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Vlad's Your Uncle, So Who's Your Vladdi?
Saturday, December 31, 2016
HAPPY NEW YEAR, Impudels!
(Impudent Infidels = "Impudels!" You read it here, first LOL)! And insolent infidels = "insodels!"
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Top 10 establishment-media cover-ups of 2016
From here:
At the end of each year, many news organizations typically present
their retrospective replays of what they consider to have been the top
news stories of the previous 12 months.
WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here, with the contribution of WND readers, are the 2016 picks:
1. The contents of the Podesta emails:
The hacking of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, certainly drew attention, with President Obama punishing Russia for the alleged act this week, without any hard evidence. Podesta, himself, declared the hacking of election-related emails the political equivalent of the 9/11 attack.
What was largely missing in establishment media coverage of the approximately 50,000 Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, however, was the content of the messages. The emails shed light, for example, on Clinton campaign collusion with the media, pay-to-play schemes involving the Clinton Foundation when Clinton was secretary of state, Clinton’s profiting from Wall Street bankers and the DNC’s rigging of it primary at the expense of Bernie Sanders.
Here are a few of the many revelations:
2. The true Obama economy:
President Obama repeatedly has boasted that he pulled the U.S. economy from the brink of depression and into robust growth, and Politico declared in December that Trump will inherit an “Obama boom,” handing his successor “an economy that’s now the envy of the world.”
But voters apparently thought otherwise, particularly the working
class in the rust belt who flipped their Democratic-leaning states to
Donald Trump. And there are economists who share their skepticism of the
“Obama recovery.”
Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara, the author of a report titled “Why the United States Has Suffered the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression,” noted Obama and his defenders often point out the recovery was especially strong given the depths of the financial crisis. Ferrara said that’s exactly backward.
“The American historical record is the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. So there should have been an economic boom coming out of the recession in the summer of 2009. Here we are, eight years later, and that still hasn’t happened,” Ferrara said.
He said it has not happened because Obama pursued a Keynesian economic strategy that is a proven failure.
“Keynesian economics is a doctrine that the road to economic recovery is to increase government spending, deficits and debt. If that sounds crazy, it is crazy. It was introduced in the 1930s. It failed to end the Great Depression, but extended it and made it even worse,” Ferrara explained.
Obama issued labor regulations in the last year of his presidency estimated to cost the economy roughly $80 billion over the next 10 years and eliminate 150,000 jobs, according to a report from the National Association of Manufacturers.
Ferrara pointed out there was twice as much economic growth under Jimmy Carter as under Obama in his first term.
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Under Obama, poverty rates skyrocketed and the middle class suffered a fiscal punch to the stomach, with income falling throughout his entire two terms in office.
But Ferrara has hope that President-elect Donald Trump will pursue a Reagan-like economic agenda.
“The reason Trump is going to create a boom is because every one of the key policies is doing the opposite of what Obama did,” Ferrara said. “He has proposed to cut taxes like Reagan did. He has proposed to reduce regulatory burdens like Reagan did. He will appoint good members to the Fed that will restore sound monetary policy that will stabilize the dollar over the long run.”
3. The doubling of the national debt under Obama
Perhaps the biggest symbol of Obama’s economic legacy is the national debt.
Currently at $19.9 trillion, it is projected to hit $20 trillion by Inauguration Day, up from $10.6 trillion when Obama entered the White House in 2009.
It means Obama will have added to the debt as much as all previous 43 presidents combined.
Whether the economy is up or down, Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” is a proven plan for financial fitness
Two graphs illustrate why many financial analysts are concerned. The first shows the steep climb in debt under Obama.
The second shows the sharp rise in total U.S. credit market debt, including household debt and credit card debt, that has occurred since the 1980s. The total U.S. credit market debt hit a high of approximately 385 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2009-2010 during the recession brought on by the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in office.
The graph shows the ratio of total U.S. credit market debt to the GDP has fallen off in recent years, down to a current level of about 355 percent of GDP.
The drop-off has occurred only because household debt has been declining since 2010 while government spending has continued to rise.
Among the many concerns is that the staggering increase in U.S. national debt over the past eight years has limited the ability of the federal economy to stimulate the economy. Typically, monetary policy has employed deficit spending, a tool popular with economists who follow Keynesian principles of economic theory.
Last June, the Congressional Budget Office issued a 2015 budget assessment concluding that the long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.
As a result, budget deficits rose, totaling $5.6 trillion in the five years between 2008 and 2012. Four of the five years had budget deficits larger in relation to the size of the economy than any budget deficit since 1946, the year immediately after the end of World War II.
The CBO concluded that the federal debt held by the public nearly doubled during this period. In 2015, the federal debt held by the public was equivalent to 74 percent of U.S. GDP, a higher percentage than at any point in U.S. history, except for a seven-year period around World War II.
The CBO further projected that with the continued aging of the population and the rising of health-care costs, the federal deficit will grow from less than 3 percent of GDP in 2015 to 6 percent in 2040, at which point the federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP – a level considered by many traditional economists to be seriously detrimental to U.S. economic growth.
4. Illegal aliens’ impact on national presidential popular vote:
Shortly after the election, as the media was making hay of Hillary Clinton’s margin of more than 2 million in the national popular vote, Donald Trump tweeted that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College tally “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” prompting a media uproar.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram insisted there “has been no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that would have had to taken place to give Clinton millions of illegitimate votes.”
But voter-integrity activists, who point out that 19 states did not require identification to vote Nov. 8, believe Trump may be right.
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, who waged a years-long fight against the IRS over its targeting of conservative groups, pointed out that without voter ID, “fraud has been institutionalized,” allowing non-citizens to flood voter rolls.
While there are no reliable figures yet on the number of illegal-alien voters, indications of the impact are there, said the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading researcher of vote fraud.
He cited a case brought by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that found some 1,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just a eight Virginia counties shortly before the election. Many already had voted in prior elections.
And, he noted, a 2013 national survey by John McLaughlin found 13 percent of non-citizen Hispanics admitted they were registered to vote.
Just months before the 2016 election, von Spakovsky had warned that several organizations, such as the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, were fighting efforts to clamp down on non-citizens voting illegally, and they were being aided by the Justice Department.
He said the organizations sued in Washington to reverse a decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that would have allowed Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, “to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form.”
William Gheen, president of the non-profit Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, noted Obama admitted to Spanish language TV audiences comprised of illegal immigrants that illegals would face no hindrances to voting.
Even a Pew Trust study, Gheen noted, concluded the nation’s voting systems “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that … fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”
ALIPAC released dozens of pages of documentation showing 46 states have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud. It found that more than 24 million voter registrations are invalid, more than 1.8 million dead voters are still on rolls and more than 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
The Florida New Majority Education Fund, Democratic Party of Florida and the National Council of La Raza currently are under investigation for alleged voter-registration fraud.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies said that if one looks at the likely 21 million non-citizens in the United States, based on the 2015 American Community Survey, there is the high probability that a substantial number voted.
5. Obama’s stealth moves to force U.S. communities to receive Muslim immigrants
Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America can be seen in the large numbers of Somali and Syrian refugees that have been planted against the will of the people in small-to-mid-sized cities such as Bowling Green, Kentucky; Owensboro, Kentucky; and Erie, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Minnesota and Ohio continue to be sent Somali refugees even though Minneapolis and Columbus have had terror recruitment problems within their Somali communities.
But Obama’s concentration of so many refugees in one place is a clear violation of statutes directing the Office of Refugee Resettlement to “insure that a refugee is not initially placed or resettled in an area highly impacted by the presence of refugees or comparable populations.”
Ann Corcoran, a leading refugee watchdog who authors the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, believes the Obama administration and the federal resettlement contractors are deliberately trying to turn red states blue by injecting them with refugees who are likely to vote for Democrats.
“Of course it would take a while with refugee numbers, but add in the illegals, et cetera, in those states and, yes, it is about turning the state,” Corcoran said. “Consider it the California model – it worked there!”
WND’s Leo Hohmann, the author of “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” said the State Department is bringing the refugees in so fast now that it’s difficult to find places to house them.
America is headed down a suicidal path – but it’s a subtle invasion. Get all the details in Leo Hohmann’s brand-new book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad,” available now at the WND Superstore.
Through the first 11 weeks of fiscal year 2017, the United States received 23,428 individuals as “refugees,” according to the Refugee Processing Center. At this rate, the U.S. will resettle roughly 110,580 this fiscal year, which would exceed President Obama’s target of 110,000.
Contrast that with last year, when the U.S. received only 13,786 “refugees” through the first 11 weeks of FY 2016. The country would end up receiving 84,995 by fiscal year’s end.
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More than 97 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted so far this fiscal year are Muslims, as were more than 99 percent of Syrians admitted last year.
Hohmann said the U.S. has had the opposite of “extreme vetting” of Syrians over the past eight years.
“It’s gone from slack to even slacker,” he observed. “Back in the spring, Obama cut the screening period on Syrian refugees from 18-24 months down to three months by sending more screeners to the United Nations camps in Jordan and setting up a template that basically takes the refugees’ story of who they are and runs a search of social media and government databases to see if they can refute that story.
“Since there is little to no law enforcement data available on people who claim to be Syrians and false passports are easily purchased on the black market, we have no idea who these people are coming to our country as so-called Syrian refugees.”
While many Americans worry about the influx of Syrians, the U.S. has taken in even more refugees from Somalia this year. Through the first 11 weeks of FY 2017, the U.S. resettled 3,269 Somali refugees. At this rate, the country would absorb more than 15,550 by fiscal year’s end. At this point in FY 2016, the U.S. had only admitted 1,721 Somali refugees on its way to taking in 9,020 for the year.
