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Tue, 15 Jan 2019 21:25:00 -0500 Yet Another Fed Study Concludes Phillip's Curve Is Nonsense
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
Proponents of the Phillips Curve keep looking for ways in which it works. Yet, another study concludes it doesn't.
The Phillips Curve
This has been a fundamental guiding economic theory used by the Fed for decades to set interest rates. Various studies have proven the theory is bogus, yet proponents keep believing.
For example, in March of 2017, Janet Yellen commented the "Phillips Curve is Alive“.
Cato noted the Phillips Curve Is Dead (except in Federal Reserve and CBO models) .
On August 29, 2017 I noted that a Fed Study Shows Phillips Curve Is Useless . Yet, economists keep trying.
Low-Unemployment States vs High-Unemployment States A new San Francisco Fed study released this week asks Does Ultra-Low Unemployment Spur Rapid Wage Growth?
The idea behind the new study was that we may not see wage growth inflation because we are looking in the wrong places.
The new theory was that wage inflation may be expanding faster in states where labor supply was tightest and unemployment the lowest. Check out the conclusion.
Conclusion
In sum, a careful look at the wage Phillips curve across states yields little evidence supporting the contention that wage growth sharply rises as the labor market reaches especially tight conditions. Of course, the current period may be different from the past. For instance, the typical pattern of local wage growth in a tight local labor market may differ when all other nearby labor markets are experiencing similar tightness, as is currently the case. As a result, geographical labor mobility—which can mute wage pressures in tight markets as workers are attracted to higher-wage areas—may be playing less of a restraining role. With this caveat in mind, given the historical experiences of states in recent decades, we do not foresee a sharp pickup in wage growth nationally if the labor market continues to tighten as many anticipate.
Notice how economists still cling to the notion that something may be different now. In reality, the Phillips Curve isn't dead, it was never alive to begin with.
Absurd Inflation Discussion In response to Absurd Inflation Discussion by Fed Jackasses
“It is de facto not possible to measure price inflation or a general level of prices. The latter is simply nonsense, it doesn’t exist. Both money and goods are subject to changes in supply and demand, hence there is no yardstick by which the purchasing power of money could be measured. And this is before we get to the fact that adding up and averaging the prices of disparate goods simply makes no logical sense.”
Brandolini’s Law It’s not just the Phillips Curve either. Keynes thought inflation and recession could not happen at the same time. Yet, people still cling to that too. This leads to:
The Phillips Curve isn't dead, it was never alive to begin with. None of the models the Fed relies on works. Repetitive bubbles are proof enough.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 21:05:00 -0500 USAF Stealth Jet Caught On Camera Performing "Restricted" Combat Maneuvers
Following the USAF Air Combat announcement on Dec. 4, that the F-35A Lightning II Demonstration Team will perform aerobatic shows in 2019 for the general public in the Lockheed F-35A Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter, demo Capt. Andrew Olson was recently spotted in the stealth jet performing never before seen combat maneuvers during a quick flyover at Luke Air Force Base near
Read more.....
Following the USAF Air Combat announcement on Dec. 4, that the F-35A Lightning II Demonstration Team will perform aerobatic shows in 2019 for the general public in the Lockheed F-35A Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter, demo Capt. Andrew Olson was recently spotted in the stealth jet performing never before seen combat maneuvers during a quick flyover at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, Arizona.
A series of clips were posted on Instagram last Thursday and quickly went viral. They were first posted by Instagram account @theromanticjaguar and then reposted by @andyo_dojo, demo pilot Capt. Olson, The Aviationist reported.
"In this clip, Capt. Andrew “Dojo” Olson approaches from the left, executes a pitch-up to the vertical with the first corner of a square loop to the inverted. Then it gets really good. Capt. Olson pulls back hard on the sidestick while inverted, backing off power and executing a quite tight loop. Once back to level flight the F-35A begins a descending flat spiral at almost zero forward airspeed. There is about one full 360° flat spin as Dojo repositions to exit show right," The Aviationsist said.
