New photos show a staircase leading downstairs, as a former contractor claims the convicted pedophile built a 1,000 sq ft underground 'strip-club' for entertaining his VIP guests with teenage girls.
(AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE) -- A new study tallies the cost of U.S. wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and finds that they have cost us $6.4 trillion: American taxpayers have spent $6.4 trillion on post-9/11 wars and military action in the Middle East and Asia, according to a new study. That total is $2 trillion…
Roughly 23,000 years ago in modern-day Israel, a small tribe of ex-cave dwellers built a tiny village near the Sea of Galilee that may have been one of the earliest agrarian societies in human history.
Archaeologists discovered the site more than thirty years ago.
And they found tens of thousands of well-preserved seeds and agricultural tools, suggesting that the people who lived there planted a great deal of food in the fertile lands nearby.
As historian Will Durant once wrote, “the first culture is agriculture.” And he was right. Civilization as we know it has its foundations in agriculture.
When human beings came out of caves, stopped roaming the wild, and began planting seeds to feed their families and tribes, they were able to produce more food than they consumed for the first time in the history of our species.
And because it only took a handful of people to feed an entire village, everyone else was able pursue other vocations like architecture, science, mathematics, medicine, etc.
Freed from the daily toil of survival, our ancestors invented trade, commerce, writing, and everything else that fueled progress over the next 10,000 years.
And this simple concept of producing more than you consume has been the foundation of human prosperity for millennia.
It’s also one of the basic principles of capitalism. People who produce and save are supposed to be rewarded. People who irresponsibly go in to debt to consume are supposed to be punished.
But not anymore.
Back in 2014, the European Central Bank made history when they pushed interest rates into negative territory.
Literally never before in the history of the world had interest rates been negative. And little by little, those negative rates have been spreading.
A recent report published by the Financial Times showed that 60% of German banks are now passing on that negative interest to their customers.
In other words, if you save money, you have to pay the bank interest. And many banks are now starting to pay customers to borrow money.
This is totally upside down. Saving is penalized, and debt is rewarded.
But the breakdown in the system doesn’t stop there.
I’ve written extensively about how some of the most popular investments in the world are companies that lose enormous amounts of money and have no plan to consistently turn a profit… ever.
Uber, for example, lost a whopping $5.2 billion just in the second quarter of this year. WeWork has been a never-ending saga of burning through billions of dollars of investors’ capital.
Even Tesla and Netflix both continue to post multi-billion dollar cash flow losses.
Yet according to a recent Bloomberg survey, these are some of the most popular investments in the world.
It’s almost as if the more money these companies lose, the more desirable they are to Wall Street.
Again– totally upside down. A business is supposed to make money for its shareholders, or at least present a credible plan to eventually do so.
Curiously, though, there are now at least 181 CEOs of some of the largest companies in the United States– from Apple to JP Morgan– who say that driving shareholder value should no longer be the priority of business.
They have re-imagined the “purpose of a corporation” as “not the sole pursuit of profits, but the animating force for achieving them,” whatever the hell that means.
Even the Financial Times– formerly one of Britain’s only sane newspapers– has launched a new project with a tagline, “Capitalism: Time for a Reset”.
You can’t simply go into business to provide value to customers, employees, and shareholders anymore.
Now there has to be some woke purpose that involves diversity, the environment, and whatever else happens to be on the Bolshevik progressive agenda.
Shareholders are not even allowed to decide who should/should not run their own companies anymore.
Multiple countries (Belgium, India, Germany, Norway, Spain, France) and US states (California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey) have already passed some sort of legislation mandating diversity requirements on company boards.
So company director positions must now go to people based on the government’s pre-determined racial and gender criteria, and not to the people who shareholders think will do the best job.
(The criteria themselves are also absurd– women, African Americans, and Latinos are included, but Native Americans, trans people, and anyone who identifies as a seedless watermelon are excluded.)
This is all a total breakdown in the system.
And on top of everything else, of course, we have dozens of Bolshevik US Presidential candidates who are foaming at the mouth with hatred for capitalism and wealthy citizens.
The Bolsheviks want to confiscate wealth, nationalize entire industries, and engage in countless other social/economic programs that are ripped from the pages of the Communist Manifesto.
They despise billionaires in particular– 607 Americans who have generated trillions of dollars of economic activity, created millions of jobs, and donated hundreds of billions of dollars to charity.
