I missed it the evening that it came out, but caught it on Youtube.
At 2:10 in the video, he notes how Hillary Clinton responded to allegations of sexual harassment on her staff in 2008.
Spoiler: It wasn’t good, and her response when it hit the news a few days ago was even worse.
In 2016, she was in a close race for the least self-aware major party presidential candidate nominee, and I am still not sure who actually won THAT contest.
Sad photo of Wall Street traders reacting as stock market plunges. pic.twitter.com/671pG4Db4L— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) February 5, 2018
A remarkably on point statement of the modern stock market.
The following headline is proof of this:
Jacinda Ardern Considers Offer from Maori Leaders to Bury Placenta at Historic British Treaty Site
I have no words.
I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!
In a shocking outbreak of judicial integrity, Justice Samuel Alito, who covers appeals from Pennsylvania, has refused to issue an injunction against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling which requires an immediate redistricting:
The Supreme Court on Monday denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to delay redrawing congressional lines, meaning the 2018 elections in the state will most likely be held in districts far more favorable to Democrats.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last month ruled that the state’s Republican legislative leaders had violated the state Constitution by unfairly favoring the GOP. Although there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, Republicans hold 13 of 18 congressional seats.
The GOP leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, but Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. turned down their request for a stay without even referring the case to his colleagues. He gave no reason for the decision, but generally the Supreme Court stays out of the way when a state’s highest court is interpreting its own state constitution.
That sound you hear is political consultants frantically updating their spreadsheets and their voter roll databases.
The nickel version is stop throwing money the for profit companies, and actually build the infrastructure ourselves.
You can, do this in the same way that we established power and telephone service in rural areas in the past, which involved cross subsidies to support rural service and the establishment of rural co-ops to actually provide the service.
Noted telecommunications advocate Harold Feld (link above) goes in a different direction, he suggests that infrastructure be publicly provided, and suggests that this can be done through the expansion of unlicensed spectrum, which naturally creates a competitive marketplace:
The beauty of modern communications networks is that we can actually break up the supply chain and target subsidies to be much more specific. We can subsidize infrastructure instead of subsidizing carriers. The advantage of this is that by subsidizing infrastructure, we can subsidize infrastructure for many potential competitors (or at least more than one), rather than basically having a monopoly provider we either need to regulate up to the eyebrows to make sure we actually get decent, affordable service in exchange for the subsidy. Additionally, we have a lot of different ways to lower cost that actually lower cost. If we do that, we can actually see local businesses and local institutions willing and able to provide service for profits that, while perfectly reasonable for a local business, would be utterly uninteresting to even a small traditional carrier.
He then gives the example of WISPs (wireless ISPs) as to how this would generally function, but that the important bit is that the infrastructure has to be held commonly in some manner
WISPs aren’t the answer. WISPs are part of the answer. But, more importantly, WISPs provide a real life demonstration that we do not need to rely on the traditional “find a single carrier and pay the carrier” to bring broadband to rural America. If we focus on providing infrastructure, either indirectly by providing necessary inputs (like spectrum) or directly (for example, by building towers or backhaul fiber), we will see entities interested and eager to provide service in regions that traditional carriers do not find sufficiently profitable to be interesting.
Personally, pinko that I am, I would like to have publicly owned fiber to the curb, with ISPs doing the final connection to the home, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly enamored of public ownership of the means of production.
Over at Foreign Policy magazine, an avatar of the establishment, has published an article calling for comprehensive and independents audits of state secrets:
The battle over the disclosure of the memo on the Russia investigation prepared by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes has been analyzed mostly in narrow partisan terms, but it has much larger significance for the health of American democracy. A key weakness of the U.S. democratic system, and indeed all democracies, is the paradox of secrecy: voters need to know what the government does in order to evaluate it but the government needs secrecy to effectively serve the public. As parties have polarized, the tensions inherent to that paradox have become increasingly impossible to ignore.
These tensions now demand some attempt at a resolution, even if any such answer will inevitably demand sacrifices from current stakeholders. The most plausible solution may be one that nobody in the political establishment has yet seriously contemplated — the creation of a system of public audits for government secrets.