All four videos show combat maneuvers not previously seen at US F-35A demonstrations where aerobatics were restricted.
The first fully aerobatic F-35A demo was flown at the Paris Air Show in 2017 by a Lockheed pilot.
These videos suggest that the general public at upcoming US demonstrations are about to observe incredible aerial combat maneuvers, generally reversed for fierce dogfights.
The F-35A Demo Team will first perform this spring at their first airshow appearance in Melbourne, Florida at the Melbourne Air & Space Show on March 30-31 at Orlando Melbourne International Airport.
The team will fly at 13 venues that will include approximately 32 flight demonstrations in 2019.
The goal of these demonstrations seems to prove the critics wrong about some F-35 Joint Strike Fighter capabilities. Pundits have claimed the aircraft “can’t dogfight.”
Or, perhaps, showing off new aerobatic moves is a subliminal message to Russia and China, indicating that the US is now prepared for a dogfight with fifth-generation fighter jets.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 20:45:00 -0500 Enemy Of The People?
Via The Zman blog,
There has never been a time when normal people did not know the media was biased and biased in a predictable direction. For every non-liberal in the media, there were at least ten liberals. The ratio was probably higher, but then, as now, some lefties liked to pretend they were independents or some third option.
The media used to invest a lot of time denying they had a bias
Read more.....
Via The Zman blog,
There has never been a time when normal people did not know the media was biased and biased in a predictable direction. For every non-liberal in the media, there were at least ten liberals. The ratio was probably higher, but then, as now, some lefties liked to pretend they were independents or some third option.
The media used to invest a lot of time denying they had a bias and an agenda, but the only people who believed them were on the Left, which had the odd effect of confirming they had a bias and an agenda.
The thing is though, the media seemed like it was biased in a predictable way.
In the 1980’s, for example, the newspapers featured stories about the so-called homeless crisis on a weekly basis. That’s when we went from calling them bums to pretending their only problem was a lack of shelter. Once Clinton assumed power, the homeless stories disappeared. It was a running joke for a long time, because it was so obvious, but also because it was so predictable. Everyone got the joke, except Lefty.
As many have observed, the mask began to drop during the Clinton years when so many media members quit their jobs and went to work in the administration. It’s hard to maintain the illusion of independence when there is a revolving door between the media and left-wing political operations. That’s when CNN became known as the Clinton News Network, because they were so hilariously in the tank for them. Some tried to maintain the ruse, but any pretense of objectivity ended in the 1990’s.
Again, there was still a sense that it was just bias and that it was predictable and therefore you could adjust for it. Today, that does not appear to be the case. The mainstream media has become advocates, but not necessarily advocates for the Progressive base of the Democratic coalition. They seem to be serving the agendas, financed by private parties operating off-stage. For example, sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Beast are about moral enforcement than news and current events.
The recent harassment of Alex McNabb by Antifa member Christopher Mathias is a great example of the phenomenon. The Huffington Post provides him with a cover identity as a reporter, but in reality someone else is paying his way. His job is as a witch hunter, looking for anyone in violation of the blasphemy laws. This is a strange new phenomenon that does not have a corollary in the past. Even Woodward and Bernstein were legitimate reporters, even if Woodward had deep connections to the intelligence community.
There’s an argument that this sort of religious advocacy is the natural result of the narrative journalism that evolved in the 1960’s and 1970’s. If you are going to report stories, the point is to inform. If you are going to spin tales, then the first goal is to entertain and there is nothing quite as a gripping as a morality tale. These doxxing stories are just campfire stories for the hard thumping loons of the far Left. The point of them is to tell the reader that they must be vigilant as heretics are everywhere.
That’s probably true, but what about stories like this one , where it is clear the New York Times now has a whole department involved in explicit political advocacy. That is a highly organized effort to alter public policy. More important, it is a long term project, going back to the Obama years. The New York Times posted a database of gun owners , with an accompanying map, in a campaign to terrorize gun owners. This goes well beyond bias and even past the morality tales spun by the Huffington Post.
