NO STRINGS ATTACHED NEWS THAT MAINSTREAM JUST WON'T COVER.
Leading Dem contender hyping communist rhetoric
https://www.infowars.com/joe-biden-democrats-promote-violent-revolution/
"It's Sickening": Elon Musk's P.I. Dug Through Vern Unsworth's Trash To Find Dirt
The more we read, the more baffled we are that Elon Musk was able to win his defamation trial against British cave diving hero Vern Unsworth, who Musk publicly labeled both "pedo guy" and a "child rapist".
The latest chapter in the saga comes from The Daily Mail, who reported yesterday that Unsworth had been subject to four investigations by Thai police due to Musk's allegations. Elon Musk's aides reportedly encouraged a private investigator that they hired - who later turned out to be convicted felon - to leak any dirt they found to the media.
E-mails and text messages show that when the PI was unable to dig up dirt, the investigator "resorted to peddling lies and unfounded innuendo."
The messages also show how private investigators posed as charity workers and journalists to try and elicit information on Unsworth. They also admitted to carrying out a "bin spin", which is slang for going through a person's trash in order to try and find dirt on them.
Using a pseudonym "Jim Brickhouse", Musk's family office manager urged a PI to find evidence that Unsworth was "linked to an extreme level of darkness". The operation was code named "Operation Rowena" and cost Musk 40,000 pounds.
Their goal of trying to find information to use against Unsworth failed miserably. As time went by without information, Musk's family office manager become more desperate for information. "Clearly we'd like information now. There is some urgency to this situation," he said on August 27.
He also suggested trying to interview Unsworth's wife by posing as a journalist. "If employing additional asset is possible… we'll support this, even if it means an additional expense," he wrote.
Unsworth commented: "That they would talk of doing that shows you the depths to which they sank to try to ruin me. It's sickening."
Unsworth continued, talking about the trial: "Musk said 'pedo guy' was just an insult, yet here was the head of his private office hoping to prove what he says he didn't mean – that I am a paedophile – and then planning to smear me publicly. When I saw these documents, I was dumbfounded."
"I'm incredibly proud of what we did to save the boys' lives and I'm proud I was a part of it. Yet my legal battle with Musk has cast a very dark cloud and come close to wrecking my life," Unsworth continued.
He concluded: "If Musk had come out and done a full apology, got on the phone to me and said he was sorry in the media, that would have put an end to it. I just wanted him to put the record straight – but he didn't."
Recall, we recently reported on L. Lin Wood, Unsworth's attorney, who, after the case, appeared to bizarrely capitulate to Elon Musk. No matter what may have been going on behind the scenes, it appears as though the one person who got the short end of the stick in this drama-show was Mr. Unsworth.
Tyler Durden Sun, 12/15/2019 - 15:10Giuliani Invited To Spill Beans On The Bidens In Senate Testimony
Rudy Giuliani has been invited to share his Ukraine findings with the Senate Judiciary Committee - after President Trump's impeachment trial, according to the panel's chairman, Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
In other words, potentially devastating evidence against the Bidens which is integral to the genesis of the entire impeachment effort won't be aired until after Graham's 'witness-less' trial, in order for the impeachment to "die quickly," as Graham put it last week.
Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday, Graham said that Giuliani could appear before the senate panel 'separately' of the impeachment trial.
"Well, I don't know what he found, but if he wants to come the Judiciary Committee — Rudy, if you want to come and tell us what you found, I'll be glad to talk to you. When it comes to impeachment, I want to base my decision on the record assembled in the House," said Graham.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmy3js8aawk?start=217]
It's clear Graham is giving as much cover to Biden as possible.
The South Carolina Republican began by saying that Joe Biden "is a friend," and "one of the most decent people I've ever met in my life," before laying out that it would be hard to go back and tell his constituents "to ignore the fact that Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from a gas company in Ukraine, run by the most corrupt person in Ukraine, and two months after the gas company was investigated, the prosecutor got fired."
