New authority departs from Obama-era policy under which only the Pentagon conducted the operations
The new authority, which hadn’t been previously disclosed, represents a significant departure from a cooperative approach that had become standard practice by the end of former President Barack Obama’s tenure: The CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists and then the military conducted the actual strike... The Obama administration put the military in charge of pulling the trigger to promote transparency and accountability. The CIA, which operates under covert authorities, wasn’t required to disclose the number of suspected terrorists or civilian bystanders it killed in drone strikes... Mr. Trump’s action specifically applied to the CIA’s ability to operate in Syria, it means the agency eventually could become empowered under Mr. Trump to once again conduct covert strikes in other places where the U.S. is targeting militants in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere... “The CIA should be a foreign intelligence gathering and analysis organization—not a paramilitary one.”.. Some members of Congress also resisted the effort to move drone operations into the sunlight... Members of the intelligence committees, for example, generally favor a paramilitary CIA role, and believe they are best positioned to conduct oversight of secret operations, while members of the armed services committees argue the military should control the mission... When it comes to vetting targets, the CIA uses a higher, or “near certainty,” standard, while the Defense Department relies on “reasonable certainty” in war zones, though it adheres to the higher standard when operating elsewhere.
How the Internet Hurt Actively Managed Mutual Funds
Yet given that the ETF is over 20 years old, and Vanguard is more than 40 years old, the question arises…why just in the past 5-10 years has the explosive growth finally shown up?
To understand why, reflect back on what it was like 20 years ago to evaluate an actively managed mutual fund. The average consumer only knew how they were doing by getting a once-per-quarter statement showing account balances, or by pulling out The Wall Street Journal stock pages to see the prior day’s closing NAVs. While this approach was fine to monitor that the portfolio was growing–which it was, almost continuously, throughout the 1980s and 1990s–it did nothing to tell investors whether the funds were actually good, or whether the rising tide of a booming stock market was lifting all boats together (even the laggards).But with the internet, for the first time, it was possible to look up not just the closing prices of the funds, but to benchmark them, with actual performance data... And the lesson brought about by that transparency: It turned out that a lot of actively managed mutual funds weren’t beating a simple, passive index fund. And it didn’t require complex calculations and reading a 172-page prospectus to figure it out. A straightforward website could easily collect all the performance data automatically, and calculate the results instantly... The coming Department of Labor fiduciary rule in 2017 will likely drive the trend even further, as advisers who hold out as such will actually be held accountable as advisers (at least with respect to retirement accounts). Which means the adviser has to justify that the actively managed fund really is worth the additional management fee over a lower-cost passive index ETF instead.
Wikileaks Isn’t Whistleblowing
Demanding transparency from the powerful is not a right to see every single private email anyone in a position of power ever sent or received. WikiLeaks, for example, gleefully tweeted to its millions of followers that a Clinton Foundation employee had attempted suicide; news outlets repeated the report.
.. Wanton destruction of the personal privacy of any person who has ever come near a political organization is a vicious but effective means to smother dissent. This method is so common in Russia and the former Soviet states that it has a name: “kompromat,” releasing compromising material against political opponents. Emails of dissidents are hacked, their houses bugged, the activities in their bedrooms videotaped, and the material made public to embarrass and intimidate people whose politics displeases the powerful.
Kompromat does not have to go after every single dissident to work: If you know that getting near politics means that your personal privacy may be destroyed, you will understandably stay away.
.. Dissent requires the right to privacy: to be let alone in our vulnerabilities and the ability to form our thoughts and share them when we choose. These hacks undermine that crucial right.
.. All campaigns need to have internal discussions. Taking one campaign manager’s email account and releasing it with zero curation in the last month of an election needs to be treated as what it is: political sabotage, not whistle-blowing.
.. These hacks also function as a form of censorship. Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. In this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. These dumps, combined with the news media’s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing
.. obsessively reporting on internal campaign discussions about strategy from the (long ago) primary, in the last month of a general election against a different opponent, is not responsible journalism. Out-of-context emails from WikiLeaks have fueled viral misinformation on social media.
In speech, Peter Thiel defends what Trump represents much more so than candidate himself
Thiel spoke at length about the condition of the U.S., citing a litany of statistics mean to alarm: 64 percent of people age 55 in the U.S have less than a year’s worth of savings. Healthcare costs are “10 times” the cost of “simple medicines” anywhere else in the world. College tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation. Millennials expect their lives to be worse than the lives of parents. Incomes have been stagnant, with the median household making less money today than 17 years ago. Meanwhile, the government is “wasting trillions of dollars of taxpayer money” on foreign wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia.
.. Thiel was also asked about Trump’s personality traits and whether he is concerned about his temperament. Thiel mostly dodged the question, saying instead that when it comes to president, he’s more concerned with world view than temperament, and that he’s more worried about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, saying he thinks she has the propensity to get the U.S. into “more wars.”
.. What about the tax returns that Trump has refused to admit? Here, Thiel suggested that government focuses too much on transparency, suggesting that it’s why we “in some ways have a less talented group running [for office] than 30 or 40 years ago.”
.. Not last, Thiel was asked about Trump’s oft-repeated statements about banning Muslims from traveling to the United States.
Somewhat amazingly, Thiel — who said he doesn’t support a “religious test” — said the “media is always taking him literally. I think a lot of the voters take him seriously but not literally, so when they hear the Muslim comment or the wall comment, it’s not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China but, ‘We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy’ and ‘How do we strike the right balance between costs and benefits?’”