It does not stop there. This story about the death of Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi takes advocacy to another level. As an aside, the story is written by Lee Smith, who was fired from The Weekly Standard by Bill Kristol. His crime was having uncovered Kristol’s involvement in the fake dossier the FBI was using to subvert Trump. The story of Khashoggi’s life and death reads like a Hollywood spy thriller, but it was not a CIA caper. It was an operation apparently run by the the Washington Post.
We’ve come a long way from simple bias. The same media that can’t stop talking about Russian efforts to trick voters into voting the wrong way, was running a covert operation to trick the government into supporting Iran over Saudi Arabia. Unlike the Russians, the Washington Post actually killed someone or at least got someone killed. Unlike the Trump team, the Washington Post was actually working with a foreign country that is often viewed as hostile to American interests.
Trump started calling the media the “enemy of the American people” but he seems to have dropped it for some reason. Maybe the media threatened him. Given what we are seeing, how long before Washington Post reporters are planting car bombs and spiking drinks with polonium? Whether or not they see Americans as the enemy is hard to know, but they certainly don’t see themselves as on the same team as Americans. While they may not be the enemies of the people, they are a short bus ride to that position.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 20:25:00 -0500 Lawmakers Seek Updates As FBI's Former Top Lawyer Undergoes Active Criminal Investigation
House Republicans revealed that the FBI's former top lawyer, James Baker, has been under active federal investigation for leaking information to the media.
House Republicans revealed that the FBI's former top lawyer, James Baker, has been under active federal investigation for leaking information to the media.
A Monday letter from GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows to Connecticut US attorney John Durham asks for an update on the leak probe. The investigation was revealed to Jordan and Meadows during Congressional investigations, when Baker's attorney, Daniel Levin, refused to let him answer lawmakers' questions.
"I’m sorry, I’m going to cut – not let him answer these questions right now," Levin interjected when Jordan asked about Baker's interactions with reporters.
"You may or may not know, he’s been the subject of a leak investigation which is still – a criminal leak investigation that’s still active at the Justice Department ," Levin continued.
Meadows cut in, asking "You’re saying he’s under criminal investigation? That’s why you’re not letting him answer?" to which Levin replied "Yes."
While the subject of the media leaks is unknown, a confidential source told the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross that the leak investigation is a nothingburger.
"I’m 100 percent confident they did not find any wrongdoing," said the source, adding that the investigation discussed during the hearing "is not a new or reopened investigation" separate of the one reported in December 2017 by the Washington Post .
Levin’s exchange with Republicans followed after Baker discussed interactions he had with Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who met with dossier author Christopher Steele prior to the 2016 election.
It is unclear what alleged leak Baker was under investigated for. A spokesman for Durham declined comment.
Jordan then asked Baker whether reporters Franklin Foer and Michael Isikoff ever reached out to him. Both of the journalists reported stories about the Russia investigation. Isikoff, who co-authored a book with Corn, also met with Steele prior to the 2016 election.
Levin blocked the line of inquiry about reporter contacts, saying: “I’m not going to have him answer any questions as asking about any interactions with the press .” -Daily Caller
In July of 2017, Circa
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 20:05:00 -0500 Class Warfare Between Workers And Elites Explains Trump-Era Conflicts
Authored by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, op-ed via USAToday.com,
What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump.
To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle. Read more.....
Authored by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, op-ed via USAToday.com,
What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump.
To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.
This sentence sounds like something that could be written by a doctrinaire Marxist. But it is nonetheless true. Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.
In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat ,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.
"Yellow Vest" protesters near the Champs Elysees in Paris on Nov. 24, 2018. (Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images)
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class ,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”)
Djilas’ work was explosive — he was jailed — because it made clear that the workers and peasants had simply replaced one class of exploiters with another. It set the stage for the Soviet Union’s implosion, and for the discrediting of communism among everyone with any sense.
Elites of postwar institutions don't want change But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements.
And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
The postwar era saw the creation of international institutions ranging from NATO to the United Nations to the World Bank, along with a proliferation of think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to accompany them. It saw the vast expansion of higher education in the United States, and the transformation of academic degrees into something close to must-haves for the upper-middle class. It saw a great expansion of power on the part of media organizations, and on the part of government bureaucrats and lobbyists, both of whose numbers increased enormously.
