Saturday, September 21, 2019
U.S. Housing Finance "Worse Off Today" Than In 2008
Remember when the housing bubble started to burst in late 2007? By September 2008, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had experienced heavy losses and were placed into conservatorship. The government then advanced them a whopping $190 billion of taxpayer money to keep them afloat.
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Always wrong: Report unveils history of failed 'global warming' alarms
It was only days ago that the socialist U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., claimed that in a few years Miami would disappear because of global warming. Not likely, reveals a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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It’s not just you: New data shows more than half of young people in America don’t have a romantic partner
Austin Spivey, a 24-year-old woman in Washington, has been looking for a relationship for years. She’s been on several dating apps — OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel, Hinge, Tinder, Bumble. She’s on a volleyball team, where she has a chance to meet people with similar interests in a casual setting.
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Friday, September 20, 2019
Facebook Walks Into Legal Trap After Claiming To Be 'Publisher' In Laura Loomer Lawsuit
The company may have just stepped on a landmine, however. As RT notes: Defining itself as a publisher opens Facebook up to lawsuits for defamation and other liability for the content users publish, something they were previously immunized against.
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Thursday, September 19, 2019
Deportation Rates in Historical Perspective
In last week’s Democratic primary debate, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos asked Joe Biden about President Obama’s record on immigration enforcement. Ramos said, “you served as vice president in an administration that deported 3 million people, the most ever in U.S. history.”
Democratic partisans were very upset on Twitter, but the numbers don’t lie. President Obama removed more people from the United States, no matter how you dice the numbers than any other president. But was President Obama's removal record an anomaly? To answer that question, I looked at the number of removals per president going back to 1892 when the government first started recording them. Table 1 shows the presidents, the number of removals under each administration, and the number of removals per year. The latter number is important as it controls for the number of years in office.
From 1892-2018, Democratic presidents were in power for 60 years and removed about 4.6 million people for an average of 76,635 per year. During the same time, Republican Presidents were in power for 67 years and removed about 3.7 million people for an annual average of 54,670. Presidents usually inherit the immigration enforcement policies of their predecessors for at least a year. I adjusted for that by assigning the number of removals in the first year of any administration to the previous administration and the results were almost identical.
But the political parties changed quite a bit over the 1892-2018 period. Shortening the period to 1990-2018 produces a similar result. During that time, Democratic presidents were in power for 55 percent of the time and removed 60 percent of all those removed or over 3.9 million. Republican presidents were in power for 45 percent of the time and removed 40 percent of all those removed or about 2.7 million. From 1990-2018, Democratic presidents removed an average of 246,006 people per year in power and Republican presidents removed 205,453 people per year in power.
Removals as a percentage of the illegal immigrant population have varied considerably over the 1990-2018 period (Figure 1). Estimates for the number of illegal immigrants come from the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Migration Studies, and linear interpolation for missing years except for 2018 where I assume that the number of illegal immigrants is the same as estimated by the Center for Migration Studies.
George Bush removed an average of 0.91 percent of the estimated illegal immigrant population each year, Bill Clinton removed an average of 1.86 percent per year, George W. Bush removed an average of 2.42 percent per year, Barack Obama removed an average of 3.33 percent per year, and Donald Trump has removed an average of 2.59 percent per year through 2018. President Trump can still increase the pace of deportations, but he won’t overcome President Obama’s record.
One problem with the removal statistics above is that they changed in the mid-2000s to include some illegal immigrants apprehended at the border rather than just removals from the interior of the United States. It would be better if we had the number of removals from only the interior of the United States and then recalculated the numbers for Figure 1. Even adjusting for that for the years that we have interior removals still shows that President Obama broke removal records.
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This article has been republished from Cato Institute under a Creative Commons license.
[Image Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Public Domain]
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Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Paglia: Criticizing Transgenderism Is Not Transphobic
Feminist academic Camille Paglia is notorious for marching to her own beat. Her recent interview in the academic journal Interfaces Brazil/Canada is no exception.
Per usual, Paglia is asked several questions about today’s hot topics, including feminism, censorship, and the current state of civilization. The questioning gets personal, however, when the subject turns to transgenderism, as Paglia herself claims the label of “transgender.”
