Month: August 2016

Liberty Links 8/16/16

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28 links today. Enjoy. Pentagon’s Sloppy Bookkeeping Means $6.5 Trillion Can’t Pass an Audit (The Fiscal Times) Tracking Lobbying by Foreign Governments (Mind-boggling lack of transparency, by Demand Progress) Pentagon Acknowledges US Ground Forces Supporting ISIS Fight in Libya (More non-boots on the ground, The Hill) With Yemeni Casualties Rising, GOP Senator Looks to Block Big … Read more

How Bloomberg Spun its Own Poll Data to Make Hillary Clinton Seem Inevitable

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*2014 Time Magazine Cover

Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news. 

“For news about Russia, Radio Liberty,” he said. “For news about America, Soviet newspapers.” He smiled. “Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others.”

American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none.

– From Matt Taibbi’s excellent article: The Summer of the Shill

A couple of days ago, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson published a very interesting article which examined how Bloomberg News egregiously spun the results of its recent presidential poll.

She notes:

Is Hillary Clinton squashing Donald Trump into oblivion in the polls? Or is her lead over him perilously shrinking? One thing we know is: there are countless ways to spin a poll. Consider the case of selective reporting on the most recent Bloomberg national poll.

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The U.N. and U.S. Embassy Stand Down as American Aid Workers Beaten and Raped in Sudan

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Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.

The United Nations was also strongly criticized for failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.

– From January’s post: U.N. Peacekeepers Caught Paying 50 Cents for Sex with 13-Year-Old Girls in War Zones

The following excerpts are gut wrenching and absolutely sickening.

The AP reports:

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.

“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.

She didn’t really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.

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Turkey Threatens to Reopen the Refugee Floodgates to Europe

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Even if you’ve only been paying a superficial amount of attention to the European refugee crisis, you’ll be aware of the fact that earlier this year the EU and Turkey agreed to a deal on migrants where in exchange for concessions, Turkey would stem the flow of migrants from its shores. The deal went through and refugee levels from Turkey fell dramatically.

Unfortunately, one major problem with the deal is Turkey’s demand for visa-free travel, something many throughout the EU were intensely against from the beginning, and are even more opposed to now following the Turkish government’s authoritarian crackdown on tens of thousands of its own citizens following last month’s failed coup.

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Negative Retail Interest Rates Have Arrived in Germany

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I only have three words in response to the following article.

Gold. Silver. Bitcoin.

Bloomberg reports:

When the European Central Bank introduced a negative interest rate on lenders’ deposits two years ago, few thought things would ever go this far.

This week, a German cooperative savings bank in the Bavarian village of Gmund am Tegernsee — population 5,767 — said it’ll start charging retail customers to hold their cash. From September, for savings in excess of 100,000 euros ($111,710), the community’s Raiffeisen bank will take back 0.4 percent. That’s a direct pass through of the current level of the ECB’s negative deposit rate.

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So How Bad is Media (and Social Media) Bias in This Election?

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Earlier today, I came across an interesting article about media (and social media) bias related to the 2016 Presidential election. The piece was published in the Observer and titled, Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump. Here are a few excerpts:

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Palo Alto Planning Commissioner Quits Due to High Cost of Housing

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As Mark Zuckerberg expands, others get pushed out.

The following is a very interesting tale from one of America’s most affluent communities.

Via Medium:

Dear City Council Members and Palo Alto Residents,

This letter serves as my official resignation from the Planning and Transportation Commission. My family has decided to move to Santa Cruz. After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year — an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

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Pentagon Refuses to Disclose How Many U.S. Troops Are Fighting ISIS

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The United States will deploy dozens of special operations forces to northern Syria to advise opposition forces in their fight against Islamic State, a major policy shift for President Barack Obama and a step he has long resisted to avoid getting dragged into another war in the Middle East.

Given this new “strategy,” if we can even call it that, I thought it’d be useful to share with readers the 16 times Obama has publicly promised over the last couple of years to not send ground forces into Syria.

From last year’s post: Obama Announces “Boots on the Ground” in Syria, Despite Promising “No Boots on the Ground” 16 Times

With American media once again singularly obsessed with the latest thing Donald Trump said, you might be surprised to find out that actual news is occurring.

What I’m referring to specifically is the latest incident of transparency flouting from the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration” ever. Namely, the U.S. military’s refusal to disclose how many American soldiers are engaged in combat against ISIS.

The Hill reports:

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Headline of the Day – ‘Europe’s Credit Investors Are Seeing Bubbles and Still Adding Risk’

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One of the most catastrophic things central banks have done in the post financial crisis period is destroy financial markets. Investors are no longer investors, they’re merely helpless rats running around the lunatic central planning maze desperately attempting to survive by front running the latest round of central bank purchases.

While actual macroeconomic and corporate fundamentals do still exert influence on financial asset prices from time to time, the far bigger driver of performance over the past several years is central bank policy.

– From April’s post: The ECB’s Insane Monetary Policy is Creating a Rush Into Derivatives

If the following headline from a Bloomberg article published today doesn’t give you the chills, you aren’t paying attention.

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Here are a few excerpts from the article:

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A Nation of Sheep, Afraid of Words

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I want to start this post off by taking a closer look at what Donald Trump actually said in his now infamous “2nd Amendment speech” yesterday. Here’s the part that generated all the controversy:

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied. You see what’s going on.

First of all, I agree that this is an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing for a Presidential candidate to say. So while I don’t think he should’ve said it, I also don’t think it’s the biggest deal in the world. Moreover, mainstream media and pundits across the land are unanimously interpreting it as a call for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. I didn’t read it that way at all.

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