaries leading questions to obtain desired answers to eliminate error potential;
4. Arbitrating any and all differences with USDA;
5. Subjecting error cases to additional scrutiny and quality control casework with the goal of overturning an error or dropping a case; and
6. Omitting verifying information in documents made available to USDA. These practices improperly decreased WDHS’s reported error rate, and as a result, WDHS earned performance bonuses for 2009, 2010, and 2011 to which it was not entitled.

Luckily, as we pointed out before, at least all that food stamp money is going to fund ‘nutritious’ diets…

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.

 

Of course, we don’t suspect these types of abuses to end anytime in the near future as taxpayers don’t really have rights…only entitlement beneficiaries have those.

via http://ift.tt/2pzt4zu Tyler Durden

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Real solutions have two parts: changes in values and operational changes in habits and processes.

While it's certainly good sport to mock "snowflakes," not all Millennials are snowflakes. Many are homesteading, buying affordable homes and building communities that get stuff done.

I discuss these trends with Drew Sample, who is living them in Ohio. ( hear a 60-second excerpt or listen to the full podcast on Drew's site.)

Although the mainstream media focuses on bubble-priced Left and Right coast homes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are perfectly serviceable houses that can be had for $50,000 or less elsewhere in America. Drew just bought one, and rather than go through a bank for the mortgage, he arranged (with the help of a real estate attorney) for a family member to put up the mortgage.

This arrangement is win-win: the family member earns a much higher return on the cash than a savings account or equivalent, the loan is secured by the property, and Drew cuts out the bank/lender.

It may surprise those who only read media accounts of Millennials living in their parents' basement playing videogames, many of the Millennials in Drew's "tribe" are growing food via homesteading. This is arguably a global trend, as the short video below from Japan reveals.

An increasing number of Japanese Millennials are abandoning the high-cost, long work hours life in big cities for a rural lifestyle that is described as "half farmer, half X," with X being whatever part-time work generates the modest incomes needed to sustain the village lifestyle.

I recently watched a Japanese TV program (Soko ga Japan is the name of the series) profiling the young residents of a Japanese farming village. Each household pays $200 or $250 per month for a spacious old house and adjoining farm plot.

This is roughly 10% of what the households were paying for cramping flats in Tokyo. One of the homes is an expansive 200-year old farm house which the young tenant has fixed up to host informal gatherings for those interested in the village community.

Drew reports his mortgage is a bit over $300/month. Including property taxes and homeowner's insurance, the basic cost of ownership is roughly half what neighboring homes are renting for.

So what is X, the other source of income? Raising animals and high-value vegetables that can be sold to restaurants is one source, but many of the young homesteaders continue to do the work they did in the city, only remotely: graphic design, illustration, IT (information technology), translation, etc.

This is an example of what I call the Mobile Creative class, the non-age specific class of people who have broken free of Corporate-State wage-slave serfdom by cobbling together multiple income streams doing work they care about, and radically slashing their cost of living to enable this freedom to do meaningful work.

America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)

The New Class: Mobile Creatives (May 1, 2014)

The Nitty-Gritty of Financial Independence: The Self-Employed Mobile Creative (February 8, 2017)

I describe how to fashion a mobile creative work life and income in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

When people say they want solutions, they're actually seeking only a specific kind of solution, one that leaves everything they have now intact but guarantees them more of something: more security, more healthcare, more education, more money, etc., but at no cost or inconvenience to themselves.

Anything that fits these parameters isn't a solution; it's magic. Magical thinking and magical fixes are endlessly appealing precisely because they don't require us to change anything or work at anything outside our comfort zone.

In the real world, solutions change core values and processes. If they don't, they're not real solutions. Fake fixes come in various types: cosmetic band-aids, alleviation of the symptoms while the disease continues unchecked, public-relations relabeling of the problem so it appears to go away via semantic trickery, and so on.

The credit-card fueled shopping-spree of suburban malls is dying for a variety of structural/systemic reasons. Embracing that as the only model we have is to choose extinction.

Real solutions have two parts: changes in values and operational changes in habits and processes. This two-sided structure of solutions–values and operations–is scale invariant, meaning it works the same for individuals, households, neighborhoods, towns, cities, organizations, enterprises, nations and empires. Any solution that doesn't change both values and operations in fundamental ways is just another magic trick, a simulacrum solution.

It requires this context of values and operations to understand how half-farmer, half-X is one spectrum of solutions for an over-indebted, dysfunctional economy of dead malls and dying models of debt-based "growth."

