May 12

Today’s News 12th May 2017

  • Visualizing Who Holds U.S. Debt Internationally

    We recommend viewing the full-size version of today’s infographic by clicking here.

    Everyone knows that the U.S. Federal Government has roughly $20 trillion of debt. A question we often get, however, is who exactly owns all these treasuries? And if it’s held abroad by countries like China, what portion do they hold?

    Today’s infographic comes from TitleMax, and it looks at who owns U.S. debt internationally, as well as the debt from other countries that is held by the U.S.

     

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

     

    WHO HOLDS U.S. DEBT?

    Federal government debt in the United States can be broadly placed in two categories: “Debt held by the public” and “Intragovernmental debt”. The former category includes securities held by individual investors, corporations, local and state governments, the Federal Reserve, and foreign governments.

    Meanwhile, intragovernmental debt includes securities held in accounts administered by other federal authorities. This category, for example, would include treasuries owed to the Social Security Trust Fund.

    Here’s the tallies of these two categories as of December 2016:

    DEBT HELD BY THE PUBLIC

    “Debt held by the public” is the most interesting of these, and it can be further broken down:

    *Note: Data for Fed is for marketable securities only. All data in this table from September 2016.

    About 43% of all debt held by the public is actually owned by foreign governments, corporations, and individuals.

    U.S. DEBT HELD INTERNATIONALLY

    Here’s how that breaks down by country:

  • Militant Leftists Are More An Annoyance Than A Real Threat To Liberty

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    In many articles leading up to the 2016 election I discussed the problem of “escalation.” Namely escalation on the left end of the political spectrum and the people who identify with it (set aside that this spectrum does not exist for the leaders and gatekeepers that exploit it).  In analyzing the consequences of the inevitable Trump win, it was clear that extreme leftists (cultural Marxists) were about to lose considerable social influence and that this would end up driving them to more aggressive measures. This process has happened even faster than I expected.

    Cultural Marxists are almost universally distrusted or despised in America today. Their only support seems to come from their own inbred activist circles, Hollywood and certain elements of the corporate and political world.

    This does not mean they are going away. Not at all. What it means is that they are going to evolve into something else, perhaps something worse.

    That said, even if this does occur, I worry that conservatives are putting far too much stock in the threat these people represent. My greatest fear is that conservatives will become so hyper-focused on a militant left that they will forget about the international financiers that instigated this mess in the first place. I also worry that we will one day abandon our constitutional principles in the name of stomping such people into the dirt, using government as our primary tool.

    I understand the circus mentality surrounding this issue. The lefties want to “punch fascists” and become some kind of folk heroes in a cultural revolution, so they fabricate images of Nazis and imperialists everywhere in order to rationalize their behavior. Conservatives see this behavior and conjure images of communist hordes overrunning the Republic and building a nation-sized gulag around us, so we want to go out and “punch communists.”  It’s a tale over a century old.

    I see an undue level of fear, though, over these cultural Marxists and their real world effectiveness.

    I see guys going out to counter-protest little 96 pound, vegan Antifa kids by strapping on ballistic plates or soft body armor, level IIIA helmets and SAP gloves like they think they are going to war. I have to chuckle a little because it showcases the conservative tendency to meet every threat with a nuclear over-response (metaphorically speaking… in some cases).  Remember, in most situations these college-age weaklings have no clue what they are doing, they can barely move around in those skinny jeans they all wear and half of the men identify as women. This is not a group of well trained, bloodthirsty Cheka; they are incompetent and fumbling in the dark.

    Opening a high pressure can of whoop ass on such people might be necessary in some instances, but “victory” against them is not going to earn you a place in Valhalla. It may provide some fleeting satisfaction, but let’s be realistic — this is not a war, it is a game… an opportunity to brawl in the streets.

    To illustrate my point further, I would like to repost a video that has been making the rounds in the liberty movement recently. Behold! The next phase of escalation in leftist militancy: Learning which end of a gun goes “Boom!”…

    The above video posted by the Phoenix John Brown Gun Club was apparently meant as a message of intimidation, but instead it resulted in a roar of laughter. These are the people we are supposed to be afraid of?

    Anyone with marginal firearms training will be feeling some cringe right now. There is nothing intimidating about 50 people shooting wildly at a drawing of Pepe The Frog and mostly hitting the dirt hillside instead. It’s hard to become personally proficient with a firearm when you can’t even tell who is hitting what during your “training.”  It is also hard to hit a target when you aren’t shown how to shoulder your weapon correctly or present a proper shooting stance.

