Infinite Unknown

There is no recovery!

A story that is not getting nearly enough attention is the ruinous fiscal meltdown occurring in state after state, all across the country.

Taxes are being raised. Draconian cuts in services are being made. Public employees are being fired. The tissue-thin national economic recovery is being undermined. And in many cases, the most vulnerable populations — the sick, the elderly, the young and the poor — are getting badly hurt.

Arizona, struggling with a projected $2.6 billion budget shortfall, took the drastic step of scrapping its Children’s Health Insurance Program. That left nearly 47,000 low-income children with no coverage at all. Gov. Jan Brewer is also calling for an increase in the sales tax. She said, “Arizona is navigating its way through the largest state budget deficit in its long history.”

In New Jersey, the newly elected governor, Chris Christie, has proposed a series of budget cuts that, among other things, would result in public schools receiving $820 million less in state aid than they had received in the prior school year. Some well-off districts would have their direct school aid cut off altogether. Poorer districts that rely almost entirely on state aid would absorb the biggest losses in terms of dollars. They’re bracing for a terrible hit.

For all the happy talk about “no child left behind,” the truth is that in Arizona and New Jersey and dozens of other states trying to cope with the fiscal disaster brought on by the Great Recession, millions of children are being left far behind, and many millions of adults as well. Continue reading »

Tags: Children, Economy, Global News, Government, Meltdown, Politics, Society

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Unemployment rates in 363 U.S. metropolitan areas rose in January, and 346 areas reported year-on-year declines in their number of jobs, the Labor Department said on Friday.

Nearly 200 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of at least 10 percent in January, showing that unemployment problems persist at the local level.

California has been especially hard hit during the recession that began in late 2007, and the Labor Department data showed the state’s jobs situation continues to deteriorate, with an overall unemployment rate of 12.5 percent in January.

The three areas with the highest jobless rates in the country, all above 20 percent, were all located in California, the most populous U.S. state. Continue reading »

Tags: Economy, U.S., Unemployment

Since 1970 the world’s polar bear population has “declined” from 5,000 to 25,000

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion.

Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF.

Now Dr Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and himself a member of the IPCC, says: “The way the WWF report calculated this 40 per cent was totally wrong, while (the new) calculations are by far more reliable and correct.” These calculations were done by researchers at Boston University and were published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. They used satellite data to study the drought of 2005, when rainfall fell to the lowest in living memory, and found that the rainforest suffered no significant effects.

So, the rainforest scare, like the Himalayan glaciers panic, is garbage. A further encouraging feature of this development is that genuine scientists are increasingly becoming emboldened to challenge the IPCC’s junk science: the Academy is beginning to reassert its integrity. AGW without withered rainforests is Hamlet without the prince. It was one of those emotive claims much invoked by priggish children in the voice-overs of nanny-state “green” commercials, lecturing their elders on the stewardship of the planet.

An even bigger tear-jerker was the plight of polar bears, bolstered by carefully cropped photographs of lonely bears stranded on fast-melting icebergs, doomed to extinction. That is the second brick that has fallen out of the IPCC wall. The official legend is that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming. The IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, which has bought into global warming in a big way, has claimed that, of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears (13 of them in Canada, home to 60 per cent of polar bears), eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing and there is insufficient data on the remaining seven. Continue reading »

Tags: Climate Change, Environment, Global News, Global Warming, IPCC, Polar Bear, Science, WWF

Added: 19th Mar 10

Tags: Bubble, China, Dollar, Economy, Government, Jim Rogers, Politics, U.S.

John Lipsky, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sits for a photograph following a television interview outside the Jackson Lake Lodge in Moran, Wyoming, on Aug. 20, 2009. (Bloomberg)

March 21 (Bloomberg) — Advanced economies face “acute” challenges in tackling high public debt, and unwinding existing stimulus measures will not come close to bringing deficits back to prudent levels, said John Lipsky, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

All G7 countries, except Canada and Germany, will have debt-to-GDP ratios close to or exceeding 100 percent by 2014, Lipsky said in a speech today at the China Development Forum in Beijing. Already this year, the average ratio in advanced economies is expected to reach the levels seen in 1950, after World War II, he said. The government debt ratio in some emerging market nations had also reached a “worrisome level.”

“This surge in government debt is occurring at a time when pressure from rising health and pension spending is building up,” Lipsky said. Stimulus measures account for about one-tenth of the projected debt increase, and rolling them back won’t be enough to bring deficits and debt ratios back to prudent levels.

Rising public debt could lead governments to seek to eliminate it through inflation or even default if they fail to carry out fiscal measures in time, Mohamed A. El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. warned earlier this month. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” a book arguing that unforeseen events can roil markets, said March 12 he is concerned about hyperinflation as governments around the world take on more debt and print money.

Budget Deficit

The U.S. budget deficit widened to a record in February as the government spent more to help revive the economy. The gap grew to $221 billion after a shortfall of $194 billion in February 2009, the Treasury Department said on March 10. The figures indicate the deficit this year will probably surpass the record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September. Continue reading »

Tags: Canada, Debt, Economy, G7, Germany, Politics, U.S.

Added: 23. Januar 2010

The rain water was tested by government labs:

Aluminum (780 times over the save level.)

Arsenic (593 times over the save level.)

Manganese (4000 times over the save level.)

Barium (300 times over the save level.)

Zinc (8000 times over the save level.)

Iron (2000 times over the save level.)

Boron (4000 times over the save level.)

