Wretchard.com

Economic growth won’t last as the U.S. labors under the burden of growing entitlement programs and weakness around the world, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC.
The long-time central bank chief repeated his warnings about the weight that Social Security, Medicare and other programs are having on what have been otherwise solid gains over the past few years.
“I think the real problem is over the long run, we’ve got this significant continued drain coming from entitlements, which are basically draining capital investment dollar for dollar,” he told CNBC’s Sara Eisen during a “Squawk on the Street ” interview.
“Without any major change in entitlements, entitlements are going to rise. Why? Because the population is aging. There’s no way to reverse that, and the politics of it are awful, as you well know,” Greenspan added.

CNBC

Opposition to conservative political commentator Michael Knowles on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus required the intervention of law enforcement after a protester attempted to squirt Knowles with an unidentified white substance.
The Young Americans Foundation invited Knowles to the Kansas City campus on Thursday, where he delivered a lecture titled “Men are Not Women.” However, the university posted on Twitter that while Knowles was speaking, protesters disrupted the event. …
After the incident, Knowles posted on Twitter that the protester got him “a bit in the face and on the side” and said, at first, he thought the substance was paint because of how it smelled. Initially, he assumed it was bleach, but after speaking with the police officers, he posted on Twitter that it was an “unknown odorous liquid.” …

During his speech, Knowles argued that the statement, “Men are not women,” should not be considered controversial. … Critics argued that his speech touted transphobic ideology.

Newsweek

The long-running debate over the relationship of Huawei to the Chinese government took an interesting and unexpected turn last week, as the Justice Department disclosed (in the context of the prosecution of Huawei and its CFO for bank fraud and sanctions-busting) that it had obtained orders under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, targeting the company. …

Two major accounts of that risk have emerged (both of them similar to arguments we also have seen in the context of the Kaspersky-Russia relationship). The most straightforward account turns on the fact that all Chinese companies have comprehensive obligations under Chinese law to comply when the Chinese government seeks information or assistance for national security purposes. The other account goes much further, arguing that there are deep ties between Huawei and Chinese intelligence services and suggesting that Huawei therefore might act as an agent of those services rather than as an independent company with an arms-length relationship with its government.

Lawfare Blog

Problems arise because companies like Huawei and Washington lobbyists perform trusted actions for the users of their system; in this case 5G or the political process respectively. In a ‘trustless’ system anyone can verify the entire chain of actions performed, or the system itself may be powerless to alter it.

Encryption allows people to use any email system without the need to trust it because security is not dependent on the transport. Similarly public block chain systems allow anyone to verify the entire sequence of transactions for themselves to make sure the results are right. So no trust is involved.

From the information point of view irrespective of the legal definitions, a ‘foreign agent’ is any entity that is more likely to act for a hidden client than for the overt one. In the context of public policy the most obvious solution is to lay bare enough of lobbying transactions so the key parts become ‘trustless’, ie anyone can verify it for themselves.

The ‘trust’ problem goes beyond subjective intent. The inability to maintain security of private information affects the well intentioned and the malicious alike. The data breach at the Office of Personnel Management was one of the most devastating blows against US national security even though it may have resulted from incompetence.

China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management, according to a member of Congress.
Rep. Chris Stewart (R., Utah) said the Chinese are easily gaining information from the stolen records. …
The first official confirmation that China’s government carried out the cyberattacks was made by White House National Security Adviser John Bolton in September.
The office is the repository of federal government personnel records, including social security numbers and documents known as SF-86s that contain personal information about people who apply for security clearances. …The federal government sent notices to the millions of security clearance holders notifying them of the compromise of their personal data. The loss of the sensitive clearance records also includes information on the relatives of security clearance applicants because details about an applicant’s offspring are part of the application process.
The breach involved the extraction from OPM networks of an estimated 23 million records of federal workers, including those who were being evaluated for access to classified information. About 20 million records related to SF-86s were stolen.

Free Beacon

This is conceivably the biggest headline that never was. Quite a feat in an admin that counted Snowden, Manning, the rollup of the CIA network in China, missing the rise of ISIS and Benghazi.

The theft at OPM came in two parts, neither of which were prevented by Katherine Archuleta. “She had previously served as National Political Director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration as chief of staff to the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Peña.”