    I’m a good sport and I’ll give the Antifa kids a few tips: Lean forward into the gun instead of backwards, and STOP gripping the mag well and put your non-shooting hand on the handguard; that’s what it is there for.  Or, just form a big circle during live weapons training and get the friendly fire incidents over with now.

    Don’t get me wrong, I have seen poorly managed prepper and militia training as well, but nothing quite to the level of pure suck that comes across in the video above. And I don’t hold it against the people who showed up to the event, I hold it against the incompetence of the trainers.

    But let’s get back to the main point of this article.

    The John Brown Gun Club does not represent REAL escalation. Not the kind of escalation I have referred to in the past. Most leftists do not grow up in a gun culture and are thus lost when trying to adopt it. When you are barely exposed to the notion of a thing, you are going to be VERY SLOW in learning that thing. When I showed a friend of mine this video they said, “It’s like when Asians immigrate and have trouble driving…” (Is that racist?  Oh who cares…).

    Real escalation when it comes to the Left is almost always funded and supported by governments or by elites seeking to use those leftists as weapons for prodding the general population and creating rationalizations for reactionary totalitarianism. I highly suggest skeptics of this idea look into Antony Sutton’s evidenced records and studies into the corporate backing of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as well as their backing of the rise of fascism in Europe.

    I would also suggest research into more famous and violent leftist activist groups like the Weather Underground; a collective responsible for dozens of bombings and threats against government facilities. Perhaps the most suspicious circumstance of the Weathermen and their seeming immunity in many cases to prosecution is the strange story of Bill Ayers, a leader within the Weather Underground that planned multiple bombings but remains free to this day and is an influential figure among political elites in Washington.

    If you think that the racially charged rhetoric of social justice warriors today is extreme or “new,” just look at the rhetoric of the Weather Underground, which included discussions on “killing all white babies” because they were destined to “grow up to be oppressive racists.”  This propaganda has been going on a LONG time.

    These are the kinds of groups we should be truly worried about when it comes to the left, and not because they are capable of ever accomplishing their goals. Leftists rely on two things when imposing their will on others — they rely on the power of the mob, the power of government or both at the same time. Right now it is clear that the left has lost the power of the mob. They have no momentum. They were losing any momentum they did have long before conservatives faced off with them at places like Berkeley.

    Government and elitist-supported groups, supplied with training and funding, are a greater danger. They tend to operate more like terrorist cells, using bombings, shootings and attrition.

    This is not always simply to instill fear or to achieve an actual political aim in support of leftist “values.” Instead, these groups are sometimes injected into the system as a way to inspire conservatives to overreact or to run into the welcoming arms of a waiting dictatorship.

    Perhaps the most effective example of the creation and exploitation of violent leftist terror was Operation Gladio, a false flag program running from the 1950s to the 1990s in Europe until it was finally exposed by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Many of the leftist and “communist” cells involved in the numerous attacks on civilians during this period were in fact either manipulated by government agencies like the CIA, or they were created from scratch by those same agencies.

    This is not to say that every Antifa and SJW organization active today is some kind of Frankenstein creation of the government.  Most of them are not. As I stated earlier, many of these people are ignorant college kids brainwashed by academia. They are, at most, useful idiots and not a true threat because they don't have the tools or capacity to present a true threat.

    However, a day is likely coming in which Gladio-style leftist groups will be active in the U.S., and they will not be assaulting senior citizens with mere pepper spray, or screaming at Trump supporters and throwing bike locks from sidewalks.

    The goal behind such groups will NOT be to “win.”  They are not trying to establish a Marxist enclave. What they really want is to frighten conservatives and liberty activists into supporting extreme measures outside of the constitution and our principles. For once we abandon our principles in the name of “winning,” we will have actually lost everything.

    At bottom, the pinnacle threat to liberty is not the cultural Marxists, the SJWs, Antifa or whatever else they like to call themselves. The real threat, as always, are the establishment elites funding and influencing that very ideology, that very mob. Countering the leftists on the street in some situations is useful, but not at the expense of abandoning the fight against the root cancer eating at the heart of our country.  Until the moneymen and political criminals (on both sides of the aisle) are dealt with, the waves of angry leftist dupes and their more dangerous Marxist cells will never end.  Fighting the left while ignoring the greater demon is an eternally foolish strategy.

  • Trump Tweets "Russia Is Laughing As U.S. Tears Itself Apart", Scraps FBI Visit

    It appears that US politics is back to its quasi-surreal state first observed in the early weeks of the Trump administration, when the president spent much of his day in front of Twitter. And while it is unclear if Trump is bored, busy, engaging in damage control or quite the opposite, he blasted a couple of tweets shortly after the close which have led to the now traditional media firestorm.