The interesting thing about Paglia is that she refuses to treat transgenderism as a badge of victimhood and cause for special treatment. Instead, she points out the problems societal fawning over transgenderism likely brings. Such an attitude has caused her to be labeled “transphobic.” But as Paglia explains, this label is overblown:
[T]ransphobia, like homophobia, is a psychological condition. This clinical term has been wrongly appropriated and distorted by political ideologues, who have injected it with a crusading moralism. A phobia is a compulsive, all-consuming fear or obsession, sometimes produced by an unconscious attraction to the very thing that is feared. Merely expressing a rational critique of transgender or gay activism does not make anyone transphobic or homophobic. [Emphasis added.]
Such a statement sheds light on why Paglia is not afraid to raise questions about the transgender movement. Indeed, her status as a transgender insider may actually help her see the problems in a clearer light. She lists several reasons for her questioning of transgender activism.
1. It Hinders Human Rights
Gender transitions have become more prevalent for children in the last several years. Part of this process involves puberty blockers, which Paglia “consider[s] a violation of human rights.”
“Children are not equipped to make an informed choice about medical matters and must rely on the wisdom and prudence of adults,” Paglia proclaims. Having wrestled with the desire to be masculine as a child, Paglia has firsthand experience with this issue and wonders what would have happened had sex-change surgery been readily available to her as a child.
Paglia goes on to say:
The long-term effects of puberty blockers are uncharted and unknown. Why would any ethical society perform medical experiments on children? I predict that the future will look back at this moment with incredulity.
2. It Ignores Biology
Paglia doesn’t mince words when it comes to this point. “Sex change is literally impossible,” she says. “[E]very cell of our bodies, except for the blood, remains coded with our birth gender for life.” She suggests that those who pursue gender reassignment are acting out in rebellion, instead of living out how they were born, as many insist is the case.
3. It Leads to Repression
Finally, Paglia implies that failure to critically question one’s own viewpoints creates a consuming ideology. This has happened to the political left which is “so consumed by its own ideology that it claims repressive and dictatorial powers over both private and public life.” Doing so, notes Paglia, drives people toward the opposing political side via reaction rather than reasoned thought.
In a politically correct world, Paglia’s thoughts on transgenderism run counterculture. Yet coming from the inside of transgenderism, does she have insight that many of us could never have? Given this, wouldn’t we be wise to heed her advice, and exercise caution before encouraging children to question their gender and make irreversible changes to their bodies?
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[Image Credit: Flickr-Fronteiras do Pensamento CC BY-SA 2.0]
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Are Conspiracy Theories Really on the Rise?
Have the internet and social media created a climate where Americans believe anything is possible? With headlines citing now as the age of conspiracy, is it really true?
In a word, no.
While it may be true that the internet has allowed people who believe in conspiracies to communicate more, it has not increased the number of Americans who believe in conspiracies, according to the data available.
Current beliefs
A “conspiracy theory” is a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot, usually by powerful conspirators.
For example, take Pizzagate, the theory that Washington elite engaged in child sex trafficking at the basement of a D.C. pizzeria, which 9% of the American population believe to be true.
Over 29% of the American population believe there is a “Deep State” working against President Donald Trump. Nineteen percent believe that the government is using chemicals to control the population.
These conspiracy theories are not simply restricted to a fringe population. At least 50% of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory, ranging from the idea that the 9/11 attacks were fake to the belief that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.
Historical data
There are no major comprehensive, longitudinal studies on Americans’ attitudes toward conspiracy theories, mostly because it was not rigorously measured until about 10 to 20 years ago.
However, researchers have done a considerate amount of work in recent years in an attempt to understand this apparent phenomenon.
Political scientists Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent reviewed over 120 years of letters to the editor, from 1890 to 2010, for both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
In over 100,000 letters, this review showed absolutely no change in the amount of conspiracy theory belief over time. In fact, the percent of letters about conspiracy theories actually declined from the late 1800s to the 1960s and has remained steady since then.
While these researchers looked at data only up until 2010, current polling has not shown any uptick in conspiracy theory belief since then.
The end is near?
As Uscinski and Parent pointed out, this isn’t the first time Americans may have felt surrounded by conspiracies.
In 2004, the Boston Globe stated that we are in the “golden age of conspiracy theory.”
In 1994, the Washington Post declared it’s the “dawn of a new age of conspiracy theory.”
In 1964, The New York Times said conspiracy theories had “grown weed like in this country.”
The list could go on and on, but the gist is clear.
Whether it is the invention of the printing press, mass publishing, the telegraph, radio, cable, the internet or social media, researchers and the general public have historically proclaimed that this – or this, or this – new advance is the change-maker in political realities.