But after the turn of the millennium, other Americans, much like the workers and peasants in the old Soviet Union, started to notice that while the New Class was doing quite well (America’s richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.), things weren’t going so well for them. And what made it more upsetting was that — while the Soviet Union’s apparatchiks at least pretended to like the workers and peasants — members of America’s ruling class seemed to view ordinary Americans with something like contempt, using terms such as “bitter clingers ,” “deplorables ” and flyover people.
Class wars in America disguised as culture wars Suddenly, to a lot of voters, those postwar institutional arrangements stopped looking so good. But, of course, the beneficiaries showed no sign of giving them up. This has led to a lot of political discord, and a lot of culture war, since in America class warfare is usually disguised as cultural warfare. But underneath the surface, talk is a battle between the New Class and what used to be the middle class.
If you look at the “yellow jacket” protests in France, the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and events in places like Italy and Hungary — or, for that matter, the Brexit movement in Britain — you find a similar unhappiness with institutional arrangements and the sleek and self-satisfied elites who benefit from them. People who, in President Bill Clinton’s famous phrase , worked hard and played by the rules now suspect that the rules were rigged, and that they were treated as chumps.
Talking about the yellow-vest movement, French geographer Christophe Guilluy observes: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore .”
That’s right. It’s class war masquerading as something else, but people have seen through the mask.
Understanding this won’t make the conflict less intense, but it might make it clearer what’s really at stake. What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 19:45:00 -0500 Blackwater Founder Says US Troops In Syria Could Be Replaced By Private Contractors
Controversial founder and ex-CEO of the private security firm Blackwater, Erik Prince told Fox Business this week that private military contractors could replace the U.S. troops that are withdrawing from Syria .
Following a similar failed proposal Prince reportedly made through White House channels in 2017 to privatize the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan — which some contractor industry analysts have suggested Trump was "sympathetic" to — it appeared Prince was attempting to pitch both Washington and the American public in the Fox interview on the "alternate" plan. “The United States doesn’t have a long-term strategic obligation to stay in Syria. But, I also think it’s not a good idea to abandon our allies,” he told Fox Business.
Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, Getty image Prince offered the plan as a solution to the administration's current stated dilemma of withdrawing troops in such a way that both protects the US-backed Kurdish SDF and prevents Iran from becoming more entrenched in the region. This way, according to Prince , private contractors could fill the void while allowing Trump to stand behind his repeat promises to end "forever wars" .
“American history is filled with public and private partnerships, of places that the private sector can fill those gaps, where a very expensive military probably shouldn’t be,” Prince said. “If there is not some kind of robust capability to defend from a ground invasions from the very conventional power that the Iranians and the Syrians have, our allies will be smashed,” he continued.
Prince — the brother of billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — has over the past years since selling his mired-in-controversy Blackwater group (now Academi ) begun a new mercenary empire in China called Frontier Services Group (FSG), in a market where Western firms of necessity find themselves working closely with Chinese state authorities. He's reportedly had success in securing security and logistics contracts in Africa and China, and has since at least 2017 lobbied both top US generals and Congressional leaders to consider massive privatization of the now fast approaching two decade long quagmire in Afghanistan, from which Trump has recently vowed to extricate the United States.
Prince's prior headline grabbing Afghan plan involved some 6,000+ mercenaries overseen by a "viceroy" reporting directly to the White House , and with a private air force to boot. An extensive report in The Atlantic at the time
Similar to his lobbying capitol hill with the Afghan privatization plan before, Prince has already long been shopping his Syria privatization plan around D.C. and even Arab Gulf capitals before taking it public; but the fact that he's now appearing on Fox to pitch it across the air waves means no doubt many doors have already been slammed in his face.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 19:25:00 -0500 A New Tactic To Suppress Online Speech: Taxing Social Media
Authored by Robert Wenzel via TargetLiberty.com,
Think things are bad in the US and Europe when it comes to social media speech suppression?
