Jts5665

Feds to Spend $500K for New Art at Border Patrol office...


(First column, 5th story, link)

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Related stories:

PAPER: 60k illegals set to be deported before November election...

At first, I thought this had to be a joke in the style of “The Onion”. Sadly, no. I have video of this dolt saying this on C-Span. I don’t know who’s more dangerous to humanity, Kerry or ISIS. The video: Here is some history leading up to this epic inanity. In February, Kerry said…

Just weeks after defaulting (yet again) on its debt (whether technically or not), and shortly after raising the minimum wage by 31% (to $523 a month) amid runaway inflation, it appears Argentina has gone full-Venezuela. As WSJ reports, the great minds that 'run' Argentina have decided to pass legislation (dubbed "the supply law") letting the government regulate private-sector prices, profit margins and production levels. The opposition is up in arms, "this is absolutely ridiculous. It's part of a very primitive ideology that says government officials should decide what people should make, how much they should make and how much they should charge," adding that "we already know exactly what it is like to suffer from these kind of interventionist economic policies," in Venezuela.

 

As The Wall Street Journal reports,

A month after Argentina defaulted on its debt, big companies here say they fear that something else could do much more damage to the economy - legislation letting the government regulate private-sector prices, profit margins and production levels.

 

On Thursday, Argentina's senate passed a bill to do just that. The bill is expected to pass the lower house within weeks.

 

As written, the bill would allow the government to "establish, at any stage of the economic process, profit margins, reference prices, maximum and minimum prices, or all or any of these measures."

 

Critics say the bill, informally dubbed the supply law, would bring Argentine regulations in line with those of Venezuela, where inflation hovers around 60% and goods like sugar and toilet paper can be scarce.

 

...

 

"This is absolutely ridiculous. It's part of a very primitive ideology that says government officials should decide what people should make, how much they should make and how much they should charge," said Congressman Federico Pinedo of the opposition Pro party.

 

...

 

"We already know exactly what it is like to suffer from these kind of interventionist economic policies," said Luis Etchevehere, president of the Argentine Rural Society, the country's top farm group. "This will lead to divestment and possibly even supply shortages of some products like is now happening in Venezuela."

 

"If this kind of thing failed in Venezuela, why would you want to try it again here?" asked San Juan Province Senator Roberto Basualdo, himself a businessman. "Nobody will invest in this context."

But Argentine officials say it's different this time...

Nicolás Maduro Jr., the 20-something son of Venezuela's president, met with Argentine legislators here last week, reportedly to discuss the bill and Venezuela's experience with its own version of a supply law.

 

Argentine officials say the criticism and comparisons to Venezuela are misguided.

 

"We can require companies to produce things only if they're essential and necessary for people, and could create scarcity problems without them," Mr. Costa said in an interview. "They have to be goods that meet basic and essential needs of the population or there has to be a situation that very clearly distorts the market."

*  *  *

Economists, some of whom expect the economy to shrink by anywhere from 1% to 3% this year, say the timing of the bill is worsening an already bad business climate.

"You won't find any logic in this if you're looking at the economy and the need to attract investment," said Nicolas Solari, a political analyst at Poliarquia. "The supply law is a weapon that lets the government keeps businessmen in line during a period of economic and political adversity."

And businessmen (unsurprisingly) are not happy...

"This bill constitutes a grave intrusion into the decisions made by private sector companies and is clearly unconstitutional," the Argentine Business Association said a recent statement.

Cross-word predicting next day's election results.

The current debate over Common Core makes this proposed "reform" sound like something new and unique. But it's not. As Andrew Ferguson points out in this Weekly Standard cover story (which I borrow from liberally in this blog post and on my show tonight), Common Core happened just eight years after President George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy offered us another "revolutionary" approach to learning: No Child Left Behind.

No Child Left Behind came eight years after President Clinton thought up Goals 2000, a nation-wide school reform. But Goals 2000 was a reworking of another plan called America 2000 pushed by the first President Bush. He wanted to be called "the education president".

Only seven years before President Bush's national education strategy, President Reagan released something similar.

I wonder why that was needed. Didn't President Carter restore excellence with the creation of the federal Department of Education?

No. 40 years of "new" ideas. It is like an itch that reformers just can't scratch. And why should they?

A new education reform brings them money. And since the reforms never work, the last reform creates the need for more reform and more money. America now spends three times what we spent when President Carter "fixed" the problem by creating the Department of Education.

Triple the money, but no improvement. Well, improvement for professional education researchers! Money pours in from government and foundations. An army of these "educrats" found work as lobbyists, psychologists, and education theorists at graduate schools of education, foundations, and government education departments.

But our government schools still stink.

More about the history of the reform failure and how a little market competition would be a much better solution this Sunday my show "Back to School" at 10 PM ET on Fox News.

School bans 'unsupervised cartwheels' on playground...


(First column, 14th story, link)

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On September 2 an armed Omaha, Nebraska woman cornered an intruder in her house and told him not to move or she'd "blow his 'bleeping' head off."

The intruder complied.

According to Omaha.com, 52-year-old Barbara Haley was home alone when she heard a noise around 3 am. She grabbed her gun, walked through her house, and found nothing. She went back to bed and heard a "huge crash," after which she grabbed her gun again and went looking.

Her dog led her to a bedroom closet where she found the intruder. She pointed her gun at him and said, "Don't move or I'll blow your 'bleeping' head off."

The suspect began "begging her to ease off" and she told him to "shut up." She then "cocked the gun so he could hear it," called 911, and held the suspect at gunpoint until police arrived. 