While the internet has certainly made discussion between conspiracy theorists easier, there is no evidence at this time that belief in these theories has increased.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
[Image Credit: Motortion Films/Shutterstock.com]
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Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Our Favorite Price
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Ass, gas or grass – no one rides for free. So said the once popular bumper sticker.
Unless you drive an EV.
Then you can use the government to force someone else to “help” pay for your ride – and your road. Because you don’t have to pay any of the gas taxes that fund the roads.
It’s quite a five-fingered discount, too.
Gas taxes – federal and state – tally about 50 cents on average, added to the cost of every gallon of gasoline (and diesel) sold. If your car’s tank holds 15 gallons – which is typical – you’re paying about $7.50 in taxes every fill-up, regardless of the cost of the gas.
If you fill up twice a week, that’s about $30 per month – or $360 annually. Over the course of a six-year new car loan, the bite comes to $2,160.
Owners of vehicles with bigger tanks that use more gas pay more in taxes, obviously. If you have an SUV or pick-up with a 21 gallon tank, each fill-up costs you about $10 in motor fuels taxes, or $40 each month – $480 annually.
$2,880 over six years.
But EV owners don’t pay a red cent. This includes Ludicrous Speed energy hogs like the Tesla S – which burn up lots of untaxed electricity.
Which is why several states have begun sending them a separate bill for their use of the roads they’re not paying for.
It’s not much of a bill. In fact, it’s a lot less of a bill than the rest of us are paying (and not counting the other paying we’re doing . . . to “help” EV owners buy their car through subsidies and cost-shifting from unprofitable EVs to the profitable vehicles the rest of us buy but now pay just a bit more for, in order for EV owners to pay less for theirs).
Arkansas, for instance, recently passed a law that will require all EV owners to pay a $200 fee each year (added to the usual vehicle registration renewal fees) in lieu of paying at the pump. But it amounts to the same thing.
They’re being charged for what they use – just like the rest of us.
And it amounts to a discount, in relation to what the rest of us pay.
$200 annually is about half what the average non-electric car driver pays each year in motor fuels taxes.
But Consumer Reports think it’s too much – that any fees are too much – probably because expecting EV owners to pay for the roads they use will “discourage adoption” of electric vehicles.
This is true, of course.
Having to pay for something tends to cause most people to think twice about buying it. Or at least, to weight the costs vs. the benefits before they buy it.
The problem with electric cars is that the costs do outweigh the benefits.
Which is why it is so important to shove those costs under the rug, in order to take people’s minds off them – in order to wheedle them into buying what they otherwise probably wouldn’t.
This includes the cost to drive the EV.
The free lunch at the plug conjures the illusion that the EV owner is saving money vs. his neighbor – the one who was forced, through taxes, to “help” him buy his EV.
Or at least, it makes the EV owner feel a bit less stupid, financially, about spending thousands of dollars more on his EV. He tells himself he’ll recoup that loss in the form of what he’s not having to spend on fuel (and taxes).
But what happens when that free ride disappears?
When Denmark dialed back what it paid people to buy EVs, people stopped buying them almost completely. Sales plummeted by more than 60 percent in one year – not surprising since the end of the subsidy amounted to a sudden several thousand dollar increase in the cost of the EV.
The same thing happened in Hong Kong and everywhere else where prospective buyers were faced with having to pay full price for an electric car.
Most people would never buy an EV at full price for the simple reason that they can’t afford too – leaving aside the other problems. That’s why the government has to pay people to buy EVs.
Adding several thousand dollars to the cost of EV ownership in gas-tax-equivalent road-use taxes makes the math that much worse – which makes it that much harder to wheedle people into EVs.
Which is problem for those pushing EVs.
Like CR.
CR has, of course, never published a critical word about gas taxes, which it has always favored more of – but not to pay for the roads. Instead, to “nudge” American drivers out of the kinds of cars CR doesn’t like, such as pick-ups and SUVs.
But because CR wants to “nudge” Americans into electric cars, it opposes making them pay even a portion of what the rest of us pay.
And then lies about it.
Either that or the editors of CR are innumerate.
The magazine claims that EV fees being applied by states like Arkansas are “up to four times higher than the annual gasoline tax would be for the average new car in 2025.”
Italics added.
The scoundrels! They are basing their math on a nonexistent (as of 2019) “average new car” that averages almost 50 MPG – nearly double what the typical car you can actually buy today averages – on the assumption that a federal fatwa so mandating all new cars must average by 2025 becomes a legal requirement. (The Orange Man is fighting this; see here for more.)