Check out, Africa.
Will this be our future?
Aware of the threat that social media poses to their power, repressive regimes in Africa have employed various methods to stifle internet-based mobilization.
These include internet shutdowns, targeted social media applications shutdowns, website takedowns, extensive surveillance of digital communications, online propaganda, and the detention of online critics, writes Babatunde Okunoye for Foreign Affairs .
According to Okunoye, in 2018, repressive governments adopted yet another tactic: taxes on social media usage
In countries such as Uganda, Benin, Tanzania and Zambia, there are now laws in place which impose daily taxes on social media and other over-the-top services.
In Uganda, for instance, citizens have to pay 200 Ugandan Shillings (US $ 0.05) per day to access Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp as a law adopted last year.
Citizens of Benin have had to pay 5 CFA francs ($0.008) per megabyte consumed through social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter as stipulated by Decree No. 2018 - 341 of July 25 2018. The decree also introduces a 5 percent fee, on top of taxes, on texting and calls.
These laws also make the cost of maintaining personal websites by citizens prohibitively expensive.
As a result of the Electronic and Postal Communications Regulations 2018, citizens in Tanzania now must pay a $920 fee to receive the government’s permission to maintain a website...
Most citizens believe that these measures were drawn up to restrict the space for freedom of expression in worsening human rights contexts in countries like Uganda and Tanzania. While some of these social media taxes have been couched as measures to raise government revenue, given the poor economic situation prevalent in much of Africa, virtually everyone sees them for what they really are - attempts to stifle the right to freedom of expression and association of the millions of Africans demanding more from their governments.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 19:00:05 -0500 Kirsten Gillibrand Announces Plans To Run For President
Barely a day after the Associated Press reported that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand would likely announce her candidacy ahead of a weekend trip to Iowa, the junior senator and former Clinton confidante - who was appointed to fill Clinton's seat when she became Secretary of State - has reportedly given the scoop about her campaign announcement to Read more.....
Barely a day after the Associated Press reported that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand would likely announce her candidacy ahead of a weekend trip to Iowa, the junior senator and former Clinton confidante - who was appointed to fill Clinton's seat when she became Secretary of State - has reportedly given the scoop about her campaign announcement to the Washington Post, which reported Tuesday night that Gillibrand will be seeking the nomination.
The New York Democrat, 52, easily sailed to reelection during the midterms, is jumping in to what's expected to be a crowded Democratic primary field. Gillibrand will officially announce her campaign Tuesday night during an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" (the episode has already been taped and will air during its usual time slot of 11:35 pm ET).
"The first thing I would do is restore what’s been lost: the integrity and the compassion in this country," she said. "I would bring people together to start getting things done."
Since Trump's election, Gillibrand has tried to position herself as a paragon of the anti-Trump "Resistance"...
The senator has latched on to the burst of activism prompted by President Trump’s election and his policies, a movement that’s largely driven by women. She called the 2017 Women’s March on Washington “truly the most inspiring moment of my entire life” and joined the protesters who challenged Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court last fall. She also stood up to fellow Democrats as the #MeToo era dawned, criticizing then-Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota and former president Bill Clinton for their alleged inappropriate behavior toward women.
Gillibrand is also a vocal critic of Trump, and she has voted against his political appointees and positions at a higher rate than most Democrats. The president responded in December 2017 by attacking her in a tweet that she called “a sexist smear.”
...Which is ironic because back when she was an up-and-coming Congresswoman representing a conservative district in Upstate New York, she embraced mostly "centrist" policies and even received a 100% rating from the NRA.
Some of her policy positions rapidly changed. The night before her appointment was announced, she called a gay rights group to profess her full support for same-sex marriage. As she voted for gun-control measures, her NRA rating fell to an F.
Gillibrand said in a CBS News interview last year that as she expanded her views beyond “the lens of Upstate New York,” she realized that her gun rights and immigration positions were “wrong.”
“I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me. And that was my fault,” Gillibrand said in the interview. “It was something that I’m embarrassed about and I’m ashamed of."