Haley's husband was out of town when the home invasion took place. Before leaving town, he showed her how to take the handgun out of the holster in case she needed it. He told her: "If you have to use it, you want to use it right."

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

 

At his Calafia Beach Pundit blog, Scott Grannis recently posted a pretty devastating critique of Keynesian economic theory and the abject failure of Keynesian fiscal stimulus in the period following the Great Recession (“the most expensive such failure in the history of the world”), here’s an excerpt below and I encourage you to read the entire post (with charts) here – “What Happened to the Profits?“:

Despite assurances from politicians and most economists of Keynesian persuasion, not only did the biggest and most rapid increase in our federal debt burden [in the six years ending June 2014] since WW II fail to boost the economy, it coincided with the weakest recovery in history—growth of only 2.2% per year on average. This is not a problem of not spending enough, it is a failure of ideology, and arguably the most expensive such failure in the history of the world.

Here’s the failure in a nutshell: The government can’t stimulate the economy by borrowing from Peter and sending a check to Paul, because that doesn’t create any new demand—it’s like taking a bucket of water from one end of the pool and pouring it into the other end; the level of the water doesn’t change. And the government can’t stimulate the economy by spending more, because the government is notoriously inefficient (not to mention the fraud, waste, and incompetence that surround most major public initiatives); the private sector is far more likely to spend its money wisely and productively than the government is. Growth only happens when an economy produces more from a given amount of resources—when productivity rises. And productivity only rises when people work more, smarter, and more efficiently, and that takes hard work and risk. You can’t just dial up productivity, you have to work for it. We can’t “spend our way to prosperity,” as the late and great Jude Wanniski told us.

Here’s my interpretation of what really happened in a nutshell: the private sector generated $8.9 trillion of profits in the past six years, and the federal government borrowed 83% of those profits to fund a massive increase in transfer payments, income redistribution, bailouts, subsidies, and a modest increase in infrastructure spending (only 8% of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act went to transportation and infrastructure).

What happened to all the profits? Almost all of the most incredible surge in profits in modern times was squandered by our government, flushed down the Keynesian drain.

The past six years in effect have been a laboratory experiment to determine whether Keynesian economic theory is valid. The result? Keynesian economic theory is (or should be) officially dead. It doesn’t work. Government can’t boost the economy by borrowing or spending more money. Politicians will be unhappy to hear this, of course, since they would prefer that we think they can dispense growth and prosperity on demand. Those who insist in perpetrating this myth should be voted out of office.

HT: Dwight Oglesby

In North Carolina:

North Carolina officials say there has been a huge increase over the past two years in the number of Tar Heel families who have pulled their kids out of public schools and begun educating them at home. The number of homeschools has jumped 27 percent since the 2011-12 school year, NewsObserver.com reports.

As of last year, 98,172 North Carolinian children were homeschooled; that’s 2,400 students more than the number who attended a private school.

While the sputtering economy is the reason families are choosing homeschooling over private schooling, the nationalized learning experiment (Common Core) is the main reason families are leaving the public schools in the first place. “Common Core is a big factor that I hear people talk about,” Beth Herbert, founder of Lighthouse Christian Homeschool Association, told NewsObserver.com. “They’re not happy with the work their kids are coming home with. They’ve decided to take their children home.”

One number they omit to mention is 1,443,998. That's the number of public schooled children in North Carolina. Which means that more than six percent of school-age children there are being homeschooled, considerably up from the national average of two percent a few years ago.

Sometimes it's nice to be able to report a positive trend for a change. And it sounds as if the numbers of homeschoolers will continue to grow.

Remember the whole VA thing?  It has mostly been forgotten, though we will all remember it again, or more accurately get to experience it ourselves, once the Democrats manage to get single payer passed.

People talk about government employees being motivated by "public service" but in fact very few government agencies have any tangible performance metrics linked to public service, and when they do (as in the case of the VA wait times) they just game them.   At the end of the day, nothing enforces fidelity to the public good like competition and consumer choice, two things no government agency allows.

I will admit that government employees in agencies may have some interest in public welfare, but in the hierarchy of needs, the following three things dominate above any concerns for the public:

• Keeping the agency in existence
• Maintaining employment levels, and if that is achieved, increasing employment levels
• Getting more budget

But look at the VA response in this context:

• The agency remains in existence and most proposals to privatize certain parts were beaten back
• No one was fired and employment levels remain the same
• The agency was rewarded with a big bump in its budget

The VA won!  Whereas a private company with that kind of negative publicity about how customers were treated would have as a minimum seen a huge revenue and market share loss, and might have faced bankruptcy, the VA was given more money.

Murry Rothbard via Bryan Caplan:

On the free market, in short, the consumer is king, and any business firm that wants to make profits and avoid losses tries its best to serve the consumer as efficiently and at as low a cost as possible. In a government operation, in contrast, everything changes. Inherent in all government operation is a grave and fatal split between service and payment, between the providing of a service and the payment for receiving it. The government bureau does not get its income as does the private firm, from serving the consumer well or from consumer purchases of its products exceeding its costs of operation. No, the government bureau acquires its income from mulcting the long-suffering taxpayer. Its operations therefore become inefficient, and costs zoom, since government bureaus need not worry about losses or bankruptcy; they can make up their losses by additional extractions from the public till. Furthermore, the consumer, instead of being courted and wooed for his favor, becomes a mere annoyance to the government someone who is "wasting" the government's scarce resources. In government operations, the consumer is treated like an unwelcome intruder, an interference in the quiet enjoyment by the bureaucrat of his steady income.