New World Order already controlling population with poisoned water and air

Added: 9. Februar 2010

Tags: Aluminum, Arsenic, Barium, Boron, Chemicals, Chemtrails, Contamination, Global News, Government, Health, Iron, Manganese, New World Order, Politics, toxic, toxicity, Water, Zinc

Keynesianism (Deficit Spending, Obamanomics) in general is outdated and wrong.

Interesting article nevertheless.

The latest U.S. Treasury Z1 Flow of Funds report was released on March 11, 2010, bringing the data current through the end of 2009. What follows is the most important chart of your lifetime. It relegates almost all modern economists and economic theory to the dustbin of history. Any economic theory, formula, or relationship that does not consider this non-linear relationship of DEBT and phase transition is destined to fail.

It explains the “jobless” recoveries of the past and how each recent economic cycle produces higher money figures, yet lower employment. It explains why we are seeing debt driven events that circle the globe. It explains the psychological uneasiness that underpins this point in history, the elephant in the room that nobody sees or can describe.

(Click on images to enlarge.)

This is a very simple chart. It takes the change in GDP and divides it by the change in Debt. What it shows is how much productivity is gained by infusing $1 of debt into our debt backed money system.

Back in the early 1960s a dollar of new debt added almost a dollar to the nation’s output of goods and services. As more debt enters the system the productivity gained by new debt diminishes. This produced a path that was following a diminishing line targeting ZERO in the year 2015. This meant that we could expect that each new dollar of debt added in the year 2015 would add NOTHING to our productivity.

Then a funny thing happened along the way. Macroeconomic DEBT SATURATION occurred causing a phase transition with our debt relationship. This is because total income can no longer support total debt. In the third quarter of 2009 each dollar of debt added produced NEGATIVE 15 cents of productivity, and at the end of 2009, each dollar of new debt now SUBTRACTS 45 cents from GDP!

This is mathematical PROOF that debt saturation has occurred. Continuing to add debt into a saturated system, where all money is debt, leads only to future defaults and to higher unemployment. Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, GDP, Global News, Government, Keynesianism, Obama administration, Politics, Treasury, U.S.

‘Deeming’ vs. the Constitution

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will ram the unpopular Senate health bill through the House without a vote. Article 1, Sect. 7 of the Constitution says she can’t.

Many House Democrats are reluctant to go on record in support of the Senate bill. Pelosi’s strategy is to “deem” it passed, go straight to a vote on a package of reconciliation “fixes” and then present both the Senate bill and reconciliation package to the president for signing.

In recent years, the US Supreme Court has twice struck down attempts to abbreviate the lawmaking process required by Article 1, Sect 7. Though it’s been used before on less controversial legislation, Pelosi’s tactic won’t survive a constitutional challenge.

* In INS v. Chadha (1982), the high court ruled 7-2 that lawmaking must follow the steps laid out in the Constitution. Foreign student J.R. Chadha (from Kenya, ironically) convinced the Immigration and Naturalization Service to suspend his deportation. The House, acting without the Senate or president, voted to overturn the INS suspension via a “legislative veto” — a device created by prior law to give either house of Congress the means to overturn certain executive decisions.

Chadha challenged the constitutionality of that arrangement and won. The Supreme Court ruled that the House’s action was “legislative” in nature — and declared that lawmaking is “subject to the procedural requirements of Art. 1, Sect. 7 for legislative action: passage by a majority of both houses and presentation to the president.” Anything less is unconstitutional.

Article 1 states: “The votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively.” Continue reading »

Tags: Constitution, Government, Healthcare, Law, Nancy Pelosi, Obama administration, Politics, Supreme Court, U.S.

(Reuters) - The Swiss Catholic Church is investigating around 10 allegations of abuse by clergy, including some acts committed since 2001, making Switzerland the latest country to be hit by a wave of scandal sweeping Europe.

In a pastoral letter on Saturday, Pope Benedict apologized to victims of child sex abuse by clergy in Ireland and ordered an official inquiry there.

The Swiss Bishops’ Conference said the Pope’s letter confirmed the church in Switzerland had acted correctly in dealing with cases of abuse, and added that it had already worked together with victims to report abuse to the authorities.

“The letter supports the guidelines that the Church introduced for cases of sexual abuse in 2002,” said Conference spokesman Walter Mueller.

The Diocese of Chur, in eastern Switzerland, said it was investigating around 10 complaints of abuse. “Our primary goal now is to help the victims,” the bishop’s representative, Christoph Casetti, told national Swiss television station SF1.

The abbot of a monastery in the diocese said at least three of the 77 monks at Einsiedeln had committed acts of abuse since he took up office in December 2001, but no legal action had been taken in any of the cases. Continue reading »

Tags: Abuse, Catholic Church, Church, Crimes, Global News, scandal, Switzerland

Boy Scouts coverup of sex abuse alleged

(Credit: CBS Graphic)

(AP) — The Boy Scouts of America has long kept an extensive archive of secret documents that chronicle the sexual abuse of young boys by Scout leaders over the years.

The “perversion files,” a nickname the Boy Scouts are said to have used for the documents, have rarely been seen by the public, but that could change in the coming weeks in a Portland, Ore., courtroom.

The attorney for a man who was allegedly molested in the 1980s by a Scout leader has obtained about 1,000 Boy Scouts sex files and is expected to release some of them at a trial that began Wednesday. The lawyer says the files show the organization has covered up abuse for decades.

On Friday, testimony from a Mormon bishop responsible for a Scout troop of church members suggested that the Scouts never provided training about spotting abuse or preventing it. Continue reading »

Tags: Abuse, Boy Scouts, Children, Global News, Sex, Society, U.S.