Woman leaves 2000 living descendants

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html?hp

Climategate:Criminal Penalties Next?

Senator Inhofe calls for criminal investigation and Senate hearings.  They should be using the RICO laws for this one!
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The staff report describes four major issues revealed by the Climategate Files and the subsequent revelations:

1. The emails suggest some climate scientists were cooperating to obstruct the release of damaging information and counter-evidence.
2. They suggest scientists were manipulating the data to reach predetermined conclusions.
3. They show some climate scientists colluding to pressure journal editors not to publish work questioning the “consensus.”
4. They show that scientists involved in the report were assuming the role of climate activists attempting to influence public opinion while claiming scientific objectivity.

The report notes a number of potential legal issues raised by their Climategate investigation:

1. It suggests scientific misconduct that may violate the Shelby Amendment — requiring open access to the results of government-funded research — and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) policies on scientific misconduct (which were announced December 12, 2000).
2. It notes the potential for violations of the Federal False Statements and False Claims Acts, which may have both civil and criminal penalties.
3. The report also notes the possibility of there having been an obstruction of Congress in Congressional Proceeds, which may constitute an obstruction of justice.

If proven, these charges could subject the scientists involved to debarment from federally funded research, and even to criminal penalties.


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/2/

Poll: Only 21% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed

Peering through the mist at last?
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The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.
However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2010/only_21_say_u_s_government_has_consent_of_the_governed

Naked Emperor Raises Rate

...and stocks and commodities go up?  Confirms inflation fears.
-------------------------------------------------------

So I’ll ask the question again — why on earth would Ben & Co. raise rates? The answer should be obvious if you’ve been listening to me and my brethren for the last several years: Bernanke is terrified of inflation. He knows that U.S. debt is losing its cachet. He knows how much money has been printed. He knows the American consumer is an empty gun. He knows what’s coming, and he figures if he starts raising rates now, he can postpone the inevitable catastrophe. And maybe he can. If he raises rates to 10,000 basis-points (that’s 100%, by the way, and even that wouldn’t be enough).
You think that’s crazy? Ben doesn’t. After Friday, he’s more terrified than ever. Sure the dollar went up a little, but so did gold, oil, and stocks, and that’s not supposed to happen when the Fed raises rates. No, when rates go higher, it’s supposed to mean slower growth ahead, and less opportunity for investment. The only real exception to this rule is the anticipation of inflationary price increases — in which case markets don’t appear to care about slower growth, because investors are more focused on the likelihood of weakening currencies. In this case, markets anticipate higher prices and move up in spite of higher rates.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/189741-inflation-why-markets-ignored-the-fed-rate-hike?source=article_sb_picks

Ignore Expiration Dates on Food

They have no meaning except in relative terms.  Even the mandated ones are arbitrary, and differ from state to state.  Also remember that advancing perishability BENEFITS the producer (who sets the date, in most cases).
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The fact is that expiration dates mean very little. Food starts to deteriorate from the moment it's harvested, butchered, or processed, but the rate at which it spoils depends less on time than on the conditions under which it's stored. Moisture and warmth are especially detrimental. A package of ground meat, say, will stay fresher longer if placed near the coldest part of a refrigerator (below 40 degrees Fahrenheit), than next to the heat-emitting light bulb. Besides, as University of Minnesota food scientist Ted Labuza explained to me, expiration dates address quality—optimum freshness—rather than safety and are extremely conservative. To account for all manner of consumer, manufacturers imagine how the laziest people with the most undesirable kitchens might store and handle their food, then test their products based on these criteria.

http://www.slate.com/id/2244249/

Naked Crony Capitalism

Shameless spendulus;  Picking the "green" winners and losers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCZBKxP4TY

Best Reason to Live in AZ

 This is awesome.  I can't stand the money-leeching Mass RMV.
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Well, maybe the second best reason… the first best is that it was 75F today.  But the second best reason is that my son got his driver’s license today, and it expires in the year 2059.  I kid you not — get your license at 16 and there are no more renewals until you are 65 years old.  Have fun at the DMV.

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/02/single-best-reason-to-live-in-arizona.html

Obama=Bush+++

Birds of a feather:  Same policies tripled down
--------------------
At first glance former President Bush and President Obama seem like opposites when it comes to economic policy making.  Talk of Bush as a free-marketeer and deregulator abounds as Obama’s reputation as a big spender and intervener grow stronger by the day.  A closer look shows their economic policies have more in common than meets the eye.

5. They love to spend. Bush passed a $3 trillion budget for 2009.  Obama posted a $3.5 trillion budget in 2010.  Bush doubled the debt to almost $6 trillion and Obama’s plans would leave us with an IOU of an additional $8.5 trillion by 2020.