Paul Roberts has an editorial in the LA Times that sortof, kindof mirrors my post the other day that observed that corporate stock buybacks (and investments to reduce tax rates) were likely signs of a bad investment climate.  Until he starts talking about solutions

Roberts begins in a similar manner

Here's a depressing statistic: Last year, U.S. companies spent a whopping $598 billion — not to develop new technologies, open new markets or to hire new workers but to buy up their own shares. By removing shares from circulation, companies made remaining shares pricier, thus creating the impression of a healthier business without the risks of actual business activity.

Share buybacks aren't illegal, and, to be fair, they make sense when companies truly don't have something better to reinvest their profits in. But U.S. companies do have something better: They could be reinvesting in the U.S. economy in ways that spur growth and generate jobs. The fact that they're not explains a lot about the weakness of the job market and the sliding prospects of the American middle class.

I suppose I would dispute him in his implication that there is something unseemly about buybacks.  They are actually a great mechanism for economic efficiency.  If companies do not have good investment prospects, we WANT them returning the cash to their shareholders, rather than doing things like the boneheaded diversification of the 1960's and 1970's (that made investment bankers so rich unwinding in the 1980's).  That way, individuals can redeploy capital in more promising places.  The lack of investment opportunities and return of capital to shareholders is a bad sign for investment prospects of large companies, but it is not at all a bad sign for the ethics of corporate management.   I would argue this is the most ethical possible thing for corporations to do if they honestly do not feel they have a productive use for their cash.

The bigger story here is what might be called the Great Narrowing of the Corporate Mind: the growing willingness by business to pursue an agenda separate from, and even entirely at odds with, the broader goals of society. We saw this before the 2008 crash, when top U.S. banks used dodgy financial tools to score quick profits while shoving the risk onto taxpayers. We're seeing it again as U.S. companies reincorporate overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes. This narrow mind-set is also evident in the way companies slash spending, not just on staffing but also on socially essential activities, such as long-term research or maintenance, to hit earnings targets and to keep share prices up....

It wasn't always like this. From the 1920s to the early 1970s, American business was far more in step with the larger social enterprise. Corporations were just as hungry for profits, but more of those profits were reinvested in new plants, new technologies and new, better-trained workers — "assets" whose returns benefited not only corporations but the broader society.

Yes, much of that corporate oblige was coerced: After the excesses of the Roaring '20s, regulators kept a rein on business, even as powerful unions exploited tight labor markets to win concessions. But companies also saw that investing in workers, communities and other stakeholders was key to sustainable profits. That such enlightened corporate self-interest corresponds with the long postwar period of broadly based prosperity is hardly a coincidence....

Without a more socially engaged corporate culture, the U.S. economy will continue to lose the capacity to generate long-term prosperity, compete globally or solve complicated economic challenges, such as climate change. We need to restore a broader sense of the corporation as a social citizen — no less focused on profit but far more cognizant of the fact that, in an interconnected economic world, there is no such thing as narrow self-interest.

There is so much crap here it is hard to know where to start.  Since I work for a living rather than write editorials, I will just pound out some quick thoughts

• As is so typical with Leftist nostalgia for the 1950's, his view is entirely focused on large corporations.  But the innovation model has changed in a lot of industries.  Small companies and entrepreneurs are doing innovation, then get bought by large corporations with access to markets and capital needed to expanded (the drug industry increasingly works this way).  Corporate buybacks return capital to the hands of individuals and potential entrepreneurs and funding angels.
• But the Left is working hard to kill innovation and entrepreneurship and solidify the position of large corporations.  Large corporations increasingly have the scale to manage regulatory compliance that chokes smaller companies.  And for areas that Mr. Roberts mentions, like climate and green energy, the government manages that whole sector as a crony enterprise, giving capital to political donors and people who can afford lobbyists and ignoring everyone else.  "Socially engaged" investing is nearly always managed like this, as cronyism where the politician you held a fundraiser for is more important than your technology or business plan.  *cough* Solyndra *cough*
• One enormous reason that companies are buying back their own stock is the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, which I would bet anything Mr. Roberts fully supports.  This program concentrates capital in the hands of a few large banks and corporations, and encourages low-risk financial investments of capital over operational investments
• All those "Social engagement" folks on the Left seem to spend more time stopping investment rather than encouraging it.  They fight tooth and nail the single most productive investment area in the US right now (fracking), they fight new construction in many places (e.g. most all places in California), they fight for workers in entrenched competitors against new business models like Lyft and Uber, they fight every urban Wal-Mart that attempts to get built.  I would argue one large reason for the lack of operational investment is that the Left blocks and/or makes more expensive the investments corporations want to make, offering for alternatives only crap like green energy which doesn't work as an investment unless it is subsidized and you can't count on the subsidies unless you held an Obama fundraiser lately.
• If corporations make bad investments and tick off their workers and do all the things he suggests, they get run out of business.  And incredibly, he even acknowledges this:  "And here is the paradox. Companies are so obsessed with short-term performance that they are undermining their long-term self-interest. Employees have been demoralized by constant cutbacks. Investment in equipment upgrades, worker training and research — all essential to long-term profitability and competitiveness — is falling."  So fine, the problem corrects itself over time.  
• He even acknowledges that corporations that are following his preferred investment strategy exist and are prospering -- he points to Google.   Google is a great example of exactly what he is missing. Search engines and Internet functionality that Google thrives on were not developed in corporate R&D departments.  I don't get how he can write so fondly about Google and simultaneously write that he wishes, say, US Steel, were investing more in R&D.  I would think having dinosaur corporations eschew trying to invest in these new areas, and having them return the money to their shareholders, and then having those individuals invest the money in startups like Google would be a good thing.  But like many Leftists he just can't get around the 1950's model.  At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is too chaotic -- the Left wants large corporations that it can easily see and control.

