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Pranks and challenges have always been popular on YouTube, but now the Google-owned company has set stricter guidelines for such content. A new YouTube support page details the company's updated policy surrounding "harmful and dangerous" content to explicitly ban pranks and challenges that cause immediate or lasting physical or emotional harm.
"YouTube is home to many beloved viral challenges and pranks, like Jimmy Kimmel’s Terrible Christmas Presents prank or the water bottle flip challenge," the FAQ post says. "That said, we’ve always had policies to make sure what’s funny doesn’t cross the line into also being harmful or dangerous."
The updated policies page now highlights three specific types of videos that are prohibited:
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PJ MEDIA: Bob Bland and Tamika Mallory, co-presidents of the Women’s March, were on The View Monday morning to talk [READ MORE]
The post Tamika Mallory of the Women’s March Refuses to Condemn Louis Farrakhan’s Antisemitism appeared first on The Savage Nation.
Update 2: Citing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's revelation that the Department of Homeland Security is fully prepared to secure the SOTU, Minority whip Steve Scalise pointed out on twitter that Pelosi's decision to "disinvite" President Trump from the speech was never about security...it was about politics.
#ShutdownNancy’s decision to shut down the State of the Union was never about security. It was about the obstruction of @realDonaldTrump. Plain and simple. https://t.co/k7LWmEayFb
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) January 16, 2019
* * *
Update: Speaking with CNN, House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer said that President Trump has been "disinvited" from making the state of the union address.
CNN's @KateBolduan asks the House Majority Leader; "The letter sounds like she’s asking, but isn’t she just telling him?"
— Brody Levesque (@BrodyLevesque) January 16, 2019
Rep. Hoyer: "The speaker is the one who invites the president…”
Kate: "So, the State of the Union is off?"
Hoyer: "The State of the Union is off."
A formal invitation is traditionally made by the Speaker of the House to the President several weeks before each State of the Union Address.
I’m on @MSNBC from 10-11 am today talking with @HallieJackson about Speaker Pelosi disinviting President Trump from delivering the State of the Union, the impacts of the shutdown, and where things go from here. Tune in!
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) January 16, 2019
He can give the SOTU from the WH. Hoyer can watch on TV. https://t.co/1IIonNRWaQ
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) January 16, 2019
***
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday asked Donald Trump to delay his State of the Union address - or deliver it in writing - while the government is partially shut down.
Pointing to security concerns, Pelosi said that the partial shutdown has crippled both the US Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security, which may compromise security measures that precede the primetime address, according to Politico.
"Sadly, given the security concerns and unless government re-opens this week, I suggest that we work together to determine another suitable date after government has re-opened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing to the Congress on January 29th," Pelosi wrote in a letter to Trump.
Publicly, Democrats plan to argue that the parties need to focus on addressing the shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history. But privately, they also don’t want to give Trump a major platform to blame them for the shutdown when Trump's demand for billions in wall funding has been the main driver, according to a Democratic lawmaker close to leadership.
Staff have been discussing the idea of postponing the State of the Union for months, with some expressing concern about scheduling travel plans for lawmakers and guests as well. -Politico
So... The State of the Union is off... That's what @LeaderHoyer just said on @CNN ...
— Eric W. Shatraw (@eric_w_shatraw) January 16, 2019
Plus this... pic.twitter.com/sQbRJWASfB
Pelosi's announcement comes before a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Problem Solvers Caucus is set to meet with Trump on Wednesday to discuss the shutdown and border security. Democrats are trying to cobble together a solid base as the White House attempts to pick off members known for cutting deals.
Shortly before Pelosi's announcement, she and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer attended a closed-door caucus meeting with House Democrats, where Schumer told them to remain unified in their opposition to funding Trump's long-promised border wall.
(Washington Examiner) Former FBI general counsel James Baker is under criminal investigation for unauthorized leaks to the media.
The development was made public in a letter sent Tuesday to the office of U.S. Attorney John Durham for the District of Connecticut by Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.
In the letter, the two lawmakers cite the transcript of a congressional interview with Baker and his lawyer in October. “You may or may not know, [Baker has] been the subject of a leak investigation … a criminal leak investigation that’s still active at the Justice Department,” lawyer Daniel Levin told lawmakers, according to the transcript cited by Jordan and Meadows.
The post FBI lawyer under Obama investigated for leaks to media appeared first on WND.