    First, Trump responded to his perpetual nemesis, Rosie O’Donnell, and specifically her tweet from December 20 of last year, in which she said “FIRE COMEY” to which Trump responded, “We finally agree on something Rosie.”

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    A New York Times reporter promptly provided the necessary and sufficient reaction to that particular tweet.

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    Shortly after, Trump followed up with another tweet, this time taking aim at Democrats, saying “Russia must be laughing up their sleeves watching as the U.S. tears itself apart over a Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election.”

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    Trump is right: whether for this, or some other reason, it is safe to say that the residents of the Kremlin have been enjoying a good time recently.

    And while the two may or may not be linked, moments ago NBC reported that contrary to a Reuters report earlier this morning confirmed later by Deputy White House press secretary Sanders, Trump abandoned plans to visit the FBI headquarters to ease tensions with the agency’s employees after he fired James Comey.  The reason: “Trump was told FBI agents might not provide a warm reception following Comey’s ouster.”

    FBI agents told NBC that many of them voted for Trump during the 2016 presidential election. However NBC’s sources added that few were ready to celebrate Trump’s visit after his sacking of Comey.

     

    “My sense is most FBI employees feel a loyalty to Comey,” one person who works at the bureau’s headquarters said.

     

    “And whether they agree or disagree with the way he handled the email case, like and respect him … Trump would not be well-received at headquarters.”

    Perhaps it’s just more fake news, but in either case with Trump having recently burned bridges with Russia just to boost his domestic image, a move which was then mostly obviated when he fired Comey and delayed the passage of his domestic economic agenda by weeks if not months, getting on the bad side of FBI’s rank and file is arguably one of the more precarious things the president can do, especially with the Russian interference probe still going on, bonus points for twitter trolling – which sadly does not result in better governance – notwithstanding.

  • "Apocalypse Now": The Horror Of The Deep State's Plan Exposed – Part 3

    Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    In Part One and Part Two of this article I detailed the decades of propaganda, false flags, and misinformation campaigns used by the Deep State to gain power and control over the U.S. government. When war or a financial crisis is necessary to keep the profits flowing, events will be steered to such an outcome. With the latest financial plundering operation running out of steam, the Deep State is pushing the world toward global conflict.

    If at first you don’t succeed with a false flag gas attack, try try again. Knowing a vast swath of the American populace is incapable of critical thinking or able to discern between fake news and factual events, the Deep State and their media lackeys unquestioningly promoted the story of children being killed by a sarin gas attack by Assad. The photos of rescue workers helping victims without gloves immediately invalidated the narrative, as the rescue workers would be dead if they handled sarin gas victims without protective gear.

    The faux journalists, pretending to be neutral observers, did not question this blatant lie. They did not ponder why Assad would commit such an idiotic atrocity when he was clearly in control of the battlefield and on the verge of defeating his American funded rebel enemies.

     

    The Deep State masters of manipulation had been flogging the Russiagate story to such a degree, a large portion of the population actually believed Putin hacked the election and got Trump elected. Despite not one iota of proof or evidence, they had successfully used their propaganda mainstream media machine to keep Trump on the ropes. Putin’s unwavering support for Assad and success in defeating the ISIS/Al Qaeda/American rebel forces made the Deep State even more desperate.

    With Trump’s domestic agenda stalled, this false flag gas attack offered him the opportunity to look tough and distance himself from Russia. He took the bait and launched the 59 missiles into Syria, doing virtually no damage to anything vital to Syria’s war effort. They were launching planes to attack rebels from that base the next day.

    The invisible government players achieved victory once again, as it only took three months to turn the non-interventionist candidate into the next war loving president. The overwhelming cheers from liberal and conservative media outlets were deafening. McCain, Graham, Schumer, Pelosi and all the usual neo-con suspects were ecstatic. Trump’s poll ratings jumped. The majority of the non-thinking public applauded the tough guy act.

    It went so well, Trump was convinced by his trigger happy military leadership to use the Mother of All Bombs on some underground tunnels in the middle of bumfuk Afghanistan. It was all captured on film so it could be played over and over on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the rest of Deep State network TV. The corporate media dutifully provided casualty counts even though they had no way of verifying anything they reported. This was essentially a propaganda film to pump up the spirits of the heavily indebted, iGadget addicted, clueless masses.

    Trump is seeing how easy it is to wage war around the globe, make threatening gestures, order his fleets into attack position, place a $1 billion missile defense system in another country at our cost, and generally act as if he is playing a giant game of Risk, like he did as a rich kid. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. It’s much easier being a foreign interventionist and pleasing the Deep State, than draining the swamp and going to war against the status quo like he promised during the campaign.