The "De" Generation (DeGrowth) (8:26)

via http://ift.tt/2owS1hs Tyler Durden

About a month ago, Fox suspended Judge Nap for suggesting British intelligence had spied on Donald Trump. The media went hysterical, saying the good judge was filled with UFO styled conspiracy theories.

Here was his claim.

A spokesman for the GCHQ at the time called the claims ‘nonsense’, proclaiming “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

Lo and behold, the Guardian is out with an exclusive tonight — rebuking the GCHQ denial — confirming that Obama had received information from the British spy agency, possibly to avoid being detected by people investigating FISA warrants. In addition to Britain’s GCHQ, Mi6 was also involved, and 4 other nations —  as part of the intelligence gathering apparatus called SIGINT — who then ferried their findings to Obama. The spying nations were Germany, Estonia, Poland and Australia.
 
Another guardian source said both France and the Netherlands were possible contributors to the Trump spying ring too.
 
The GCHQ became aware of  ‘suspicious interactions’ in late 2015.
 

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.
 
It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.

 
In typical spin, the Guardian’s source posited the notion that something improper had taken place between the Russians and Trump.
 

“It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” the source added. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’
 
“The message was: ‘Watch out. There’s something not right here.’”

 
The Guardian claims the GCHQ head, Robert Hannigan, passed the information in the summer of 2016 to the CIA boss, John Brennan. In turn, Brennan told the ‘gang of eight’ in the House and Senate that there was evidence Russia was trying to swing the election towards Trump, then reported by the NYT.
 
According to the Guardian, intelligence agencies were progressing in their attempts to tie the hacking of John Podesta’s email box, Russia, and the Trump team.

“They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,” the source said. “This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.”

 
We eagerly await their findings.

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

 

via http://ift.tt/2pccgC9 The_Real_Fly

With just two days to go until North Korea’s “Day of the Sun” celebrations, when as reported yesterday it may conduct its 6th nuclear test at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, NBC reports citing multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials that in the latest stepwise escalation, the U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that Kim Jong-Un’s nation North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test. Note: North Korea does not even have to carry out the text: mere conviction on the side of the US that it would, is sufficient.

As first reported yesterday, North Korea warned that a “big event” is near, and U.S. officials say signs point to a nuclear test that could come as early as this weekend. According to multiple sources, the U.S. intelligence community has reported with “moderate confidence” that North Korea is preparing for its sixth underground nuclear test, though the U.S. is also in the dark regarding the specific timing.

The launch of a preemptive attack would naturally threatens a counterattack by Kim: the U.S. is thus “worried” that its strikes could provoke the volatile and unpredictable North Korean regime to launch its own blistering attack on its southern neighbor. “The leadership in North Korea has shown absolutely no sign or interest in diplomacy or dialogue with any of the countries involved in this issue,” said Victor Cha, the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, intelligence officials have told NBC News that the U.S. Navy has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site. Additionally, American heavy bombers are also positioned in Guam to attack North Korea should it be necessary, and earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.

Earlier in the week, North Korea said it would “hit the U.S. first” with a nuclear weapon should there be any signs of U.S. strikes. On Thursday, North Korea warned of a “merciless retaliatory strike” should the U.S. take any action. It is almost as if the U.S. is eager to provoke the “irrational” North Korean dictator.

“By relentlessly bringing in a number of strategic nuclear assets to the Korean peninsula, the US is gravely threatening the peace and safety and driving the situation to the brink of a nuclear war,” said North Korea’s statement, which actually sounded quite rational and measured.

Futhermore, virtually everyone knows that Kim’s threats are those of a paper tiger: North Korea is not believed to have a deliverable long-range nuclear weapon, according to U.S. experts, nor does it yet possess an intercontinental missile. Which begs the question: why is the US getting involved in yet another regime change operation half way around the world?

South Korea’s top diplomat said today that the U.S. would consult with Seoul before taking any serious measures, or at least he hoped: “U.S. officials, mindful of such concerns here, repeatedly reaffirmed that (the U.S.) will closely discuss with South Korea its North Korea-related measures,” foreign minister Yun Byung told a special parliamentary meeting. “In fact, the U.S. is working to reassure us that it will not, just in case that we might hold such concerns.”

Of course, if the U.S. does not “closely discuss” any pre-strike plans, then… oops.

In any case, a new war may break out as soon as this weekend: “Two things are coming together this weekend,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis, former commander of NATO and an NBC analyst. “One is the distinct possibility of a sixth North Korean nuclear weapons detonation and the other is an American carrier strike group, a great deal of firepower headed right at the Korean Peninsula.”

