Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Spooks
- Sentencing
- Tanking
- Simon
- Coordination
- Hack
- Unity
- Spooks. One of the lessons learned by those who have fought with Donald Trump in the real estate wars is that he generally wins, and if sufficiently irritated, he will bankrupt you. This is most recently demonstrated by the $239,000 lawyer fees judgment against porn star Stormy Daniels. So how would Trump do a similar thing to the Deep State FIB, (In)Justice, and other ne’er-do-wells illegally hounding him and his people? One way would be to set them up, and there are at least two bloggers out there who believe he has done just that. The event in question is a raid by the FIB on the home of a US government whistleblower on 18 Nov 18. Someone leaked information that he was storing original evidence devastating to the Clintons and Special Prosecutor Mueller in his home. The goal of the raid was to get the original evidence, all of it and destroy it. The bloggers believe that the raid was a setup, intentionally leaked information so as to smoke out yet more Mueller and Comey-friendly FIB agents in the FIB and (In)Justice and force them to act. And act they did. Problem is that the whistleblower appears to have been a decoy, and that the original whistleblower has all materials and hard copy is currently under protection. John Solomon reported this on Hannity on 30 Nov 18. Whoever ordered the raid, likely at the behest of Mueller and / or his prosecutors, was both deceived and exposed. Question is who set them up? The answer would be Trump-friendly military intelligence agents put into place by General Mike Flynn at the DIA and Defensive Clandestine Service. Most of these guys learned their trade in actual hostile combat theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decades. Others learned against the Russians and ChiComs. The existence of these guys is one of the reasons the civilian intel community and law enforcement absolutely despised Flynn and targeted him right off the bat for destruction. Problem is that Trump and Flynn knew what was coming before he took office and set into motion a counter working in the very black world to smoke out every single O’Bama and Clinton goon and thug possible. With this raid, Mueller, Comey and the Special Counsel Office are in a world of hurt. If they stop what they are doing, O’Bama, Clinton and all their goons are exposed. If they keep on going, they continue to commit new crimes, engage in additional prosecutorial misconduct framing, prosecuting, and going after innocents. To protect their own criminality, they are protecting criminals. Now I have no idea what is going on. But I do know Trump does not trust federal law enforcement or the civil intel community. OTOH, he gets along quite well with the military. While this is likely just wishful thinking, I am starting to wonder if all of this isn’t a setup for a large caliber shot of Drain-O for the swamp. Stranger things have happened. https://quodverum.com/2018/12/337/trump-s-master-spooks.html
- Sentencing. I will wait the Flynn sentencing for next week. Wanted to discuss the Cohen sentencing last week to campaign finance violations and tax evasion / tax fraud. The most interesting thing out of the plea was that Cohen pled guilty to something that is not a crime, the use of Trump personal funds to pay extortion by Stormy Daniels during the campaign. It appears that Mueller and his buds in the Southern District of NY are creating a new crime out of thin air to charge Trump with, even though the law is clear, and most recently upheld by a very quick jury decision in the John Edwards trial in 2012. Paying someone to keep quiet is not illegal. Threatening to go public unless you get paid is. We generally call it extortion. This is something that appears to be outside the realm of experience among federal prosecutors these days. Democrats and media were quick to jump on the bandwagon with promises to investigate and impeach Trump for this newly created violation of campaign finance laws. But there is a little problem in their newly found paradise, as Congress has a slush fund that pays sexual harassment claims by its members. Over the last 20 years, that fund has paid over $17 million of taxpayer dollars for 264 sexual harassment claims. Use taxpayer dollars to shut someone up = legal. Using your own dollars = illegal. Got it. Final funny observation on our newfound Victorian prudishness is that the democrats are trying to both reopen and lose a political argument they won and closed in 1997. That was the year of the Clinton impeachment which the media and democrats managed to turn what was a very clear abuse of office and perjury issue into what they called a private sexual affair between two consenting adults. Now that Trump is involved in something sexual and a Republican, they want to turn back the clock 20 years and lose the argument they won in the public arena. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/27/sexual-harassment-fund-exposes-congress-editorials-debates/898008001/
- Tanking. The last couple months in the stock market has been ugly, with it now below where it was at the first of the year. The Fed is playing along, helping the slide with threats to jack up interest rates in the absence of inflation. Their excuse is concern over impending inflation. Stocks crashing the worst are in the tech sector, leading no small number of those on the conservative side of the house to start head scratching about intentional tanking of the stock market by Big Tech and the leftist billionaires to in turn bring down the economy and with it, the Trump presidency, not unlike what some believe took place in 2008. I am not sold on the intentional crash in 2008, though I most certainly believe democrats pushed it and greased the path before it on the way down (Chuckie Schumer’s letter on Lehman Brothers June 2008 for instance), and did everything they could to turn the crash to their political advantage. With Big Tech, we have the modern equivalent of the Robber Barons of 130 years ago. They have theirs and are not particularly interested in the ability of any of the rest of us to make ours, enjoying their newly constructed feudal system in California. I have yet to find anything tying them to the ongoing crash but would put nothing past them in this regard. Our response? Keep on working, keep on building, keep on drilling, keep on raising our kids. And if the Robber Barons of Big Tech want to crash their market in order to hurt Trump, buy as much stock as possible at the bottom, as it will eventually go back up. https://www.cnbc.com/id/25654303
