Author Archives: lawofmarkets

Getting the unbalanced just right

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On the one hand:

Longtime Trump Org CFO granted immunity...
'Narrow in scope'...
Manhattan D.A. Eyes Criminal Charges...
'We don't know quarter of what's in pocket of Mueller'...
RUDY TAKES SHOT AT PRESIDENT FOR 'FLIPPING' COMMENTS...
LEAK: Aides expect to go rogue on pardon...
DRAMA: George Conway tweets again...
Mueller Muzzles Manafort...
BUCHANAN: We are headed for hellish year...
DAN RATHER: STAY TUNED...
Kavanaugh argued the president can be impeached for lies, cover-ups and refusing to testify...
Dems' midterm strategy: Stop talking about Trump... 

But then on the other:

STOCKS RECORD HIGH...

The most climate-skeptical nation on Earth

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This is how our political troubles have been viewed in the US, at least according to the Crackpot News Network: Why not wreck the planet? It could save your political skin. Although already overtaken by events, there you may read:

(CNN) There is a certain mindset in politics, present the world over and across the political spectrum, which distrusts expertise. That mindset is presently revealing itself in Australia, where this week a small group of conservative-minded members of parliament held the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, hostage over climate policy.

Turnbull’s center-right Liberal party had pledged to reduce emissions from Australia’s energy companies more than a quarter (from 2005 levels) by 2030, a key part of its efforts to meet its international obligations.

 

But several of his own MPs, led by his predecessor as prime minister and long-term rival Tony Abbott, forced him into a climbdown by threatening to vote against the legislation. Turnbull’s government barely has a majority in the House of Representatives, and losing such a key vote could have led to a leadership challenge. Cowed, he dropped the pledge, and on Tuesday narrowly survived the revolt.

 

Yet for large parts of the political class here, and the people who vote for them, climate change is seen as a scam perpetrated by liberal, anti-business scientists.

 

One in five Australians, a poll last year showed, believe that climate change is a “hoax.” Another poll in 2015 declared that Australia was the most climate-skeptical nation on Earth.

 

Abbott himself has said that the “settled science” of climate change is “absolute crap” and that efforts to reduce its impact are like “killing goats to appease the volcano gods.” Another politician, the anti-immigration populist Malcolm Roberts, has clashed with scientist Brian Cox, claiming that NASA data was “manipulated” to make climate change appear worse than it was, to Cox’s astonishment.

 
And you can see here the evidence we are ignoring, from that same report.
 

Australia is a country where environmental damage is obvious, in the form of the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic caused by use of CFCs decades ago, the steady bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef from warming, carbon-dioxide-acidified seas, and the ever more prevalent bushfires.

Makes me proud to be an Australian.

 

Small mercies

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No doubt we should be grateful for small mercies. Malcolm is gone, although not gone all that far, and that is something. Scott Morrison is a step up, but lacks either gravitas or the charismatic glow. Perhaps we will be surprised, but I won’t be surprised if we’re not surprised. But he can win the next election and I most assuredly hope he does.

But what has been the most disturbing part of the day’s events were the 40 votes cast against the spill. It is possible the number was made up to save a bit of face for Malcolm. On the other hand, it really may reflect the attitudes within the party room. It would mean near enough half the Liberal Party is made up of Keynesian central planners who think they can spend our money better than we can, and who see themselves at the centre of the economy by dispensing billions towards their favourite projects. These same people wonder why productivity growth has come to a stop. Economic illiterates, but then most economists are as well. No idea how a decentralised economy causes growth almost without effort. They did it themselves under Peter Costello who made the economy hum by savage cuts to public spending and the easing of some of the burdens placed on businesses by governments. You can see the same result in the US right now, but no one here or there sees the cause and effect relationship between freer markets and economic prosperity.

The 40 votes against the spill also suggest that a large part of the party accept that global warming is such a major and pressing problem that it is worth wrecking our economy and our productive base to do what they can to ward off this phantom catastrophe. For myself, anyone who entertains this possibility at this late date is a credulous fool of the highest order, basically a simpleton without a shred of common sense. We sell our coal which gets burned up in a far more polluting way than if we used “clean coal” ourselves. And whether or not we stopped selling coal in an act of suicidal idiocy, the CO2 levels will do whatever they will do with our sacrifice or without. Meanwhile more and more Australians will freeze in the dark as the power bills go up.