She won a special election in 2010 with 63 percent of the vote and followed with 72 percent of the vote in 2012, when she earned her first full term, and 67 percent in November. The last campaign came as Gillibrand navigated intraparty divisions over how to handle the #MeToo movement.
Gillibrand is the second purported front-runner to enter the race after Elizabeth Warren formed an exploratory committee earlier this month, widely seen as a first step toward announcing a campaign.
But with Gillibrand in the race, one can only wonder how she might react if her former mentor, Hillary Clinton, decides to give her life-long dream of being president one more shot.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:45:00 -0500 American Psychologists Join Gillette, Warn "Traditional Masculinity Can Hurt Boys"
Yesterday's Gillette ad has triggered more than a few hairy-chested lumberjack types across America... raising the question - Should we be teaching young boys to reject traditional masculinity?
VIDEO
Read more.....
Yesterday's Gillette ad has triggered more than a few hairy-chested lumberjack types across America... raising the question - Should we be teaching young boys to reject traditional masculinity?
VIDEO
Well, as Michael Snyder reports, via The End of The American Dream blog, according to the American Psychological Association, that is precisely what we should be doing.
In this day and age, “traditional masculinity” has been renamed “toxic masculinity” , and an all-out attempt is being made to eradicate traditional forms of male behavior from our society. We see this happening in our classrooms, we see this happening in popular culture , and lately this new agenda is being constantly pushed by the mainstream media. For example, the New York Times just published a piece about the new guidelines for men that the American Psychological Association recently issued. Their article was entitled “Traditional Masculinity Can Hurt Boys, Say New A.P.A. Guidelines” , and it suggests that we need to totally redefine what it means “to be a man”…
The guidelines , 10 in all, posit that males who are socialized to conform to “traditional masculinity ideology” are often negatively affected in terms of mental and physical health .
They acknowledge that ideas about masculinity vary across cultures, age groups and ethnicities. But they point to common themes like “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.”
In other words, they want men to become weak, feminine under-achievers that never take risks and never go on adventures.
And to a significant degree, the elite have already made quite a bit of progress in removing traditional masculinity from our society. Today, millions upon millions of American men feel lost, defeated and beaten down. And even the APA’s official article about these new guidelines acknowledges that we have a very real crisis on our hands …
But something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims . They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide , and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s . Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school—especially boys of color.
But instead of embracing masculinity, the solution that the American Psychological Association is pushing is to try to eradicate it altogether.
They openly admit that they are trying to “change” the culture, and they argue that traditional masculinity had been hindering our society “by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles” …
First, clinicians must be aware of dominant masculine ideals, and cognizant of their own potential biases. Second, they must recognize the integrated nature of masculinity, and how factors ranging from spirituality to ability status to age and ethnicity interact. Mental health professionals must also understand how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles .
The underlying message is that if you wish to embrace traditional masculinity you are a bad person, and we see this message reinforced in popular culture all the time.
For instance, in literally hundreds of television shows and movies, fathers are portrayed as bumbling dolts that are always getting into some sort of trouble. Meanwhile, their wives are portrayed as the smart, capable, responsible ones.
Or if there is a “bad guy” in a television show or movie, there is a more than 95 percent chance that it is going to be a man. At the same time, there is a concerted effort by Hollywood to portray women as executives, leaders and achievers.
They say that art imitates life, but in this case life is imitating art. At this point, females are greatly outperforming males at every level of education …
“Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school,” says Dr. Michael Thompson, a school psychologist who writes about the academic problems of boys in his book, “Raising Cain .” He says that after decades of special attention, girls are soaring, while boys are stagnating.
“Girls are being told, ‘Go for it, you can do it. Go for it, you can do it.’ They are getting an immense amount of support,” he says. “Boys hear that the way to shine is athletically. And boys get a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be a student. Does being a good student make you a real man? I don’t think so… It is not cool.”
And women have earned at least 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in this country for 18 years in a row …
Women earned approximately 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2016-2017 academic year, according to data released this week by the National Center for Education Statistics , which is part of the U.S. Department of Education.