- Simon. Julian Simon famously made a wager with biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1980 over relative scarcity of resources for the decade of the 1980’s. Ehrlich famously predicted catastrophic population growth would outstrip the ability to provide food and resources in his 1968 Population Bomb. Simon thought it was nonsense and proved it in his Ultimate Resource. The bet was that the inflation corrected prices of 5 commodities selected by Ehrlich would not increase. Al 5 metals selected by Ehrlich and his fellow travelers fell, and Ehrlich paid the bet in October 1990. The idea behind Simon’s Ultimate Resource is that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource and will be brought to bear on all resource scarcity problems by simple economics. The only caveat is that this always works as long as governments stay out of the way. With this in mind, the editor of Human Progress and a Professor expanded Simon’s idea by gathering 37 years of data on 50 commodities to develop a new way to measure resource availability. They call the new measure the Simon Index. During the period 1980 – 2017, the commodities in their basket decreased in price by an average of 36% the same time the population of humanity has increased by nearly 69% to 7.55 billion. They introduce something they call the price elasticity of population, a measure that finds that “Every additional human being born on our planet appears to make resources proportionally more plentiful for the rest of us”, a measure that proves Simon’s contention that human ingenuity is the Ultimate Resource. Finally, they figured out how to compound resource availability over the period, finding that resources are nearly four times more abundant in 2017 than in 1980. They go on to describe the earth as a closed system in the same way a piano is a closed system. A piano only has 88 possible notes, but they can be combined in nearly infinite ways. The only thing that matters is the human freedom to experiment and create new ways to use the resources we have on hand. As we expand into space, that ingenuity will be applied to a much, much larger stage. If the singularity guys are correct, that rate of change / improvement will accelerate due to the penetration of technology (new tools and techniques) into the general economy. https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/simon-abundance-index-new-way-measure-availability-resources
- Coordination. Sara Carter reported last week that Mueller’s attack dog, federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman met with AP reporters to either leak or coordinate information on Mueller target Paul Manafort. At the time, Weissman was the head of the (In)Justice Fraud Division at the time. This was before he was hired by the Mueller prosecution. Weissman met with AP reporters after they told him of their investigation into Manafort. The AP published their story the day after meeting with Weissman. Reporters had promised to share documents and information on their investigation with Weissman, who apparently took it with him to Mueller’s operation. Nobody from either Mueller’s office or (In)Justice chose to comment on the story. https://saraacarter.com/andrew-weissmann-met-with-ap-reporters-to-discuss-paul-manafort-case-before-joining-special-counsel/
- Hack. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) was hacked during the 2018 campaign and lost thousands of internal e-mails to an outside intruder. There appeared to be four targets who were surveilled for months. The intrusion was detected in April by a vendor who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor. There was an internal investigator and the FIB was alerted to the attack. Here’s where it gets weird. The hack was first detected by MSSP, a managed security services provider. They informed the NRCC who in turn notified CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm retained by the NRCC. Where have we heard about CrowdStrike? It was the company hired by the DNC in 2016 to analyze their hacked servers. It was the company that told the FIB, who accepted their analysis and results without doing any forensic analysis of their own, that Russians hacked the DNC. And for some reason, the NRCC decided to hire them too. Interesting timing, that, as I have not heard of any hacks of Republicans over the last election cycle. They hire CrowdStrike and immediately get hacked. If it were me, I’d hire another security contractor. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/04/exclusive-emails-of-top-nrcc-officials-stolen-in-major-2018-hack-1043309
- Unity. Virgin Galactic flew their fourth powered test flight of the former SpaceShip Two, renamed Unity last week. This flight was the first to officially reach space, above 80 kilometers, making the two pilots officially commercial astronauts. This was the longest powered flight of the vehicle. The flight carried four NASA technology payloads. This is the fourth rocket powered launch since the fatal crash of a previous version Halloween 2014. Since then, the new vehicle has extensive engine testing, seven glide tests, and currently its fourth powered flight. Branson’s plan is to conduct multiple flights with an eye on starting a successful sub-orbital tourist operation. This test is yet another step along the path to that goal. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/virgin-galactic-flight-could-send-first-astronauts-to-edge-of-space.html
More later –
– AG