But the only 2019 cars that average 50 MPG are compact-sized hybrids like the Toyota Prius, which constitute less than 5 percent of the total new car spectrum. Using hypothetical 2025 model years cars as the basis for its cost comparisons is a greasy shuck-and-jive that would make a tent show evangelist blush.
CR’s editors know perfectly well that there is quite a difference between what most people who don’t drive electric cars today are paying in motor fuels taxes vs. what it asserts they’ll be paying in 2025, when they assume the average new car will average 50 MPG.
What if it doesn’t?
And what if people don’t trade-in what they’re driving today for that “50 MPG” 2025 model?
CR is trying, in other words, to make it look as though EV owners are being hit up to pay more for the roads they use vs. what non-electric car owners actually are paying – when in fact, the mild fees a few states are imposing on EV owners are well below what most people are paying right now in motor fuels taxes.
It’s despicable.
But it’s of a piece with everything else relating to electric cars. To give people the facts about EVs would be dangerous.
It might “discourage adoption” of them.
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Finnish Citizens Conduct Own Vaccine Safety Study and Question Health Authorities Letting 12-Year-Olds Make Own Decisions About HPV Vaccine without Parental Consent
Citizens disagree with Finnish health authorities regarding the safety profile of vaccines based on an internet-based questionnaire conducted by a local patient support group.
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Sunday, September 15, 2019
The Torture and Murder of Julian Assange
Back in May, retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski said the CIA’s “Chemical Gina has her hands in this one, and we are being told that Assange is being ‘treated’ with 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ.”
On September 14, Kwiatkowski wrote Julian Assange “is being held on behalf of the United States and he is being chemically and physically interrogated in Belmarsh (the British Gitmo) in order to reveal his private cryptographic keys, and the names and cryptographic information relating to others within the Wikileaks information network.”
He has been reduced to the mental capacity of a drug-addled rubberhead, and some of these effects will be found to be permanent. Physically he is reported to be underweight (under 100 pounds) with food and water being used as bargaining chips in his continued interrogation. Ironically, even the prisoners at Gitmo, as part of the tender care by the USG, were force-fed when they tried to starve themselves to death. Julian’s government caretakers are using food and water to break him completely.
The CIA and its media call this practice “enhanced interrogation,” an Orwellian term for torture. In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission determined the CIA’s MKUltra was developed for the explicit purpose of breaking down individuals, destroying them psychologically and physically, and reformatting their minds. In the 1950s, the agency was searching for a way to brainwash subjects and turn them into amnesiac assassins.
The full extent of this program will never be known. The CIA destroyed its records on the MKUltra project.
In the case of Assange, as Kwiatkowski notes, the British and American torturers hope to break Assange’s “private cryptographic keys, and [reveal] the names and cryptographic information relating to others within the Wikileaks information network.”
This information would be highly beneficial to the state as it hunts down those who reveal uncomfortable truths about its psychopathic behavior. However, the primary objective in keeping Assange locked up in Belmarsh (as extradition drags on) is to break him down, similar to how the British state broke down and rendered mentally ill David Shayler, the former MI5 officer who revealed crimes of the state.
The difference here is dramatic. Shayler served time and was released. Assange will never be released. It’s fair to say he will be taken out of Belmarsh in a body bag.
This is the message to whistleblowers and truth-tellers—mess with the state, expose its dirty dealings and war crimes, and you may end up like Julian Assange—a skeletal “rubberhead” tortured until a babbling ruin or dead.
Ditto Chelsea Manning, Ola Bini, and others rounded up since Assange went into the Bolivarian embassy seeking asylum, only to be betrayed and turned over to the Brits who, with the eager help of the US government, are now in the process of slowly killing him, or possibly rendering him a mental patient or vegetable.
Assange and those who may have worked with him will be interrogated with the full capability of the state (physical, mental and chemical torture). They will not be tried, represented or defended in a public court, and as noted here for Assange, they will never be released regardless of what is discovered through various interrogations.
Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who visited Assange prior to arrest, writes:
Yes, living in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard may seem like a sweet deal when you believe the rest of the lies. But when no one remembers the reason for the hate you endure, when no one even wants to hear the truth, when neither the courts nor the media hold the powerful to account, then your refuge really is but a rubber boat in a shark-pool, and neither your cat nor your skateboard will save your life.
The conspiracy to torture and murder Assange and his associates will never be reported by a government script-reading media.