    Filling your cabinet with status quo insiders is not a recipe for success. His first two military parlays played so well, he decided it was time to teach the crazed midget lunatic in North Korea who’s boss. Trump ordered carrier groups to sail towards North Korea. He’s been test firing ICBM rockets as a warning. He’s been threatening China unless they do something to get the height challenged dictator under control. The propaganda machine has been trying to strike fear into the hearts of Americans with bullshit storylines about him nuking the U.S.

    Kim Jong Un is a certifiable nutjob. He’s been running the third world country as dictator for the last five years. He’s a blustering fool who constantly threatens, with no actions to back up the threats. Half his missile launches blow up shortly after launch. If he even has a nuke, he has no means of delivering it effectively. The drivel about him hitting the U.S. with a nuke is laughable, but the deceitful neo-cons act as if he could do it.

    The mainstream media unquestioningly reports the threat to the western U.S. The Deep State would love to provoke a war with North Korea. They have no concern for the millions of South Koreans who would become the latest collateral damage of the imperialist American Empire. War means profits. Maybe a clash with the Chinese over the South China Sea islands could be arranged. Placing missiles on the border of Russia and conducting NATO war games certainly isn’t provocative.

    “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force–nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

    The United States is not in danger of being attacked by North Korea, Syria, Iran or a bunch of cave dwellers in Afghanistan. Russia and China are not threatening our vital interests. We spend more on the military than the next seven countries combined, but the narrative sold to the gullible public is how our military has been gutted and needs hundreds of billions more funding. When the cost of past wars and the surveillance state expenditures are included, the U.S. spends in excess of $1 trillion per year.

    We have been an imperial power since World War II and have been intervening in other countries’ affairs since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Policing the world is expensive for the citizens, but enriching to those doing the policing and supplying the police. Without a central bank printing press and man-made inflation, American presidents and their Deep State backers couldn’t oppress countries throughout the world with the threat of instantaneous annihilation or invade without a declaration of war – as mandated by the Constitution.

    “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” – Ron Paul, End the Fed

    America’s imperial empire may be more technologically advanced and larger than previous empires, but there is nothing special or new about imperialism. The policy of wielding influence and power through the use of military and economic force by empires over smaller weaker countries has been played out through the centuries. Whether it was the Roman, Dutch, Ottoman, or British empires, they all declined and fell due to military overreach, civic decay, and economic decline.

    When I step back and try to analyze our current situation I come to the conclusion our current policies and budget priorities are pure madness. But I feel like the crazy uncle at the family reunion who is shunned and ignored when I bring up the blatantly obvious facts regarding our fiscal situation.

    Congress just passed a spending bill extension which cuts nothing and increases military spending. The House just passed an Obamacare replacement bill that won’t cut your premiums or copays, and will keep insurance conglomerates, hospital corporations and corporate drug company cartels in charge of your healthcare.

    It is business as usual in the imperialistic capital of Washington DC, and the madness will continue until the teetering empire collapses under the massive weight of debt and overreach. Trump is no Tea Party Republican. He’s a big spending, big tax cut, big military, pretend fiscal conservative without the guts to touch entitlement spending or war expenditures – the two budget areas driving the country towards bankruptcy.

    “As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.” –  Ron Paul

    Trump’s recent conversion into a warmongering neo-con, policing the world with his cruise missiles, MOABs, carrier fleets, and boots on the ground remind me of Apocalypse Now, one of my favorite movies about imperialism and madness. Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant movie was a modern day updating of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness.

    Both the movie and the novel address the evil nature of imperialism, the brutality inflicted on innocent people in the name of spreading democracy, and ultimately driving good men to madness as they attempt to rationalize their allegiance to an imperialist empire bent on profit through the committing atrocities in the name of progress. Rational moral men cannot carry out the orders of sociopathic politicians and generals without ultimately losing their minds.

    King Leopold of Belgium formed “The Company” to strip the Congo of its natural resources while enslaving and killing millions from 1880 until 1900. The leaders of imperialist nations practice hypocrisy on a grand scale. While they justify their imperialism with rhetoric about democracy, fighting evil, and doing God’s work, reality is the opposite of the propaganda peddled by the imperialist emperors of evil.

    The Kurtz character in the novel and the movie is a brilliant man, selected by his imperial masters for great things and a future at the top of the “Company” food chain. While the men running the show at the top describe their invasion and subjugation of foreign peoples as a benevolent project of civilization, people like Kurtz, who are tasked with the dirty work of suppression and extermination through the use of violence and intimidation, are driven mad in the process.