The U.S. is aware that simply preparing an attack, even if it will only be launched if there is an “imminent” North Korean action, increases the danger of provoking a large conflict, multiple sources told NBC News.

 

“It’s high stakes,” a senior intelligence official directly involved in the planning told NBC News. “We are trying to communicate our level of concern and the existence of many military options to dissuade the North first.”

 

“It’s a feat that we’ve never achieved before but there is a new sense of resolve here,” the official said, referring to the White House.

The unofficial admission that a preemptive strike is imminent comes on the same day the U.S. announced the use of its MOAB in Afghanistan, attacking underground facilities, and on the heels of U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian airbase last week, a strike that took place while President Trump was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.

Earlier today, Trump gave China what amounted to a tacit ultimatum: deal with North Korea, or Trump will.

I have great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea. If they are unable to do so, the U.S., with its allies, will! U.S.A.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2017

And as the clock is ticking, officials have told NBC that Trump has talked to Chinese president Xi twice about North Korea since their Florida summit.

China has since sent its top nuclear negotiators to Pyongyang to communicate the gravity of the situation to the North, officials say. On Wednesday, President Xi called for a peaceful resolution to the escalating tensions.

It’s not just China: “Moscow has weighed in as well: “We are gravely concerned about Washington’s plans regarding North Korea, considering hints about the unilateral use of a military scenario” the Putin government said in a press release issued on Tuesday.”

Ultimately, the only thing standing between Kim and a Tomahawk is a decision by South Korea, where as a reminder, the political regime has been in chaos since the impeachment of former president Park.

Implementation of the preemptive U.S. plans, according to multiple U.S. officials, depends centrally on consent of the South Korean government. The sources stress that Seoul has got to be persuaded that action is worth the risk, as there is universal concern that any military move might provoke a North Korean attack, even a conventional attack across the DMZ.

Tensions have escalated on the Korean Peninsula, as this Saturday marks the anniversary of the birth of the nation’s founder — Kim il-Sung, grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong-un. At the highest levels in South Korea and the U.S., sources told NBC News, there are fears North Korea could mark the “Day of the Sun” by testing a nuclear device. As discussed yesterday, North Korea in the past has used these national holidays to celebrate the strengths of the regime and to reinforce the national narrative of their independence, as confirmed by Cha.

“I think that is what President Trump is getting trying to get the Chinese to do,” said Cha. “[It] would impose real pain and force real choices on North Korea — whether the costs are worth it for them to continue to pursue this program if they no longer have any sustenance.”

In addition to the coal ships, the Chinese made an important gesture at the UN Thursday: A surprising abstention on a Security Council resolution condemning a Syrian chemical weapons attack. China didn’t stand with the Russians on Syria, as it has in the past.

But the biggest indicator may have been the market: for the first time in month, the S&P closed on the lowest tick of the day ahead of a long weekend, almost as if traders had no desire to go long into a the 72 hours in which there is a non-trivial chance that, in some form or another, a nuclear device may go off, coupled with the launch of an unknown number of US Tomahawk missiles.

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

CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted Wikileaks during an event held by the Center for Strategic & International Studies today, despite having promoted the publisher’s leaks in 2016 to attack political opponents during the U.S. Presidential elections.

 

Pompeo took an extremely hard line with the publishing giant, labelling them a “non-state hostile intelligence service” before repeating the baseless contention that Wikileaks was abetted by the Russian Federation, despite FBI Director James Comey’s assertion in late March that Wikileaks has never dealt directly with the Russian government.

 

Pompeo further stated that the Russian media outlet Russia Today (RT) had actively collaborated with Wikileaks, and that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was a narcissist and a fraud “hiding behind a computer screen.” Mr. Assange is currently residing in Ecuador’s London Embassy, where he has been held in de-facto captivity since August 2012 after being granted asylum by Ecuador. On April 6, 2016 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Assange’s detention was unlawful. They ordered that he be released immediately and compensated by Sweden and the United Kingdom for the roles these states played in his captivity.

Director Pompeo’s comments are ironic given that during the 2016 election, he was happy to publicize Wikileaks’ release of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails which proved that the DNC had been committing election fraud during the Democratic primary race and improperly communicating with members of the American media. Pompeo tweeted about about the release and accused then President Barack Obama of being complicit in the primary fraud and collusion with the press.

