News Items

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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The Dirty Business of U.S. ‘Think Tanks’

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Many of you have already read this past Sunday’s excellent and deeply disturbing article published by the New York Times regarding the shady and inappropriate activities regularly conducted by U.S. “think tanks.” If you haven’t read it yet, I highly suggest you take the time to do so.

It’s important to acknowledge that the U.S. economy has morphed into one gigantic lawless crime scene. An environment in which crony insiders who add zero value to society parasitically feast on the country’s treasure. In the case of so-called “think tanks,” we have organizations receiving copious taxpayer subsidies for the privilege of screwing over the American public.

To understand the topic further, I present you with some excerpts from the article titled, Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line:

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Black Pastors Across America Are Breaking the Law to Help Promote Hillary Clinton

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Last night, I came across a very interesting article published in the Atlantic which highlighted the fact that according to a recent Pew Research survey, “28 percent of those who have attended black Protestant churches in the last few months heard their pastor support Hillary Clinton.” This is a pretty remarkable statistic considering it is illegal to do so.

Which brings up a related question. To what extent did this phenomenon play a role in Hillary Clinton’s sweeping victories across the south versus Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary?

Here are a few excerpts from the Atlantic article:

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Meet the Company That Claims to Have a Profile on Every American Adult

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Below are a few excerpts from an article recently published by Bloomberg. At the very least, it’s something to be aware of.

From Bloomberg:

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.

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