More than 99.9 percent of the Somalis admitted this fiscal year are Muslims, as was the case in FY 2016 as well.
Hohmann noted Somali refugees are probably an even bigger risk than Syrians, as Somalis have committed several terrorist attacks on U.S. soil recently.
“There’s been no debate in Congress or the media asking the obvious questions: Why is America still taking thousands of refugees every year from Somalia more than 25 years after that country’s civil war broke out?” Hohmann asked. “How many is too many, and why aren’t the Somalis doing a better job of assimilating? Dozens have gone off to fight for overseas terror organizations while even more have been charged, tried and convicted here at home of providing material support to overseas terrorists.”
The migrant disaster in Germany should serve as a warning to the United States. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after welcoming more than a million Muslim refugees with open arms in 2015 and into the first half of 2016, did a sudden about-face after the terror attacks started piling up and the campaign season neared.
She said such a mass influx of refugees “should never be repeated” in Germany and has even talked about the need to “ban the burqa.”
Pamela Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” sees a troubling aspect of the recent Berlin truck attack that applies to the United States, which has seen eight bloody terror attacks on its soil in less than 18 months – all carried out by Muslim migrants or sons of migrants.
“Will Democrats continue to demand that we also import these invaders?” Geller said in an email to WND. “We dodged a bullet — and a truck — with Hillary Clinton, who pledged to increase Muslim ‘refugee’ immigration [from Syria] by 550 percent.”
6. Huma Abedin’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood:
Hillary Clinton’s longtime top aide and confidante Huma Abedin was a
central figure in the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly as emails
she sent and received while serving as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff
for operations at the State Department came under the FBI’s scrutiny,
culminating in a bombshell announcement by FBI Director James Comey 11
days before the election. Comey announced that the bureau had reopened
its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified
information after discovering 650,000 of Abedin’s State Department
emails on a computer owned by her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who
is under investigation for allegedly sexting a minor.
But almost entirely ignored during the campaign by establishment media or dismissed as irrelevant were Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia, including her position in her family’s institute, which was established by the Saudi government and supported by a prominent financial contributor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Abedin served for several years as an assistant editor for the institute’s journal, while her father was editor and her mother a co-editor.
Alongside Abedin on the editorial board also was Abdullah Omar Naseef, the founder of the Rabita Trust, a financial institution founded prior to 9/11 for the explicit purpose of funding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
While Abedin was working with Naseef, she was in the White House working as an intern.
Abedin then became an aide to Hillary Clinton, a senior adviser to Clinton’s senatorial campaigns and office, and eventually deputy chief of staff at the State Department.
Former CIA officer and current vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington Clare Lopez notes that it was during that period of time when U.S. foreign policy “flipped on its head.”
The U.S., she said, went from “going after jihad and jihadist like al-Qaida to, in Libya, for example, aiding and abetting known al-Qaida jihadist militias to overthrow a sitting, sovereign government led by Moammar Gadhafi, no choir boy, to be sure, but our ally at the time.”
“All of this happened during the period of time when Clinton was secretary of state and Huma Abedin was at her side, whispering in her ear,” Lopez said.
The purpose of the Abedin-run institute, as WND has reported, is to instruct Muslims in foreign countries how to live according to the dictates of Islamic law, or Shariah, so they can fulfill the ultimate objective of making Shariah and the Quran the ultimate authority in the world, overturning “man-made” institutions such as the U.S. Constitution.
A Muslim Brotherhood document entered as evidence in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history shows the Brotherhood’s aim is to carry out “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
But Philip Haney, a former DHS subject matter expert on Islam, says Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are even “broader and deeper” than Abedin’s, citing, for example, Clinton’s leadership promoting a U.N. resolution favored by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference, which is run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The resolution would effectively criminalize criticism of Islam.
In a Dec. 14, 2011, speech, Clinton said the resolution “marks a step forward in creating a safe, global environment for practicing and expressing one’s beliefs.”
“By endorsing U.N. Resolution 1618, by default Hillary Clinton is aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, on a macro, global level,” Haney says.
The U.S. government’s cooperation with its “enemies within” is graphically recounted through the eyes of a Homeland Security officer in “See Something Say Nothing.”
WikiLeaks founder Assange said the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks through its “Hillary Clinton Email Archive” contain some 1,700 emails that connect Clinton to al-Qaida and ISIS in both Libya and Syria, demonstrating Clinton supplied weapons to ISIS via Syria.
7. The threat of ISIS and its Islamic roots
Two conflicting views of the enemy the United States faces in the so-called “War on Terror” were on display as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and President Obama responded to attacks by Muslims in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey over one September weekend during the presidential campaign.
Trump, chastising Clinton and Obama for refusing to name the enemy
“radical Islam,” called the threat a “cancer from within” while Clinton
reiterated the Obama administration’s insistence that calling ISIS, the
Islamic State, Islamic would play into the hands of the jihadist group
and its allies.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest downplayed the war against ISIS, saying “in some ways, this is actually just a war of narratives” against a “poisonous, empty bankrupt mythology.”
That attitude was summarized by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the title of a Senate hearing he held in June, “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism,” in which former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney testified that the administration “purged” more than 800 of his records related to the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. because they somehow were an offense to Muslims.
Two days later, when Cruz confronted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with Haney’s testimony, Johnson insisted he had no knowledge of the incident and had never even heard of Haney. But in January, Johnson was reported saying that he not only knew about Haney’s claim, he had read an article the retired DHS officer wrote in the Hill, the influential Capitol Hill newspaper.
It’s no wonder that in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this month, Obama admitted that he was taken by surprise by the rise of ISIS as a territorial power in 2014, which he once dismissed as “the JV team.”
In May, FBI Director James Comey said
that of the nearly 1,000 FBI cases across the country looking at people
who may have been “radicalized online,” about 80 percent are tied to
ISIS.
Meanwhile, as many as 1,750 ISIS jihadists have returned to Europe with orders to carry out attacks, a European Union report warned in December.
In June, ISIS claimed responsibility for the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, as 50 people were killed at a packed gay nightclub by Omar Mateen, who was described by the ISIS Amaq news agency as an “Islamic State fighter.”
In another example, two Wisconsin men were arrested in Texas on charges of providing material support to ISIS. They were traveling to Mexico and allegedly had plans to travel on to Iraq or Syria.
In Maryland, a pro-ISIS imam at the center of a terrorism probe celebrated ISIS killings and immolations on Facebook and issued a fatwa against feminism through an Islamic law center he started in near the nation’s capital.
8. The establishment media’s ‘fake news’:
So far there’s been no solid evidence that Russian “fake news,” as the establishment media seem to believe, propelled Donald Trump to an astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton.
But in recent decades, and this year is no exception, the
establishment media itself has been shown to be a purveyor of fake news,
defined as the dissemination of false information from the government
or a favored group.
Familiar memes are: the Benghazi 9/11 attack that killed four brave Americans was caused by a YouTube video, Michael Brown had his hands up and shouted “Don’t shoot” before Ferguson cop Darren Wilson shot him and man-caused global warming is settled science.
Some would argue a prime example this year was the assertion, reported as “settled science,” that Donald Trump was a buffoonish clown who had no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the White House.
WND columnist Jack Cashill recalled others over the years:
2013: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes ran the successful, if thoroughly dishonest, “Iran-deal messaging campaign.” As the Times conceded three years later, the story the White House told America about Iran “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”
2012: A week after the Benghazi attack, Obama told David Letterman, “Here’s what happened. You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character.” The media, in the person of CNN debate moderator Candy Crowley, preserved Obama’s presidency by insisting Obama said Benghazi was a terrorist attack from day one.
2012: On Anderson Cooper’s “AC360,” CNN reporter Gary Tuchman, working with an audio design specialist, concluded that George Zimmerman referred to blacks as “coons.” This was one of a dozen fake news stories created to paint Hispanic civil rights activist and Obama supporter Zimmerman as a brutal racist in the shooting death of his thuggish attacker, the 6-foot-tall “little boy,” Trayvon Martin.
2011: Obama laid out the case for intervention in Libya, claiming that if he “waited one more day,” Gadhafi would have unleashed a massacre in Benghazi that would have “stained the conscience of the world.” Democratic Mideast expert Alan Kuperman did the calculations the media refused to do, writing two weeks later, “The best evidence that Gadhafi did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured.”
2006: “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” So said Al Gore at the premiere of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”
2004: The story supposedly was that the Bush White House willfully leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to discredit her allegedly whistleblowing husband, Joseph Wilson. After a year of Watergate-style hysteria, and eventually a movie, it turned out that Bush’s critics in the State Department accidentally leaked this utterly inconsequential bit of information.
2004: Following Barack Obama’s convention speech, the media openly celebrated what biographer David Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” The details, however, were false. Despite his parents’ “improbable love,” infant Obama never spent a night under the same the roof as the old man and no more than a few weeks, if that, in the same state.
2004: On “60 Minutes,” Dan Rather attempted to derail President George Bush’s re-election campaign by claiming Bush went AWOL from his Air National Guard service. The documents proving this claim turned out to be fake. That did not stop Hollywood from trying to exonerate producer Mary Mapes in the absurdly titled 2015 movie “Truth.”
Back in 1996, Time magazine decried the “national epidemic of violence against black churches.” In fact, more white churches than black churches burned that summer, fewer than normal in both cases, and at least as many by Satanists as presumed racists.
In 1999, to justify bombing Serbia, President Clinton accused the Serbs of “genocide.” He claimed they murdered “tens of thousands of people” and compared their actions in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The media played along. In the war’s wake, however, international teams could find no signs of genocide. “We did not find one – not one – mass grave,” said the Spanish surgeon in charge.