The apparent policy flip by Pompeo comes after Wikileaks began to release their Vault 7 series of leaks, showing that the CIA has been improperly accessing the personal electronic devices of Americans, was concealing known exploits from product manufacturers, utilizes false attribution techniques allowing them to conceal their hacking attacks by portraying them as coming from another country and uses tools which appear to have been developed by Russian criminal organizations.

via http://ift.tt/2peLcj4 William Craddick

Roughly a month ago, during the height of the mainstream media mania over Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on Fox and Friends with a startling new revelation, namely that President Obama circumvented U.S. law and employed a British intelligence agency to conduct surveillance of the Trump campaign.  Despite Napolitano’s assertion that the information had been confirmed by 3 separate sources, the Obama administration and foreign intelligence agencies issued immediate denials and the mainstream media was all too happy to trash the latest ‘conspiracy theory’ of their competitor network.  Here’s what he said:

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command.  He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice.  He used GCHQ.”

 

“What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database.”

 

“So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.”

.@Judgenap: Three intel sources have disclosed that Pres. Obama turned to British spies to get surveillance on Trump http://pic.twitter.com/IghCFm7qhO

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 14, 2017

 

Of course,  Napolitano’s efforts ultimately earned him a multi-day suspension from Fox News.

Now, some 30 days after Napolitano broke the story, CNN seems to have just confirmed it:

British and other European intelligence agencies intercepted communications between associates of Donald Trump and Russian officials and other Russian individuals during the campaign and passed on those communications to their US counterparts, US congressional and law enforcement and US and European intelligence sources tell CNN.

 

The communications were captured during routine surveillance of Russian officials and other Russians known to western intelligence. British and European intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, the British intelligence agency responsible for communications surveillance, were not proactively targeting members of the Trump team but rather picked up these communications during what’s known as “incidental collection,” these sources tell CNN.

 

The European intelligence agencies detected multiple communications over several months between the Trump associates and Russian individuals — and passed on that intelligence to the US. The US and Britain are part of the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement (along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand), which calls for open sharing among member nations of a broad range of intelligence.

Of course, we’re quite certain that, as CNN notes, the intercepted communications were merely “incidental” and in no way requested by the Obama administration, but rather, were conveniently volunteered, unsolicited, by British intelligence.  Moreover, we’re sure that British intelligence also had very innocent reasons for “accidentally” happening upon the communication of Trump’s advisors.  That said, we do wonder whether they also happened upon any communications from the Hillary campaign…

via http://ift.tt/2nKsum1 Tyler Durden

Social media giant Facebook – whose “Fake News” thought police include the degenerates over at Snopes, and which has banned conservative accounts such as iBankCoin from accessing the platform – is apparently really cool with child pornography and beheading videos.

According to UK publication The Times, Facebook could face criminal prosecution for refusing to remove dozens of images and videos depicting child porn, pedophilic cartoons, child rape, an ISIS beheading video, and propaganda posters glorifying terrorist attacks in London and Egypt.

Instead of removing the content, moderators said that the posts did not breach the site’s “community standards”.

Facebook’s algorithms even promoted some of the offensive material by suggesting that users join groups and profiles that had published it.

 

A leading QC who reviewed the content said that, in his view, much of it was illegal under British law. Facebook was at risk of committing a criminal offence because it had been made aware of the illegal images and had failed to take them down, he said.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has defended pedos…

In March, the BBC – which busted a Facebook pedo ring in 2016 (resulting in a 4 year prison sentence) – reported dozens of examples of child pornography. Facebook’s response? They removed around 20% of the images, then reported the BBC journalists to the police – and canceled plans for an interview!

Using Facebook’s own moderation tools, the BBC’s recent investigation attempted to report 100 images that appeared to violate Facebook’s terms of service for sexualized images of children. The BBC found that just 18 of the 100 were eventually taken down on Facebook. –Gizmodo

What in the hell is going on?

In November, we reported how Twitter banned a user for exposing thousands of child porn accounts, while allowing the offensive content to remain on the platform.

Meanwhile the New York Times and Salon have tried to ‘normalize’ pedophilia by running an article in defense of pedos. Salon went on to scrub the article from their website the day before a hit-piece on Milo Yiannopoulos, however the NYT continues to run it. I wonder why?

So we have social media giants Twitter and Facebook allowing pedophilic and pro-terrorism content on their platforms, while MSM outlets such as the New York Times and Salon defend it. And it’s not just those outlets… Think about it – how much attention has the record number of human trafficking busts since the inauguration received from the MSM? Meanwhile, conservative voices with divergent opinions are being throttled, banned, ‘un-followed,’ or otherwise limited from reaching audiences.

Something is very wrong with this picture…

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