The Libs plus the Nats remain better than Labor, and Morrison does at least have form in having stopped the boats and does apparently want to cut back on public spending. And all those folk who think letting Labor have a go while the Libs rejig themselves are the worst fantasists of all.

We must all live in hope, but as they say, hope is not a policy. We shall see.

Some people just can’t take a joke

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From The Mail Online:

EXCLUSIVE: Jeremy Corbyn said British ‘Zionists’ have ‘no sense of English irony despite having lived here all their lives’ and ‘need a lesson’, while giving speech alongside Islamic extremists at a conference publicised by Hamas’ military wing

  • The comments were made when Corbyn  spoke at a 2013 conference advertised by the propaganda website of Hamas’ military wing
  • Corbyn said that British ‘Zionists’ didn’t understand ‘English irony’
  • He added: ‘They needed two lessons, which we could perhaps help them with’
  • Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: ‘This shows the reality of what Jeremy Corbyn thinks of Jews’

And then from Drudge:

President Tweet on SAfrican Land Seizure Draws Govt’s Ire…
MALEMA: ‘Only death will stop us’…
SAYS ‘JEWS’ TRAINING RIGHT-WING SNIPERS…

“A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived in Gross Error and Ignorance”

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A note to me from the author.

If you want to stop and reverse the resurgence of socialist ideas on campus and elsewhere, here’s an excellent vehicle for doing it:

This thirty-three thousand word essay is now available in Kindle format at Amazon.com for just 99¢. Go here to order it.

Royalty free licenses are available for anyone who wants to assign the essay to a class or distribute it to any special group, such as the members of an organization or its contributors, or to one’s personal list of friends and associates. Write to me at g.reisman@capitalism.net to request such a license along with a copy from which duplicates can be made either for distribution online or in hardcopy format.

You gotta try, but the hill to climb does keep getting steeper and more difficult. Might just mention Scott Johnson discusses just this today: Socialism as a Hate Crime. What is there not to understand about one of the most intense political failures in the history of the human race? But whatever there is, no actual real world experience ever seems to get vast numbers to see the disastrous futures they plan for themselves should they actually achieve their political ends.

Tony Abbott for Prime Minister

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I just spent the afternoon re-reading Tony Abbott’s outstanding Battlelines, his 2009 tract on political philosophy. It reads better now than when it was first published.

We are about to have a race between three mediocrities to replace a non-entity, with Tony standing on the sidelines. The Libs have a proven vote winner who was sandbagged from his first day in office by an incompetent Minister who wanted the job for himself, and when he had it, drove the party into the ground. Now there will be one more try to get it right.

Abbott understands the major policy issues of our time, and he stands on the right side of history. Not everyone will see this as a positive, but he is our Donald Trump. The left hates him, and rightly, because he sees through everything they have tried to do and wish to do. The left are the party of Venezuela, decay and ruin. Tony Abbott, with a cabinet onside with his fundamental liberal-conservative philosophy, is far and away the best hope we have for renewal, growth, prosperity and freedom.

Tony, please run. And as for the rest of you in the party, restore as your leader the only person in Parliament with the stature, the knowledge and now the deeper understanding of politics to lead.

Trumped up charges

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Before I add my own comment, you are advised (urged) to look at this post at Reddit: Connecting some dots. You are guaranteed not to read it in the papers.

Now to Manafort and Cohen, which is, in essence: “Look Michael, see what we did to Paul. Well we can do the same to you.” And they can. And they will, if he does not cooperate 100%. So what is the issue? This is how Manafort fits in:

The trial of Manafort, who chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in mid-2016 when Trump was selected as the Republican presidential nominee, never dealt with possible collusion between the campaign team and Russia or efforts to obstruct justice that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating.

But they got their man. So how does Cohen fit in: Cohen testifies Trump told him to commit crime by paying off women. This, by the way, is not illegal:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified on Tuesday that Trump had directed him to commit a crime by arranging payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

This is what’s illegal:

“Today he (Cohen) stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis said in a statement.

And only if that was the reason is it even technically illegal, and only because the payment was not declared as an election expense. If he merely wished to avoid having to deal with his wife over the question of adultery, say, then it is not illegal for him to have paid these women to keep things to themselves.

We are dealing with some of the sleaziest people you will ever see and I don’t in this case mean Stormy Daniels. Meanwhile it is very likely that Cohen will say whatever he is told to say:

Cohen, 51, made the statements as he pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges in federal court in Manhattan, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

If they can get him out, they will get him out. All of it right before your righteous eyes.