9. Anti-Trump hoax incidents
To fuel its narrative that the election of Donald Trump had brought about unprecedented expressions of hatred toward minorities, the media breathlessly reported “hate crimes” purportedly committed by Trump supporters.
Many
of those reports, however, turned out to be hoaxes, while actual crimes
committed by anti-Trump rioters were virtually ignored.
NBC News reported an openly bisexual Chicago student claimed she received anti-gay, pro-Trump notes and emails after the election such as “Back to hell.” Taylor Volk of North Park University said she was a victim of “a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden.” But later, a university investigation found Volk had fabricated the messages.
A whiteboard message “Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista that roiled the campus of Elon University, including condemnation from the president, turned out to have been written by a Latino student who saw it as a joke.”
Bowling Green State University student Eleesha Long falsely claimed to have been attacked on the school’s Ohio campus by three white men wearing Trump T-shirts just one day after the election.
In Philadelphia, a rash of “white supremacist” graffiti declaring “Black Bitch” and “Trump Rules” turned out to have been done by a black man.
A black man in the Boston area admitted he fabricated his claim that he was forced to run for his life after being threatened with lynching and told, “It’™s Trump country now.”
In another case, a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed two white males tore off her hijab. But the woman later admitted she made up the story.
The controversial Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report in November that compiled 867 alleged incidents of “harassment and intimidation” in the 10 days that followed the presidential election.
But many turned out to be hoaxes and most of the incidents on SPLC’s list, while deplorable if they actually happened, did not include physical violence, meaning the use of the term “attack” was misleading. Most of the incidents were uncorroborated assertions of verbal threats or racist comments that don’t appear to rise to the level of a crime, including chalking the word “Trump” on a university sidewalk and middle school students chanting “Build the wall!”
Further, SPLC’s definition of “haters” and “extremists” has been at
variance with the mainstream. The organization, for example, labeled
former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson an “extremist.” After a
nationwide backlash last year, the organization apologized and removed
the post.
But the SPLC website still has a negative “file” on Carson that insists he has said things that “most people would conclude are extreme,” such as his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
The
Southern Poverty Law Center is expose in the Whistleblower issue “THE
HATE RACKET: How one group fools government into equating Christians and
conservatives with Klansmen and Nazis – and rakes in millions doing it”
When SPLC issued a widely cited survey-report charging Trump’s election sparked “hate crimes” in schools against minorities, it censored its finding that at least 2,000 educators nationwide reported racist slurs and other derogatory language against white students.
10. Democrats’ rigging of their own primary to make sure Bernie Sanders lost
As columnist Ron Hart put it:
“Democrats and the legacy media got all twitchy after losing the
election, saying the Russians rigged it. WikiLeaks released DNC emails
showing how the DNC plotted to undermine Bernie Sanders in their
primary. So to recap, if I understand what the left is saying here,
Putin might have rigged our election by revealing how Democrats rigged
their election.”
The WikiLeaks emails, released just days before the party’s presidential nominating convention, showed how top officials at the DNC privately planned to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
In one email, DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to communications director Luis Miranda about planting a narrative to the media that Sanders’ “campaign was a mess.”
In another email in early May, DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall brought up Sanders’ “Jewish heritage,” suggesting the DNC get someone in Kentucky and in West Virginia, which were holding upcoming primary elections, to ask if the candidate believes in God.
“He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” Marshall wrote.
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – who was forced to resign because of the revelations – wrote in May that Sanders “isn’t going to be president” and “has no understanding of” the Democratic Party.
WND’s editors, however, long have considered it more newsworthy to publicize the most underreported or unreported news events of the year.
WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah has sponsored “Operation Spike” every year since 1988, and since founding WND in May 1997, has continued the annual tradition.
Here, with the contribution of WND readers, are the 2016 picks:
1. The contents of the Podesta emails:
The hacking of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, certainly drew attention, with President Obama punishing Russia for the alleged act this week, without any hard evidence. Podesta, himself, declared the hacking of election-related emails the political equivalent of the 9/11 attack.
What was largely missing in establishment media coverage of the approximately 50,000 Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, however, was the content of the messages. The emails shed light, for example, on Clinton campaign collusion with the media, pay-to-play schemes involving the Clinton Foundation when Clinton was secretary of state, Clinton’s profiting from Wall Street bankers and the DNC’s rigging of it primary at the expense of Bernie Sanders.
John Podesta
- In a March 4, 2015, email to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Cheryl Mills, Podesta asks if they should withhold email exchanges between Clinton and President Obama that were sent over Clinton’s private server a day before the House Benghazi Committee privately told Clinton to preserve and hand over all her emails.
- Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial firms, a point of contention during this year’s primary, were the subject of an email to Podesta. Excerpts from some of the speeches had been flagged by Clinton’s research team, including the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on issues. It was just part of “making sausage” in the political arena, she said, that certain positions on issues needed to be kept hidden from the public.
- Some “flags” in Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches were noted in a Jan. 25 email from campaign research director Tony Carrk to top Clinton advisers, including Clinton’s declaration, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”
- The New York Times gave the Clinton campaign veto power over which interview quotes could be used in a profile of the candidate.
- Democratic National Committee official and CNN contributor Donna Brazile apparently tipped off the Clinton campaign to a potentially difficult CNN town-hall question on capital punishment during the Democratic Party primary season.
- Podesta discussed fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church with a progressive activist while Hillary’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, mocked Catholics who speak out against the liberal social causes of the Democratic Party.
- Clinton, who has accused Trump of praising Vladimir Putin, called the Russian leader in a 2014 speech “engaging” and “a very interesting conversationalist.” Excerpts from Clinton’s speeches were contained in a document emailed to Podesta to point out quotes that could harm the campaign.
- Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton’s work-related emails, contending it showed collusion between the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign. Fallon wrote that “DOJ folks” told him a court hearing in the case had been planned.
- The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, Podesta met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department. Lawyers also told the Clinton campaign in emails that Hillary’s private email scandal “smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”
- King Muhammad IV of Morocco made a $12 million pledge to fund the Clinton Global Initiative conference, but only if the likely presidential candidate attended the event as a speaker. Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, wrote in a January 2015 email that “if HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.” Then she warned: “She created this mess and she knows it.” Hillary ended up not attending but her husband Bill did.
- In a leaked 2013 paid speech to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, Hillary said Jordan and Turkey “can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Two years later she called for a 550 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. largely from United Nations refugee camps in Jordan.
- The Clinton campaign tried to reschedule the Illinois presidential primary to lower the chances a moderate Republican would get a boost following the Super Tuesday primaries. “The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them,” wrote Robby Mook, who later became Clinton’s campaign manager, in the November 2014 email to Podesta.
2. The true Obama economy:
President Obama repeatedly has boasted that he pulled the U.S. economy from the brink of depression and into robust growth, and Politico declared in December that Trump will inherit an “Obama boom,” handing his successor “an economy that’s now the envy of the world.”
President Obama (White House photo)
Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara, the author of a report titled “Why the United States Has Suffered the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression,” noted Obama and his defenders often point out the recovery was especially strong given the depths of the financial crisis. Ferrara said that’s exactly backward.
“The American historical record is the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery. So there should have been an economic boom coming out of the recession in the summer of 2009. Here we are, eight years later, and that still hasn’t happened,” Ferrara said.
He said it has not happened because Obama pursued a Keynesian economic strategy that is a proven failure.
“Keynesian economics is a doctrine that the road to economic recovery is to increase government spending, deficits and debt. If that sounds crazy, it is crazy. It was introduced in the 1930s. It failed to end the Great Depression, but extended it and made it even worse,” Ferrara explained.
Obama issued labor regulations in the last year of his presidency estimated to cost the economy roughly $80 billion over the next 10 years and eliminate 150,000 jobs, according to a report from the National Association of Manufacturers.
Ferrara pointed out there was twice as much economic growth under Jimmy Carter as under Obama in his first term.
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Under Obama, poverty rates skyrocketed and the middle class suffered a fiscal punch to the stomach, with income falling throughout his entire two terms in office.
But Ferrara has hope that President-elect Donald Trump will pursue a Reagan-like economic agenda.
“The reason Trump is going to create a boom is because every one of the key policies is doing the opposite of what Obama did,” Ferrara said. “He has proposed to cut taxes like Reagan did. He has proposed to reduce regulatory burdens like Reagan did. He will appoint good members to the Fed that will restore sound monetary policy that will stabilize the dollar over the long run.”
3. The doubling of the national debt under Obama
President Obama (White House photo)
Currently at $19.9 trillion, it is projected to hit $20 trillion by Inauguration Day, up from $10.6 trillion when Obama entered the White House in 2009.
It means Obama will have added to the debt as much as all previous 43 presidents combined.
Whether the economy is up or down, Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” is a proven plan for financial fitness
Two graphs illustrate why many financial analysts are concerned. The first shows the steep climb in debt under Obama.
The second shows the sharp rise in total U.S. credit market debt, including household debt and credit card debt, that has occurred since the 1980s. The total U.S. credit market debt hit a high of approximately 385 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2009-2010 during the recession brought on by the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in office.
The graph shows the ratio of total U.S. credit market debt to the GDP has fallen off in recent years, down to a current level of about 355 percent of GDP.
The drop-off has occurred only because household debt has been declining since 2010 while government spending has continued to rise.
Among the many concerns is that the staggering increase in U.S. national debt over the past eight years has limited the ability of the federal economy to stimulate the economy. Typically, monetary policy has employed deficit spending, a tool popular with economists who follow Keynesian principles of economic theory.