Bill Gates uses his wealth to eradicate disease and save lives around the world.
Yet Elizabeth Warren thinks that the US government– the same institution that spent $2 billion to build a website– can deploy his capital more effectively.
These are the new rules of upside-down capitalism:
– Debt is wealth
– Loss is the new profit
– ‘Wokeness’ above all else
– Rich people are evil
– Socialism makes sense
It’s amazing how quickly this new reality took over… and I shudder to think how much more absurd it will become over the next few years.
Prince Andrew is named in a cache of secret legal documents detailing explosive new allegations against Jeffrey Epstein that could be unsealed by a U.S. judge before the end of the year.
THE JOURNAL’S FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power - that the company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users.
Police in Tempe, Arizona, announced plans in July for a “positive-ticketing” campaign to pull over drivers who had violated no traffic laws. A Phoenix TV station reported that the police would give the people they targeted free soft-drink coupons for Circle K as a reward for their “good driving behavior.” Police in other areas have run similar programs in recent years but the TV news report on Tempe’s plan spurred a torrent of testy Tweets:
“Keep your hands on the wheel and don’t make any sudden moves while you are being rewarded, it could cost you your life.”
“We gunned him down…. well, he refused to stop for his coupon. Self defense. Case dismissed.”
“Um, WHAT?!? They better not stop me for driving legally cause that’s illegal! #harassment”
“What if you don’t stop?”
“Cops to profile for illegal immigrants under the guise of campaign to promote good driving.”
“There goes probable cause right out the window. Police state 101.”
“I would get a panic attack. My reward for driving well is not dying. That’s all I want.”
“Unless it’s a ruse to illegally search your vehicles. And if they notice anything out of line during the mock pullover you’ll be arrested.”
“What’s next? Are they going to start walking into people’s houses to congratulate them for not breaking the law?”
One commenter suggested he could be fined for “resisting a coupon” for free drinks.
A few months before its “positive ticketing campaign” announcement, Tempe police were harshly criticized after one of their officers shot a 14-year-old boy in the back, killing him as he was running away while holding a replica airsoft pistol. An Arizona ACLU employee summarized the situation on Twitter:
“Tempe cops: the community doesn’t trust us after we shot and killed an unarmed teen (sic) what do we do
Community: stop killing us
Tempe cops: FREE THIRSTBUSTERS AND UNREASONABLE STOPS”
The Tempe Police Department responded to the uproar by issuing a statement stating that they never intended to pull over motorists without good cause. Instead, the free-coupon program would be targeted to pedestrians, bicyclists, and skateboarders. But the furious reaction of people across the nation signaled the profound distrust of police.
This is presidential campaign season, and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg claims that he will be able to end the pervasive distrust of the police. In one of the first candidate debates, he said he is “determined to bring about a day when” any driver, white or black, has “a feeling not of fear but of safety” when he sees a police officer approaching.
And how would Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, achieve this profound change? He has not yet detailed his panacea. Perhaps he believes that sensitivity training or racial consciousness-raising classes could do the trick. But Buttigieg has ignored the real source of the problem: politicians have given police so much power that citizens naturally fear them.
Arresting anyone
In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that police can justifiably arrest anyone believed to have “committed even a very minor criminal offense.” That case involved Gail Atwater, a Texas mother who was driving slowly near her home but, because her children were not wearing seatbelts, she was taken away by an abusive cop whose shouting left her children “terrified and hysterical.” A majority of Supreme Court justices recognized that “Atwater’s claim to live free of pointless indignity and confinement clearly outweighs anything the City can raise against it specific to her case” — but upheld the arrest anyhow.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that “such unbounded discretion carries with it grave potential for abuse.” Unfortunately, there are endless pretexts for people to be arrested nowadays because federal, state, and local politicians and officials have criminalized daily life with hundreds of thousands of edicts. Capt. Steve Powell of the Colorado State Patrol commented, “Ninety percent of the cars out there are doing something that you can pull them over for. There are a jillion reasons people can be stopped — taillights, windshields cracked, any number of things.” Gerard Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in the 1990s, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law. I could write you a hundred tickets depending on what you said to me when I stopped you.”
Justice O’Connor noted in her dissent that the Fourth Amendment “guarantees the right to be free from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures.’” But when politicians have enacted endless laws that make almost everyone a criminal, then the Fourth Amendment is practically null and void.
