Trump not a Putin puppet?

For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations.

Google head Eric Schmidt's secret strategic plan for the US election #PodestaEmails https://t.co/LskJODXyXn

More: https://t.co/ZUfh7WDAT5 pic.twitter.com/llq5G9kp5V

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 31, 2016

Scary Google

b) The Voter Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about ("the benefits of ACA to you" etc.)

Bitcoin isn't anonymous

The newcomers sense opportunity in one of bitcoin's flaws: Analytics companies -- fueled by government research grants -- have gotten really good at exposing users' identities, which were supposed to be hidden by public keys that reduced them to a mere string of numbers and letters. This is possible because all transactions are recorded in a permanent public ledger, allowing anyone to see the entire history of each bitcoin and all the activity of each account. A single payment to an online retailer can be enough to reveal a user’s identity, which in turn reveals everything that person has done with that account.
In other words, the same transparency that guarantees the validity of bitcoin transactions also allows people to find out whether a user’s bitcoin previously passed through dirty hands. Such information is both an asset and a liability. It’s useful for helping service providers make informed decisions about whether they want someone as a customer, but it can come with the responsibility of having to screen those customers to stay on the right side of the law. Here's a tool that shows how much bitcoin payment traffic has gone through various counterparties, such as the dark-web marketplace Silk Road:

A monopoly on spying

America paid about $16 billion to five companies last year for 80% of our contracted domestic and international surveillance: Leidos Holdings, CSRA Inc., SAIC, CACI International, and Booz Allen Hamilton, recently in the news following an employee arrest on cyberweapons theft charges.
Tim Shorrock at The Nation did the legwork to to come up with the numbers.

Junk bond bull market is over

Traders have yanked billions of dollars from the biggest corporate-debt exchange-traded funds in the past week. While some big flows in and out of these funds can be hard to interpret, these appear to stem from a real shift in sentiment.
First of all, it’s not just one ETF. Yes, the biggest junk-bond ETF recently experienced a record one-day outflow and has increasingly become a hotbed of activity.
Not only is money coming out of these funds, but investors are showing skittishness in other ways, too. For example, it's getting more expensive to hedge against losses using credit-default swaps, and yields on corporate bonds have sharply risen in the past few days. U.S. investment-grade bonds just had their worst monthly loss in more than a year. Dollar-denominated junk bonds have seen a 1 percent decline in the past week alone.
It seems that investors have finally grown tired of locking up their money in increasingly leveraged companies. It took them long enough; they’ve already gobbled up a record amount of new, investment-grade debt so far in 2016 and helped fuel an unprecedented spate of mergers. And they've accepted relatively meager yields for taking the risk.

end of the bond bull market

Treasury 10-year note yields rose four basis points, or 0.04 percentage point, to 1.86 percent at 10:29 a.m. in New York, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. The yield difference between U.S. two- and 10-year notes widened, pushing the spread above 1 percentage point for the first time since May.
Spain’s sovereign debt led declines in Europe, pushing the yield on 10-year bonds to a four-month high, while those in the U.K. earlier approached the most since the nation voted to leave the European Union in June. Yields on similar-maturity German bunds increased two basis points to 0.18 percent.

Advancing on Mosul

Iraq's special forces entered the outskirts of Mosul on Tuesday and were advancing toward its more urban center despite fierce resistance by ISIS fighters who hold the city, an Iraqi general said.
Troops have entered Gogjali, a neighborhood inside Mosul's city limits, and were only 800 yards from the more central Karama district, according to Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces.

No escape means bloody battle to the end

The U.S.-led coalition has developed plans to target Islamic State militants from the air if they attempt to escape the Iraqi city of Mosul and head west toward Syria, as Iraqi ground forces close in on the city from several sides, a top U.S. general said Monday.
“This is all about getting after (the Islamic State) and setting up an opportunity where, should they try to escape, we have a built-in mechanism to kill them as they are departing,” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, commander of U.S. air forces in the Middle East.

The ruling class

They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Meltdown at Justice

Fewer than three of 10 Americans trust government to do the right thing always or most of the time, Gallup reports, and the years since 2007 are “the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years.” The details emerging about the multiple investigations into Hillary Clinton explain a lot about this ebbing public confidence in institutions such as the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.