Last June, the Congressional Budget Office issued a 2015 budget assessment concluding that the long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.
As a result, budget deficits rose, totaling $5.6 trillion in the five years between 2008 and 2012. Four of the five years had budget deficits larger in relation to the size of the economy than any budget deficit since 1946, the year immediately after the end of World War II.
The CBO concluded that the federal debt held by the public nearly doubled during this period. In 2015, the federal debt held by the public was equivalent to 74 percent of U.S. GDP, a higher percentage than at any point in U.S. history, except for a seven-year period around World War II.
The CBO further projected that with the continued aging of the population and the rising of health-care costs, the federal deficit will grow from less than 3 percent of GDP in 2015 to 6 percent in 2040, at which point the federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP – a level considered by many traditional economists to be seriously detrimental to U.S. economic growth.
4. Illegal aliens’ impact on national presidential popular vote:
Shortly after the election, as the media was making hay of Hillary Clinton’s margin of more than 2 million in the national popular vote, Donald Trump tweeted that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College tally “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” prompting a media uproar.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram insisted there “has been no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that would have had to taken place to give Clinton millions of illegitimate votes.”
But voter-integrity activists, who point out that 19 states did not require identification to vote Nov. 8, believe Trump may be right.
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, who waged a years-long fight against the IRS over its targeting of conservative groups, pointed out that without voter ID, “fraud has been institutionalized,” allowing non-citizens to flood voter rolls.
While there are no reliable figures yet on the number of illegal-alien voters, indications of the impact are there, said the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading researcher of vote fraud.
He cited a case brought by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that found some 1,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just a eight Virginia counties shortly before the election. Many already had voted in prior elections.
And, he noted, a 2013 national survey by John McLaughlin found 13 percent of non-citizen Hispanics admitted they were registered to vote.
Just months before the 2016 election, von Spakovsky had warned that several organizations, such as the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, were fighting efforts to clamp down on non-citizens voting illegally, and they were being aided by the Justice Department.
He said the organizations sued in Washington to reverse a decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that would have allowed Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, “to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form.”
William Gheen, president of the non-profit Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, noted Obama admitted to Spanish language TV audiences comprised of illegal immigrants that illegals would face no hindrances to voting.
Even a Pew Trust study, Gheen noted, concluded the nation’s voting systems “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that … fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”
ALIPAC released dozens of pages of documentation showing 46 states have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud. It found that more than 24 million voter registrations are invalid, more than 1.8 million dead voters are still on rolls and more than 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
The Florida New Majority Education Fund, Democratic Party of Florida and the National Council of La Raza currently are under investigation for alleged voter-registration fraud.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies said that if one looks at the likely 21 million non-citizens in the United States, based on the 2015 American Community Survey, there is the high probability that a substantial number voted.
5. Obama’s stealth moves to force U.S. communities to receive Muslim immigrants
Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America can be seen in the large numbers of Somali and Syrian refugees that have been planted against the will of the people in small-to-mid-sized cities such as Bowling Green, Kentucky; Owensboro, Kentucky; and Erie, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Minnesota and Ohio continue to be sent Somali refugees even though Minneapolis and Columbus have had terror recruitment problems within their Somali communities.
But Obama’s concentration of so many refugees in one place is a clear violation of statutes directing the Office of Refugee Resettlement to “insure that a refugee is not initially placed or resettled in an area highly impacted by the presence of refugees or comparable populations.”
Ann Corcoran, a leading refugee watchdog who authors the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, believes the Obama administration and the federal resettlement contractors are deliberately trying to turn red states blue by injecting them with refugees who are likely to vote for Democrats.
“Of course it would take a while with refugee numbers, but add in the illegals, et cetera, in those states and, yes, it is about turning the state,” Corcoran said. “Consider it the California model – it worked there!”
WND’s Leo Hohmann, the author of “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad,” said the State Department is bringing the refugees in so fast now that it’s difficult to find places to house them.
America is headed down a suicidal path – but it’s a subtle invasion. Get all the details in Leo Hohmann’s brand-new book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad,” available now at the WND Superstore.
Through the first 11 weeks of fiscal year 2017, the United States received 23,428 individuals as “refugees,” according to the Refugee Processing Center. At this rate, the U.S. will resettle roughly 110,580 this fiscal year, which would exceed President Obama’s target of 110,000.
Contrast that with last year, when the U.S. received only 13,786 “refugees” through the first 11 weeks of FY 2016. The country would end up receiving 84,995 by fiscal year’s end.
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More than 97 percent of the Syrian refugees admitted so far this fiscal year are Muslims, as were more than 99 percent of Syrians admitted last year.
Hohmann said the U.S. has had the opposite of “extreme vetting” of Syrians over the past eight years.
“It’s gone from slack to even slacker,” he observed. “Back in the spring, Obama cut the screening period on Syrian refugees from 18-24 months down to three months by sending more screeners to the United Nations camps in Jordan and setting up a template that basically takes the refugees’ story of who they are and runs a search of social media and government databases to see if they can refute that story.
“Since there is little to no law enforcement data available on people who claim to be Syrians and false passports are easily purchased on the black market, we have no idea who these people are coming to our country as so-called Syrian refugees.”
While many Americans worry about the influx of Syrians, the U.S. has taken in even more refugees from Somalia this year. Through the first 11 weeks of FY 2017, the U.S. resettled 3,269 Somali refugees. At this rate, the country would absorb more than 15,550 by fiscal year’s end. At this point in FY 2016, the U.S. had only admitted 1,721 Somali refugees on its way to taking in 9,020 for the year.
More than 99.9 percent of the Somalis admitted this fiscal year are Muslims, as was the case in FY 2016 as well.
Hohmann noted Somali refugees are probably an even bigger risk than Syrians, as Somalis have committed several terrorist attacks on U.S. soil recently.
“There’s been no debate in Congress or the media asking the obvious questions: Why is America still taking thousands of refugees every year from Somalia more than 25 years after that country’s civil war broke out?” Hohmann asked. “How many is too many, and why aren’t the Somalis doing a better job of assimilating? Dozens have gone off to fight for overseas terror organizations while even more have been charged, tried and convicted here at home of providing material support to overseas terrorists.”
The migrant disaster in Germany should serve as a warning to the United States. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after welcoming more than a million Muslim refugees with open arms in 2015 and into the first half of 2016, did a sudden about-face after the terror attacks started piling up and the campaign season neared.
She said such a mass influx of refugees “should never be repeated” in Germany and has even talked about the need to “ban the burqa.”
Pamela Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” sees a troubling aspect of the recent Berlin truck attack that applies to the United States, which has seen eight bloody terror attacks on its soil in less than 18 months – all carried out by Muslim migrants or sons of migrants.
“Will Democrats continue to demand that we also import these invaders?” Geller said in an email to WND. “We dodged a bullet — and a truck — with Hillary Clinton, who pledged to increase Muslim ‘refugee’ immigration [from Syria] by 550 percent.”
6. Huma Abedin’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood:
Huma Abedin
But almost entirely ignored during the campaign by establishment media or dismissed as irrelevant were Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia, including her position in her family’s institute, which was established by the Saudi government and supported by a prominent financial contributor to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Abedin served for several years as an assistant editor for the institute’s journal, while her father was editor and her mother a co-editor.
Alongside Abedin on the editorial board also was Abdullah Omar Naseef, the founder of the Rabita Trust, a financial institution founded prior to 9/11 for the explicit purpose of funding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
While Abedin was working with Naseef, she was in the White House working as an intern.
Abedin then became an aide to Hillary Clinton, a senior adviser to Clinton’s senatorial campaigns and office, and eventually deputy chief of staff at the State Department.
Former CIA officer and current vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington Clare Lopez notes that it was during that period of time when U.S. foreign policy “flipped on its head.”
The U.S., she said, went from “going after jihad and jihadist like al-Qaida to, in Libya, for example, aiding and abetting known al-Qaida jihadist militias to overthrow a sitting, sovereign government led by Moammar Gadhafi, no choir boy, to be sure, but our ally at the time.”
“All of this happened during the period of time when Clinton was secretary of state and Huma Abedin was at her side, whispering in her ear,” Lopez said.
The purpose of the Abedin-run institute, as WND has reported, is to instruct Muslims in foreign countries how to live according to the dictates of Islamic law, or Shariah, so they can fulfill the ultimate objective of making Shariah and the Quran the ultimate authority in the world, overturning “man-made” institutions such as the U.S. Constitution.
A Muslim Brotherhood document entered as evidence in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history shows the Brotherhood’s aim is to carry out “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
But Philip Haney, a former DHS subject matter expert on Islam, says Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are even “broader and deeper” than Abedin’s, citing, for example, Clinton’s leadership promoting a U.N. resolution favored by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference, which is run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The resolution would effectively criminalize criticism of Islam.
In a Dec. 14, 2011, speech, Clinton said the resolution “marks a step forward in creating a safe, global environment for practicing and expressing one’s beliefs.”
“By endorsing U.N. Resolution 1618, by default Hillary Clinton is aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, on a macro, global level,” Haney says.
The U.S. government’s cooperation with its “enemies within” is graphically recounted through the eyes of a Homeland Security officer in “See Something Say Nothing.”
WikiLeaks founder Assange said the thousands of documents released by Wikileaks through its “Hillary Clinton Email Archive” contain some 1,700 emails that connect Clinton to al-Qaida and ISIS in both Libya and Syria, demonstrating Clinton supplied weapons to ISIS via Syria.
7. The threat of ISIS and its Islamic roots
Two conflicting views of the enemy the United States faces in the so-called “War on Terror” were on display as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and President Obama responded to attacks by Muslims in Minnesota, New York and New Jersey over one September weekend during the presidential campaign.
