PC: The Real Danger

One of PC's hallmarks is anti-competition.

Twitter is a PC run organization.

medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump

Competition is acknowledgement of real diversity, one of the ideas the phony PC crowd claims they promote and revere--diversity.

Twitter has come under fire for selective censoring. The answer to selective censoring is competition. Open free, competition as in free speech. Like Google and many others Twitter disdains free speech. So does Hollywood.  We won't mention CNN because nearly everyone now knows what they are with their Hollywood-connected leadership.

Here's what competition looks like and whether you agree or disagree it's one of the most important reasons if you value your freedom to fight and defeat PC. Stacking the courts is hardly new. The outgoing administration attempted to stack the FCC and did a pretty good job of it. With the influx of poorly vetted at best Syrian immigrants they are doing their best to stack those red areas of rural America that costs them this past election.

If you can't figure out where that will lead, you deserve what you'll get.
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fastcompany.com/3065777/inside-gab-the-new-twitter-alternative-championed-by-the-alt-right

The purge is happening. At least according to the universe of alt-right users on social media: Many of them claim that in recent days their Twitter accountshave been suspended and that their posts on Facebook are not being promoted or shared like they used to. It’s all part of a crackdown on "fake news" in the wake of reports that misleading reports shared on Facebook and Twitter helped influence the election. To many, these efforts are an overdue attempt to maintain online civility. But to others it’s blatant censorship.

For those alt-right individuals and other social media refugees who feel that their views are suppressed, there’s a new social network that promises a digital space for completely free and unfettered communications. Gab, a platform that looks and feels like a combination of Twitter and Reddit, is meant to "put people first and promote people first," as it was described to me by its founder. And this week, it’s been attracting thousands of users, many of them alt-righters exiled from Facebook and Twitter, though its founder insists that it aims to expand beyond that community and build a more diverse audience. Even Richard Spencer, who leads the far-right National Policy Institute think tank and is widely credited with inventing the term "alt-right"had his Twitter account suspended on Tuesday and soon increased the frequency of his posts on Gab.

Gab is the brainchild of Andrew Torba, an adtech startup founder who now lives in Austin after a stint in Silicon Valley. He found the politically progressive atmosphere of the Bay Area to be stifling, making him uncomfortable about expressing his views, and he moved to Texas to help build his fledgling social network. He was once a member of Y Combinator (he was recently ousted), and has now taken on the mission of fixing what he sees as the censorship that plagues online spaces. The tipping point that pushed him to leave the tech bubble and start Gab came earlier this year, when he read that several Facebook employees had come forward to divulge that the network’s trending topics section was actively suppressing conservative news. "I knew I had to take action," Torba says.
So he created Gab, which is similar to Twitter in that users can only write a limited number of characters (up to 300) in a single post and also mimics Reddit in that these posts can be up-voted or down-voted.

Whose Fake News

It's interesting how selective MSM and the other crybaby losers can be when it comes to fake news.

Let's just start with an interview of once big-time network news anchor Brian Williams who was back on network television covering the recent election.

Q: Mr. Williams, how many dead bodies was it again you saw floating past your Ritz Carlton hotel room during Katrina? How deep was the water again outside your landlocked hotel? And run that dangerous helicopter story by us again, if you will. You know, the one former military people who were there proved you lied about and you gave a phony public apology on national television.

And we need USA Today to tell us how many completely fabricated phony stories one of their foreign correspondents a few years back filed. The number if you knew would surprise before his editors caught on or got caught. And while we're at it Washington Post, let's go over that Bob Woodward intern story who got an award for a totally phony story she wrote about an inner city young person. It was both PC and PF--politically correct and also patently false.

And we're just scratching the surface here. MSM has a long history of fabricating the news. But somehow or other we don't think we're going to hear from these folks. Here's an excerpt from a 2007 piece on the subject from the Columbia Journalism Review, hardly a right wing organization.

www.cjr.org/feature/before_jon_stewart.php

Fake news has been with us for a long time. Documented cases predate the modern media, reaching as far into the past as a bogus eighth century edict said to be the pope-friendly words of the Roman emperor Constantine. There are plenty of reports of forgeries and trickeries in British newspapers in the eighteenth century. But the actual term “fake news”—two delicious little darts of malice (and a headline-ready sneer if ever there was one)—seems to have arisen in late nineteenth century America, when a rush of emerging technologies intersected with news gathering practices during a boom time for newspapers.