Everyone knows that secrecy is a problem for democracy because voters cannot easily evaluate the government if the government acts in secret. This leads to endless calls for greater transparency, with the obligatory invocation of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s memorable line that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” What this trite sentiment overlooks is that secrecy is also essential to democracy. No democracy can function unless the government is permitted to act in secret.
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Hence the need for a public auditing system, one that requires the government from time to time to release batches of classified information to the public — and in real time, not decades later, as is the current practice. For this to work, all secret information at a given time — tax records, health records, military strategies, weapons systems, CIA analyses, FBI and IRS investigations — would need to be accessible. A citizens’ counsel could be created, with the authority to review that secret information, subpoena government officials to defend their classification choices, and disclose the information to the public if the officials fail to persuade.
While I disagree with the mechanism, I have been advocating for the incorporating Swedish principle of Offentlighetsprincipen (Openness) into the US constitution for years, it is not a bad start.
Because any hint of wages increasing along with productivity result in the Federal Reserve trying to shut it down.
The Fed has been promulgating low wage economics for decades:
There have been all kinds of carefully phrased semi-hawkish statements emanating from carefully contained semi-hawkish Fed governors recently. Today, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan repeated what he has been saying for a while – that the “base case” should be three rate hikes this year, and that there could be four, warning, “if we wait to see actual inflation, we’ll be too late.”
But it’s the most fervent “doves” – when they start getting cold feet as doves – that matter the most when it comes to tightening monetary policy.
One of the most persistent, most vocal doves on the policy setting FOMC has been Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari. He voted against all three rate hikes in 2017, and was vocal about why he did: inflation was too “low.”
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There was a number in the jobs report this morning that got his attention: Average hourly earnings in January gained 2.9% year-over-year, the largest gain since June 2009, hallelujah, finally. Pressures are building up in parts of the economy, and companies are griping they cannot hire enough workers in some professions – or that they would have to pay more, God forbid, to hire them.
………
“The most important thing that I saw in a quick review of the jobs data is wage growth,” Kashkari told CNBC on Friday.“We’ve been waiting for wage growth. Everyone has been declaring that we’re at maximum employment. More Americans have been coming in, which is a really good thing. But there hasn’t been much wage growth. This is one of the first signs that we’re seeing wage growth finally starting to pick up. That’s good for the public as a whole. I think it’s good for the economy overall. But I do think if wage growth continues, that could have an effect on the path of interest rates.”
The path of these interest rates is already winding uphill. For now, everyone at the Fed when they advocate for higher rates keeps repeating the qualifier, “gradual.” But so far, Kashkari has used every opportunity to vote and speak out against any and all rate hikes.
Yet the moment wages tick up, suddenly it gets his attention. It gets every Fed governor’s attention. Wage increases give them the willies.
Creating asset price inflation, including the most glorious housing bubble imaginable, became the Fed’s publicly stated policy goal under Chairman Bernanke – his infamous “wealth effect” doctrine. And consumer price inflation must always be high enough to eat up wage gains and help companies show growing revenues, but not so high that it blows down the whole house.
But wage inflation is toxic for the Fed. Wage inflation means that people get paid more for the same amount of work. A higher income due to promotions, for example, is not part of wage inflation.
Expect rates to go up much more rapidly now.
No one took a knee during the national anthem.
First, we have an al Qaeda linked group shooting down a Russian jet with a US missile:
Syria’s former al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility Saturday for the downing of a Russian warplane in northern Syria, apparently using a surface-to-air missile to target the aircraft.
The pilot was killed after he ejected and exchanged gunfire with militants on the ground, the Russian Defense Ministry and a monitoring group said.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a powerful rebel alliance that publicly split from al-Qaeda last year, said it had used a shoulder-fired weapon to down the Su-25 fighter jet as it flew low over the opposition-held town of Saraqeb.………
It also raises questions about the source of the apparent “man-portable air-defense system,” or MANPADS, a shoulder-fired weapon for which Syria’s rebels have repeatedly pleaded from their international backers. The United States has been strongly opposed, fearing that antiaircraft weapons could fall into the hands of the country’s extremist groups.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said any allegation that the United States has provided MANPAD missiles in Syria was untrue, and she denied that U.S. equipment was used in shooting down the Russian plane.