DHS
Secretary Jeh Johnson reacts to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, confronting him
at a Senate hearing June 30, 2016, with testimony of former DHS officer
Philip Haney that his agency “purged” records related to terrorism.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest downplayed the war against ISIS, saying “in some ways, this is actually just a war of narratives” against a “poisonous, empty bankrupt mythology.”
That attitude was summarized by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the title of a Senate hearing he held in June, “Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism,” in which former Department of Homeland Security officer Philip Haney testified that the administration “purged” more than 800 of his records related to the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. because they somehow were an offense to Muslims.
Two days later, when Cruz confronted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with Haney’s testimony, Johnson insisted he had no knowledge of the incident and had never even heard of Haney. But in January, Johnson was reported saying that he not only knew about Haney’s claim, he had read an article the retired DHS officer wrote in the Hill, the influential Capitol Hill newspaper.
It’s no wonder that in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this month, Obama admitted that he was taken by surprise by the rise of ISIS as a territorial power in 2014, which he once dismissed as “the JV team.”
FBI Director James Comey
Meanwhile, as many as 1,750 ISIS jihadists have returned to Europe with orders to carry out attacks, a European Union report warned in December.
In June, ISIS claimed responsibility for the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, as 50 people were killed at a packed gay nightclub by Omar Mateen, who was described by the ISIS Amaq news agency as an “Islamic State fighter.”
In another example, two Wisconsin men were arrested in Texas on charges of providing material support to ISIS. They were traveling to Mexico and allegedly had plans to travel on to Iraq or Syria.
In Maryland, a pro-ISIS imam at the center of a terrorism probe celebrated ISIS killings and immolations on Facebook and issued a fatwa against feminism through an Islamic law center he started in near the nation’s capital.
8. The establishment media’s ‘fake news’:
So far there’s been no solid evidence that Russian “fake news,” as the establishment media seem to believe, propelled Donald Trump to an astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton.
Protests in Ferguson, Mo., turned violent after Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted in the shooting death of Michael Brown.
Familiar memes are: the Benghazi 9/11 attack that killed four brave Americans was caused by a YouTube video, Michael Brown had his hands up and shouted “Don’t shoot” before Ferguson cop Darren Wilson shot him and man-caused global warming is settled science.
Some would argue a prime example this year was the assertion, reported as “settled science,” that Donald Trump was a buffoonish clown who had no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the White House.
WND columnist Jack Cashill recalled others over the years:
2013: Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes ran the successful, if thoroughly dishonest, “Iran-deal messaging campaign.” As the Times conceded three years later, the story the White House told America about Iran “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”
2012: A week after the Benghazi attack, Obama told David Letterman, “Here’s what happened. You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character.” The media, in the person of CNN debate moderator Candy Crowley, preserved Obama’s presidency by insisting Obama said Benghazi was a terrorist attack from day one.
2012: On Anderson Cooper’s “AC360,” CNN reporter Gary Tuchman, working with an audio design specialist, concluded that George Zimmerman referred to blacks as “coons.” This was one of a dozen fake news stories created to paint Hispanic civil rights activist and Obama supporter Zimmerman as a brutal racist in the shooting death of his thuggish attacker, the 6-foot-tall “little boy,” Trayvon Martin.
2011: Obama laid out the case for intervention in Libya, claiming that if he “waited one more day,” Gadhafi would have unleashed a massacre in Benghazi that would have “stained the conscience of the world.” Democratic Mideast expert Alan Kuperman did the calculations the media refused to do, writing two weeks later, “The best evidence that Gadhafi did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured.”
2006: “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” So said Al Gore at the premiere of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”
2004: The story supposedly was that the Bush White House willfully leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to discredit her allegedly whistleblowing husband, Joseph Wilson. After a year of Watergate-style hysteria, and eventually a movie, it turned out that Bush’s critics in the State Department accidentally leaked this utterly inconsequential bit of information.
2004: Following Barack Obama’s convention speech, the media openly celebrated what biographer David Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” The details, however, were false. Despite his parents’ “improbable love,” infant Obama never spent a night under the same the roof as the old man and no more than a few weeks, if that, in the same state.
2004: On “60 Minutes,” Dan Rather attempted to derail President George Bush’s re-election campaign by claiming Bush went AWOL from his Air National Guard service. The documents proving this claim turned out to be fake. That did not stop Hollywood from trying to exonerate producer Mary Mapes in the absurdly titled 2015 movie “Truth.”
Back in 1996, Time magazine decried the “national epidemic of violence against black churches.” In fact, more white churches than black churches burned that summer, fewer than normal in both cases, and at least as many by Satanists as presumed racists.
In 1999, to justify bombing Serbia, President Clinton accused the Serbs of “genocide.” He claimed they murdered “tens of thousands of people” and compared their actions in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The media played along. In the war’s wake, however, international teams could find no signs of genocide. “We did not find one – not one – mass grave,” said the Spanish surgeon in charge.
9. Anti-Trump hoax incidents
To fuel its narrative that the election of Donald Trump had brought about unprecedented expressions of hatred toward minorities, the media breathlessly reported “hate crimes” purportedly committed by Trump supporters.
Many
of those reports, however, turned out to be hoaxes, while actual crimes
committed by anti-Trump rioters were virtually ignored.NBC News reported an openly bisexual Chicago student claimed she received anti-gay, pro-Trump notes and emails after the election such as “Back to hell.” Taylor Volk of North Park University said she was a victim of “a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden.” But later, a university investigation found Volk had fabricated the messages.
A whiteboard message “Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista that roiled the campus of Elon University, including condemnation from the president, turned out to have been written by a Latino student who saw it as a joke.”
Bowling Green State University student Eleesha Long falsely claimed to have been attacked on the school’s Ohio campus by three white men wearing Trump T-shirts just one day after the election.
In Philadelphia, a rash of “white supremacist” graffiti declaring “Black Bitch” and “Trump Rules” turned out to have been done by a black man.
A black man in the Boston area admitted he fabricated his claim that he was forced to run for his life after being threatened with lynching and told, “It’™s Trump country now.”
In another case, a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed two white males tore off her hijab. But the woman later admitted she made up the story.
The controversial Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report in November that compiled 867 alleged incidents of “harassment and intimidation” in the 10 days that followed the presidential election.
But many turned out to be hoaxes and most of the incidents on SPLC’s list, while deplorable if they actually happened, did not include physical violence, meaning the use of the term “attack” was misleading. Most of the incidents were uncorroborated assertions of verbal threats or racist comments that don’t appear to rise to the level of a crime, including chalking the word “Trump” on a university sidewalk and middle school students chanting “Build the wall!”
Donald
Trump was rushed offstage by members of his Secret Service detail
during a rally Nov. 5 in Reno, Nevada, after a person in the crowd
shouted that someone had a gun.
But the SPLC website still has a negative “file” on Carson that insists he has said things that “most people would conclude are extreme,” such as his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok
When SPLC issued a widely cited survey-report charging Trump’s election sparked “hate crimes” in schools against minorities, it censored its finding that at least 2,000 educators nationwide reported racist slurs and other derogatory language against white students.
10. Democrats’ rigging of their own primary to make sure Bernie Sanders lost
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
The WikiLeaks emails, released just days before the party’s presidential nominating convention, showed how top officials at the DNC privately planned to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
In one email, DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach wrote to communications director Luis Miranda about planting a narrative to the media that Sanders’ “campaign was a mess.”
In another email in early May, DNC Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall brought up Sanders’ “Jewish heritage,” suggesting the DNC get someone in Kentucky and in West Virginia, which were holding upcoming primary elections, to ask if the candidate believes in God.
“He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist,” Marshall wrote.
DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – who was forced to resign because of the revelations – wrote in May that Sanders “isn’t going to be president” and “has no understanding of” the Democratic Party.
Here Comes The SOMA!
Having lost the election to other (saner) people's free-will choices, the fearful, huddling and benighted groupthink gangster left is doubling down on stupid, by trying to legislate morality - a concept they clearly refuse to understand - and enforce it on all other people by way of thought-controlling medications!
In today's Ottawa Citizen, (Saturday December 31, 2016, Pp#NP1, NP3) the following article was right next to this one, which is no less all about regurgitating the classical Marxist "Historical Predeterminism" victim alibi to excuse their crimes:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/welcome-to-the-fourth-turning-the-dramatic-1997-doomsday-prophesy-that-is-coming-true-now
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/1231-moral
What if you could take a pill for a better, more moral, you? Neuroethicists ponder the panacea
What if all it took to make you a better human was a little pill?
Go vegan. Oppose Trump. Drink less. Exercise more. Have more houseplants.
It’s the season of self-delusion with Twitter users pledging resolutions they’ll make and, statistics tell us, promptly break. But what if we could be better people with drugs — more moral mortals by taking a pill?
Neuroethicists and other thinkers are increasingly absorbed by the idea of “moral enhancement” through pharmaceuticals, implanted brain electrodes or other biomedical means.
Leading proponents argue advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest
morally desirable capacities may, at least in part, be
neurologically&-based and therefore amenable to tinkering.
Some envision a day when we could use drugs that act directly on the brain to dial down aggression and other “anti-social” sentiments and dial up “pro-social” ones like compassion and trust.
Whether that’s a good thing or bad is another question.
Oxford University philosophers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson have argued that humans now have “the means of wiping out life on earth” and that moral bioenhancement (or “MB”) may be our only hope for averting wide-scale terrorism, climate change and all the other rot in the world. Writing in the journal Neuroethics, they say the capacity for sympathy, in particular, “appears to be biologically based,” and that women tend to be more sympathetic than men, suggesting “that MB could consist in making men in general more like women in general,” at least with regards to sympathy.