While many traders saw the mid-December market meltdown as a "catharsis" of sorts, a long overdue and much-needed "mean reversion" process, one which hit hard stocks that were the biggest winners of 2018 and slammed "momentum" names, those which had enjoyed the biggest pile up of "smart money", while names that had seen little institutional institutional interest (and were heavily shorted) outperformed, arguably bringing some semblance of normalcy to a gaping valuation dispersion, one month later something unexpected has emerged.
According to Sanford Bernstein, momentum stocks have not only regained their mojo in the past three weeks, but according to Bloomberg, now display a valuation gap relative to losers that widened to levels not seen since the dot-com era.
"This is worrying - the spreads are (much) higher than they were in February 2009 – a catastrophic career-costing period for momentum," Bernstein wrote in the note to clients. "This shocked us and caused us to double check our numbers."
The numbers were correct.
According to the report, and as observed in the latest batch of 13F filings, healthcare and utility stocks joined technology in the list of winners over the past 12 months. And while these newly minted "momentum" stocks got cheaper during the sell-off in late 2018, losers such as financial and commodity shares fared even worse.
As Bloomberg's Lu Wang notes, it's not just a sector phenomenon, as drilling down the differential within the same sector revealed a similar pattern: namely high-momentum stocks traded at double the price-to-earnings ratio of low-momentum shares. In fact, as the chart below shows, that was the highest premium since 2000.
According to this data, investors have once again not only not learned anything from the December shock, but are piling back into the very same names that were the main culprits for the sharp fourth quarter swoon. And, as one would expected, as money once again piles into the very same names, another reversal could "mean trouble", according to Bernstein strategists Sarah McCarthy and Inigo Fraser Jenkins. Why? Because the last time momentum-stock valuations approached the sort of extremes seen in 2000, the strategy tumbled 53 percent in the following six months.
Oh, and the market crashed.
"While the sector exposure is now more balanced, the valuation spread has become even more extreme,” the note warned, adding that "the re-rating of winners and the de-rating of losers has been very pervasive and extreme even within sectors."
As Bloomberg notes, Bernstein isn’t the only bank warning on the gaping momentum divergence: a few weeks ago, Bank of America cited momentum as the biggest risk for money managers this year as market volatility is poised to pick up.
For now, however, and as in recent years, momentum investing has once again proven to be a winning strategy, largely with the help of the Fed which has implicitly backstopped risk with Powell's dovish relent over the past two weeks. Meanwhile, until the next crash, the MTUM Momentum Factor ETF, has gained almost 15% every year since its inception in 2013...
... outperforming the broader market's 12% annual increase. And, perhaps most surprising, MTUM also beat the S&P500 by almost 2% points last month, when the index was on the brink of a bear market.
How much longer this divergence continues is anyone's guess, however just like in 2000, it is probably safe to say that the wider the spread gets, the more violent the ultimate repricing of momentum stocks will be... at some point in the not too distant future.
Authored by David Stockman via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually, we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York Times' Friday evening bushwhack.
The trio of authors, apparently self-tortured victims of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, actually had the gall to print a story in the once and former Gray Lady of journalistic rectitude which was nothing more than an ugly smear on the sitting President of the United States - one that would have done Joe McCarthy proud:
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
It doesn't get lower than that. The only thing that they didn't mention was presidential Treason, but it's hard to say that "working in behalf of Russia against American interests" would constitute anything less.
So exactly what did the trio of wet behind the ears nincompoops at the New York Times—Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos—dig up from the diarrhetic bowels of the FBI that warranted the above characterization?
Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is, one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT, which once courageously published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War Party shill—not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman: Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when...
...he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Well, for crying out loud!
Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails?
More importantly, how in the world of constitutional government, free speech, and contested elections does Trump's refusal to criticize a foreign leader that we we're not at war with constitute something worthy of a counter-intelligence investigation by the FBI?
Indeed, in the case of the Ukraine resolution at the GOP convention, the issue was about making the GOP's prior pro-Ukraine platform even more hawkish, which Trump thought was a bad idea on policy grounds.
Besides, the Democratic platform ended up more dovish than the GOP's final wording. And, no, the FBI didn't think to investigate the Dems for being squishy soft on support for the crypto-Nazi's who took control of Ukraine during an illegal, US funded/supported coup on the street of Kiev in 2014.
What we are saying is that the trio pictured here—one of whom graduated from Harvard in 2015 and the other two not much older—don't seem to even know that foreign policy is a debatable issue. Or that the American people actually voted into office a candidate who took the other side of Imperial Washington's unwarranted demonization of Putin and made no bones about his desire for a rapprochement with Russia.