Considering the fact that the CIA has been supporting groups that the US military has been attacking, so take that with a grain of salt.
The rather more shocking news today though is that Israel has been conducting airstrikes in the Sinai with the affirmative assent of the Egyptian government:
The jihadists in Egypt’s Northern Sinai had killed hundreds of soldiers and police officers, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, briefly seized a major town and begun setting up armed checkpoints to claim territory. In late 2015, they brought down a Russian passenger jet.
Egypt appeared unable to stop them, so Israel, alarmed at the threat just over the border, took action.For more than two years, unmarked Israeli drones, helicopters and jets have carried out a covert air campaign, conducting more than 100 airstrikes inside Egypt, frequently more than once a week — and all with the approval of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The remarkable cooperation marks a new stage in the evolution of their singularly fraught relationship. Once enemies in three wars, then antagonists in an uneasy peace, Egypt and Israel are now secret allies in a covert war against a common foe.
The Israeli airstrikes are not that unusual, but the fact that there has been official (though not public)n approval, and not just grudging acknowledgement, of the Egyptian government.
The obvious conclusion here is that the Egyptian Government (particularly el-Sisi) is desperate, which indicates that the government is far less secure than it would like to proclaim.
It’s complete crap.
There are a number of what appear to be elementary factual errors, but it’s basically a nothing-burger.
It is also a document that should ever have been classified at any level.
The claims that its release would compromise national security are, and ALWAYS HAS BEEN six pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.
Everyone involved in this knew this before the release, because the summaries that had been floating about made that quite clear,
The claims of security damage were made because the FBI did not want a criticism of their actions to be made public.
The bottom line is that Devin Nunes peddled a sh%$ sandwich for explicitly partisan political purposes.
There is nothing shocking about this: This is what politicians, particularly hacks like Nunes do.
The objections, and the hysteria from the US state security apparatus is rather more concerning. They are, as they frequently have in the past, attempted to short circuit any meaningful oversight by making bogus claims of national security consequences.
What is probably most significant is that this is the first time ever that the House Intelligence Committee has declassified a document unilaterally using Clause 11(g) of Rule X of the House rules.
What this means is that the intelligence apparatus was unable to delay, suppress, or rewrite this document to its liking.
This rule has been in existence since the 1970s, and has never been invoked before, and from this narrow perspective, at least from my perspective as someone who is profoundly suspicious of US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, this is a welcome change.
In fact, it should have happened years ago.
In the immediate aftermath of Doug Jones’ shock victory in the Alabama Senate race, the Democratic National Committee tried to take no small amount of credit. Indeed, it took $1 million worth of credit.
The truth is more complicated.
After Jones defeated Republican and accused pedophile Roy Moore, the DNC said it had quietly spent $1 million constructing a voter-outreach effort for the Democrat, including an extensive campaign of text messages, phone calls, and door-knockers.
Now, faced with documentation that questions the claim, DNC officials say the committee spent only $250,000 of its own money on the race, cash that funded more than two dozen staffers on the ground in the state who, among other things, conducted extensive outreach to African-American voters.
The rest – nearly three-quarters of the total funds originally claimed – was not a direct injection of DNC money but instead cash the DNC raised on behalf of Jones through email solicitations.
Counting that kind of assistance as funds spent is unusual, according to Democrats familiar with campaign fundraising; political groups typically make clear distinctions between the money they raise for a candidate and the money they spend backing a candidate.
Just when I thought that the DNC could not get any lamer.
After markets closed on her final workday in office, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered a blow to one of the nation’s largest banks: Wells Fargo & Co. won’t be allowed to grow until it cleans up.