Submitted by James Stafford via OilPrice.com,

Who could have ever imagined that North America would surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas liquids? A decade ago, that would have seemed laughable.

Yet that’s exactly what has happened; and it’s not just Saudi Arabia that has been left in North America’s dust -- Russia has, too.

The surge in North American oil and gas production is arguably the most important development in energy over the last decade. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that North America doesn’t have nearly enough oil and gas pipelines to accommodate its 11-million-barrel-a-day output level.

The famously unresolved proposed Keystone XL pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, but its future is in legal and political limbo. The controversial Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed as an alternative to Keystone XL, would connect Canada’s oil sands to the Pacific Coast, allowing greater volumes of oil to be shipped to Asia, but it, too, is still on the drawing board.

Both are good examples of how pipelines – considered the safest way to move oil and gas – have become politicized and scrutinized, and not without reason. Despite their reliability, pipelines still lead to an unacceptable rate of safety mishaps. They corrode and rupture, which threatens workers and nearby communities. In 2013 alone, over 119,000 barrels of oil were spilled in 623 incidents.

America’s existing pipelines are getting older and more prone to corrosion, and over the next five to 10 years, there will be a significant increase in the number of new pipelines.

And that is creating a huge opportunity for better pipeline safety technology.

Monitoring and detecting corrosion in pipelines is still a crude affair (no pun intended). Pipeline companies tend to underspend on safety, concerned only with meeting the minimum regulatory requirements.

One of the major ways pipeline operators detect corrosion is with a “pig,” a machine that travels down the inside of a pipeline looking for problems.

Pigs are not new -- the industry has long relied heavily on them—and the newest generation of pigs, known as “smart pigs,” is considered an improvement over the pigs of yesterday. Smart pigs give a read on the state of the pipeline, such as cracks, corrosion, and metal loss. Operators receive this information in a control room and can then dispatch crews to fix the problem. As of 2012, 93 percent of pipeline inspections were conducted using smart pigs.

But smart pigs might not be enough. Enbridge (NYSE: ENB), a major Canadian pipeline company, has spent over $4.4 billion to upgrade pipeline safety. It is spending big bucks after one of its pipelines spilled oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 – a corrosion breach that Enbridge’s smart pigs failed to detect ahead of time.

And that’s the problem: despite recent advances, smart pigs aren’t terribly accurate. They also require pipeline operations to shut down (you can’t pump oil through a pipeline if there is a machine in the way), and analyzing the data smart pigs gather can take some time. The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year that talked about the pitfalls of smart pigs, even as pipeline companies continue to depend heavily on them.

So alternative methods to detect trouble spots are needed. One method for detecting corrosion uses a device from outside the pipeline. A series of sensors placed on the outside of the pipeline can search for corrosion without interfering in operations.

Pipeline safety company Fox-Tek, a subsidiary of Augusta Industries (CVE: AAO), uses such a system to detect corrosion, as well as a fiber optic system to detect bends, strains and stress in pipelines.

But the real innovation in Fox-Tek’s system is its data analytics package. Companies that use smart pigs usually need to spend months doing post-inspection analysis, but Fox-Tek has developed proprietary software that does continuous and automatic analysis.

Fox-Tek’s sensors gather information and automatically send back confidential reports on everything the company needs to know – temperature, pressure, strain, rates of corrosion, etc. in the form of handy graphs, charts and diagrams. It eliminates the need for an army of people to go out and inspect pipelines and then come back to do the analysis.

The pipeline safety market is massive and growing, but one of the major hurdles for new technologies like advanced sensors and software will be reluctance by pipeline companies to proactively invest in corrosion management and maintenance. In the past, they have largely focused on the bare minimum and viewed safety as a regulatory requirement.

However, there seems to be a sea change in the pipeline industry, particularly since operators are running into an environmental backlash. The blocking of several high-profile pipelines may have finally gotten the attention of the industry. Bringing local communities onboard and acquiring permits from regulators will require pipeline operators to demonstrate improved safety throughout their networks.

But above all, pipeline companies will see dollars saved by using cost-effective monitoring systems to reduce pipeline leaks. Enbridge has been forced to spend around $1 billion to clean up its mess in the Kalamazoo River, which was the result of a corrosion breach. It could spend a fraction of that to have better information on pipeline corrosion to prevent a growing problem from getting worse. That could reduce the frequency of future pipeline spills.

This could be a game changer in terms of how oil and gas pipelines are viewed in North America. If operators use smart software to catch small problems before they can turn into big ones, the common view of pipelines as accidents waiting to happen could be erased. Instead of seeing them as an environmental risk, the public may grow to see them as just another piece of modern infrastructure that facilitates commerce.

A team of researchers has finally managed to explain how such large boulders can move all by themselves. The phenomenon, which was discovered in the 1...

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from Roger Meiners’s October 2012 review of Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu’s 2012 book, The Locovore’s Dilemma:

Locavore restaurants are sprinkled around the country.  Adherents worry about how far it is to go to get acceptable food; is 100 miles fair?  This hobby may voluntarily generate a bit of income for high-cost banana growers in Montana rather than greedy low-cost Guatemalan banana farmers, but what does it do for food efficiency and the environment as a whole?