That, according to NCES data , makes 2016-2017 the eighteenth straight academic year in which women have earned approximately 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. colleges and universities.
Clearly we have a huge problem. But according to the American Psychological Association, it is a bad thing for young boys to put an emphasis on “achievement”.
Of course the truth is that masculinity is not “toxic” at all. Just like femininity, masculinity should be embraced and celebrated.
But instead, the elite are spreading very toxic ideas that are deeply dividing the American people. I really like how author Heather MacDonald made this point…
America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.
The American people are more deeply divided than ever before, and it is difficult to imagine such a deeply divided nation having any sort of a positive future.
We have got to learn how to love one another, and it would greatly help if we could rediscover the shared values that once made this country so great.
Unfortunately, the politically-correct crowd is becoming more dominant with each passing year, and they are absolutely obsessed with permanently altering our culture.
Close Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:25:45 -0500 Ukrainian Hackers Broke Into The SEC's EDGAR Database, Made $4.1 Million From Insider Trades
On Tuesday, United States authorities charged numerous mostly Ukrainian hackers for a scheme to trade on press releases that had not yet been released. The Ukrainians breached the SEC's EDGAR database to receive access to the nonpublic information.
The scheme net
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On Tuesday, United States authorities charged numerous mostly Ukrainian hackers for a scheme to trade on press releases that had not yet been released. The Ukrainians breached the SEC's EDGAR database to receive access to the nonpublic information.
The scheme netted over $4 million for fraudsters from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine. Using 157 corporate earnings announcements, the group was able to execute trades on material nonpublic information. Most of those filings were "test filings," which corporations upload to the SEC's website.
The charges were announced Tuesday by Craig Carpenito, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, alongside the SEC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes. In a Tuesday press conference, Carpenito said the thefts included thousands of valuable, private business documents. "After hacking into the EDGAR system they stole drafts of [these] reports before the information was disseminated to the general public," he said.
The elaborate scheme involved seven individuals and operated from May to at least October 2016. Prosecutors said the traders were part of the same group that previously hacked into newswire services, according to CNBC .
Similar to the way John Podesta's email account was hacked, the hackers used malicious software sent via email to SEC employees. Then, after planting the software on the SEC computers, they sent the information they were able to gather from the EDGAR system to servers in Lithuania, where they either used it or distributed the data to other criminals, Carpenito said. The EDGAR service operates in New Jersey, which is why the Justice Department office in Newark was involved in the case.
Those documents included quarterly earnings, mergers and acquisitions plans and other sensitive news, and the criminals were able to view it before it was released as a public filing, thus affecting the individual companies' stock prices. The alleged hackers executed trades on the reports and also sold them to other illicit traders. One inside trader made $270,000 in a single day, according to Carpenito.
Stephanie Avakian, co-head of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said the same criminals also stole advance press releases sent to three newswire services, though she didn't name the newswires. The hackers used multiple broker accounts to collect the illicit gains, she said.
The defendants then kicked back a portion of their trading profits to Oleksandr Ieremenko, a Ukrainian (oddly not Russian) hacker that is said to have infiltrated the database at some point between May 2016 in October 2016. There, he obtained thousands of "test filings" which included, among other things, earnings results.
Two Ukrainians were charged by the Justice Department with hacking the database — Oleksandr Ieremenko and Artem Radchenko. Seven further individuals and entities were also named in a civil suit by the SEC for trading on the illicit information: Sungjin Cho, David Kwon, Igor Sabodakha, Victoria Vorochek, Ivan Olefir, Andrey Sarafanov, Capyield Systems, Ltd. (owned by Olefir) and Spirit Trade Ltd.
Ieremenko had previously been charged in 2015 for a similar plot involving hacking into the databases of distribution companies who are responsible for putting out corporate press releases. Ieremenko and Artem Radchenko face a criminal indictment for conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Radchenko allegedly “recruited traders to join the conspiracy” and kept notes on what the SEC does and how to hack it, the Justice Department said.
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