[Obama Spokesman Josh] Earnest said Ms. Archuleta had resigned “of her own volition,” adding that while she had been an “effective director, Mr. Obama believed that new leadership at the agency was “badly needed.” He also noted that she does not have “this particular expertise” in cybersecurity.
Beth Cobert, the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget and a former longtime management consultant at McKinsey & Company, will step in temporarily to replace Ms. Archuleta while a permanent successor is found, Mr. Earnest said.
Ms. Archuleta, who assumed her post in November 2013, had been under pressure from lawmakers in both parties to resign since last month, when she announced the first of two separate but related computer intrusions that compromised the personnel files of 4.2 million current and former federal workers.

NYT

When you combine the litany of disasters with what we now know about lobbying for foreign governments in Washington it’s probable that Collusion has been out of control for some time. It’s a design defect. DC was architected as a national capital, not the capital of the world, which it has become.

Its systems require too much trust to guarantee the necessary integrity. We have to convert such portions as possible into trustless systems. The ‘trustless’ system still relies on trust: it’s just not in parties trusting each other. It’s in the system itself.

One way to achieve this is to create immutable transaction ledgers in which the steps leading to the entries can be independently and repeatedly reproduced.

Craig, for example, wanted to keep his work for foreign governments off the books, in a private ledger. There was not even a way to come to a universal understanding of what he was doing for the Ukranians. That is apparently par for the course. In other words there was no consensus mechanism in DC. The idea was that politics would enforce eventual consistency by forcing the right sequence over rival narratives. One can argue that’s what it eventually did via the upheaval of 2016.

But the price of eventual consistency was a system crisis. Because so much went on with private reckoning when clearing time came there were two sets of incompatible transactions. The whole Mueller thing was an attempt to roll back the ‘wrong transactions’.

The Trump administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security to release immigrants detained at the southern border into so-called sanctuary cities in part to retaliate against Democrats who oppose President Donald Trump’s plans for a border wall, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN on Thursday.

CNN

Podesta, Hillary, Trump, Seth Rich.

The timing of Mr. Assange’s actions fueled suspicions. His June 2016 interview announcing the impending release of Democratic emails came three days after a meeting at Trump Tower in New York between Russians and senior Trump campaign officials — a meeting set up on the promise that the Russians would have damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Mr. Assange played down accusations of Russian interference, and misled the public on his source for the damaging documents WikiLeaks released.
He offered a $20,000 reward for information about the killing in Washington of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staff member shot to death in an apparent bungled street robbery. Some supporters of Mr. Trump suggested that it was Mr. Rich who had leaked the committee’s emails and that he had been killed in retaliation.

NYT

Mueller’s investigation sets off a chain reaction. Will it go critical?

WASHINGTON — In an indictment that seized the attention of the capital’s K Street lobbying corridor, Gregory B. Craig, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, was charged on Thursday with lying to the Justice Department and concealing information about work he did in 2012 for the government of Ukraine.
The indictment of Mr. Craig, 74, stemmed from an investigation initiated by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
The charges represented a continuation — and an expansion — of a new focus on a long-neglected law governing foreign influence operations in the United States, which the Justice Department has begun prioritizing in part because of scrutiny related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation.The indictment of Mr. Craig, 74, stemmed from an investigation initiated by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
The charges represented a continuation — and an expansion — of a new focus on a long-neglected law governing foreign influence operations in the United States, which the Justice Department has begun prioritizing in part because of scrutiny related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

New York Times

The same principle, but it will result in fewer laughs.

The indictment said Mr. Craig “did not want to register as an agent for the government of Ukraine” partly because he believed doing so would make it less likely that he and others at his firm at the time, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, would be appointed to federal government posts. Mr. Obama had put rules in place restricting the work that former lobbyists could do in his administration.

Does he have an insurance data dump. A Doomsday process? Gentlemen start your servers.

“The MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] had a duty to execute the warrant, on behalf of Westminster magistrates court, and was invited into the embassy by the ambassador, following the Ecuadorian government’s withdrawal of asylum.”

Guardian

It had to end this way and he had to know it would. So if he couldn’t cut a deal all this time with the Man, what was his Plan B?

Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.

NYT

Men with beads and long hair have smaller testicles, scientists claim.