"I don't know if there's anything to this. I hope not. I hope I can look at the transcripts of the phone call between Biden and the Ukraine."
“I love Joe Biden, but none of us are above scrutiny. I'd like to knock all this off and get back on governing the country," @LindseyGrahamSC says of @JoeBiden: https://t.co/aRHlcH9Hcj pic.twitter.com/hze4f8g0GI
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 15, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAs we noted on Saturday, Giuliani has been in Ukraine for the last several weeks interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence against the Bidens and investigating claims that Kiev interfered in the 2016 US election in favor of Hillary Clinton.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi2UWTO2DyY]
Tyler Durden Sun, 12/15/2019 - 14:45 Tags Politics"A Profound Shift Is Under Way Among Investors": Morgan Stanley Thinks 2020 Will Be The Year Of The Quants
Authored by Morgan Stanley strategist, Vishwanath Tirupattur
A profound shift is under way among investors. The significance of quant in our clients’ investment process is clearly on the rise. Increasingly, they are applying sophisticated quantitative techniques in investment analysis and alpha generation, beyond pure quantitative or factor investing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) stand out among these techniques: at a Morgan Stanley Quantitative Research and Investment Conference a few weeks ago, 66% of the investors surveyed leverage ML for investment research and alpha generation, with another 15% applying these techniques for portfolio construction and risk management.
[ZH: everyone just loves to overcomplicate their lives and come up with the most convoluted solutions, when all they should have done is buy the biggest shorts, and short the most popular names - the best performing strategy in the past five years - period, end of story]
At Morgan Stanley, our fundamental analysts and strategists are increasingly collaborating with quantitative analysts and data scientists, deploying AI and ML to generate insights that wouldn’t have been possible just a few years ago. Four recent reports – on diversity, sentiment analysis, munis, and mortgage prepayments – highlight these efforts.
Gender diversity is a hot topic among corporates and investors alike. In Introducing HERS: Gender Diversity Pays Off, our analysts analyzed its impact on stock performance. To quantify diversity, they used four gender representation metrics across 1,875 companies in the MSCI World index to come up with the proprietary Holistic Equal Representation Score (HERS). They found that stocks with high HERS outperformed their less diverse regional peers even after controlling for size, yield, profitability and risk. It’s important to highlight that this analysis is not a simple stock screen. Given the scarcity of data for some representation metrics, our analysts used an ML technique called Hierarchical Clustering to create stock groups in each region that were both substantial enough for meaningful statistical analysis and similar enough to reduce industry-specific biases. In The Power of Words: Going Global, sophisticated quantitative techniques enabled our researchers to systematically extract alpha from Morgan Stanley Research. Our analysts harnessed Natural Language Processing (NLP) – one of the tools used by Siri – to measure the sentiment embedded in the text of our fundamental analysts' reports. They built a proprietary model with NLP and an AI technique called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The model assigns each report a sentiment score from -100 (most negative) to 100 (most positive). Applying the model to 135,000 company-level reports published in the US, Europe, Japan and Asia ex Japan from January 2013 to May 2019, they demonstrated a positive relationship between the scores and subsequent stock excess returns across all regions, with more alpha outside the US. Another innovative application using NLP came from an unlikely corner – municipal securities. Every new muni bond comes with an 'official statement', a disclosure about the issuer and the issue that averages 120,000 words. That means an analyst covering the new issue calendar could easily have to read more than the equivalent of War and Peace several times a week. In What Official Statements Are Really Trying to Say, our muni strategists used NLP to parse the text of 150 official statements for new issues. Their analysis suggested rules of thumb for investors uating the calendar, identifying words and syntax with useful clues about future rating agency upgrades and downgrades as well as eventual defaults. What drives mortgage prepayments, especially in the new area of non-qualified mortgages? There’s an overabundance of loan-level data on multiple variables, including borrower and loan characteristics, geography, types of property, occupancy, documentation, and loan purpose. Complicating matters, the data are available both at loan origination and afterwards on an ongoing basis. The informational value of many of these variables overlaps, and their impact on prepayments is non-linear. In Good Variable Hunting, our mortgage strategists deployed two ML techniques – cluster analysis and a classification algorithm called Random Forest – to uate the importance of different variables in determining prepayments on non-qualified mortgages. Our strategists clustered mortgage loan pools into "fast" and "slow" prepay groups based on prepay curves and then used Random Forest to help investors think about prepayment speeds, shedding light on this nascent area of the US mortgage market.These reports just scratch the surface of quant/fundamental collaboration at Morgan Stanley. Equally innovative application of quantitative methods is going on across a broad variety of sectors and markets – supply chains, CLOs and asset managers, to name a few others. With more powerful technology, better data and advances in quantitative methods, we expect the integration of quantitative and fundamental analysis to uncover new sources of alpha for our clients.