    The young men who do the fighting and killing on the front lines of this so called War on Terror must eventually come to realize they are waging war on behalf of evil men who have lied to them and the American public. Assenting to obvious mistruths and propaganda is essentially co-operating with and enabling evil. When citizens fail to hold their leaders accountable for blatant lies, false narratives, and despicable propaganda storylines, they become evil themselves.

    They lie to themselves in order to go along with the crowd and appear normal. By remaining silent as the State operates without constraints, a humiliated populace loses its will to resist evil deeds done in their name. A society of impotent, passive, normalcy bias racked people is easy to control and manipulate. Appearing normal in a world gone mad is not a sign of true normalcy, but a sign of madness and abnormalcy.

    “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.

    They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” –  Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

    If Huxley considered American society to be inhabited by millions of abnormally normal people in the 1950’s, I can only imagine what he would think of our deviant, irrational, utterly mad civilization today. In this profoundly abnormal society my views are considered absurd and the ravings of a chicken little. How could I question $1 trillion annual budget deficits? How could I point out the unsustainability of a system with $20 trillion of debt and $200 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities?

    How could I be outraged by a private bank controlling our currency, debasing its purchasing power by 96% over 104 years, and working on behalf of Wall Street rather than Main Street? How could I question spending $1 trillion per year on military adventurism and policing the world when we are already $20 trillion in debt? Is it too much to ask if we send men to die for a cause, that the cause not be false?

    “To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!” – H.L. Mencken

    How could I not trust my government to run our healthcare system after seeing how well they run the Veterans Administration, Medicare and Social Security? Why would I not believe politicians of both parties who have lied to me for decades and are completely in the pockets of wealthy special interests? Why shouldn’t I support mega-corporations who have shipped millions of American jobs to foreign slave labor camps, while utilizing lobbyists to game our purposely complex tax system?

    It’s crazy talk for me to point out how Wall Street bankers committed the largest control fraud in world history and were rewarded with a $700 billion taxpayer bailout, free money from the Fed, larger market shares, record bonuses, no prosecutions, and now control of the White House from the inside. How could I possibly support “traitors” like Snowden and Assange for revealing the contempt for the Constitution displayed by our government keepers as they illegally conduct surveillance operations against every citizen in the nation? Am I mad for asking these questions?

    Kurtz symbolizes the imperialism of empires enforced through the ruthless application of power, craven terror, economic retribution, armed intimidation and military attack. As the empire grows in power, degenerates morally, becomes more corrupt, and develops an overwhelming level of arrogance and hubris, decline and fall are inevitable. Madness and imperialism go hand in hand.

    Absolute power with no fear of reprisal from citizens or a free press, combined with man’s fundamental fallibility, lead to uncontrolled dangerous decision making. We are witnessing the perilous effects of imperial hubris as Trump and his arrogant advisors provoke conflict in multiple hotspots across the globe with nuclear armed nations. Imperialists are always sure their malevolent machinations will end in victory. They never consider the potential unintended consequences of their actions, like global war, nuclear annihilation, millions of casualties, or the fall of their empire.

    The same arrogance displayed by central bankers, government apparatchiks, crooked politicians, and Wall Street shysters as the 2008 financial catastrophe approached is being displayed today by Trump, his surveillance state cronies, and the neo-cons now running the show in the White House. They believe their “brilliant” strategy, tactics, and propaganda campaign will surely result in success, as their opponents/victims are weaker and not as skilled in diplomatic manipulation and military aptitude.

    The Deep State players, who now seem to have gained control over Trump, have no sense of morality, no shame in their blatant hypocrisy, no hesitation in sending men to their deaths based on a fabricated cause, no compunction in lying to the American public, and no guilt while shredding the U.S. Constitution. The object of power is power to these traitorous men.

    Many Americans viewed the presidential election as a choice between the lesser of two evils, or the least bad choice. As Trump has broken promises, filled his cabinet with Goldman Sachs cronies, failed to drain the swamp, proven ineffective in legislating, and has now been captured by the neo-con warmongers, the best argument for his presidency has been “at least he’s not Clinton”. That is true. The Supreme Court won’t go further left, taxes won’t go up, the EPA won’t regulate industries out of existence, illegal immigration will be reduced and ridiculous social justice bullshit won’t be pushed down our throats by the Feds.

    But let’s face the facts. This is nothing but tinkering around the edges of a bloated government bureaucracy, controlled by powerful men in smoke filled rooms, who have absolutely no interest in changing anything that would impact their financial interests in a negative way. They are doing everything in their power to keep the status quo in place.