The impact of new technology is hard to overestimate. The telegraph was followed by trans-Atlantic and transcontinental cables, linotype, high-speed electric presses and halftone photo printing—wireless gave way to the telephone. The nation, doubled in population and literacy from Civil War days, demanded a constant supply of fresh news, so the media grew additional limbs as fast as it could. Newly minted news bureaus and press associations recruited boy and girl reporters from classified ads—“Reporting And Journalism Taught Free Of Charge”—and sent their cubs off to dig up hot stories, truth be damned, to sell to the dailies.

By the turn of the century, the preponderance of fakery was reaching disturbing proportions, according to the critic and journalist J.B. Montgomery-M’Govern. “Fake journalism,” he wrote in Arena, an influential monthly of the period, “is resorted to chiefly by news bureaus, press associations and organizations of that sort, which supply nearly all the metropolitan Sunday papers and many of the dailies with their most sensational ‘stories.’”

Montgomery-M’Govern delivers a taxonomy of fakers’ techniques, including the use of the “stand-for,” in which a reputable person agrees to an outrageous lie for the attendant free publicity; the “combine,” in which a group of reporters concoct and then verify a false story; the “fake libel” plant, in which editors are duped by conspirators into running false and litigious articles; the “alleged cable news” story, in which so-called “foreign reports,” dashed off in the newsroom or a downtown press association, are topped with a foreign dateline and published as truth. The editors of huge Sunday editions, with their big appetites for the juiciest stuff (what M-M calls “Sunday stories”) naturally set the bar lower for veracity than they did for hot-blooded emotional impact.

One could easily add to those fake techniques a journalism staple, the attribute "a source close to "or "an un-named source said...."  Once upon a time when the three main networks controlled nearly everything, they lied to the population on a consistent basis. Their favorite method, fake news stories.

Dedicated To FT

One of Trump's biggest critics has been the snobby crowd at the Financial Times. Just this week they had a few of their resident intellects go off on Trump's seemingly disjointed transition. They suffer  from selective memory, one of the hallmarks of their kind of intellectualism.

The other is revisionism, like Lincoln didn't win the popular vote either.

Nor does it matter that people from the left like Joe Biden and others have stated they were no further along in the transition process at this point for Mr. Obama than the Trumpsters are now. No matter. These people want what they want and they sure as hell know what they don't want, anyone in a position of power who disagrees with them.

So we dedicate this article to the Financial Times and their editorial board who have been pounding their rocks against Trump way before it looked as if he could even win the primary let alone create their worst nightmare. We have no particular interest in Trump. Our attention was arrested way before even the primaries. When you see so many people lining up to beat on one guy, you know the chickens are threatening to come home to roost. And the more you look the more you realize who and where those chickens are--two corrupt political parties, Hollywood, Wall Street and and all those
corporates who pay lip service with one side of their mouths and steal from common people with the other.
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Moments ago, the Hollywood Reporter released the much anticipated Michael Wolff interview with Steve Bannon, the controversial president-elect's chief strategist. As a preface, Wolff reveals that Bannon - unlike virtually anyone else in the "credible" media - predicted exactly how things would play out:

In late summer when I went up to see Steve Bannon, recently named CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, in his office at Trump Tower in New York, he outlined a preposterous-sounding scenario. Trump, he said, would do surprisingly well among women, Hispanics and African-Americans, in addition to working men, and hence take Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and therefore the election. On Nov. 15, when I went back to Trump Tower, Bannon, promoted by the president-elect to chief strategist for the incoming administration, and by the media as the official symbol of all things hateful and virulent about the coming Trump presidency, said, as matter-of-factly as when he first sketched it out for me, “I told you so.”

Perhaps Trump naming Bannon "chief strategist" is not a bad idea.
Below we picked a few of the most notable excerpts from the interview, starting with Wolff's description of what he saw on the day he visited Trump. He writes "the New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of “disarray” for the transition team." It appears the NYT was being a source of fake news again:

"In fact, it’s all hands on: Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and by many accounts his closest advisor, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: “Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?”), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it’s a peculiarly focused and organized kind."

Why did Wolff pick Bannon as the subject of his interview: simple - he is the brains of the operations, the man whose job is to make the Trump regime "intellectually and historically coherent."

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth. A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School. Then it’s Goldman Sachs, then he’s a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune — then into the otherworld of the right wing conspiracy and conservative media. (He partners with David Bossie, a congressional investigator of President Clinton, who later spearheaded the Citizens United lawsuit that effectively removed the cap on campaign spending, and who now, as the deputy campaign manager, is in the office next to Bannon’s.) And then to the Breitbart News Network, which with digital acumen and a mind-meld with the anger and the passion of the new alt-right (a liberal designation Bannon derides) he pushes to the inner circle of conservative media from Breitbart's base on the west side of liberal Los Angeles.