Tyler Durden Sun, 12/15/2019 - 14:23"It Was Real Sloppy": Comey Comes Clean On FISA Abuse: "Horowitz Was Right, I Was Wrong"
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
Former FBI Director James Comey admitted fault following last week’s Justice Department Inspector General’s report that detailed at least 17 serious errors during the launch of the agency’s investigation into Trump’s campaign.
Comey had previously defended the FBI’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts during the investigation, but Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI’s investigative team made errors and omissions when applying for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide. Horowitz, in a Senate hearing, criticized the “entire chain of command” at the FBI and Justice Department for their failures in handling the warrant. Comey was in charge of the FBI when the investigation was launched.
“He’s right, I was wrong,” Comey told “Fox News Sunday” about how the FBI used the FISA system, adding that
"...I was overconfident in the procedures that the FBI and Justice had built over 20 years. I thought they were robust enough. It's incredibly hard to get a FISA. I was overconfident in those because he's right, there was real sloppiness. Seventeen things that either should have been in the applications or at least discussed and characterized differently. It was not acceptable, so he's right, I was wrong."
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7C1AfGCu9g]
Horowitz said the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference and alleged connections to the Trump campaign was properly initiated, but he said there is a “low threshold” for that to happen. In the report, the inspector general said there was no documentary or testimonial evidence implying that the investigation was started due to political bias. However, when he was prodded about the bias claim during the Senate hearing, Horowitz didn’t rule it out.
During a line of questioning, Horowitz replied to Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), “I think it’s fair for people to sit there and look at all of these 17 events and wonder how it could be purely incompetence.”
He also said that he “agrees completely” with the assertion that someone at the FBI needs to be fired. The “culture” also needs to be “changed” at the FBI, he told senators.
In the Fox interview, Comey downplayed the role that former British spy Christopher Steele’s unverified information played in the FISA process. There were “significant questions” raised about the “reliability of the Steele dossier that was used in the Carter Page FISA applications,” Horowitz concluded, adding that “the FISA applications relied entirely on information from the Steele reporting to support the allegation that Page was coordinating with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities.”
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for Steele’s work, a fact the FBI did not disclose in the warrant application. A number of FBI officials directly involved in preparing and signing the FISA warrants have all either left or been fired from the bureau, including Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok.
Comey told the news outlet that Steele’s work was “not a huge part of the presentation to the court,” but he noted that “it was the one that convinced the lawyers” to move forward on the warrant.
The former FBI chief claimed the Bureau didn’t intentionally commit wrongdoing, but he said there was “real sloppiness” at the FBI. “I was responsible for this,” he said.
In 2018, Comey told MSNBC that the FISA process is “incredibly rigorous” and criticized Republicans of the Page FISA warrant for trying to interject politics into the process. And after the IG report was released on Dec. 6, Comey said the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s campaign “was just good people trying to protect America.” That was before Horowitz went in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and faulted the FBI’s leadership.
In a statement to the Judiciary Committee, Horowitz said he’s “deeply concerned” that numerous “basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations.”