They and others argue that, because the moral character of many
people is less than ideal, what’s not to love about this new medical
approach?
Critics such as John Harris, author of How to be Good, say using chemicals to make humans “better” animals could undermine our “moral freedom.”
Artificially enhancing people to always “be good” would rob them of their free will to make — and learn from — mistakes, they argue.
Then there are the questions of what exactly does it mean to be moral, and who gets to decide?
For now, “the reality is that there is not much out there that allows us to do these sorts of things,” said Queen’s University bioethicist Udo Schuklenk. “Look at the miserable failure that is modern
psychiatry. We just don’t really understand how the brain works,” he added.
“But it’s also true they’re making progress in leaps and bounds, and I
have personally no doubt that these kinds of drugs will eventually
exist,” Schuklenk added
In fact, they may already.
In their 2014 paper, “Are you Morally Modified?” Neil Levy and colleagues cite three widely prescribed drugs that may, unbeknownst to the people taking them, alter their moral decision making and behaviour: propranolol for high blood pressure; the antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); and drugs that affect the release or metabolism of oxytocin, the love and bonding hormone.
One 2013 study involving 40 healthy volunteers found propranolol made men and women more likely to judge harmful actions as morally unacceptable (though only in scenarios involving “up-close-and-personal” harms). The drug also appeared to increase aversion to harming others.
SSRIs, meanwhile, seem to make people more cooperative, less critical of others and more sensitive to other people’s pain.
Oxytocin appears to make people more trusting. Three years ago, an Australian team reported that couples who took a hit of oxytocin through a nasal spray before starting couple’s therapy recalled memories with more emotion and detail and seemed more open to the other partner’s perspective.
Yep! Sounds like a literal prescription for creating a world full of ever-more leftards, to me!
“Five or 10 years ago the evidence seemed to suggest oxytocin was just this universally good thing — that if we just dosed everybody up with oxytocin they’d all be walking around like love puddles,” said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, CT.
Still, we do have drugs such as those used to treat attention deficit disorder — a behaviour that would have been classified as some kind of moral failing in the past, Hughes said.
Brains come in a bell curve of moral capacities, he argued, “and the folks who are on the lower end of that bell curve can be moved up to the middle and perhaps we can all be moved up towards the top.”
The result? “The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier,” Hughes said.
The downside? “We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment,” he said.
“I think there is such a thing as pathological xenophobia, pathological racism. But do I want to see every racist in the United State rounded up and put in a re-education camp? I don’t think so,” he said.
“We do have to figure out where these lines get drawn.”
No one is suggesting morality drugs be added to the drinking water like fluoride — for now anyway. It would be up to the individual to voluntarily pursue moral neuroenhancers — assuming they worked.
But what does it mean to become morally better? “Morality is like the snitch in (Harry Potter’s) Quidditch: it’s elusive, very hard to pinpoint or catch,” Saskia Verkiel, of Georgia State University’s Neuroscience Institute, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. “You think you have it, and then you don’t.”
An extreme case would be psychopaths. “They’re so far off out of the norm that maybe bringing them back to the norm would be generally understood to be advantageous,” Brian Earp, associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University, said in an interview.
More broadly speaking, the drugs could be used to augment the things people already pursue to try to better themselves, Earp said. “They go to church, they go on spiritual retreat, they speak with their friends about moral issues.” That’s why he and his colleagues have built their arguments around the notion of voluntary moral self-enhancement. There’s not going to be a pill that makes us more moral, he said. “But you might take a pill that makes you more susceptible to, or find more compelling the sorts of moral lessons you’re already engaged in.”
Most people fall short of their own view of what would be morally acceptable behaviour, he added. Personally, he thinks it’s wrong to eat meat, but he does sometimes. “I act against my own better judgement because of a weakness of will. If there was some pill I could take to help me with that, I would be behaving in accordance with my own better judgment.”
Schuklenk, of Queen’s, questioned whether we should be investing in research and development of moral modulators at all. “Your gut response would be, well this would be a pleasant place to be,” he said. “But what if the country next to us did the exact opposite, and invested in drugs that made their compatriots more aggressive, more competitive?”
Most importantly, “how do we decide what constitutes a moral deficiency? Who should be allowed to make these decisions about what is good and what is bad?”
It’s the season of self-delusion with Twitter users pledging resolutions they’ll make and, statistics tell us, promptly break. But what if we could be better people with drugs — more moral mortals by taking a pill?
Neuroethicists and other thinkers are increasingly absorbed by the idea of “moral enhancement” through pharmaceuticals, implanted brain electrodes or other biomedical means.
MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images
A human brain is displayed inside a glass box in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
A human brain is displayed inside a glass box in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Some envision a day when we could use drugs that act directly on the brain to dial down aggression and other “anti-social” sentiments and dial up “pro-social” ones like compassion and trust.
Whether that’s a good thing or bad is another question.
Oxford University philosophers Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson have argued that humans now have “the means of wiping out life on earth” and that moral bioenhancement (or “MB”) may be our only hope for averting wide-scale terrorism, climate change and all the other rot in the world. Writing in the journal Neuroethics, they say the capacity for sympathy, in particular, “appears to be biologically based,” and that women tend to be more sympathetic than men, suggesting “that MB could consist in making men in general more like women in general,” at least with regards to sympathy.
Critics such as John Harris, author of How to be Good, say using chemicals to make humans “better” animals could undermine our “moral freedom.”
Artificially enhancing people to always “be good” would rob them of their free will to make — and learn from — mistakes, they argue.
Then there are the questions of what exactly does it mean to be moral, and who gets to decide?
For now, “the reality is that there is not much out there that allows us to do these sorts of things,” said Queen’s University bioethicist Udo Schuklenk. “Look at the miserable failure that is modern
psychiatry. We just don’t really understand how the brain works,” he added.
FotoliaEthicists
warn that a pill to make people more "moral" could pave the way to a
world where every bad act begets chemical treatment, voluntary or not.
In fact, they may already.
In their 2014 paper, “Are you Morally Modified?” Neil Levy and colleagues cite three widely prescribed drugs that may, unbeknownst to the people taking them, alter their moral decision making and behaviour: propranolol for high blood pressure; the antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); and drugs that affect the release or metabolism of oxytocin, the love and bonding hormone.
One 2013 study involving 40 healthy volunteers found propranolol made men and women more likely to judge harmful actions as morally unacceptable (though only in scenarios involving “up-close-and-personal” harms). The drug also appeared to increase aversion to harming others.
SSRIs, meanwhile, seem to make people more cooperative, less critical of others and more sensitive to other people’s pain.
Oxytocin appears to make people more trusting. Three years ago, an Australian team reported that couples who took a hit of oxytocin through a nasal spray before starting couple’s therapy recalled memories with more emotion and detail and seemed more open to the other partner’s perspective.
The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier.But it isn’t all pretty. A 2014 study by Princeton University researchers found people given oxytocin were more likely to engage in “group-serving dishonesty.” Compared with volunteers receiving placebo, they lied more and lied faster to benefit their groups.
Yep! Sounds like a literal prescription for creating a world full of ever-more leftards, to me!
“Five or 10 years ago the evidence seemed to suggest oxytocin was just this universally good thing — that if we just dosed everybody up with oxytocin they’d all be walking around like love puddles,” said James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, CT.
Still, we do have drugs such as those used to treat attention deficit disorder — a behaviour that would have been classified as some kind of moral failing in the past, Hughes said.
We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment.“We no longer consider ADHD a moral failing because we’ve medicalized that moral failing. And that is part of what moral enhancement is about — to recognize the natural diversity of brains, and that some of us are just born with a poor roll of the dice that doesn’t give us enough self-control, executive function or capacity for compassion or moral cognition.”
Brains come in a bell curve of moral capacities, he argued, “and the folks who are on the lower end of that bell curve can be moved up to the middle and perhaps we can all be moved up towards the top.”
The result? “The world will be happier; we’ll probably all be happier,” Hughes said.
The downside? “We could end up in a world where every kind of political or moral deviance is subject to some kind of mandatory treatment,” he said.
“I think there is such a thing as pathological xenophobia, pathological racism. But do I want to see every racist in the United State rounded up and put in a re-education camp? I don’t think so,” he said.
“We do have to figure out where these lines get drawn.”
No one is suggesting morality drugs be added to the drinking water like fluoride — for now anyway. It would be up to the individual to voluntarily pursue moral neuroenhancers — assuming they worked.
But what does it mean to become morally better? “Morality is like the snitch in (Harry Potter’s) Quidditch: it’s elusive, very hard to pinpoint or catch,” Saskia Verkiel, of Georgia State University’s Neuroscience Institute, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. “You think you have it, and then you don’t.”
An extreme case would be psychopaths. “They’re so far off out of the norm that maybe bringing them back to the norm would be generally understood to be advantageous,” Brian Earp, associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University, said in an interview.
More broadly speaking, the drugs could be used to augment the things people already pursue to try to better themselves, Earp said. “They go to church, they go on spiritual retreat, they speak with their friends about moral issues.” That’s why he and his colleagues have built their arguments around the notion of voluntary moral self-enhancement. There’s not going to be a pill that makes us more moral, he said. “But you might take a pill that makes you more susceptible to, or find more compelling the sorts of moral lessons you’re already engaged in.”
Most people fall short of their own view of what would be morally acceptable behaviour, he added. Personally, he thinks it’s wrong to eat meat, but he does sometimes. “I act against my own better judgement because of a weakness of will. If there was some pill I could take to help me with that, I would be behaving in accordance with my own better judgment.”