MEANWHILE: Unless you have been paying close attention, you won’t even know who this is: JUDGE GIVES NO JAIL TIME TO IMRAN AWAN, ATTORNEY CLAIMS HE WAS BUILDING ‘WOMEN’S SHELTER’. The major points in the story:

  • Former IT aide Imran Awan received no jail time Tuesday after a federal judge said he had “suffered enough.”
  • His lawyer said his “destitute” client was building a charity hospital, but reports show that the land was also used for a real estate development and was allegedly stolen from farmers.
  • Former Democratic chiefs of staff wrote letters of support for Imran, despite IT-violation findings by the House inspector general and Capitol Police.

Here is an anodyne version of why he was up on charges:

Imran and his family were banned from the House computer network in February 2017 after the House’s top law enforcement officer wrote that Imran is “an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems,” and that a server containing evidence had gone “missing.” The inspector general said server logs showed “unauthorized access” and procurement records were falsified.

The best bit in the story is that Imran actually thanked the prosecutors! He also no doubt has more material than Julian Assange that if he leaked it out could put half the Democrat caucus away for a very long time.

And I like this from some comment somewhere:

Mueller’s novel and idiotic theory is that Trump’s blackmail payoff was an illegal campaign contribution to himself.

I wonder if that really is the scope of it.

They don’t care if you know because you cannot do a thing

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One of the best things about living in an open society is that you find out about many things you might otherwise not have found out, even criminal conspiracies, but nothing ever happens since in many cases the criminals are at the very top. This is from Stacy McCain in a post he titles, Who Is Lisa H. Barsoomian? It is a direct reprint from this post at Reddit. Every fact is verifiable, but they don’t care if you know because you cannot do a thing about it.

I am passing this on from someone who’s connecting some dots with input from sources he cannot reveal.

Here’s what it looks like when all the pieces are sewn together

It smells like conspiracy and treason. Everyone needs to read this. Slowly, and patiently, because it’s very important……

From 2001 to 2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

A Grand Jury had been impanelled.

Governments from around the world had donated to the “Charity”.

Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton Foundation were declared. Now you would think that an honest investigator would be able to figure this out.

Look who took over this investigation in 2005: None other than James Comey; Coincidence? Guess who was transferred into the Internal Revenue Service to run the Tax Exemption Branch of the IRS? None other than, Lois “Be on The Look Out” (BOLO) Lerner. Isn’t that interesting?

But this is all just a series of strange coincidences, right?

Guess who ran the Tax Division inside the Department of Injustice from 2001 to 2005?

No other than the Assistant Attorney General of the United States,

Rod Rosenstein.

Guess who was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during this time frame?

Another coincidence (just an anomaly in statistics and chances), but it was Robert Mueller.

What do all four casting characters have in common?

They all were briefed and/or were front-line investigators into the Clinton Foundation Investigation.

Another coincidence, right?

Fast forward to 2009….

James Comey leaves the Justice Department to go and cash-in at Lockheed Martin.

Hillary Clinton is running the State Department, official government business, on her own personal email server.

The Uranium One “issue” comes to the attention of the Hillary.

Like all good public servants do, supposedly looking out for America’s best interest, she decides to support the decision and approve the sale of 20% of US Uranium to no other than, the Russians.

Now you would think that this is a fairly straight up deal, except it wasn’t, America got absolutely nothing out of it.

However, prior to the sales approval, no other than Bill Clinton goes to Moscow, gets paid 500K for a one hour speech; then meets with Vladimir Putin at his home for a few hours.

Ok, no big deal right? Well, not so fast, the FBI had a mole inside the money laundering and bribery scheme.

Robert Mueller was the FBI Director during this time frame? Yep, He even delivered a Uranium Sample to Moscow in 2009.

Who was handling that case within the Justice Department out of the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland?

None other than, Rod Rosenstein. And what happened to the informant?

The Department of Justice placed a GAG order on him and threatened to lock him up if he spoke out about it.

How does 20% of the most strategic asset of the United States of America end up in Russian hands when the FBI has an informant, a mole providing inside information to the FBI on the criminal enterprise?

Very soon after; the sale was approved!~145 million dollars in “donations” made their way into the Clinton Foundation from entities directly connected to the Uranium One deal.

Guess who was still at the Internal Revenue Service working the Charitable Division? None other than, – Lois Lerner.

Ok, that’s all just another series of coincidences, nothing to see here, right?

Let’s fast forward to 2015.