And it came “after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny,” the inspector general remarked.
Finally, Wallace asked Comey:
“If you were still there, and all of this came out, and it turned out it happened on your watch, would you resign?”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Comey.
“There were mistakes I consider more consequential than this during my tenure.”
Proclaiming that the central conspiracy that President Trump and his allies have pushed about the Russia investigation — that it was a "treasonous" attempt by the FBI to overthrow the president - was "nonsense."
"The facts just aren't there. Full stop. That doesn't make it any less consequential, any less important, but that's an irresponsible statement."
For many, including former Rep. Trey Gowdy, it is “too damn late” for James Comey to admit he was wrong about FBI abuse of the FISA process.
“I think this morning Comey admitted he was wrong. Sometimes, Maria, it’s better late than never, and sometimes it’s just too damn late,” Gowdy said in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RxSOpnauyc]
“We could have used his objectivity, as head of the FBI helping Republicans figure out what was happening with FISA instead of thwarting us and obstructing us,” he said.
“He said it was policy and procedure issue. It’s not, Maria. There always has been policies against manufacturing evidence and withholding exculpatory evidence — that’s not new. This is a personnel issue. It’s the wrong people in the wrong positions of power. That’s not going to be fixed with a new policy or procedures. It’s going to be fixed by replacing the people who did what they did in 2016.”
So much for "vindicated"?!
But President Trump gets the final word:
So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong. Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red handed. He was actually caught a long time ago. So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail? Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Tyler Durden Sun, 12/15/2019 - 13:55 Tags PoliticsChinese Gangs Infect Pigs With Swine Fever In Criminal Meat Scheme
Chinese criminals have been flying drones onto farms and infecting perfectly healthy pigs with African swine fever, lowballing the farmer for their sick pigs, and then selling the tainted meat as healthy, according to SCMP, citing China Comment - a magazine affiliated with state news agency Xinhua.
In some cases, the gangs have spread rumors about the virus which is not deadly to humans - but causes hemorrhagic fever in pigs which is almost always fatal.
Sometimes they spread rumours about the disease spreading in the locality and may even leave dead pigs on the side of a road to make farmers believe the infection is spreading. -SCMP
In more extreme cases, however, the gangs use drones to drop infected items into the farms.
"One of our branches once spotted drones air dropping unknown objects into our piggery, and later inspection found [the] virus in those things," said one farm manager.
Once the sick pigs have been acquired by the gang, they are then smuggled to other areas with sky-high pork prices, violating a ban on transporting pork or livestock between provinces, and sold for a profit as high as $143 per pig.
In Yunnan, a southwestern province, authorities have intercepted the transport of more than 10,000 live pigs - some of which were infected with the virus. According to the report, one gang smuggled 4,000 pigs from a province in one day.
It said that smugglers had been bribing inspectors and faking quarantine certificates to smuggle the animals across provincial borders.
In one such case in Lichuan, a city in the central province of Hubei, the disease spread through the area after a vet forged certificates for infected animals.
The smugglers are trying to profit from a spike in prices that has seen the cost of meat rise from about 20 yuan per kilogram to a high of 52.30 yuan last month. -SCMP
In October, China's Ministry of Agriculture reported that the country's pig herd had collapsed 41.1% YoY. According to Rabobank, that figure could rise to 50% - 55% by the end of the year.
As we have documented, the price of Chinese pork has risen accordingly.
"However many pigs you have, we are taking them all," said one meat dealer.
In #Malaysia, canned luncheon meat from #China was found infected with African Swine Fever (ASF) virus. Malaysia has banned all pork products from China. Some *smart* Chinese: "So many dead pigs, what a waste...oh yes, we can make SPAM!"#BoycottChina https://t.co/uweDc65nhT pic.twitter.com/fwowJUTpzN
— W. B. Yeats🎅🏻 (@WBYeats1865) November 1, 2019 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Tyler Durden Sun, 12/15/2019 - 13:30 Tags Environment
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