Men with longer hair and beards may have smaller testicles than those who struggle to grow facial hair, a study claims.
It found that humans, and more than one hundred other primates, face an evolutionary dilemma when it comes to their genitals.
Teams from the University of Western Australia, who carried out the research, say a male ‘can be well-adorned or well-endowed, but it’s hard to be both’.

Daily Mail

With the country’s economy in meltdown, an estimated 300,000 fortune hunters have descended on this mineral-rich jungle area to earn a living pulling gold-flecked earth from makeshift mines.
Their picks and shovels are helping to prop up the leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Since 2016, his administration has purchased 17 tonnes of the metal worth around $650 million from so-called artisan miners, according to the most recent data from the nation’s central bank.
Paid with the country’s near-worthless bank notes, these amateurs in turn supply the government with hard currency to purchase badly needed imports of food and hygiene products. This gold trade is a blip on international markets. Still, the United States is using sanctions and intimidation in an effort to stop Maduro from using his nation’s gold to stay afloat.

Reuters

BERLIN (AP) — The European Union’s executive branch is proposing that individual member countries drop their right to veto decisions on energy taxes, a move that could facilitate the introduction of a carbon tax across the whole bloc.
The EU’s energy commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, said Tuesday that no longer requiring unanimous votes would allow “the potential of energy taxation to foster the clean energy transition can be freed.”
Approval of energy tax decisions instead would need a qualified majority, or 16 of the current 28 countries representing at least 65 percent of the EU’s population.

AP

Taken in the context of Brexit and the political battle in Washington this suggests that the progressives are not backing down. They are in complete earnest about the Green program and will push it as hard as they can.

On Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr insisted that intelligence agencies under former President Barack Obama spied on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. He did not declare that this spying was illegal, but the spying is unsettling regardless.
“I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal. It’s a big deal,” Barr said in a Senate hearing on Wednesday. “There are a lot of rules put in place to make sure that there’s an adequate basis before our law enforcement agencies get involved in political surveillance. I’m not suggesting that those rules were violated but I think it’s important to look at that.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) pressed him on the issue of spying. “You’re not suggesting, though, that spying occurred?” she asked.
“I think spying did occur. Yes, I think spying did occur,” Barr replied. “The question is whether it was predicated, adequately predicated.”

PJMedia

Adam Schiff is unhappy.

The casual suggestion by the nation’s top law enforcement officer of “spying” may please Donald Trump, who rails against a “deep state coup,” but it strikes another destructive blow to our democratic institutions.
The hardworking men and women at the DOJ and FBI deserve better.

Twitter

Now that the power struggle in Washington is out in the open what is to be done about it? One option is to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube, hard but possible. Political conflict is one of those one way functions that is easy to start but much more difficult to reverse.

If the truce is to be re-established a group of truce-makers must be found on each side. Yet superficially at least these are nowhere to be seen. On every side everyone seems raring to go.

The fundamental problem is that there is no constituency for burying the hatchet yet, except in someone’s back.

As Central Bank slowly shuts down

Most of the bank’s 2,000 employees were sent home when the lights went off in Caracas on March 25 — and haven’t been able to return since, said the people on condition of anonymity. The emergency group has been working from a library with the help of water tanks, focused on vital tasks to keep operations going, such as transactions between local banks and reserves, they added.
The central bank’s situation underscores the disarray inside President Nicolas Maduro’s administration. Bathrooms have no water and the building has no air conditioning as a power crisis exacerbated water shortages in the Venezuelan capital amid a drought. Employees don’t know when they will be able to return to work. A spokesperson for the bank didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Bloomberg

Maduro’s dilemma is that he doesn’t have enough money left to run a state. He can’t meet payroll, pay the utilities — there are no utilities. He has about enough to run an insurgency. Maybe he should resign and try that.

However Maduro’s utility to Putin is as an incumbent. His value is not as a ruler but to keep someone else from ruling. He’s like the dog in the manger, who neither eats nor lets anyone else eat.

He must desperately cling to power if only for one more day, one more hour. What’s his future otherwise?