Actually, as to pursuing rapprochement, so did:
JFK, after the near catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis;
Lyndon Johnson, after the Seven Days War during his meeting with Kosygin at Glassboro NJ;
Richard Nixon, with the ABM Treaty, detente and his visit with Brezhnev in Moscow;
Jimmy Carter, when he signed the SALT-II agreement;
Ronald Reagan, when he went to Moscow to virtually end the Cold War; and
Bill Clinton, when he sent a multi-billion IMF aid package to Yeltsin to help him get re-elected in 1996.
The fact is, all of the above presidential policy initiatives were heatedly debated in Washington during a period when the US and Soviet Union each had roughly 9,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the other. But that did not lead to FBI counter-intelligence investigations of politicians—to say nothing of sitting Presidents—who took the "wrong" side of these thoroughly democratic debates.
And that includes the outright "peace" candidacies of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Indeed, shortly thereafter it was the Church Committee in the US Senate that aggressively investigated the CIA and FBI, not the incipient Deep State which investigated the elected politicians of that era.
Stated differently, Senator Lloyd Bentsen would have to said to the trio pictured below, "I knew Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh—and you are no Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh!"
In that regard, your editor did not know the latter three personally back in the day. But those of us on the anti-war barricades during the Vietnam era read them assiduously; and we did not mistake their honest journalistic coverage of that calamitous foreign policy episode for Robert McNamara's lie-filled talking points and genocidal "body counts".
Indeed, back in those days mainstream journalists tended to be the nemesis of the Deep State (yes, it has existed ever since WWII), not it's handmaid.
For instance, in the 1980s Congressman Ed Boland's amendment stopped the effort of neocons in the Reagan Administration to undermine the duly elected "Sandinista" government of Nicaragua. But back then, the press went after the meddlers and interventionists in the national security bureaucracy, not Congressman Boland and the Congressional majority which voted to shackle the Deep State.
In fact, several of the Reagan meddlers went to prison—not to sinecures at CNN or NBC.
Moreover, the alleged "communist" threat in those days was on America's doorstep in central America, not thousands of miles away on Russia's doorstep, as in the case of the Ukraine and Crimea.
Have the three knuckleheads ever read a history book?
Do they not know, for instance, that there are virtually no Ukrainians in Crimea (the population is mainly Russian, Tartar etc.); that the latter was a integral province of Mother Russia for 171 years after it was purchased from the Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783; and that Crimea only was added as a territorial appendage to the Socialist Republic of the Ukraine in 1954 by the order of the Soviet Presidium as a door prize to the comrades in Kiev who had supported their favorite son, Nikita Khrushchev, in the bloody battle for Stalin's succession?
Has it not occurred to them that when the scourge and historical anomaly of the Soviet Empire finally slithered off the pages of history that untangling the utterly artificial borders that had enslaved 350 million people might be a tad messy, and that the rump-state of Russia had a valid security interest in the manner in which it unfolded?
Likewise, did they perchance ever read the strident warnings of the father of Soviet containment and NATO, Professor George Kennan, about the foolishness of extending NATO to the very borders of Russia; and especially after Bush the Elder and his Secretary of State, James Baker, had promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence to unification of Germany that NATO would not be extended by "a single inch" to the east?
In fact, have they ever bothered to contemplate why NATO even exists any longer; or the anomaly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sending troops to the Hindu Kush to make war upon the Taliban tribesman who had actually defeated the Soviet Empire—and 27 years after the Soviet Union was no more?
That is to say, in the whole ragged to-and-fro of post-Soviet eastern Europe and Washington's arrogant claim to sole superpower status, is it really so hard to see that there are two sides to the debate; and that dissent from Washington's hegemonic claim to say what can and can't happen in Kiev, the Donbas and Crimea is actually the more rational course, and certainly not tantamount to treason?
Or consider what happened to Ronald Reagan's misbegotten infatuation with the Star Wars will-o-wisp of a nuclear shield. The latter had the military-industrial complex drooling over the implied trillions (in today's $) of funding, and the Deep State giddy
with the thought that the putative Star Wars shield would unleash it from the bonds of MAD (mutual assured destruction) and thereby open the path t0 US global hegemony.
Needless to say, the intrepid mainstream journalists of the 1980's still had the Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh investigative spirit and courage about them. It did not take too many years for their exposes to make Star Wars the laughingstock it actually was, and for their rebukes to the Deep State narrative to embolden the bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill to essentially shut it down.