Due to a series of tragic events in Benghazi and after the 9 “investigations” the House, Senate and at State Department, Trey Gowdy who was running the 10th investigation as Chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi discovers that the Hillary ran the State Department on an unclassified, unauthorized, outlaw personal email server.He also discovered that none of those emails had been turned over when she departed her “Public Service” as Secretary of State which was required by law. He also discovered that there was Top Secret information contained within her personally archived email.

Sparing you the State Departments cover up, the nostrums they floated, the delay tactics that were employed and the outright lies that were spewed forth from the necks of the Kerry State Department, we shall leave it with this…… they did everything humanly possible to cover for Hillary. .

Now this is amazing, guess who became FBI Director in 2013? None other than James Comey; who secured 17 no bid contracts for his employer (Lockheed Martin) with the State Department and was rewarded with a six million dollar thank you present when he departed his employer? Amazing how all those no-bids just went right through at State, huh?

Now he is the FBI Director in charge of the “Clinton Email Investigation” after of course his FBI Investigates the Lois Lerner “Matter” at the Internal Revenue Service and he exonerates her. Nope…. couldn’t find any crimes there.

In April 2016, James Comey drafts an exoneration letter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile the DOJ is handing out immunity deals like candy.They didn’t even convene a Grand Jury!

Like a lightning bolt of statistical impossibility, like a miracle from God himself, like the true “Gangsta” Comey is, James steps out into the cameras of an awaiting press conference on July the 8th of 2016, and exonerates the Hillary from any wrongdoing.

Do you see the pattern?

It goes on and on, Rosenstein becomes Asst. Attorney General,Comey gets fired based upon a letter by Rosenstein, Comey leaks government information to the press, Mueller is assigned to the Russian Investigation sham by Rosenstein to provide cover for decades of malfeasance within the FBI and DOJ and the story continues.

FISA Abuse, political espionage….. pick a crime, any crime, chances are…… this group and a few others did it:

All the same players.

All compromised and conflicted.

All working fervently to NOT go to jail themselves

All connected in one way or another to the Clinton’s.

They are like battery acid; they corrode and corrupt everything they touch.How many lives have these two destroyed?

As of this writing, the Clinton Foundation, in its 20+ years of operation of being the largest International Charity Fraud in the history of mankind, has never been audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Let us not forget that Comey’s brother works for DLA Piper, the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

The person that is the common denominator to all the crimes above and still doing her evil escape legal maneuvers at the top of the 3 Letter USA Agencies?

Yep, that would be Hillary R. Clinton.

Now who is LISA BARSOOMIAN? Let’s learn a little about Mrs. Lisa H. Barsoomian’s background.

Lisa H. Barsoomian, an Attorney that graduated from Georgetown Law, is a protégé of James Comey and Robert Mueller.

Barsoomian, with her boss R. Craig Lawrence, represented Bill Clinton in 1998.

Lawrence also represented:

Robert Mueller three times;

James Comey five times;

Barack Obama 45 times;

Kathleen Sebelius 56 times;

Bill Clinton 40 times; and

Hillary Clinton 17 times.

Between 1998 and 2017, Barsoomian herself represented the FBI at least five times.

You may be saying to yourself, OK, who cares? Who cares about the work history of this Barsoomian woman?

Apparently, someone does, because someone out there cares so much that they’ve “purged” all Barsoomian court documents for her Clinton representation in Hamburg vs. Clinton in 1998 and its appeal in 1999 from the DC District and Appeals Court dockets (?). Someone out there cares so much that even the internet has been “purged” of all information pertaining to Barsoomian.

Historically, this indicates that the individual is a protected CIA operative. Additionally, Lisa Barsoomian has specialized in opposing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the intelligence community. Although Barsoomian has been involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC Office of the US Attorney, her email address is Lisa Barsoomian at NIH.gov. The NIH stands for National Institutes of Health. This is a tactic routinely used by the CIA to protect an operative by using another government organization to shield their activities.

It’s a cover, so big deal right? What does one more attorney with ties to the US intelligence community really matter?

It deals with Trump and his recent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports, the border wall, DACA, everything coming out of California, the Uni-party unrelenting opposition to President Trump, the Clapper leaks, the Comey leaks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14 month nap with occasional forays into the marijuana legalization mix …. and last but not least Mueller’s never-ending investigation into collusion between the Trump team and-the Russians.

Why does Barsoomian, CIA operative, merit any mention?

BECAUSE….

She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s WIFE!