Schuklenk, of Queen’s, questioned whether we should be investing in research and development of moral modulators at all. “Your gut response would be, well this would be a pleasant place to be,” he said. “But what if the country next to us did the exact opposite, and invested in drugs that made their compatriots more aggressive, more competitive?”
Most importantly, “how do we decide what constitutes a moral deficiency? Who should be allowed to make these decisions about what is good and what is bad?”
As was previously presented to an unsuspecting public by their masters at the New York Crimes:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/are-we-ready-for-a-morality-pill/?_r=01
=======
Leftists fear other people's free-will choices. ALL criminal gangsters (leftists, muslims) want the POWER to forcibly CONTROL all other people, (whom they fear), through fear, simply because they can not trust them selves. As fear-fearing phobophobes, they are scared of others' fears, and so always accuse them of being afraid (as if being afraid or a phobe were some sort of thought-crime)!
Here's a short list of THEIR most prominent common phobias:
Racist, (melanin-o-phobe; or, more accurately, their own fear of those too-smart, scary white people who lack it) Sexist, (femophobe) Homophobic, Xenophobic, Islamophobic, (aka Crime-o-phobic) - you name it.
Yet the only real thought crime is in refusing to think at all, because one is scared of the pain of fearful thought!
In one word, what they fear the most is "Freedom!" In stead, they prefer the safe surety and security of "inevitable" slavery! They are cowardly, suicidal masochists at heart - always seeking to control their own fears, BY causing those very same, worst-case scenario problems which cause the pains they fear the most!
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Follow Farrell’s Rule No. 9
From here:
Bob Farrell is a legend on Wall Street.
He built Merrill Lynch into a market powerhouse, capitalizing on the markets in the mid-1960s, mid-80s and during the big downturns in the ’70s and Black Monday in ’87.
Over his decades in the teeth of the greatest and fiercest markets in modern history, he put together a list of 10 rules that are key for any investor or student of the markets. One good detailed explanation of the list is here.
Given where we are right now, I think it’s crucial for you to keep a copy of this list bookmarked or on your bulletin board or refrigerator!
Here’s Farrell’s unadorned list:
They make up what I consider an ‘Easier Said Than Done’ list.
It goes along with, say, the Ten Commandments or other lists that are very simple but somehow are the hardest to follow.
But the one on Farrell’s list that sticks out right now is number 9 — When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.
That’s not to say that 1-4 aren’t very timely as well, but 9 is the biggest concern I have right now.
For example, there was ‘great’ news that U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) was upgraded from 3.2 percent last quarter to 3.5 percent. But what most talking heads fail to mention is that much of that big move was related to a spike in soybean demand. Consumer spending was tepidly higher.
Simply put, there is no news that isn’t spun to light the path to higher highs on Wall Street. There are no voices that are warning about the market excesses. Everyone is cheering it on.
The markets continue to push toward — and through — record highs. But earnings are not growing in parallel to stocks’ growth.
A recent article from the blog Wolfstreet.com states that since 2011, S&P 500 firms have spent $3 trillion on stock buybacks. This should be troubling. But is this story anywhere in the lamestream media? Nope. Hurts the fake narrative that the U.S. economy is going gangbusters.
Corporations are buying back shares instead of investing in their businesses. And they’ve done it so big shareholders like Wall Street hedge funds that own big stakes and their own share-owning corporate chieftains can make more and more money through artificially inflated stock prices.
This kind of money shuffling does not create growth, and does nothing to help the U.S. economy. It’s the classic vicious circle — you buy back stock, which helps boost earnings per share, which raises the value of the stock, which gets paid out in performance bonuses.
The problem is, share buybacks are now drying up. In the past two quarters they’re off $52 billion — the largest drop since a $57 billion drop in 2007/2008.
The public is told the fake news that the economy is prospering because Wall Street is.
This is not the case. Real America has suspected this for quite some time. And Bob Livingston has been on the forefront in warning Americans — and investors — that the system continues to distort what’s really going on in the domestic and international economy for the benefit of the few at the top. His new report is all about how to protect yourself from the downside and possible rough seas ahead.
But the more specific point I’m trying to make now is, we’re getting flashing red signals from one of the market’s greatest insiders that we’re headed for a reckoning very soon. Don’t wait to do something before it’s too late.
Take your profits in January and get out of bonds and most stocks, except the few I am going to show you in an upcoming report I’ve written. More on that soon, but if you want something to hold onto, stick with physical gold and silver until this market corrects. They’re both cheap now, but that won’t last. And it’s easier to wait on a good investment than it is to sell a bad one at the right time.
Also remember that the stock markets are no reflection of the economy any longer. They are completely distorted by central bank money that has been used by companies to boost their own share prices, so that these valuations have no real underpinnings — kind of like real estate about eight-10 years ago.
And we know how that turned out.
— GS Early
=============================
Bob Farrell is a legend on Wall Street.He built Merrill Lynch into a market powerhouse, capitalizing on the markets in the mid-1960s, mid-80s and during the big downturns in the ’70s and Black Monday in ’87.
Over his decades in the teeth of the greatest and fiercest markets in modern history, he put together a list of 10 rules that are key for any investor or student of the markets. One good detailed explanation of the list is here.
Given where we are right now, I think it’s crucial for you to keep a copy of this list bookmarked or on your bulletin board or refrigerator!
Here’s Farrell’s unadorned list:
- Markets tend to return to the mean over time.
- Excesses in one direction will lead to opposite excesses in the other direction.
- There are no new eras — excesses are never permanent.
- Exponentially rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.
- The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.
- Fear and greed are greater than long-term resolve.
- Markets are strongest when they’re broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue chip names.
- Bear markets have three stages: sharp down, reflexive rebound and a drawn out fundamental downtrend.
- When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.
- Bull markets are more fun than bear markets.
They make up what I consider an ‘Easier Said Than Done’ list.
It goes along with, say, the Ten Commandments or other lists that are very simple but somehow are the hardest to follow.
But the one on Farrell’s list that sticks out right now is number 9 — When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.
That’s not to say that 1-4 aren’t very timely as well, but 9 is the biggest concern I have right now.
For example, there was ‘great’ news that U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) was upgraded from 3.2 percent last quarter to 3.5 percent. But what most talking heads fail to mention is that much of that big move was related to a spike in soybean demand. Consumer spending was tepidly higher.
Simply put, there is no news that isn’t spun to light the path to higher highs on Wall Street. There are no voices that are warning about the market excesses. Everyone is cheering it on.
The markets continue to push toward — and through — record highs. But earnings are not growing in parallel to stocks’ growth.
A recent article from the blog Wolfstreet.com states that since 2011, S&P 500 firms have spent $3 trillion on stock buybacks. This should be troubling. But is this story anywhere in the lamestream media? Nope. Hurts the fake narrative that the U.S. economy is going gangbusters.
Corporations are buying back shares instead of investing in their businesses. And they’ve done it so big shareholders like Wall Street hedge funds that own big stakes and their own share-owning corporate chieftains can make more and more money through artificially inflated stock prices.
This kind of money shuffling does not create growth, and does nothing to help the U.S. economy. It’s the classic vicious circle — you buy back stock, which helps boost earnings per share, which raises the value of the stock, which gets paid out in performance bonuses.
The problem is, share buybacks are now drying up. In the past two quarters they’re off $52 billion — the largest drop since a $57 billion drop in 2007/2008.
The public is told the fake news that the economy is prospering because Wall Street is.
This is not the case. Real America has suspected this for quite some time. And Bob Livingston has been on the forefront in warning Americans — and investors — that the system continues to distort what’s really going on in the domestic and international economy for the benefit of the few at the top. His new report is all about how to protect yourself from the downside and possible rough seas ahead.
But the more specific point I’m trying to make now is, we’re getting flashing red signals from one of the market’s greatest insiders that we’re headed for a reckoning very soon. Don’t wait to do something before it’s too late.
Take your profits in January and get out of bonds and most stocks, except the few I am going to show you in an upcoming report I’ve written. More on that soon, but if you want something to hold onto, stick with physical gold and silver until this market corrects. They’re both cheap now, but that won’t last. And it’s easier to wait on a good investment than it is to sell a bad one at the right time.
Also remember that the stock markets are no reflection of the economy any longer. They are completely distorted by central bank money that has been used by companies to boost their own share prices, so that these valuations have no real underpinnings — kind of like real estate about eight-10 years ago.
And we know how that turned out.
— GS Early
=============================
Over the weekend, it was interesting to see the number of advisors/analysts quickly rushing to defend their “buy and hold” investing philosophies following the sharp decline on Friday. As I wrote this past weekend:
“The downfall of all investors is ultimately ‘greed’ and ‘fear.’They don’t sell when markets are near peaks, nor do they buy market bottoms. However, this does not just apply to individuals but many advisors as well.When I read articles from advisors/managers promoting ‘buy and forget’ strategies it is for one of three reasons. They either can’t, don’t want to, or don’t know how to manage portfolio risk. Therefore, the easy message is simply:‘You just have to ride the market out. Long-term it will go up. But hey, let me charge you a fee for holding your stuff in an account.’The reality is that markets do not return 6%, 8% or 10% annually, and spending years making up previous losses is not a way to successfully obtain retirement goals. (Read this)It is also worth pointing out that those promoting these ‘couch potato’ methodologies are generally out in full force near peaks of bull market cycles, and are rarely heard of near bear market bottoms. This is why, as I discussed in ‘Why You Still Suck At Investing,’ investors consistently underperform over long periods of time.”