    The American Empire has been waging war virtually non-stop since the creation of the Creature from Jekyll Island (aka Federal Reserve) in 1913. After World War II, as the size of the empire grew to heights never seen in world history, the level of hypocrisy, propaganda, maliciousness, immorality, and hubris has grown exponentially. The madness of the men running this colonial empire is concealed through the moral ambiguity and faux patriotism utilized to confuse and mislead a willfully ignorant populace who long ago relinquished their citizenship responsibilities to men they have never seen and never voted for.

    How can we judge the actions of these men to be evil when all societal moral standards and social values have been abandoned?  Is there such thing as insanity in a world that has already gone insane? The American Empire is slithering along the edge of a straight razor. Only real judgement enforced by alarmed critical thinking armed citizens can defeat the Deep State at this point.

    “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor… and surviving.” – Kurtz – Apocalypse Now

    “If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”- Kurtz – Apocalypse Now

     

  • A Russian Went Inside A Chinese Click-Farm: This Is What He Found

    On the day when Snapchat erased billions of market cap from investors (and founders) accounts – as the MAUs-means-money model seems to break – we thought it worthwhile taking another glimpse into the hush-hush world of 'click-farms' and the fakeness of the latest social network fads.

    In 2014, we first exposed the world to the 'click-farm' where nothing is what it seems, and where social networking participants spend millions of dollars to appear more important, followed, prestigious, cool, or generally "liked" than they really are. As we detailed at the time, social networking has been the "it" thing for a while: for the networks it makes perfect sense because they are merely the aggregators and distributors of terrabytes of free, third party created content affording them multi-billion dollar valuations without generating a cent in profits (just think of the upside potential in having 10 times the world's population on any given publicly-traded network), while for users it provides the opportunity to be seen, to be evaluated or "liked" on one's objective, impartial merits and to maybe go "viral", potentially making money in the process. Of course, the biggest draws of social networks also quickly became their biggest weaknesses, and it didn't take long to game the weakest link: that apparent popularity based on the size of one's following or the number of likes, which usually translates into power and/or money, is artificial and can be purchased for a price.

    But it is not only sport stars with chips on their shoulder, or fading move and music gods who are willing to dish out in order to get the fake adoration and fake fans: as the AP reports, In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers. In one case, its fan tally rose to more than 2.5 million from about 10,000.

    Since then there have been crackdowns (self-regulated) and also numerous "advertising metric errors," but still, as recently as March of this year, scientists at USC and Indiana University discovered up to 15% of Twitter accounts could be fake. Since Twitter currently has 319 million monthly active users, that translates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, using USC's high-end estimate. The report goes on to say that complex bots could have shown up as humans in their model, "making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate." At 15 percent, the evaluation is far greater than Twitter's own estimates.

    In a filing with the SEC last month, Twitter said that up to 8.5 percent of all active accounts contacted Twitter's servers "…without any discernable additional user-initiated action."

    Since that equates to roughly 20 million more bot accounts than Twitter's own assessment, that could be an issue in light of analyst concerns about user growth. In a recent research report, Nomura Instinet analysts wrote that "Twitter's revenue growth has slowed to the mid-single digits, as the platform has struggled to attract new users over the past year…"

    The research could be troubling news for Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base in the face of growing competition from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and others.

    So, if they're not human, where do all those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your social media accounts from?

    Thanks to this Russian gentleman – who visited a Chinese click farm, where they make fake ratings for mobile apps and other things like this –  we now know…

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          He said they have 10,000 more phones just like these.

    As we concluded previously, the bottom line is simple: "The illusion of a massive following is often just that," said Tony Harris, who does social media marketing for major Hollywood movie firms, said he would love to be able to give his clients massive numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but buying them from random strangers is not very effective or ethical. And once the prevailing users of social networks grasp that one of the main driving features of the current social networking fad du jour is nothing but a big cash scam operating out of a basement in the far east, expect both Facebook and shortly thereafter, Twitter, to go the way of 6 Degrees, Friendster and MySpace, only this time the bagholders will be the public. Because "it is never different this time." The only certain thing: someone will promptly step in to replace any social network that quietly fades into the sunset.

  • 'Resist 45' Activist Gets $45,000 Taxpayer Grant To Study 'Transgender Health'

    The National Institute of Health (NIH), in its infinite wisdom, has just awarded nearly $45,000 to a post-doctoral student at Duke University, and unabashed “Resist 45” activist, for the specific purpose of studying ‘transgender health.’  According to the NIH website, the project got underway on May 1st and is expected to continue through August 2018…at which point we’re almost certain more taxpayer money will be thrown at worthy follow-up projects.

