Year: 2016

‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’ – Donald Trump Raises Huge Sums From Small Donors

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I’ll be the first to admit I did not see this coming. Back when it was announced Trump had appointed ex-Goldman Sachs banker, Steven Mnuchin, to be his national finance chairman, I assumed this would mean Hillary Clinton-esque oligarch pandering would rapidly ensure. Surprisingly (to me), this has not really been the case.

Indeed, when it comes to raising money from small donors, Trump may have a little Bernie Sanders in him.

Politico reports:

Donald Trump has unleashed an unprecedented deluge of small-dollar donations for the GOP, and one that Republican Party elders have dreamed about finding for much of the last decade as they’ve watched a succession of Democrats — Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton — develop formidable fundraising operations, $5, $10 and $20 at a time.

Trump has only been actively soliciting cash for a few months, but when he reveals his campaign’s financials later this week they will show he has crushed the total haul from small-dollar donors of the last two Republican nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney — during the entirety of their campaigns.

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has an actual political movement behind him. John McCain and Mitt Ronmey did not, and neither does Hillary Clinton.

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Are the Saudis Using U.S. Supplied White Phosphorous in Yemen?

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The U.S. government’s already despicable role in aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia’s routine murder of civilians in Yemen may have just become a whole lot more grotesque.

As The Washington Post reports:

Saudi Arabia appears to be using U.S.-supplied white phosphorous munitions in its war in Yemen, based on images and videos posted to social media, raising concerns among human rights groups that the highly incendiary material could be used against civilians.

Under U.S. regulations, white phosphorous sold to other countries is to be used only for signaling to other troops and creating smoke screens. When the munition explodes, it releases white phosphorous that automatically ignites in the air and creates a thick white smoke. When used against soldiers or civilians, it can maim and kill by burning to the bone.

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The ‘Emerging Art Bubble’ Has Burst

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Earlier today, Bloomberg published a fascinating article on the collapse of what is known as the “emerging art market.” Namely, a slice of the art world where spraying a canvas with paint from a fire extinguisher had been commanding six figures a pop. Well all of that is now over, as the space has experienced a stunning collapse.

Bloomberg reports:

Art dealer and collector Niels Kantor paid $100,000 two years ago for an abstract canvas by Hugh Scott-Douglas with the idea of quickly reselling it for a tidy profit. Instead, he is returning the 28-year-old artist’s work to the market this week at an 80 percent discount.

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New Interview on The Keiser Report – Return Free Risk & the ‘Deplorable’ Financial System

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Below you can find my latest appearance on the always excellent, Keiser Report.

We talk about the financial system, the 2016 Presidential election as well as continued negative headlines for Warren “slumlord” Buffett.

This is a really good one. Enjoy.

For more information on the Clayton Homes story mentioned in the interview, see:

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Liberty Links 9/17/16

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33 links for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy. Opinion We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People (Long but worth it, Bill Moyers) Fooled Again (Chris Hedges writing at Truth Dig) Foreign Affairs/WW3 The Saudis Can’t Wait for Hillary Clinton (The Hill) Obama to Veto 9/11 Victims Bill (The Saudis always win, CNN) Throughout History, Debt and … Read more

‘The Intellectual Yet Idiot’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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In particular, they all (totalitarian systems) seem to have in common an intense dislike of the more abstract forms of thought –a dislike characteristically also shown by many of the collectivists among our scientists.

– From my 2010 review of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom

The following is an excellent takedown of the so-called “elite,” the status quo, whatever you want to call them. We all know the type. It’s the self-assured people who constantly get things wrong, constantly screw up on issues of national significance and yet somehow never face any consequences or accountability for their actions.

Here’s the meat of the piece, originally published at Medium:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

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A Dire Warning – ‘Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet’

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When Bruce Schneier writes a post titled, Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet, you better listen.

Read his post below and share widely:

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.

First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it’s overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don’t like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it’s a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.

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The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump

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Unless something dramatic happens (certainly possible in this election), I believe Donald Trump will win the 2016 election quite easily, and I believe this victory will be driven by the resentment vote. Forget card-carrying Democrats and Republicans, they will vote along party lines. The key to this election is, and always has been, independent voters. I believe the following chart from Gallup tells you all you need to know about who will decide this thing:

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By definition, most of the 43% of Americans who identify as independents have serious misgivings about the two-party system and its so-called “luminaries.” As such, both Trump and Clinton should be battling aggressively for this key voting bloc. Unfortunately for Hillary supporters, only one of them is. The other candidate is rallying the status quo from both parties under one large, oligarch-funded tend of cronyism, militarism and business as usual. Earlier this week, I highlighted how the resentment vote against mainstream media would play a key role in tipping the scales to a Trump victory (see: The Death of Mainstream Media). Today, I want to look at how the resentment vote also targets the two-party political oligarchy.

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Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Plunges to Record Low in Gallup Poll

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In yesterday’s post, The Death of Mainstream Media, I noted:

At the end of the day, I have concluded that my focus on Hillary as of late (vs. Trump) has as much to with my disgust for the mainstream media as anything else. To see these organs, which have destroyed this country by keeping the people uninformed for decades, now rally around a sickly, corrupt, oligarch coddling politician as the empire enters the collapse stage is simply too much to stomach…

The only positive thing to happen during this election season is the death of mainstream media. With their insufferable propaganda fully exposed, there is no coming back. 

Then today, we learned the following from Gallup:

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WIRED Reports – Feds Will Soon Be Able to Hack Almost Anyone

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America: This is Your Government.

Wired reports:

DIGITAL DEVICES AND software programs are complicated. Behind the pointing and clicking on screen are thousands of processes and routines that make everything work. So when malicious software—malware—invades a system, even seemingly small changes to the system can have unpredictable impacts.

That’s why it’s so concerning that the Justice Department is planning a vast expansion of government hacking. Under a new set of rules, the FBI would have the authority to secretly use malware to hack into thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers that belong to innocent third parties and even crime victims. The unintended consequences could be staggering.

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