When markets are at, or near, “record levels” those levels are records for a reason. Throughout history awe-inspiring bull markets have been followed by devastating bear markets. Like “yen and yang,” a bull cannot exist without its forever intertwined counterpart.
Despite the media, advisor and analysts rhetoric to the contrary, investors DO have the ability to manage the inherent risk in their portfolios.
Investors can capture returns and grow their “savings” versus just blindly hoping that history will not once again repeat itself. While I can’t tell you exactly when the second half of the full-market cycle will manifest itself, I can assure you it will and the negative impact to retirement goals, and the time lost, will be just as damaging.
One other question to ponder. While Wall Street tells you to “just hold on and ride the market out,” why are they managing risk, spending billions on trading platforms and algorithms, and in many instances betting against you?
With this in mind, I present Bob Farrell’s 10-Investment Rules. While these rules should be a staple for any investor who has put their hard earned “savings” at risk in the market, they are rarely heeded in the heat of bull market. Just as they are being ignored now.
Who is Bob Farrell?
Bob is a Wall Street veteran with over 50 years of experience in crafting his investing rules. Farrell obtained his master’s degree from Columbia Business School and started as a technical analyst at Merrill Lynch in 1957. Even though Farrell studied fundamental analysis under Gramm and Dodd, he turned to technical analysis after realizing there was more to stock prices than balance sheets and income statements. Farrell became a pioneer in sentiment studies and market psychology. His 10 rules on investing stem from personal experience with dull markets, bull markets, bear markets, crashes, and bubbles. In short, Farrell has seen it all and lived to tell about it.
The Illustrated 10-Rules Of Investing
Markets tend to return to the mean (average price) over time.
Like a rubber band that has been stretched too far – it must be relaxed in order to be stretched again. This is exactly the same for stock prices which are anchored to their moving averages. Trends that get overextended in one direction, or another, always return to their long-term average. Even during a strong uptrend or strong downtrend, prices often move back (revert) to a long-term moving average. The chart below shows the S&P 500 with a 52-week simple moving average.
The bottom chart shows the percentage deviation of the current price of the market from the 52-week moving average. During bullish trending markets, there are regular reversions to the mean which create buying opportunities. However, what is often not stated is that in order to take advantage of such buying opportunities profits should have been taken out of portfolios as deviations from the mean reached historical extremes. Conversely, in bearish trending markets, such reversions from extreme deviations should be used to sell stocks, raise cash and reduce portfolio risk rather than “panic sell” at market bottoms.
The dashed RED lines denote when the markets changed trends from positive to negative. This is the very essence of portfolio “risk” management.
Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.
Markets that overshoot on the upside will also overshoot on the downside, kind of like a pendulum. The further it swings to one side, the further it rebounds to the other side. This is the extension of Rule #1 as it applies to longer term market cycles (cyclical markets).
While the chart above showed prices behave on a short term basis – on a longer term basis markets also respond to Newton’s 3rd law of motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The first chart shows that cyclical markets reach extremes when they are more than 2-standard deviations above or below the 50-week moving average. Notice that these excesses ARE NEVER worked off by just going sideways.
The second chart shows the price reversions of the S&P 500 on a long term basis and adjusted for inflation. Notice that when prices have historically reached extremes – the reversion in price is just as extreme. It is clear that the current reversion in the stock market is still underway from the 2000 peak.
There are no new eras – excesses are never permanent.
There will always be some “new thing” that elicits speculative interest. These “new things” throughout history, like the “Siren’s Song,” has led many investors to their demise. In fact, over the last 500 years, we have seen speculative bubbles involving everything from Tulip Bulbs to Railways, Real Estate to Technology, Emerging Markets (5 times) to Automobiles and Commodities. It always starts the same and ends with the utterings of “This time it is different”
[The chart below is from my March 2008 seminar discussing that the next recessionary bear market was about to occur.]
As legendary investor Jesse Livermore once stated:
“A lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new on Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”
Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways
The reality is that excesses, such as we are seeing in the market now, can indeed go much further than logic would dictate. However, these excesses, as stated above, are never worked off simply by trading sideways. Corrections are always just as brutal as the advances were exhilarating. As the chart below shows when the markets broke out of their directional trends – the corrections came soon thereafter.
The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.
The average individual investor is most bullish at market tops and most bearish at market bottoms. This is due to investor’s emotional biases of “greed” when markets are rising and “fear” when markets are falling. Logic would dictate that the best time to invest is after a massive sell-off; unfortunately, this is exactly the opposite of what investors do.
Fear and greed are stronger than long-term resolve.
As stated in Rule $5 it is emotions that cloud your decisions and affect your long-term plan.
“Gains make us exuberant; they enhance well-being and promote optimism,” says Santa Clara University finance professor Meir Statman. His studies of investor behavior show that “Losses bring sadness, disgust, fear, regret. Fear increases the sense of risk and some react by shunning stocks.”
The index of bullish sentiment shows that “greed” is once again beginning to reach levels where markets have generally reached intermediate-term peaks.
In the words of Warren Buffett:
“Buy when people are fearful and sell when they are greedy.”
Currently, those “people” are getting extremely greedy.
Markets are strongest when they are broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names.
Breadth is important. A rally on narrow breadth indicates limited participation and the chances of failure are above average. The market cannot continue to rally with just a few large-caps (generals) leading the way. Small and mid-caps (troops) must also be on board to give the rally credibility. A rally that “lifts all boats” indicates far-reaching strength and increases the chances of further gains.
The chart above shows the ARMS Index which is a volume-based indicator that determines market strength and breadth by analyzing the relationship between advancing and declining issues and their respective volume. It is normally used as a short term trading measure of market strength. However, for longer term periods the chart shows a weekly index smoothed with a 34-week average. Spikes in the index has generally coincided with near-term market peaks.
Bear markets have three stages – sharp down, reflexive rebound and a drawn-out fundamental downtrend
Bear markets often start with a sharp and swift decline. After this decline, there is an oversold bounce that retraces a portion of that decline. The longer term decline then continues, at a slower and more grinding pace, as the fundamentals deteriorate. Dow Theory suggests that bear markets consist of three down legs with reflexive rebounds in between.
The chart above shows the stages of the last two primary cyclical bear markets. The point to be made is there were plenty of opportunities to sell into counter-trend rallies during the decline and reduce risk exposure. Unfortunately, the media/Wall Street was telling investors to just “hold on” until hey finally sold out at the bottom.
When all the experts and forecasts agree – something else is going to happen.
This rule fits within Bob Farrell’s contrarian nature. As Sam Stovall, the investment strategist for Standard & Poor’s once stated:
“If everybody’s optimistic, who is left to buy? If everybody’s pessimistic, who’s left to sell?”
As a contrarian investor, and along with several of the points already made within Farrell’s rule set, excesses are built by everyone being on the same side of the trade. Ultimately, when the shift in sentiment occurs – the reversion is exacerbated by the stampede going in the opposite direction
Being a contrarian can be quite difficult at times as bullishness abounds. However, it is also the secret to limiting losses and achieving long-term investment success. As Howard Marks once stated:
“Resisting – and thereby achieving success as a contrarian – isn’t easy. Things combine to make it difficult; including natural herd tendencies and the pain imposed by being out of step, since momentum invariably makes pro-cyclical actions look correct for a while. (That’s why it’s essential to remember that ‘being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.’)Given the uncertain nature of the future, and thus the difficulty of being confident your position is the right one – especially as price moves against you – it’s challenging to be a lonely contrarian.”
Bull markets are more fun than bear markets
As stated above in Rule #5 – investors are primarily driven by emotions. As the overall markets rise; up to 90% of any individual stock’s price movement is dictated by the overall direction of the market hence the saying “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Psychologically, as the markets rise, investors begin to believe that they are “smart” because their portfolio is going up. In reality, it is primarily more a function of “luck” rather than “intelligence” that is driving their portfolio.
Investors behave much the same way as individuals who addicted to gambling. When they are winning they believe that their success is based on their skill. However, when they began to lose, they keep gambling thinking the next “hand” will be the one that gets them back on track. Eventually – they leave the table broke.
It is true that bull markets are more fun than bear markets. Bull markets elicit euphoria and feelings of psychological superiority. Bear markets bring fear, panic, and depression.
What is interesting is that no matter how many times we continually repeat these “cycles” – as emotional human beings we always “hope” that somehow this “time will be different.” Unfortunately, it never is and this time won’t be either. The only questions are: when will the next bear market begin and will you be prepared for it?
Conclusions
Like all rules on Wall Street, Bob Farrell’s rules are not meant has hard and fast rules. There are always exceptions to every rule and while history never repeats exactly it does often “rhyme” very closely.
Nevertheless, these rules will benefit investors by helping them to look beyond the emotions and the headlines. Being aware of sentiment can prevent selling near the bottom and buying near the top, which often goes against our instincts.
Regardless of how many times I discuss these issues, quote successful investors, or warn of the dangers – the response from both individuals and investment professionals is always the same.
“I am a long term, fundamental value, investor. So these rules don’t really apply to me.”
No, you’re not. Yes, they do.
Individuals are long term investors only as long as the markets are rising. Despite endless warnings, repeated suggestions and outright recommendations; getting investors to sell, take profits and manage your portfolio risks is nearly a lost cause as long as the markets are rising. Unfortunately, by the time the fear, desperation or panic stages are reached it is far too late to act and I will only be able to say that I warned you.
2016/09/12
Lance Roberts
Lance Roberts is a Chief Portfolio Strategist/Economist for Clarity Financial. He is also the host of “The Lance Roberts Show” and Chief Editor of the “Real Investment Advice” website and author of “Real Investment Daily” blog and “Real Investment Report“. Follow Lance on Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In
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