The agricultural market is already shot through with subsidies, such as the one for uncompetitive American sugar growers in a few states who make campaign contributions in each and every election.  Don’t be surprised if locavores manage to get in on the act, tying together misguided economic and environmental beliefs that Desrochers and Shimizu dissect in scholarly, but readable fashion.

The gross, in fact epic, incompetence of the Congressional Budget Office when it comes to doing its only job, forecasting the future state of the US economy, has previously been extensively documented here (and here and here and here). This incompetence is in the spotlight once again this morning with the CBO's release of its latest forecast revision of its original February 2014 projection.

And while every aspect of the revised projection has changed, in an adverse direction of course, the punchline is the chart below: the CBO's revised projection for 2014 GDP. It's one of those "no comment necessary" visuals.

Surprising? Hardly. After all the CBO is swarming with indoctrinated Keynesian cultists whose only achievement in life is to be wrong about everything (and then to blame the Fed for not "easing enough"). Here is how the CBO "explains" this 50%+ cut in its forecast in just 6 months:

CBO has lowered its projection of real growth of GDP in  2014 from 3.1 percent to 1.5 percent, reflecting the surprising economic weakness in the first half of the year.

Which as other Keynesian talking heads have already made quite clear was due to snow. That's right: over $100 billion in forecast economic growth "evaporated" from the US economy because it... snowed.

The good news? The CBO refuses to forecast the "harsh weather" for the foreseeable future, and has kept all of its 2015 and onward GDP estimates as is. So when things go horribly wrong to the CBO's forecast, which is 100% guaranteed to happen, the CBO can again blame "surprising economic weakness" because, well, everyone else is doing it.

Those who wish to waste their time can find the source here.

Damages from the earthquake that hit the San Francisco area this weekend are estimated to be as high as $4 billion. For many cities around the world, particularly coastal cities situated on the geologically active Ring of Fire, an earthquake could be catastrophically destructive. Bloomberg looks at the five cities that are most vulnerable to earthquakes.

 

 

As Michael Snyder rather ominously warns, the quake last weekend is just the start of the shaking in California...

 

Don't get too excited about what happened on Sunday.  Scientists assure us that it is only a matter of time before "the Big One" hits California.

In fact, the 6.1 magnitude earthquake that hit northern California on Sunday was not even the largest earthquake along the Ring of Fire this weekend.  According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake shook the area around Valparaiso, Chile on Saturday and a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck Peru on Sunday.

As I mentioned above, we have moved into a time when seismic activity is steadily rising.  It has gotten to the point where even the mainstream media cannot ignore it anymore.  For example, just check out the following excerpt from a recent CBS News report…

The average rate of big earthquakes — those larger than magnitude 7 — has been 10 per year since 1979, the study reports. That rate rose to 12.5 per year starting in 1992, and then jumped to 16.7 per year starting in 2010 — a 65 percent increase compared to the rate since 1979. This increase accelerated in the first three months of 2014 to more than double the average since 1979, the researchers report.

Something is happening that scientists don't understand, and that is a little scary.

As I wrote about the other day, earthquake activity seems to particularly be increasing in the United States.  While the west has been relatively quiet, the number of earthquakes in the central and eastern portions of the nation has quintupled over the past 30 years…

According to the USGS, the frequency of earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. has quintupled, to an average of 100 a year during the 2011-2013 period, up from only 20 per year during the 30-year period to 2000.

 

Most of these quakes were minor, but research published by the USGS earlier this year demonstrated that a relatively minor magnitude 5.0 quake caused by wastewater injection after conventional oil drilling triggered a much bigger, 5.7 magnitude quake in Prague, Okla.

 

“We know the hazard has increased for small and moderate size earthquakes. We don’t know as well how much the hazard has increased for large earthquakes. Our suspicion is it has but we are working on understanding this,” said William Ellsworth, a scientist with the USGS.

What in the world could be causing this to happen?

Oklahoma, which used to rarely ever have significant earthquakes, has experienced over 2,300 earthquakes so far in 2014.

That is absolutely staggering.

And of course volcanic activity has been rising all over the planet as well.  In 2013, the number of eruptions around the globe set a new all-time high, and right now persistent rumbling under Iceland's Bardarbunga volcano has much of Europe on alert...

For more than a week the earth has been rumbling beneath Iceland’s looming Bardarbunga volcano. The almost continuous small earthquakes led the government to activate its National Crisis Coordination Centre this week and block off access to the largely uninhabited region around the Bardarbunga caldera.

 

Major airlines are making contingency plans for a potential eruption that could throw dust into the atmosphere and disrupt flight paths between North America and Europe.

Some scientists are saying that if that volcano erupts, it "could trigger Britain’s coldest winter ever".

Clearly something is happening.

All over the world seismic activity is on the rise.

That means that the shaking in California (and in much of the rest of the world) may soon get a whole lot worse.

So what do you think is causing all of this?

On Tuesday, Burger King announced that it would spend some $11 billion to buy Tim Hortons Inc., a Canadian breakfast food chain, then merge Burger King into it, thereby turning what was once a major American company into a major Canadian one. As the Washington Post reports, Burger King would “move the company’s headquarters to Canada, where corporate taxes are significantly lower.”

This process, called inversion, has been occurring more and more often, despite the fascistic suggestion by President Obama that headquartering outside the United States represents a betrayal of God and country. Members of the Obama administration have taken to labeling business inversions a lack of “economic patriotism” – presumably under the assumption that to stay in America, cut jobs, and lose all profits in order to pay higher taxes represents a sort of higher moral value than moving one’s headquarters and continuing to pay millions of workers and reward consumers with better and cheaper products.

