Scott Adams has a point

I’ll start by reminding readers that my politics don’t align with any of the candidates. My interest in the race has been limited to Trump’s extraordinary persuasion skills. But lately Hillary Clinton has moved into the persuasion game – and away from boring facts and policies – with great success. Let’s talk about that.

This past week we saw Clinton pair the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.

That is good persuasion if you can pull it off because fear is a strong motivator. It is also a sharp pivot from Clinton’s prior approach of talking about her mastery of policy details, her experience, and her gender. Trump took her so-called “woman card” and turned it into a liability. So Clinton wisely pivoted. Her new scare tactics are solid-gold persuasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see Clinton’s numbers versus Trump improve in June, at least temporarily, until Trump finds a counter-move.

The only downside I can see to the new approach is that it is likely to trigger a race war in the United States. And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him. And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I’m called an “apologist” on Twitter, or sometimes just Joseph Goebbels).

If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.

So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety.

Brexit scaremongering

The rival EU referendum camps have clashed over the economy, after David Cameron said Brexit would "put a bomb" under the UK's prospects.
The Prime Minister accused the Leave campaign of an "undemocratic and reckless" failure to explain to voters how they see Britain's economic future in the case of a Brexit vote in the June 23 referendum.

Snowden told the truth again

Now Snowden, who had been demonized by the NSA and the Obama administration for the past year, was publicly claiming something that set off alarm bells at the agency: Before he leaked the documents, Snowden said, he had repeatedly attempted to raise his concerns inside the NSA about its surveillance of US citizens — and the agency had done nothing.
Some on the email thread, such as Rajesh De, the NSA's general counsel, advocated for the public release of a Snowden email from April 2013 in which the former NSA contractor asked questions about the "interpretation of legal authorities" related to the agency's surveillance programs. It was the only evidence the agency found that even came close to verifying Snowden's assertions, and De believed it was weak enough to call Snowden's credibility into question and put the NSA in the clear....
Hundreds of internal NSA documents, declassified and released to VICE News in response to our long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, reveal now for the first time that not only was the truth about the "single email" more complex and nuanced than the NSA disclosed to the public, but that Snowden had a face-to-face interaction with one of the people involved in responding to that email. The documents, made up of emails, talking points, and various records — many of them heavily redacted — contain insight into the NSA's interaction with the media, new details about Snowden's work, and an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the efforts by the NSA, the White House, and US Senator Dianne Feinstein to discredit Snowden.

Job Market has been getting worse for months

The LMCI is a new measure cooked up by Federal Reserve Board economists in 2014 that consolidates 19 different labor market indicators to reflect changes in the job market. They calculated it going all the way back to 1976; the chart above shows its movements since the end of the last recession in June 2009. The May index, released Monday morning, showed a 4.8-point decline from April. As you can see from the chart, the index has now declined for five straight months -- its worst performance since the recession.
The index does get revised a lot. When the January number was first reported on February 8, for example, it was still modestly positive. Still, since the February number was released on March 7 the news from the LMCI has been unremittingly negative. Which probably should have told us something....
One of the indicators included in the LMCI, for example, is employment in temporary help services, which tends to start rising and falling before overall employment does. Well, watch out: It looks like it may have peaked in December.

Working for the Vampire Squid

Goldman Sachs attracted more than a quarter of a million applications from students and graduates for jobs this summer, suggesting fears of a ‘brain drain’ in the sector may be exaggerated as banks introduce more employee-friendly policies.
The number of applications from students and graduates globally have risen more than 40 per cent since 2012, according to figures provided to the Financial Times. The data can include more than one application per individual

Iraqi army training fails yet again

A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq's regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.
Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.
The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat ISIS and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good.

anti-austerity in Spain

A coalition including Spain's anti-austerity party Podemos will take second place at the June 26 election, overtaking the more established Socialists, though the vote remains too fragmented for any clear government majority, polls showed on Sunday.

The election is being held after an inconclusive vote on Dec. 20 failed to deliver a mandate to govern to any single party and political leaders could not reach an accord on a coalition large enough to take a majority in parliament.

While the ruling center-right People's Party (PP) would win the most votes, according to two separate polls published in El Mundo and El Pais, it remains without a large enough presence in the lower house to take a second term alone.