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    But, perhaps even more important that the topic of the grant is the person to whom the grant has been awarded.  Ethan Cicero is a post-doctoral student at Duke University and an avid “Resist 45” activist.   He has written numerous previous research reports in the past on extremely critical healthcare issues like whether or not hospitals should ask individuals for their preferred pronouns and “be sensitive to shared spaces” by keeping the “gender to which they identify in mind” when placing transgender individuals in rooms.

    Cicero has also attacked doctors for “incorrectly us[ing] sex and gender interchangeably,” since gender is “more abstract and refers to the complex relationships among gender biology (sex), gender identity (one’s sense of being female, male, both, or neither), and gender expression (outward presentation behaviors, and roles).”

    Meanwhile, in an article published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Emergency Nursing entitled “‘I Was a Spectacle…A Freak Show at the Circus’: A Transgender Person’s ED Experience and Implications for Nursing Practice,” Cicero went so far as to blame America’s emergency rooms for the high attempted suicide rates of transgender people.

    “Few worry about clinician competence or are concerned that they may be denied care; however, transgender personal contemplating and ED visit sometimes face these issues.  The scarcity of of clinical providers adequately prepared to care for transgender persons is a major barrier to seeking care.  In addition, some transgender people encounter denial of services, discrimination, harassment, and even violence in healthcare settings.  The accumulation of barriers cause some transgender people to avoid seeking even routine preventative care.

     

    The implication of these barriers is profound.  The lack of high-quality, equitable healthcare is directly  associated with a high lifetime suicide rate in the transgender community.”

    New flash, Ethan, everyone hates going to the emergency room…it has nothing to do with your ‘gender expression.’

    As the The Washington Free Beacon points out, Cicero’s controversial public statements go well beyond his emergency room research papers and were spread all over his FaceBook page before it was recently changed to private.  Perhaps he didn’t think that the NIH would appreciate his post alleging the Pence’s pro-life views only applied to “white, straight, and American individuals/babies.”

    Ethan Cicero, a post-doctoral student at Duke University, received the grant. Cicero describes his employer as “The Resistance” on his now-private Facebook account.

     

    Cicero’s cover photo on the social media platform reads “Resist 45,” in reference to President Donald Trump. He changed his profile picture to “Not My President” on Inauguration Day.

     

    “Hey Women’s Marchers, vagina does not equal woman,” Cicero wrote on Facebook, referencing the liberal march the day after Inauguration Day that received criticism from transgender activists for not being inclusive to biological men who identify as women.

     

    “Stop erasing trans/gender nonconforming people,” Cicero said, linking to an article in the Washington Post with the headline, “It’s time to drop the vagina as a protest symbol.”

     

    Cicero’s Facebook account was changed to private shortly after the request for comment was sent.

    We simply can’t wait to see what amazing things Ethan can write about with his new $45,000 budget. 

  • Maxine Waters Does It Again…

    Maxine Waters is mad; angry as hell that President Trump dared to fire FBI Director Comey and she took to MSNBC to explain just how terrible his decision to fire Comey was… except it didn't quite come out that way – as we are used to seeing when the California Democrat opens her mouth.

    As RealClearPolitics reports, in March, Waters issued a press release that read Comey "advanced Russia's misinformation campaign."

    But today, during an interview on MSNBC, she explained…

    "I do not necessarily support the president's decision,"

     

    " I think that if the president would have fired him when he first came in, he would not have to be in a position now where he is trying to make up a story about why. It does not meet the smell test."

    However, NBC's Peter Alexander asked if she would be okay with a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton dismissing Comey from his position, Waters said yes.

    "If she had won the White House, I believe that given what he did to her, and what he tried to do, she should have fired him. Yes," the California Democrat said.

     

    "So she should have fired him but had he shouldn't fire him. This is why I'm confused," Alexander said to Waters.

     

    "No, no you're not confused," Waters told Alexander.

     

    "I am confused," Alexander responded, adding "The bottom line is you think an FBI director without credibility would have been best served in this position to try to pursue this investigation."

    Waters then tries to explain to Alexander that she does not support Trump's decision to fire Comey. Enjoy…

  • Do Americans Eat In Or Out?

    In the aftermath of today’s woeful results from Macy’s, Kohl’s and Nordstrom’s, It may sound surprising, but there is one US industry that is doing even worse than “bricks and mortar” retail – restaurants. For those unfamiliar, we urge readers to skim our latest analysis of the state of the US restaurant indstry, which just suffered its worst monthly collapse since 2009. For everyone else, ahead of tomorrow’s retail sales report, here are some evening thoughts from Bank of America on the divergence in eating patterns across America.