Asset-forfeiture laws give police sweeping arbitrary power over Americans’ wallets, cars, and homes. Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher told the Supreme Court in 2018 that the government is entitled to confiscate cars that exceed speed limits by 5 miles per hour — a standard that would justify seizing most vehicles. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from 60,000 travelers on the nation’s highways — with no criminal charges in the vast majority of cases, the Washington Post reported.
Police have been trained to confiscate private property of drivers by absurdly claiming that “trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks, or air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors” are signs of criminal activity. Blacks and Hispanics have been victimized far more often by such laws. Tenaha, Texas, police ran an operation that stopped and plundered almost anyone passing through their East Texas locale. The names of the court filings capture Tenaha’s voraciousness, such as State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix. “The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” the New Yorker noted. If drivers “refused to part with their money, officers threatened to arrest them on false money laundering charges and other serious felonies,” an ACLU lawsuit charged. Tenaha police stopped a 27-year-old black man who worked as a chicken slicer in a Tysons plant in Arkansas and fleeced him of $3,900 after detecting him “driving too close to the white line.”
Subverting the Fourth Amendment
Police have gutted the Fourth Amendment with dogs that will give them a positive alert almost any time they seek a pretext to forcibly search someone’s vehicle. The fact that canines are sometimes trained to give false alerts is irrelevant as long as the government always wins. Canine alerts to currency are routinely used to justify seizures even though most U.S. currency has trace amounts of drug contamination. For 30 years, the courts have condemned the abuses based on currency seizures due to dog alerts. But the official robberies continue.
There is a long history of federal, state, and local officials partnering to fabricate pretexts to stop drivers. From 1992 through 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration illegally commandeered the phone records of all Americans who called most of the foreign nations in the world, as USA Today revealed in 2015. To keep its phone-record seizures secret, the DEA partnered with local police to concoct phony reasons for traffic stops that sometimes included staging fake auto accidents and even car thefts. Why should citizens trust law-enforcement agencies that engaged in decades of systemic fraud? If bureaucrats and cops gave themselves an unlimited right to lie regarding the source of their evidence, what other lies have they permitted themselves in the war against any American who possesses substances of which politicians disapprove?
Uncle Sam has brought the surveillance state to the nearest police car dashboard. Federal grants have enabled many states and localities to equip police cars with license-plate scanners that provide plenty of bogus pretexts to harass hapless drivers.
License-plate readers often misread plates. Brian Hofer was pulled off Interstate 80 in California and handcuffed and held at gunpoint after his rental vehicle was misreported as stolen. Hofer commented in 2019, “I’m sitting ice-cold and saying nothing because I do not want any itchy trigger fingers.” With an error rate approaching 10 percent, license-plate readers effectively generate potentially thousands of false accusations each day.
Subverting the Second Amendment
Local officials exploit surveillance data to subvert the Second Amendment. John Filippidis was driving with his family through Maryland when he was pulled over by a Maryland transportation policeman outside a Baltimore tunnel. The policeman ordered Filippidis out of his car and angrily demanded to know where his gun was. Filippidis has a Right to Carry (RTC) permit from Florida — where he had left his firearm. Police spent hours questioning him and searching his minivan before permitting him to move on, leaving his wife and daughters utterly distraught. Maryland police have targeted and rigorously searched other out-of-state drivers with RTC permits (which Maryland does not recognize). Federal grants enabled Maryland to equip hundreds of police cars with license-plate scanners that create almost 100 million records per year detailing exactly where and when each vehicle travels.
The war on drugs and its endless crackdowns and intrusions spurred far more distrust of police but politicians learned nothing from its debacles. Sixteen states have raised the smoking age to 21, and there is a push (supported by Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) to dictate a federal smoking age of 21. Why not simply issue a federal mandate for an annual additional 10 million unnecessary confrontations between police and youth? Criminalizing private vices is the surest way to make law enforcement a public menace.
Citizens are wary of police cars in their rear-view mirrors because politicians and judges made average Americans legally inferior to anyone with a badge and a gun. Police almost always receive legal immunity when they unjustifiably shoot people — it is practically a perk of their job. The existence of video footage from dashboard cams and police cameras is helping to ravage the final remnants of police credibility in many areas. The pervasive cover-ups and lies that follow dubious killings by police do more to spur wariness than a million “Officer Friendly” public-service announcements can counteract.