Fed officials said the San Francisco-based lender’s pattern of consumer abuses and compliance lapses called for an unprecedented sanction. Until Wells Fargo addresses shortcomings in areas including internal oversight, it can’t take any action that would boost total assets beyond their level at the end of 2017, without the Fed’s permission. The bank said after-tax profit in 2018 would be reduced by $300 million to $400 million and its stock slumped in late trading Friday.
“This is akin to the last scene in ‘The Godfather,”’ said Isaac Boltansky, an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading. “Chair Yellen decided to handle unfinished business on her way out the door.”
Yellen’s act stands out at a time when the Trump administration is looking to dial back some of the financial regulations put in place after the 2008 global financial crisis. Those moves include watering down enforcement actions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and proposing revisions to Dodd-Frank reforms on Wall Street.
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Regulators can’t allow “pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank,” Yellen said in a statement. She also sent a letter on Friday to Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who’s among the bank’s — and the financial industry in general’s — most prominent critics.
“The firm has much to do to earn back the trust of its customers, supervisors, investors and the public,” Yellen told the lawmaker. The growth restriction “is unique and more stringent than the penalties the Board has imposed against other bank holding companies for similar unsafe and unsound practices.”
I expect this to be overturned within the next 12 months, but it is seriously gangsta.
We had the first failure of the year on Tuesday, St. Elizabeth’s Credit Union of Chicago, IL.
Here is the Full NCUA list.
Slow pace this year so far.
It appears that, in addition to increasing the size of paychecks, testosterone offers protection from autoimmune disease:
Testosterone. Source of prostates and testes, muscles and machismo, chest hair, and according to some, even math skills. Its levels are only one of the biological differences between males and females, but they may help to explain another: the discrepancies in the incidence of autoimmune diseases.
Women are three to nine times more likely than men to suffer from autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), Grave’s disease, celiac disease, systemic lupus erythematous, and rheumatoid arthritis. Not only do women get these diseases at higher rates, they usually get them at younger ages.
Men’s higher testosterone levels—about seven to eight times higher than women’s—have been shown to be protective for MS in both mice and men. But it was not clear exactly how this worked. Recent work in a mouse model of MS has filled in the downstream effectors that mediate testosterone’s protective effects. These effectors might be useful as therapeutics, whereas testosterone use really isn’t, especially for women, who are the ones who need it most.
The work focused on a type of immune cell called a mast cell. Mast cells get a bad rap because they release histamine during allergic reactions, but they’re generally involved in inflammation. In the mice that recapitulate MS, testosterone influences the behavior of mast cells in the lymph nodes, central nervous system, and lining of the brain. In female mice, which don’t have as much testosterone, mast cells instead produce pro-inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines.
The more you know.
It’s about a man who just won the lottery, and decides that he can finally afford to see the doctor:
Man Uses $1m Win To Finally Visit Doctor, Gets Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, Dies Weeks Later
Clearly, the solution to our broken healthcare system is more capitalism.
*The Princess Bride, watch it, watch it again, and then watch it again.
$30 million missile touted as a possible second layer of defense for Hawaii from North Korean threats reportedly failed in its first-ever flight from Kauai’s Aegis Ashore facility today when it did not intercept a target representing an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
U.S. Pacific Command put out a statement saying only: “The Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Navy sailors manning the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex conducted a live-fire missile flight test using a Standard-Missile (SM)-3 Block IIA missile launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai.”
The Pentagon is not publicly revealing the failure because of possible ramifications with North Korea tensions as well as concern for the upcoming South Korean Olympic games, CNN reported. According to the news channel, the target missile was launched by an aircraft.
Raytheon’s new SM-3 Block IIA missile, co-developed with Japan, is seen as a possible second layer of protection for Hawaii from North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles in addition to ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California — the only other line of defense.
The SM-3 IIA missile now has a record of one intercept in three tries off Kauai.
Rule one of ABM systems is, this sh%$ is hard.
Rule two of ABM systems is, this sh%$ is WAY more expensive than what they are shooting at you.
It’s a sucker’s game, but given defense contractors need a new boat.