Lawyers for former Obama administration White House counsel Greg Craig say they expect their client to be charged in a foreign lobbying investigation that grew out of the special counsel’s Russia probe. … The scrutiny of Craig stems from an investigation of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his work on behalf of a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. If filed, the charges would come about three months after Craig’s former law firm agreed to pay more than $4.6 million and publicly acknowledge that it failed to report its work for the Ukrainian government.

AP

Background: the NYT says lots of people in Washington were doing what Craig and Manafort did.

The Manafort case, and others developed by Mr. Mueller, marked the first high-profile criminal charges in years under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. The 1938 law requires Americans to disclose detailed information about lobbying and public relations work for foreign governments and politicians.
It had rarely been used in prosecutions, even as prominent Washington lobbyists, consultants, lawyers and former public officials collected ever-larger, often six- and seven-figure paydays from foreign interests looking to burnish their sometimes unsavory reputations in the United States capital.
Mr. Manafort’s case, and the investigations into Mr. Craig and other high-profile consultants who worked with Mr. Manafort, have left Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor scrambling to deal with the heightened scrutiny.

NYT

Craig said ‘why me? SDNY already gave me a clean bill of health’.

In a statement, Craig’s lawyers noted that the case against him was investigated by the Southern District of New York, and although they expect an indictment from the Justice Department in Washington, they allege that prosecutors are abusing their authority.
“This case was thoroughly investigated by the SDNY and that office decided not to pursue charges against Mr. Craig. We expect an indictment by the DC US Attorney’s Office at the request of the National Security Division. Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” Craig’s lawyers said in a statement.

Washington Examiner

The real takeaway of the Mueller investigation is that Washington is honeycombed with lobbyists working for foreign governments. The voters probably guessed this already and this probably emboldened them to vote for Trump. There was nothing to lose by blowing the whole setup sky high.

Chicago Boyz interprets some of the infighting that makes Washington so deadly. Some version of power struggle is going on. One hopes some account will emerge in the future.

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen.
The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor.
It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.
General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others at the civilian intel agencies chewed it over, decided what to do, and sent instructions back to the war zone. By the time all that happened, the battlefield had changed. Flynn short-circuited this cumbersome bureaucratic procedure and moved the whole enterprise to the war itself. The new methods were light years faster. Intel went to local analysts, new actions were ordered from men on the battlefield (Flynn famously didn’t care about rank or status) and the war shifted in our favor.

Chicago Boyz

I wonder what J Street and Beto will say?

“We have a long night and a long day ahead of us waiting for the real results but I already thank you, citizens of Israel, Likud voters and activists,” Netanyahu thanked the public. “Almost everyone already said publicly that they would recommend me to the president.”
Netanyahu said his government will be good for “Jews and non-Jews, all citizens of Israel…I am taking care of the country that belongs to all of us. I am sure that if we work together we can meet all our challenges.”

Jerusalem Post

An ‘explainer’ from Israelly Cool. Perhaps the same may be said of the world. ‘Populism’ may at least be partly the result of the Left having overplayed their hand but they see problem as not being ruthless enough but they see problem as not being ruthless enough, preferring to believe that ‘hate’ not their own errors are responsible for the turnabout.

You see, the Israeli electorate has shifted more to the right over the years. And you can thanks palestinian intransigence and terrorism – which has backfired on them spectacularly – for this. And not mythical institutionalized Israeli or Jewish racism.
Most of us want peace. But not at the cost of us being dead.

Israelly Cool

It would be surprising if the Left backed off on Netanyahu. They are probably going to launch another banzai. But then the realities of the new Middle East are hard to ignore as Airbnb is finding.

Airbnb has reversed its decision to remove rental listings of homes located inside Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The move will settle legal action brought by hosts, potential hosts and guests against the US firm.
Airbnb said it would now donate all proceeds from rentals in the West Bank to humanitarian organisations.
The settlements are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
Airbnb released a statement that said: “We understand the complexity of the issue that was addressed in our previous policy announcement.”
“Airbnb has never boycotted Israel, Israeli businesses, or the more than 20,000 Israeli hosts who are active on the Airbnb platform. We have always sought to bring people together and will continue to work with our community to achieve this goal,” it added.

BBC

The only way to compete with Israel — and with America — is on a human capital based, productivity oriented strategy. The one country that has come closest to doing this is China.

