Monthly Archives: May 2015

John Hussman: Recognizing the Risks to Financial Stability

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“The past several years have featured little more than a gigantic asset swap, the short description being that massive volumes of government debt have been swapped by central banks for massive volumes of idle bank reserves, while massive volumes of low-yielding, covenant-lite debt have been issued into the hands of yield-seeking investors, in order to retire massive volumes of corporate equities at elevated valuations through buybacks. This has left the U.S. economy with a much more leveraged balance sheet than before the last crisis, and with much greater sensitivity to equity risk and debt default than at any point in history.”

http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc150511.htm

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Follow-the-Data Fed May Play Follow-the-Markets to Avoid Shock

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“The Federal Reserve may be about to discover that letting the data drive its decisions on raising interest rates is easier said than done.  Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s new strategy, a departure from six years of explicit guidance, calls for adjusting policy according to how the economy evolves. That will make it harder for investors to predict the Fed’s decisions, and risks hurting growth if a surprise triggers a surge in bond yields that stifles business investment and starves the housing recovery.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/follow-the-data-fed-may-play-follow-the-markets-to-avoid-shock

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Republicans: Abandon Benghazi, and Talk about Hillary’s Other Foibles

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“The Republicans could criticize Hillary for her much more important lapses in judgment in advocating the disastrous American use of force on Iraq and Libya in order to take out their respective leaders. Both interventions violated international law and common sense and have turned into chaotic messes that have bred more terrorism. She could also be disparaged for her support for the ineffectual escalation of the Afghan War, the expansion of Obama’s illegal drone wars, and the aborted plans to conduct air strikes against Syria. But all of these criticisms of Hillary’s policy stances and operational diplomatic security lack the sensational ‘gotcha’ that our current presidential campaigns require.”

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=6376

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James Corbett: The Last Word on Osama Bin Laden [2011]

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“But after finally waking from the 10 year nightmare of the Osama Bin Laden fable, are the public willing to go straight back to sleep? Or are they going to start questioning the official narratives that are cemented into place in the wake of every large-scale event, narratives that always support more government intrusion in our lives, expanded wars of aggression around the globe and an ever-expanding police state?”

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Seymour Hersh defends his blockbuster bin Laden story

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“It was the kind of question he has heard a wearying number of times over the course of a storied career. The veracity of his own reporting was a topic that seemed only to exasperate him.  ‘You’re talking about someone who was a freelance reporter in 1969 and wrote about massacring hundreds of people in Vietnam for an anti-war news agency,’ Hersh said. ‘My God, you don’t think I had trouble then?’  He’s irritated at what he sees as a public obsession with where and how his bin Laden report had been published. ‘It’s not a press story — it’s a story about what the government does,’ Hersh said. ‘If the questions are about the press, I can’t help you.'”

http://www.businessinsider.com/seymour-hersh-defends-his-blockbuster-bin-laden-story-2015-5

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U.S. officials fuming over Hersh account of Osama bin Laden raid

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“The firestorm of criticism has been immediate and unforgiving, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA.  The publication Sunday of a 10,000-word article questioning the official version of the 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might have received scant attention had it it not been penned by Seymour Hersh.  The award-winning reporter, 78, who uncovered one of the worst war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War and disclosed the torture of inmates at the U.S military-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, is now questioning the entire national security bureaucracy in one fell swoop. And its members are taking it personally.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-raid-officials-criticism-117826.html

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The big drug database in the sky: A firefighter’s legal nightmare

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“In Pyle’s case, there was no evidence to suggest he had anything to do with the morphine theft that sparked the investigation. While looking through his prescription history, however, the detective felt that something wasn’t right. Eventually, Pyle heard from the Salt Lake County Attorney’s Office. His case had been screened and declined for prosecution.  Four days later, the Utah Attorney General charged Ryan Pyle with prescription drug fraud.  How can the police have such broad powers to comb through a prescription drug database?  [..] State law changes like Utah’s, however, won’t stop federal agencies like the DEA from accessing these databases without a warrant.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/the-big-drug-database-in-the-sky-one-firefighters-year-long-legal-nightmare/

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Datapp Sniffs Out Unencrypted Mobile Data

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“The result was released this week with the public availability of Datapp, a Windows 7 program that acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot for a mobile device, monitors HTTP traffic, and returns information on which mobile data sent from a device is leaving unencrypted. The free app, once installed on a Windows machine, turns the PC or laptop into a hotspot. The user can then connect their mobile device to that hotspot and the app watches traffic and shows the user what’s going on with their traffic in a dashboard.  It will list apps that are sending in HTTP or HTTPS, reconstruct unencrypted images from TCP/IP packets, and show on a map any servers worldwide where the data is connecting.”

https://threatpost.com/datapp-sniffs-out-unencrypted-mobile-data/112743

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Warrantless airport seizure of laptop “cannot be justified,” judge rules

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“The authorities who were investigating Jae Shik Kim exercised the border exception rule that allows the authorities to seize and search goods and people—without court warrants—along the border and at airport international terminals. US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson noted that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue of warrantless computer searches at an international border crossing, but she ruled (PDF) the government used Kim’s flight home as an illegal pretext to seize his computer. Authorities then shipped it 150 miles south to San Diego where the hard drive was copied and examined for weeks, but the judge said the initial seizure ‘surely cannot be justified.'”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/warrantless-airport-search-of-laptop-cannot-be-justified-judge-rules/

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How Cops’ Extra Rights Shield Misconduct

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“Maryland was the first state to pass a LEOBR, in 1972, and by now many states have followed, invariably after lobbying from police unions and associations. Often the bills are sponsored by Republicans, who seem to forget their normal skepticism of public employees as an interest group when uniformed services are involved.  Prison and jail guards are often covered by these laws as well, and scandals of corrections administration (the state-run Baltimore jail had a huge one in which the Maryland LEOBR was implicated) are often hard to investigate because of the law’s barriers. Union contracts often add further layers of insulation from discipline.”

http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/how-cops-extra-rights-contribute-to-misconduct

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