The Obama administration ought to note that the Soviets built a wall in the center of Berlin to keep their people and industries “economically patriotic.” Suggested measures to chain companies to the United States represent the same sort of government compulsion. And that sort of compulsion is a heavy club for a very slight increase in government revenue: an estimated $19 billion over 10 years.

Sadly, the Obama administration’s policies have driven more and more industries out of the country. Since 2008, more than two dozen companies have taken advantage of inversion. Here are seven other companies that have shifted production out of America in order to avoid our ridiculous regulatory schemes, or are considering the possibility of doing so:

Walgreens. Walgreens seriously considered inversion this month, but walked away from moving its headquarters to Europe after purchasing Alliance Boots GmbH. That decision drove Walgreens stock down. Walgreens’ board only decided against inversion, according to the Wall Street Journal, because “the board felt that the arrangement might not easily pass muster with the Internal Revenue Service and created the potential to be hung up in litigation for a decade.”

Pfizer. The pharmaceutical giant has been in on-again, off-again talks to buy Britain’s AstraZeneca in order to take part in a tax inversion. In May, Pfizer walked away from a deal to buy AstraZeneca for some $118 billion – but now, the deal is reportedly back on the table. According to Reuters five days ago: 

Pfizer Chief Executive Ian Read has made clear he is still considering big deals to revive his firm's pipeline and cut its tax bill - something buying AstraZeneca would allow it to do via a so-called inversion that would shift its tax base to Britain.

Should AstraZeneca not become part of the deal, other companies, like GlaxoSmithKline, could.

Medtronic. Medtronic, a huge medical technology firm, has acquired Covidien, and will adopt Ireland as its legal headquarters. As the Wall Street Journal reports, here is the deal: “Medtronic agrees to call Ireland its legal home, and in return it gets to bring $1 billion or more into the U.S. without penalty.” The deal was for some $43 billion.

Tim Hortons. The company Burger King now seeks to buy participated in what is called a “naked inversion” itself in 2009. It started off as a Canadian company, according to the Congressional Research Service, but was bought by Wendy’s in 1995, then went independent in 2006.

Liberty Global. In 2013, Liberty Global bought Virgin Media for $23.3 billion. The merger, according to BBC, created “the second biggest pay-TV business after BSkyB” as well as “the world’s largest broadband company, with 25 million customers in 14 countries.” Most of the company’s revenue was earned in Europe. Richard Branson, previous owner of Virgin Media, became a 2 percent stakeholder in the new entity. Upon inverting, the tax rate for Liberty Global dropped to 21 percent, and the company was exempted from taxes for several years, according to the American Bar Association.

Chiquita Brands. Just this month, Chiquita participated in an inversion deal, buying Fyffes of Ireland and relocating its headquarters there. The company stated, “Chiquita remains committed to completing its transaction with Fyffes, which it believes will create a combined company that is better positioned to succeed in a highly competitive marketplace while driving strong performance and value for shareholders.”

Eaton. When Eaton bought Cooper Industries and headquartered in Ireland, Eaton saved approximately $160 million on taxes. The companies explained, “Incorporating as an Irish company provides significant global cash management flexibility and associated financial benefits.” As Bloomberg News noted:

Eaton’s effective tax rate for 2011 was 12.9 percent and its rate for 2010 was 9.5 percent, according to company filings. In 2011, lower taxes on its non-U.S. operations made up more than half of the difference between the company’s effective tax rate and the 35 percent top U.S. rate.

Overall, some 25 major companies have participated in tax inversions since President Obama took office. That trend will continue to accelerate as President Obama ratchets up the rhetoric and threatens harsher action against companies that dare to buck his high-tax priorities.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

When it comes to worthless majors, it is no secret that "liberal arts" are at the top of the heap. This is the conclusion of not just the real world: a recent survey of 68,000 workers by salary information firm PayScale confirmed as much when asking the humanities majors themselves, and where employees with degrees in fields like English, general studies, and graphic design were among the most likely to report feeling "underemployed" at their current jobs.

Also, that the list was topped of by Criminal Justice majors probably speaks more about the current captured state of US crony capitalism than anything else.  But what is surprising is that graduates with more "practical" degrees in fields like business administration, ranking second in terms of pay dissatisfaction, also said their jobs didn't put their education, training or experience to work as much as they should. In other words, Wall Streeters thought they were underpaid. Actually did we say "surprising"... scratch that.

Some more from the WaPo:

Why the poor showing for business majors? PayScale notes that in many cases, a simple bachelor's degree in business might not get you very far - a more advanced degree like an MBA might be necessary "in order to set up recipients for jobs in their fields."

 

At the other end of the spectrum, STEM fields produced graduates with the least likelihood of underemployment. Engineering degrees accounted for six of the ten least underemployed majors. Law, physics, geology and mathematics made up the remaining four.

 

What causes workers to feel underemployed? Most survey respondents cited poor pay as a leading factor. PayScale also notes that "nine of the 10 most underemployed majors are female-dominated," making underemployment a factor in the gender wage gap. Conversely, many of the least underemployed majors are dominated by men, according to a 2013 Georgetown survey.

In total, about 43 percent of respondents to the PayScale survey reported feeling underemployed. It was unclear if the other 57% were just unemployed to begin with.