Incidentally, Bannon appears to be a fan of "darkness":

“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Bannon next discusses the "battle line" inside America's great divide.

zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-18/steve-bannon-interviewed-issue-now-about-americans-looking-not-get-f.....over.

He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver—” by "we" he means the Trump White House "—we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Trump's strategist views himself as a simple symbol: the "fall of the establishment." He also slams the media: "The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country....It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern." He's right.

Bannon represents, he not unreasonably believes, the fall of the establishment. The self-satisfied, in-bred and homogenous views of the establishment are both what he is against and what has provided the opening for the Trump revolution. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

Bannon's vision: an "entirely new political movement", one which drives the conservatives crazy. As to how monetary policy will coexist with fiscal stimulus, Bannon has a simple explanation: he plans to "rebuild everything" courtesy of negative interest rates and cheap debt throughout the world. Those rates may not be negative for too long. 

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

The Real List

The real list of fascists collaborators

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The Threats Continue

How do you spell survival. Panic.

The threats continue. You will do what we say or else pay a severe price. Sit idly around  or get your voice heard. Just never claim you had no choice. Note here Brexit is not even suppose to be on the agenda of these bureaucrats at this meeting.
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Britain could be forced to write cheques to Brussels until 2030 despite leaving the EU, the German finance minister has warned.

Wolfgang Schauble delivered his blustering warning as Theresa May flew into Berlin for talks with Angela Merkel and other world leaders.

Mr Schauble said post-Brexit Britain would be bound by tax rules restricting it from granting incentives to keep investors in the country. He also insisted there will be no special deal to curb freedom of movement if the UK wants to remain part of the common market.

Signalling that the bloc is determined to take a tough line in looming negotiations, Mr Shauble - a key ally of Mrs Merkel - said: 'Until the UK's exit is complete, Britain will certainly have to fulfil its commitments.

'Possibly there will be some commitments that last beyond the exit… even, in part, to 2030.'

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3948808/We-not-letting-EU-German-finance-minister-warns-Britain-paying-Brussels-coffers-2030. 

Worse Nightmares

Worse nightmares depend on who gets to define them. But if you're currently one of the entrenched elitist crowd (See EU bureaucrats!), here's your worst nightmare in quite succinct language.

So when the protected class of well-paid institutional "progressives" speak darkly of "reversing 40 years of social progress," what they're really saying is we're terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness.

To understand the Great Con of political correctness, we must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as "the middle class"), i.e. those who must sell their labor to earn their livelihood.

Labor's share of the national economy has been declining for 46 years:

So where has the wealth that's been generated ended up? In the hands of the .1%

You'll find a healthy dose of Silicon Valley techo heads here.

charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-great-con-political-correctness-has.

Three Cheers

Three cheers for Poland.

No, we're not Polish. But anyone who stands up to the repressive, freedom-threatening European Union (See Netherlands for future threats.gatestoneinstitute.org/9311/europe-free-speech ) gets our vote of support. Hello Brexiters.

Bureaucrats are great at threatening people. It's the essence of PC. Rightwing nationalists (MSM loves to attach names to anyone and everyone who differs with them.) in Poland have, according to the Financial Times, taken heart from Brexit and Trump. One Times columnist writes, "Tide of populism threatens to engulf Austria and Italy."  When it was a tide of PC designed to silence any and all dissenters, these folks were remarkably silent.

You have it all in the last sentence of this quote from the Times: "Warsaw....." It tell you all you want to know.
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The defiant stance has come despite the commission’s threats of sanctions and its unprecedented decision to accuse Warsaw of endangering democracy, which some EU officials fear will be found to be toothless.

“As far as we are concerned, there is no procedure,” said a senior Polish diplomat in reference to the “rule of law” measures brought against the country. “We want to fix this problem by ourselves. There is almost no one in Warsaw who will listen to what the commission wants to say.

“As far as we are concerned, there is no procedure,” said a senior Polish diplomat in reference to the “rule of law” measures brought against the country. “We want to fix this problem by ourselves. There is almost no one in Warsaw who will listen to what the commission wants to say.

“We should not be triumphalist … but I do not expect any developments,” he added, echoing comments by other senior officials.

The EU has faced a dilemma over how to respond to Poland. The commission relies on member state support for its warnings to carry weight.

Yet Poland’s ally Hungary will block any action, and Germany and other big countries are unwilling to intervene for fear it would achieve nothing but sour relations with Warsaw. Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission president, has hinted that proposing sanctions would be pointless “because some member states are already saying they will refuse to invoke it”.
The political drift has given the Warsaw government space to achieve its goals. The expiry of the court chairman’s term on December 19 will allow it to install its own nominee and raise the number of government-friendly judges on the bench.