During WW2 they forbade the use of proximity shells over land until late in 1944 out of fear the Axis could reverse engineer it. The same worry now surrounds the F-35. There was a similar concern round the Norden bombsight.

“We recovered the wreckage and determined it was from the F-35,” a spokesman for the Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) said, adding that the pilot of the aircraft was still missing.
The advanced, single-seat jet was flying about 135 km (84 miles) east of the Misawa air base in Aomori Prefecture at about 7:27 p.m. (1027 GMT) on Tuesday, when it disappeared from radar, the Air Self Defense Force said.
The aircraft was less than a year old and was delivered to the ASDF in May last year, the spokesman said. Japan’s first squadron of F-35s has just become operational at Misawa and the government plans to buy 87 of the stealth fighters to modernize its air defenses as China’s military power grows.

Reuters

In WW2 the captain of the Sculpin, who knew the Navy had broken the Japanese codes, deliberately went down with his ship rather than risk the secret.

This action left CAPT Cromwell facing a fateful choice. With his personal knowledge of both ULTRA and GALVANIC, he realized immediately that to abandon ship and become a prisoner of the Japanese would create a serious danger of compromising these vital secrets to the enemy under the influence of drugs or torture. For this reason, he refused to leave the stricken submarine and gave his life to avoid capture. He and 11 others[7] rode Sculpin on her final plunge to the bottom, where her secrets would be safe forever.

Wikipedia

The Army Air Corps rescued downed airmen and their Norden bombsights by dogsled from Greenland to keep them secure.

For a moment it looked as if he’d made it, but then the nose wheel collapsed and the airplane flipped over. The remaining P-38s all landed with their wheels retracted. The B-17s stayed up for another hour or so, sending out S.O.S. signals before they too bellied onto the harsh and desolate site.
For nine days, the 25 men on the flight huddled inside the two B-17s, where they lived, all things considered, in relative comfort. There was little concern about rescue—supplies had been dropped on the third day, and word came that a rescue team was on its way. Men from a special Army Air Forces unit driving a dogsled finally arrive on July 24 to lead the downed crew on an arduous 10-mile march to the south-east coast of Greenland, where a Coast Guard cutter would be waiting.

Air and Space Magazine

British finance minister Philip Hammond raised the prospect of lawmakers revoking Article 50 this week rather than allowing Britain to leave the European Union without a deal if talks collapse, the Telegraph reported on Tuesday.
Hammond warned that the value of the pound could fall significantly if Prime Minister Theresa May fails to reach agreement on a Brexit delay with Brussels, the Telegraph said.

Reuters

You Owe I. China and Russia are now deeply invested in maintaining an incompetent regime in Venezuela. The Venezuelans are caught between two fires.

The head of U.S. Southern Command says Beijing is using disinformation and debt diplomacy to dig in as Maduro clings to power. …

As U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security team mulls a military intervention to oust Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, the Pentagon is watching China’s commercial and financial creep in the crisis-gripped nation with growing alarm.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, Adm. Craig Faller, the four-star military officer who heads U.S. Southern Command, pointed to a Chinese disinformation campaign designed to blame the United States for the blackouts that devastated Venezuela in recent weeks.

Foreign Policy

This shooting is a case about motive and state of mind. The facts seem simple.

Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Patrick Lofton told jurors that Noor fired across his partner, Matthew Harrity, through an open driver’s side window “without saying a word.”A Minneapolis police officer acted recklessly when he fatally shot a woman who had called 911 to report a possible rape near her home, a prosecutor told jurors in the former officer’s trial. Opening statements began Tuesday in the trial of the ex-officer, Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond in July 2017 as she approached his SUV.
Noor, 33, who is Somali American, is charged with murder and manslaughter in the death of Damond, a 40-year-old dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia.
Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Patrick Lofton told jurors that Noor fired across his partner, Matthew Harrity, through an open driver’s side window “without saying a word.”

CBS

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cole, the last surviving member of World War II’s Doolittle Raiders, died Tuesday in Texas at the age of 103.
The president of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Association told The Air Force Times that Cole died in San Antonio on Tuesday morning with his son and daughter by his side.
Cole, originally from Dayton, Ohio, was mission commander Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot in the 1942 bombing attack less than five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The bold raid on Japan is credited with providing the United States with a morale boost and helping turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.

Fox

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.