Melzer, who holds the Human Rights Chair at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Switzerland, as well as serving as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, is unable to get the word out to a larger audience about Assange and his sadistic punishment.
“This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek… None responded positively,” he wrote on his Medium blog in June.
And none will so long as the state continues to steer the narrative on Assange. His death will be on the hands of the government and its functionaries—the torturers, hired killers of journalists, and the serial murderers of innocent and helpless civilian populations. This horrific reality is buried beneath a mountain of slander, defamation, and lies pushed out by the CIA’s Mockingbird media. Remarkably, millions of Americans and Brits support the slow murder of Julian Assange. The state has long excelled at manipulating the public through ceaseless propaganda and calculated lies.
Melzer concludes:
Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.
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U.S. Housing Finance “Worse Off Today” Than In 2008
From Birch Gold Group
Remember when the housing bubble started to burst in late 2007?
By September 2008, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had experienced heavy losses and were placed into conservatorship. The government then advanced them a whopping $190 billion of taxpayer money to keep them afloat.
At the time, this action was described as “one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets in decades.”
Turns out, the drama wasn’t over. In fact, it was just getting started…
After changing the terms of the conservatorship, both organizations were seized by the U.S. Treasury in 2012 to avoid a financial catastrophe like the one that had occurred during the Great Recession a few years earlier.
Given the benefit of experience, you would think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s financial problems would have been cleaned up and resolved. But in a recent hearing for the Senate Banking Committee, Trump Administration officials warned, “The U.S. housing finance system is…
“Worse off today than it was on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis.”
If the situation is worse now than it was 11 years ago, that means the $190 billion bailout didn’t do much good.
In fact, officials from the Administration are also warning that lending standards have deteriorated since 2008 and the two entities lack sufficient capital. (These loose lending standards help to explain the rise of unconventional loans.)
In light of these facts, the Committee meeting examined the Administration’s call to end conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie. In the hearing, Senator John Kennedy lamented that the “whole thing is a car wreck. It’s a dumpster fire.”
Senator Mark Warner added, “We could end up with a system that actually doesn’t end too-big-to-fail and doesn’t increase affordable access to credit” and is “going to put us right back to where we were prior to 2008.”
Together, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae control about $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities. That means the impact from any “car wreck”, like Senator Kennedy alluded to, could potentially be catastrophic to the economy.
Fannie and Freddie Are Severely Over-Leveraged
On its own, this information from the Committee hearing is sobering enough, but the same meeting also shed light on another disturbing fact:
“I will tell you as a safety-and-soundness regulator, when I look at a $3 trillion institution that is leveraged 1,000 to 1, it keeps me up at night,” Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria, the companies’ regulator, told the committee.
Thanks to a directive from Congress, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are allowed to keep a total of $6 billion ($3 billion each) as a capital buffer. But they own or guarantee almost $5 trillion in mortgage securities.
That’s why Calabria is losing sleep at night. Two entities that control half of the mortgage-backed securities in the U.S. are effectively one thousand times over-leveraged.
To put that in perspective, if just 0.12% of Fannie and Freddie’s mortgages go bad (about one-tenth of 1%), it would wipe them out completely. They’d have no capital left. And without a government bailout, they might cease to exist altogether.
Fannie and Freddie are critical to maintaining liquidity in the real estate market. Without these two entities repackaging and guaranteeing mortgages, the sale of homes would be decimated, causing a massive ripple effect across the entire real estate market.
It would not be an understatement to say that billions (if not trillions) in savings could be wiped out within months of Fannie and Freddie going belly up.
Maybe that should be keeping all of us up at night, too.
Don’t Let a Housing “Car Wreck” Ruin Your Retirement
These are interesting times indeed. The impending housing bubble, a rise in risky loans, and both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae may be heading towards the end of the road. And all of them seem to be following a similar script to 2008.
Don’t let your retirement suffer, like many did after the Great Recession. Now is a good time to consider hedging your bets.
Diversify into assets known to be a source of protection during times of economic disruption, such as gold and silver. There may never be a better time to protect your savings than right now.
With global tensions spiking, thousands of Americans are moving their IRA or 401(k) into an IRA backed by physical gold. Now, thanks to a little-known IRS Tax Law, you can too. Learn how with a free info kit on gold from Birch Gold Group. It reveals how physical precious metals can protect your savings, and how to open a Gold IRA. Click here to get your free Info Kit on Gold.
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