“Meet Margaret Ball”
An interview with SF author and Chicago Boyz contributor Margaret Ball. Worth reading.
Margaret’s Amazon author page is here.
THE DEEP STATE CIVIL WAR AND THE COUP D’ETAT AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP
In case you all had not noticed, a -LOT- of what is going on in the news between the Deep State and Pres. Trump here in the USA is a intra-Deep State factional Civil War over Iran.
In short — It’s Iran, STUPID!
This can be shown via the fact that the Obama “Iran Nuclear Deal” faction used the full powers of the FISA counter-intelligence to ram the Iran deal through Congress in 2015. (See the text immediately below and the Tablet on-line magazine link to their April 2017 article on the subject)
In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
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The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it. As The New York Times reported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained”preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.
Now you know why General Flynn was under counter-intelligence surveillance by the Asst. AG Sally Yates at the DoJ and Andrew McCabe at FBI Counter-Intelligence in 2015.
The Obama Administration was afraid ex-Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen Flynn would be called to testify before Congress about how CIA Chief Brennen and DNI Clapper were cooking the intelligence books on Iran and ISIS.
It turned out the illegal FISA surveillance by the Obama Administration got enough dirt on Congressional leaders to prevent that from happening.
The Deep State’s Iran Deal factional plans might have worked if Trump had lost…but he didn’t.
Everything regards the spying on the Trump campaign and attempted coup d’etat by special council/lawfare/impeachment against President Trump is about hiding the facts of that Iran Nuclear Deal from the American people and law enforcement.
But while the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal faction was the largest and strongest Deep State faction…it wasn’t the only one.
Pres. Trump has the anti-Iran Deep State faction on his side as well — which is mainly uniformed US military intelligence, see Gen Flynn and Adm Mike Rogers formally head at NSA — with a foreign intervention in the form of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli Mossad and Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on Trump’s side of the ledger.
Some in the the ‘coup supporting media’ would argue that this gets into fine shades of “what is treason” regards President Trump.
This sort of argument ignores the fact that the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal Deep State faction — the DoJ, FBI, CIA, the State Department and a small faction in the senior civil service at the Defense Department — had the support of the EU political and IC elites as well as Iran’s Mullah’s & the Moslem Brotherhood in ramming home the Iran deal. And that they
- Launched FBI Operation Crossfire Hurricane which;
- Illegally used Stefan Halper as a ‘Agent Provocateur’ to tag Trump campaign officials with the FISA tag of ‘Foreign intelligence asset’ to;
- Use the full powers of the Federal government to spy on the Trump for President campaign, and government, plus
- Has had Asst. A.G. Rosenstein appoint Special Council Mueller and delegate to him — quite illegally mind you — full authority to conduct on-going FISA surveillance in a criminal investigation against US citizens.
IMO, the bottom line up front here is that the Trump faction was and remains “constitutional” in its actions — his faction won an election and is following legal procedure.
The legal terms of art for “Iran Nuclear Deal” Deep State faction efforts engaged in to date are an on–going seditious conspiracy to violate both the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s civil rights “Under color of Law” in order to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The short form for that is the Iran Nuclear Deal faction the Deep State are attempting a Coup d’etat.
It gets worse.
Whether or not President Trump finally wins over the Obama faction and takes down the Iranian Mullah’s. The Obama’s Deep State Faction has done deep, lasting and permanent “Gramscian damage” (See link: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260 for an explanation of the term) to the American Republic, because they attempted a Coup De Etat against the tradition of peaceful succession of executive political power.
We can no longer take for granted peaceful opposing political party transitions of power in the American political system.
Running a Nuclear Plant While Misunderstanding the Instruments Can be Hazardous
…the same is true of establishing policy for a national economy and while misunderstanding the relevant economic indicators.
It has often been asserted, by economists and others, that the decline in US manufacturing employment is largely a result of great strides in automation-based productivity, and that offshoring and imports have had relatively little effect…some have gone so far as to say that the offshoring/import effect on jobs has been practically irrelevant compared with that of automation.
I was quite willing to believe that there have been great strides in manufacturing productivity, but the idea that offshoring & import effect on jobs was unimportant never sat very well with me…it seemed clear that the tens of millions of workers producing for export, in China and elsewhere, must have had a very material impact of American jobs, even given the greatly superior productivity of American factories to those located in most other countries.
But now it seems that even the assumption of a broad-based productivity improvement in American manufacturing must be questioned. Susan Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute, has done some interesting work in unpacking the productivity numbers. Her analysis indicates that a very high proportion of the measured growth in US manufacturing productivity actually reflects productivity growth in a single sector: computers and electronic products. Excluding this sector reduces to overall productivity growth for US manufacturing reduces annual productivity growth from about 3% to a little less than 1%. Moreover: Houseman argues that the productivity growth in that computers & electronics segment is less a result of automation-driven manufacturing productivity than it is a result of (a) better product design, and (b) the way the price deflators are calculated to turn nominal into real numbers. And in all segments, the handling of imported intermediate goods (parts, subassemblies, and materials) changes the productivity estimates in ways that may be questionable:
An article summarizing Houseman’s work, and an interview: Don’t blame the robots.
Also, direct links to some of her work:
2011: Offshoring Bias in US Manufacturing
2016: Is American manufacturing in decline?
I learned about this work via Marginal Revolution…a few relevant comments at the link.
The Truth is Starting to Seep Out about the Spy in the Trump Campaign
Way back during the transition from the Obama Administration, the evidence of illegal surveillance of the Trump Campaign began to appear. First, Admiral Mike Rogers warned Donald Trump, the president-elect, that he was under surveillance by the Obama Administration.
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.
October 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes. The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.
On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November 9th, 2016.
On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.
Trump moved his transition team to his private golf course immediately.
The other Mike Rogers, a Republican who was deeply compromised by the Benghazi matter, was quickly dropped from the Trump transition team.
This worried the DNC mouthpiece WaPoo. Admiral Rogers probably also warned Trump about the former Intel Committee Chair.
The FBI surveillance and CIA complicity has continued with the appointment of insider Mueller.
Then they took down Mike Flynn who had once written a letter supporting the complaint of a woman named Robyn Gritz, an FBI agent who had worked with McCabe’s team, and accused him of sexual harassment.
In 2013, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against her FBI supervisors alleging sexual discrimination and hostile work environment. In 2014, she amended her complaint by averring that she suffered “a hostile [work] environment, defamation of character through continued targeting by Andrew McCabe.”
The FBI’s response claimed that she had become “underperforming, tardy to work, insubordinate, possibly mentally ill…”
She was forced out.
In May 2014, Flynn provided a letter on Pentagon stationery which stated that Gritz “was well-known, liked and respected in the military counter-terrorism community for her energy, commitment and professional capacity, and over the years worked in several interagency groups on counter-terrorism targeting initiatives.” He added, “Her work consistently produced outstanding results in the most challenging environments.”
That is the back story of why the FBI went after General Flynn. Plus, of course, he had resisted Obama’s out reach to Muslims.
Despite his underlings’ concerns, McCabe’s plan of retaliation against Flynn proceeded apace. According to Joseph diGenova, the newest member of President Trump’s legal team, McCabe set up Flynn for the interview that led to the general’s indictment for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who was tasked with this maneuver sought private legal advice.
Now, the New York Times, at last, admits the presence of a spy in the Trump campaign. Of course, the Times’ version is the FBI/CIA version with enough spin to make the left feel justified.