The best way to encourage citizens to have “a feeling not of fear but of safety” when they see a cop is to repeal legions of laws empowering police to unjustifiably accost and wrongfully subjugate peaceful citizens. But that is unlikely to happen as long as most politicians are more interested in power than in domestic tranquility.
In a surprising finding using the standard animal model of Down syndrome (DS), scientists were able to correct the learning and memory deficits associated with the condition — the leading genetic cause of cognitive disability and the most frequently diagnosed chromosomal disorder in the U.S.
ORIGINAL LINK In Shock To $3.5 Trillion Healthcare Industry, Trump Admin Will Force Hospitals To Disclose "Secret" Insurance Rates
In a move that will send shockwaves across the $3.5 trillion US healthcare industry, on Friday the Trump administration unveiled a plan that would - for the first time - force hospitals and insurers to disclose their secret negotiated rates, the WSJ reported.
In hopes of bringing some transparency and openness to a pathologically opaque industry, one which many have blamed for being behind the explosion in US underfunded liabilities to more than $100 trillion, administration officials said the final rule will compel hospitals in 2021 to publicize the rates they negotiate with individual insurers for all services, including drugs, supplies, facility fees and care by doctors who work for the facility. The White House would also propose extending the disclosure requirement to the $670 billion health-insurance industry. Insurance companies and group health plans that cover employees would have to disclose negotiated rates, as well as previously paid rates for out-of-network treatment, in computer-searchable file formats.
As the WSJ notes, the proposal covering insurers is the newest part of the price-disclosure initiative, and would include the private-employer market, where about 158 million people get their health insurance. Insurers and group health plans would have to put the negotiated rates into a file that third-party developers could incorporate into shopping tools. As with hospitals, insurers will have to create a web-based tool for beneficiaries that discloses the list price, the negotiated rate, cost sharing, and the amount left on a plan deductible, as well as allowable out-of-network rates.
The requirements, which are more far-reaching than industry leaders had expected, could upend commercial health-care markets, which are rife with purposefully complex systems of hidden charges and secret discounts which enable the fleecing of either end users or chronically underfunded government healthcare programs. The price-disclosure initiative has become a cornerstone of the president’s 2020 re-election health strategy, despite threats of legal action from industry.
“Right now there is too much arbitrage in the system,” a senior administration official said in an interview Thursday with The Wall Street Journal. “There are a ton of vested interests who will oppose this. We expect to get sued. We’re really goring people’s oxes.”
Hospitals and insurers typically treat specific prices for medical services as closely held secrets, with contracts between the insurers and hospital systems generally bound by confidentiality agreements. Policy makers, employers and patients are often unable to see clearly which hospital systems and doctor practices are driving high costs.
Ironically just a few days ago we showed why "US Healthcare Costs Are Exploding", and the primary culprit was soaring insurance and medical care service fees. If there is one thing that could potentially put a dent in this exponential surge, it is the elimination of all the various secret price deals and arrangements.
Why is transaprency good? Because as studies have shown, consumers are often required to pay more out of pocket when they don’t have the price information they need to comparison shop. Employer health-plan deductibles are outpacing wage growth and have risen to an average $1,655 for a single plan, according to a September survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Workers on average pay $6,015 toward the cost of their coverage.
Taken together, the WSJ notes, "the price-disclosure initiatives could reshape the $3.5 trillion health-care industry."
The good news: the much needed transparency finally may bring some - literal - price discovery to what has traditionally been the most opaque, and lucrative, sector for the aging and chronically obese US population. The bad news: as Trump is going against trillions in vested interests, expect even more "whistleblowers" to emerge from the sector that has chronically been the biggest lobbyist of Washington...
... doing their best to bring the president down.
Meanwhile, as Americans lament soaring prices of, well, everything, after shelter and rent costs, the second biggest drain of US household income and savings is insurance premiums.
Controversy erupted on Wednesday when two contestants on “Survivor: Island of the Idols” admitted that they exaggerated a #MeToo allegation of “inappropriate touching” to win the game.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expects to have face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people in its biometrics database by 2022. Is there any way to escape the mass surveillance and tracking that George Orwell warned us all about in his iconic book, 1984?
Tyler Durden Fri, 11/15/2019 - 23:05
Tyler Durden Fri, 11/15/2019 - 09:43