I try not to go for conspiracy theories generally, but this ongoing IRS nonsense involving conveniently disappearing emails potentially pertaining to the scandal involving targeting certain groups is making my skeptics beacon go off. The official story essentially involves a computer (server?) crash that obliterated the email data of several email accounts that would otherwise be of great interest to those trying to figure out who in the Obama administration knew what about how the IRS was operating. That crash somehow also involves the destruction of any local backups these IRS folks are required to keep as part of their job.

But what I imagine pretty much everyone that has even a modicum of interest in office technology is asking is what about the kind of backups that are typically run for disaster recovery and offsite purposes. You know, like tape drives (blech), D2D backups, or remote storage. It's difficult to believe that all copies of the data for those email accounts had somehow been disappeared by accident. Or, really, disappeared entirely at all.

As it turns out, there is backup data for those email accounts, but if you're thinking that we're finally going to get to the bottom of this nonsense, you're a silly naive person that hasn't witnessed our glorious government at work.

“A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News’s Shannon Bream. “But it would be too hard to go get Lois Lerner’s e-mails from that backup system."

Now, I know, Fox News and blah blah blah, but this is a claim worth paying attention to mostly because it only makes sense to begin with. Well, the part about there being backups, I mean. The suggestion that such backups are so difficult to parse and recover that the administration isn't going to get them for review makes zero sense because that's what damned backups are for.

Think about the logic here for a moment. The reason the federal government has backups of data in place is because there's a great deal of horrible crap that could happen to their facilities. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, hallmark-level incompetence, Area 51 aliens going Rambo on the computers. These are the things they have to prepare for and they need the ability to restore data from a remote location should one of their facilities fall to our alien overlords. To say that restoring that data is too hard to do when requested is to say that they're ill-prepared for a disaster. The suggestion that the government can't retrieve emails for court or congressional review is to say that they wouldn't even meet FINRA compliance, something that itsy-bitsy little trading firms are required to meet.

Fitton said his group plans to ask a federal judge to order the IRS to hand over the e-mails, which conservative opponents of Lerner want to see in order to determine if there is a link between President Obama’s team and the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups.

“If this backup system is working, Lois Lerner’s e-mails are there,” Fitton said.

And if the backup system isn't working, then fire everyone everywhere because this kind of thing is no joke. I'd say it'd be a bigger scandal to have any portion of the federal government not have basic backup and DR systems in place than to find out that any portion of the Executive administration was encouraging the IRS to target certain special interest groups.

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Gabriela Calderon de Burgos

A new “monetary and finance” law that was approved by Ecuador’s National Assembly in July, is expected to be signed into law any day now. Many suspect that this marks the beginning of the end for dollarization in Ecuador, which began in January of 2000. But the underlying threat to dollarization is the incessant growth of public spending. Losing dollarization would be a sad development, considering it is what has protected Ecuadorians from one of the worst evils of populism: high inflation.

The remarkable contribution dollarization has made to the Ecuadorian economy is worth noting. A 2010 study published by Ecuador’s central bank (BCE) analyzed the first decade of the absence of independent monetary policy and found that average GDP growth increased from -6.3 percent during the 1990s to 4.4 percent during the 2000s; annual inflation decreased from a high of 90 percent in September of 2000 to single digits within a year, and has averaged 3 percent since 2004. Additionally, interest rates went down immediately, thereby reducing the cost of capital. According to the World Bank, the percentage of Ecuadorians living on less than $2 a day (PPP) decreased from 37.7 percent in 2000 to 10.6 percent in 2009.

Of course, there are many problems dollarization cannot solve and the positive outcomes above are not solely due to it. But it probably has been one of the main factors contributing to Ecuadorian growth prior to and during our current “revolutionary” government. In fact, Ecuador owes its superior economic performance today–compared the two most prominent populist nations in the region, Argentina and Venezuela–mostly to dollarization.

Ecuadorians love getting paid and saving in American dollars–and the government knows this. So why would de-dollarization be more likely today than seven years ago when Rafael Correa became president? Mainly because public spending has increased to unsustainable levels and will most likely continue its breakneck growth as Correa seeks to stay in power indefinitely or, at least, beyond 2017. Additionally, Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution made the BCE explicitly part of the executive branch (Article No. 303) and retained its power to issue currency of legal tender. Moreover, the new monetary and finance law contains several provisions that are only applicable if the BCE were to issue a national currency again. These include, for example, a whole chapter on the “exchange rate regime,” the ability to perform open market operations, and to use the rediscount window to ensure liquidity within the economy.

Most of the discussion has revolved around the provisions of the new monetary and finance law and how it might be the first step towards a return to a national currency. But laws and constitutions come and go fairly easily in Ecuador and are frequently violated if politics make it convenient to do so.

As F.A. Hayek explained in his book Denationalization of Money, national state monopolies over the issuing of money arose out of the discovery by kings that they could finance their uncontrolled spending by reducing the metallic content of the currency and forcing people to accept the devalued coins. Likewise, the main threat to dollarization is the incessant growth of public spending. More public spending increases the temptation to go back to the days when Ecuadorian politicians could monetize debt via the BCE. Public spending has grown from 24.6 percent of GDP in 2007 to 44.4 percent in 2013. Just so that you get an idea of the incredible growth of spending, this year’s projected fiscal deficit of $9.2 billion is almost equivalent to the total government spending in 2006 ($9.927 billion).

The government is already showing signs of a fiscal squeeze and making adjustments might be a difficult pill to swallow. For instance, expected government spending in the bureaucracy ($8.433 billion) and in subsidies ($6.213 billion) for 2014 would no longer be covered by expected tax revenue ($13.965 billion). These expenditures, like most other budget items, are politically costly to reduce. Public investment, however, is one of the few areas of the budget that could be easily trimmed. But the development model of Correa’s so called “citizen’s revolution” has crowded out so much private investment that the economy has become very dependent on public investment for growth.