“It is pretty inevitable that by 19 December they will have control of the constitutional tribunal … I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” said a senior EU diplomat involved in the issue.
Since coming to power a year ago, Law and Justice has passed a series of laws giving it control over public media channels and the public prosecutor, while purging opponents from state-run companies. This has startled EU officials, who fear the Law and Justice government is replicating the “illiberal democracy” of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s leader.

Warsaw accuses the commission of overreaching and trampling on Poland’s sovereignty.

Facts Not Sides

Remember it wasn't just the left calling Trump a racist and such. Many on the right, particularly the WSJ, rolled out similar epithets.Now many of these people are kissing his ass trying to get government appointments.

Here are a couple of interesting reads to show just  how biased MSM is. This is not about sides; it's about the facts. What a large segment right and left of this society doesn't want you to know.

slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf

thehill.com/homenews/house/306480-115th-congress-will-be-most-racially-diverse-in-history

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source).



Trump made gains among blacks. He made big among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

Overnight

Not since January has the Nikkei 225 been this high as the yen weakened further against the dollar brightening the outlook for Japanese exporters. Up 0.7% to 17,989.73 early, the index hit as high as 18,043.72 and could finish up 3.6%, the biggest weekly gain since mid-August.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen's hawkish talk in Washington Thursday no doubt added to the hoped for rise interest rates next month, the first one in a year. That and hopes the new administration headed to Washington will help stimulate spending. The yen traded at 110.45 compared with levels below 105.00 prior to the U.S. election results. In other markets, the Hang Send was up 0.17%, the ASX 200 0.31%, Kospi down -0.34% and the Shanghai composite off -0.32%.

Reuters reported that:"Yellen testified to Congress where she said in prepared remarks that a rate hike could be "appropriate relatively soon," and added there were dangers to waiting too long to tighten monetary policy. She added she would not step down from her position as the head of the Federal Reserve until the end of her term. Her comments pushed the dollar higher, with the dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, reaching a session high of 101.32.
However, shares in Asian emerging markets faced further selling pressure, with analysts expecting more declines given that rate increases will likely spur a flight of capital back to the U.S., as investors search for higher yields. In Indonesia, the Jakarta Composite Index JAKIDX, +0.15%  was last down 0.5%, while the FTSE Bursa Malaysia Index FBMKLCI, -0.37%   was off 0.3%. “I expect the broad selloff to continue in emerging markets in Asia because I feel if the rates in the U.S. are really going to go up, there is no point putting your money in risky countries,” one analyst noted.

Oil prices fell as hopes that members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could reach a deal to cut output at their Nov. 30 meeting took a dive. Brent crude, the global price benchmark, was last down 1.0% at $46.01 a barrel overnight. The strong dollar didn't help gold and other so-called safe haven investments as the yellow stuff $1,207.40 an ounce, down 0.80%.

Economists Like To Flap

So you sold off your utility shares and other high yielding holdings scared off by the prospect of higher interest rates. And that might yet come, given Fed Chair Yellen's hawkish views today in Washington.

But the hike expected next month is already in the market if the sell off in bonds means anything. All of the damage there is most likely not just wishful thinking about more fiscal stimulus. But there might be fly in that linear thinking salve, an apparent overlooked one by many. The Trump corporate tax cut should it happen.

In his Financial Times "Hunt for groups that are not yet priced properly for a tax cut," John Authers cites Citi equity strategist Tobias Levkovich, "a cut to 20 per cent from the current effective rate of nearly 27 per cent would add $12 to his current top-down estimate of $129 for next year's S&P 500 earnings." Authers then ask which firms would be most sensitive to the tax cut, pointing out energy is one sector that has already benefited lower rates owing to loopholes or inversions.

Inversion were not very popular with Democrats and the outgoing administration you will recall. Quoting Levkovich, Authers writes: "telecoms and utilities stand to benefit most." Adding to that and the much disliked inversions where some politicians called those firms who sought them "traitors" and "un-American." It's a toss up which of these two pathetic excuses for parties and political leadership likes name calling the most, but by our reckoning it's the left.

Hoards of non-US earning idle overseas owing to unfriendly tax laws here at home. Should that change significantly that money could find its way here and add fuel to the markets flames in the form of buybacks and higher dividends. Critics will no doubt protests this won't help jobs and productivity. No, probably not. But it might help pension funds and insurance companies and other yield-starved folks.

It might also boost small cap firms despite their already strong performance. This is not to say, as Authers notes, there's an absence of other headwinds. There certainly are some loitering about. But if you're an investor you often have to take what the market gives you and skip all the name callers and    economists flapping their tongues. That is, unless you've forgotten these academics have successfully predicted 10 of the last three recessions.