"It's official: not only has bitcoin officially made its way to Wall Street, but confirming rumors that emerged over the weekend, 'hedge' funds - starved of volatility in virtually all other asset classes - are now not only actively trading the volatile digital currency, but as clients of the vampire squid, have petitioned Goldman's chief technician, Sheba Jafari to start covering it." Continue reading →
"If we’re not going to war, we’re doing a really good imitation." Continue reading →
"Ideally, America would stop giving out all foreign aid, but a good place to start would be nixing aid to countries with horrible human rights records." Continue reading →
"Federal law enforcement officers are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year with little oversight or constitutional protections for property owners. Most of these types of seizures are never challenged. The I.G. found petitions were filed in only 20 percent of the DEA cash seizures it reviewed. Of those that were challenged, though, 40 percent saw money fully or partially returned to the owner, indicating that there may be a significant number of unfounded seizures going unchallenged." Continue reading →
"The study, which was first outlined by the Washington Post, helped stir up the debate over how a legitimate cannabis market might be able to reduce the national opioid problem. That’s because the University of Georgia data shows when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful — and potentially deadly — prescription narcotics. Specifically, the researchers found that — in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013 — prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply, compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law." Continue reading →
"State lawmakers in California and New York voted this year to pass state-run single payer health care plans, despite the fact that both states would need to double their existing tax revenue to pay for the new entitlement. But even if those political hurdles are overcome, and even if the two states figure out how they are going to come up with the necessary tax revenue—about $400 billion in California's case, and somewhere between $91 billion and $225 billion in New York's—to make those systems functional, both may run into another problem: The whole thing could be against the law." Continue reading →
"As Judge Katherine Forrest explained at the time, Ulbricht's life sentence was intended also to send a message to other would-be dark web drug kingpins. Her strategy appears to have backfired, at least in the short term: Sales on Silk Road successor sites doubled in the immediate wake of Ulbricht's sentence, as news of the trial's outcome raised awareness of the dark web drug market." Continue reading →
"Although the states are arguing over their differences, it is their similarities that are the real root of the crisis." Continue reading →
"The results of a government-sponsored inquiry into the sources of funding for Islamist militant groups operating in the U.K. may be kept hidden forever due to the nature of its findings, the U.K.'s Home Office has said, according to local media. A Home Office spokesperson told the publication that a decision may be made on the inquiry after the nation's next government is elected, but the article provided no further details." Continue reading →
"Bloomberg also debunks the 'official narrative' behind the Gulf crisis and suggests that Saudi Arabia’s isolation of Qatar, 'and the dispute’s long past and likely lingering future are best explained by natural gas.' The reasons for nat gas as the source of discord are numerous and start in 1995 'when the tiny desert peninsula was about to make its first shipment of liquid natural gas from the world’s largest reservoir. The offshore North Field, which provides virtually all of Qatar’s gas, is shared with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s hated rival.'" Continue reading →