If the government continues down this path of fiscal irresponsibility, the temptation to use the printing press at the BCE might become irresistible. The cherry on top of all of this is that the new penal code that went into effect this month makes it a crime—punishable with up to seven years in jail—to “publish, broadcast or spread” economic or financial information that, according to the authorities, is false and might cause economic or financial “panic.”

Submitted by Llewellyn King via OilPrice.com,

Hydroelectric dams are a nifty way of producing a huge amount of power, but they do not last forever. This is a tale of two dams that will fail unless they are urgently repaired, and if they fail, catastrophic suffering and loss of life will be the result.

The first is the Mosul Dam, which stretches across the Tigris River in a valley north of Mosul, Iraq. As dams go, this one is a civil engineering horror. The dam was captured on Aug. 7 by the Islamic State, and retaken 10 days later by Iraqi and Kurdish forces, with American air support.

Should the two-mile-wide dam fail, which is likely, Mosul would be wiped out and the damage would extend to Baghdad. Loss of life could reach 500,000, and millions could be deprived of water and power: an immense catastrophe piled on the daily pain of Iraq.

The second dam, in southern Africa on the Zambezi River, is the Kariba. This 55-year-old dam, by some measures, is the world’s second largest. It was a civil engineering masterpiece and has held up well, given the spotty maintenance by its owners – Zambia, on the north bank and Zimbabwe, on the south bank.

But the Kariba Dam is predicted to fail within three years unless it undergoes massive repair. If it does, surging water would rip a vast trench down the length of the Zambezi River on its route to the Indian Ocean. The wall of water would take out another giant dam, Cahora Bassa, in Mozambique.

Loss of life could reach 3.5 million, with untold damage to wildlife. South central Africa would lose 40 percent of its electric supply.

While the Mosul and Kariba dams share the same potential lethality, they are very different structures.

The Mosul Dam was a rush job, ordered by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s without regard to the engineering realities of the site. It is anchored in gypsum, which dissolves in water. Daily, leaks in the foundation have to be plugged with grout -- a mixture of cement and sand. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the Mosul Dam is fundamentally the wrong structure for the location, and called it the “most dangerous dam in the world.”

Even with careful tending, the Mosul Dam is in danger. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, many of the workers who have kept the dam operating fled when fighters from the Islamic State arrived on the scene. Only one dedicated manager is known to have stayed.

The United States has spent $33 million trying to stabilize the Mosul Dam, but the money, according an inspector general’s report, was largely wasted. Now, the U.S. bombing campaign is threatening to further destabilize an already fragile structure.

Apart from general maintenance issues, the Kariba Dam’s problems are a little simpler. When the dam was built between 1955 and 1959, the plan was to control the river’s flow though six sluice gates set in the wall. The water travels through the sluices and empties into a plunge pool before flowing downstream.

The trouble is that the plunge pool has grown from an indentation in the riverbed to a vast 285-foot-deep crater. The water, which swirls around inside it with great force, is eroding the basalt rock on which the dam is anchored. In other words, the dam is eating itself alive. Engineers dare not open all the sluice gates at once – the last time they did was in 1966.

The necessary fix is a combination of blasting an enlarged plunge pool so the water moves along without creating a whirlpool, and injecting grout -- in the form of underwater concrete -- to shore up the foundation.

A consortium of the World Bank, the European Union and the African Development Bank this month agreed to provide $250 million to save Kariba. Engineers say the work must be done in the next three years or it will be too late.

If Zimbabwe and Zambia can agree on the contracts, work should begin next year. But in that part of the world, the only thing that moves fast is the Zambezi River.

Considering the chaos that has befallen Iraq, the outlook for the Mosul Dam is anyone’s guess.

Top IRS ethics lawyer facing possible disbarment, accused of lying...


(First column, 9th story, link)

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We've been writing an awful lot lately about the militarization of police, but apparently some in Congress want to make sure that the American public can't protect themselves from a militarized police. Rep. Mike Honda (currently facing a reasonably strong challenger for election this fall) has introduced a bizarre bill that would make it a crime for civilians to buy or own body armor. The bill HR 5344 is unlikely to go anywhere, but violating the bill, if it did become law, would be punishable with up to ten years in prison. Yes, TEN years. For merely owning body armor.

Honda claims that the bill is designed to stop "armored assailants" whom he claims are "a trend" in recent years. Perhaps there wouldn't be so much armor floating around out there if we weren't distributing it to so many civilian police forces... Not surprisingly, the very same police who have been getting much of this armor are very much in favor of making sure no one else gets it:

Honda said it has been endorsed by law enforcement organizations including the California State Sheriffs' Association, the Fraternal Order of Police and the Peace Officers Research Association of California, according to Honda.

Santa Clara County's District Attorney Jeff Rosen and Sheriff Laurie Smith and Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley and Sheriff Gregory Ahern also attended today's news conference, held at the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office in San Jose.

Santa Clara police Chief Michael Sellers and Milpitas police Chief Steve Pangelinan also attended the news conference.

That all sounds great. But when you read stories about police shooting unarmed teenagers, pointing guns at protesters and reporters, even threatening to kill or shoot them, isn't there at least a reasonable argument that people who are doing perfectly legal things might want to protect themselves from out of control, militarized police officers too? Owning a gun is perfectly legal, but owning a "ballistic resistant" shield gets you 10 years in jail?

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