At the end of the day, there is no other way to say it. The Goldman/Schmidt/Fandos types of the present era are not journalists at all; they are lazy, intellectually corrupted, mendacious stenographers of Imperial Washington's oppressive group think.
After all, only a decade or two ago any journalist who typed the words "....whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence" would have suffered tremors and palpitations for the very phrasing of it.
Don't these kids know them thar words is McCarthyite code for unmasking commie traitors?
Here's the thing. Until the groupthink of the Imperial City congealed into what amounts to worship of the Warfare State after 9/11, any self-respecting journalist who discovered that the FBI had opened a counter-intelligence investigation of a sitting president for the preposterous reasons outlined in the NYT story would have been all over this insidious affront to constitutional government like a screaming banshee.
That is, under what imaginable constitutional scheme does a second tier law enforcement agency have the prerogative to investigate the duly elected President because he fired the FBI director for good cause; rejected the prevailing anti-Russia foreign policy for solid reasons of national interest; and knew that the Russian collusion meme was Democrat sour grapes for loosing the election and said so publicly, loudly and frequently, as is his prerogative?
In the old days, journalists often had the integrity and summoned the courage to speak truth to power. By contrast, the trio of sanctimonious brats pictured above were too lazy, stupid or mendacious to even connect the dots.
That is, this ballyhooed counter-intelligence investigation was launched the very next day after Comey was fired by two of the most compromised people in the entire Obama Administration posse of anti-Trump election meddlers--if not criminals—led by former CIA director John Brennan.
We are referring to the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, later fired for leaking to the media and lying about it and his legal council, Lisa Page. After the release of literally tons of anti-Trump SMS messages with her lover-boy, the FBI agent Peter Strzok, over the past 12 months what kind of self-respecting journalists would not see the red flags flying in every direction?
By now any one who knows how to Google, also knows or should know that Strzok and Page sent text messages that suggest they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Trump even before Comey’s firing. And when it happened, their exchanges left no doubt:
“And we need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey’s ouster.
So there you have it. McCabe, Strzok and Page are Deep Staters if the term has any meaning at all. Yet here is why Lisa Page thought Trump was such a threat to national security that she and her colleagues were justified in unilaterally suspending the constitution and prosecuting the elected President of the people because they disagreed with his foreign policy positions.
Indeed, by her own closed door testimony to the House committee (now leaked) it is obvious that Lisa Page is a light-weight numbskull when it comes to thinking about national security. For it turns out, she doesn't even claim that Russia is a military threat to America or that Putin has aggressive intents for territorial conquest.
No, it seems his sin is that he doesn't embrace Washington's self-conferred role as the Indispensable Nation and may even be in mind of thwarting Washington's noble effort to spread "our democratic ideals" and bring the blessings of Coca-Cola, long pants and the ballot box to the otherwise benighted peoples of the planet.
You only need a decent regard for the mayhem that the Washington War party has brought to the world—from the jungles of the Mekong Valley, to the Hindu Kush, to Mesopotamia, the Levant, North Africa and Latin America, too—to say are you f*cking kidding?
'In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,' Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times..... 'That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,' she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported in the Epoch Times.
Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.
'With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,' Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.
As to the last bolded line, we will not bother to wonder how a pint-sized economy of $1.5 trillion compared to America's $20 trillion and all of NATO's $36 trillion, with a military budget of $61 billion compared to NATO $1.05 trillion, is going to do what Khrushchev failed to do—bury us!
So we fully appreciate why the Donald is on the rampage...
'Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!' the president tweeted.
'Funny thing about James Comey,' he continued. 'Everybody wanted him fired, Republican and Democrat alike. After the rigged & botched Crooked Hillary investigation, where she was interviewed on July 4th Weekend, not recorded or sworn in, and where she said she didn’t know anything (a lie).'
'the FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey’s poor leadership and the way he handled the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department). My firing of James Comey was a great day for America.'
"He was a Crooked Cop,” Saturday’s tweetstorm concluded, “who is being totally protected by his best friend, Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats – leaking machines who have NO interest in going after the Real Collusion (and much more) by Crooked Hillary Clinton, her Campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. Just Watch!”
..., and in this instance, couldn't more wholeheartedly agree.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged President Donald Trump in a letter Wednesday to delay his State of the Union address this month until after the federal shutdown ends.