    In a note looking at “City Eating” (vs everything else) BofA investigates changes in how consumers eating habits. The bank asks the following questions: 1) Has there been a shift toward online shopping  for groceries? 2) Are there differences based on demographic group? 3) How do urban  consumers allocate spend on food vs. suburban/rural? This is what it found.

    We created a proxy for online grocery stores which is representative of the sector but unlikely comprehensive, making up only about 1% of average household spending on groceries. Card spending for this aggregate has increased at a roughly 50% yoy pace  since 2015. Digging deeper by demographic group, we find that spending by Millennials at online grocery stores has increased 750% since 2012 and is running at a 55% yoy  pace since 2015. Generation X and Baby Boomers have also increased spending at  online groceries but at a much more modest rate.

     

    The story is also fascinating on a regional level. We don’t have sufficient data to test online grocery shopping regionally, but we can look at broad food consumption trends.  We break the data into major cities (defined as densely populated regions), cities, suburban and rural. The standout comes from major cities where a greater share of food consumption is from dining out versus groceries (Chart of the month). The combination  of competition from online grocers and greater urbanization may continue to present a  challenge to the standard grocery store model.

     

    What does this tell us about the consumer? Our internal data shows how innovation is changing how the consumer spends money, even on ‘necessary goods such as groceries. In our view, this will continue to create disturbances to the retail sector,  impacting trends in job creation and creating downward price pressures.

    Finally, here is the visual answer to the question posed in the title.

  • Senate Hearing Summary: Everything You Thought You Knew About Russia/Comey Just Got Destroyed

    Pretty much no one emerged a ‘winner’ from today’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing other than perhaps Andrew McCabe.  From the mainstream media to Trump to Congressional Democrats, pretty much all of the narratives surrounding the FBI’s Russia investigation and Comey’s sudden dismissal were succinctly obliterated by McCabe’s testimony.

    First, the mainstream media and Democrat narratives which suggest that Trump’s firing of Comey was nothing more than an intentional obstruction of an ongoing FBI investigation was laid to bed pretty early when McCabe said “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.”

    Rubio:  “Has the dismissal of Mr. Comey in any way impeded, interrupted, stopped, or negatively impacted any of the work, any of the investigations or any ongoing projects at the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

     

    McCabe:  “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.”

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    Meanwhile, McCabe also succinctly destroyed Democrats’ demands for the appointment of an “independent investigator.”

    Senator Lankford:  “Is it your impression at this point that the FBI is unable to complete the investigation in a fair and expeditious way because of the removal of Jim Comey?”

     

    McCabe:  “Is is my opinion and belief that the FBI will continue to pursue this investigation vigorously and completely.”

     

    Senator Lankford:  “Do you need someone to take this away from you and somebody else to do it?”

     

    McCabe:  “No, sir.”

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    Going one step further, McCabe also destroyed another New York Times narrative that emerged yesterday (which we covered here) which implied that Comey was fired as a direct result of his request for a “significant increase” in funding for his ‘Russia probe’. 

    Senator:  “Can you confirm that that request [funding request for Russia probe] was, in fact, made?”

     

    McCabe:  “I can not confirm that request was made.

     

    As you know, when we need resources, we make those requests here.  So, I’m not aware of that request and it’s not consistent with my understanding of how we request additional resources. 

     

    That said, we don’t typically request resources for an individual case.  And, as I mentioned, I strongly believe that the Russia investigation is adequately resourced.”

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    All that said, the narratives emanating from Trump and the White House also took a beating.

    First, on Trump’s assertion that Comey confirmed on three separate occasions that he was not the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation, McCabe implied that such a confirmation would be highly unusual.

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    Then on whether the Russia investigation was “one of the smallest things on the plate of the FBI”, as suggested by the White House, McCabe said the FBI considers the Russia probe to be a “highly significant investigation.”

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    And then on whether Comey had lost the confidence of the “rank and file” within the FBI…

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    That said, McCabe did confirm for the first time publicly that Comey’s decision to not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton did result in some “frustration” among certain agents who were “very vocal about their concerns.”

    “I think morale’s always been good, but there were folks within our agency that were frustrated with the outcome of the Hillary Clinton case and some of those folks were very vocal about those concerns.”

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    But perhaps nothing from the hearing today was more damaging to the White House’s narrative than Trump’s own words.  As we noted earlier, after repeatedly saying the Comey was fired based solely on the recommendation of AG Sessions and Deputy AG Rosenstein, Trump today told Lester Holt that he planned to fire Comey all along.

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    So, does that clear everything up?

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