4. They shop at the same stores. Contrary to popular belief, defense and homeland security spending only made up about 40 percent of Bush’s new spending.  He increased spending across most non-defense categories – like education, Medicare, Medicaid, income security and regional development – by four to six times the rate of inflation.  In Obama’s first half year in office, as he demanded a departure from the “investment deficit” years under Bush, these budgets rose another 70 percent or 40 times the rate of inflation.

3. They dabble with stimulants. In 2001 and 2008, Bush spent billions on rebates to stimulate consumer spending.  In 2009, Obama upped the ante with his $862 billion stimulus package.

2. They give sweetheart deals to failing corporations. Obama carried out Bush’s unpopular $700 billion bailout for failing corporations.  Together, the presidents have bailed out over 600 businesses since Spring 2008.

1. They enjoy regulating in their free time. Once again contrary to popular belief, President Bush was the biggest regulator since Richard Nixon.  Under his leadership in 2007, the number of pages of regulation added to the Federal Register reached an all-time high of 78,090  – a 21 percent increase from Bush’s first year.  And spending on regulatory activities rose to $42 billion in 2009 – a 62 percent increase.  Since taking office, Obama has proposed a large and sweeping increase in regulation that many worry could lead to another financial crisis in the future.

Despite rhetoric that suggests the contrary, President Obama’s economic policies are strikingly more of the same failed policies that Bush tried before him.  This is unfortunate because, as Paul Krugman claims, the last decade has seen declining private-sector employment and declining median household income.

http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/2010/02/16/the-odd-couple-5-unfortunate-similarities-between-bush-and-obama/

Insolvency? Making Greece look good

 

http://seekingalpha.com/article/188776-outstanding-external-debt-numbers-greece-doesn-t-look-so-bad?source=email

Measure the Speed of Light with Valentine Chocolate

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/leftover-valentines-chocolate-use-it-to-measure-the-speed-of-light/

Climategate-Moving to Capitulation

• Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
• There has been no global warming since 1995
• Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

TSA; Disabled 4-Year-Old Forced to Remove Leg Braces

I feel so much safer;
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Did you hear about the Camden cop whose disabled son wasn't allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces?
Unfortunately, it's no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden's emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan.
Ryan was taking his first flight, to Walt Disney World, for his fourth birthday.
The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk.
Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple of hours before their Southwest Airlines flight was to depart.
The boy's father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector.
The alarm went off.
The screener told them to take off the boy's braces.
The Thomases were dumbfounded. "I told them he can't walk without them on his own," Bob Thomas said.
"He said, 'He'll need to take them off.' "
Ryan's mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.
No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own.



http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_region/20100215_Daniel_Rubin__Another_case_of_TSA_overkill.html

Mortgage Bankers Association Underwater on their Mortgage

On Friday, CoStar Group Inc., a provider of commercial real estate data, announced that it had agreed to buy the MBA’s 10-story headquarters building in Washington, D.C., for $41.3 million. The price is well below the $79 million the trade group says it paid for the glass-walled building in 2007, while it was still under construction. The price also falls short of  the $75 million of financing that the MBA received from a group of banks led by PNC Financial Services Group Inc. for the purchase.

When the MBA announced the purchase of the building in early 2007, the trade group’s president at the time, Jonathan Kempner, said: “We have come to the inescapable conclusion that owning our own building was the smartest long-term investment for the association.”  In October 2009, however, the MBA informed its members that it had put the building up for sale. At that time, the MBA said that continued ownership of the building, which was financed with $75 million of variable-rate debt, would be “economically imprudent.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/02/06/mortgage-bankers-mum-on-how-they-fixed-their-own-mortgage-woes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fdevelopments%2Ffeed+(WSJ.com%3A+Developments+Blog)&mod=WSJ_Real+Estate_BLOGSDEVELOPMENTSFEED

Nearly Failed Treasury Auction?

Hmmm.  Interesting.
---------------------------------------------------

I realize this sounds complicated, so simply think of it this way:
1) Direct Buyers: folks who buy straight from the Treasury, typically comprising a minor stake in US debt purchases
2) Indirect Buyers: folks who buy LARGE chunks of US debt, typically Foreign Governments
3) Primary Dealers: banks that HAVE to buy US debt to ensure an auction doesn’t fail. You don’t want to see a lot of Primary Dealer purchases as this means that those who can CHOOSE to buy US debt DON’T want to.
On Wednesday, February 10, 2010, the US Treasury issued $16 billion in 30-year Treasuries. Here are the buyer data points:

Buyer	Purchase Amount (%)
Primary Dealers	47%
Direct Buyers	24% (A RECORD)
Indirect Buyers	28%

First of all, we see Direct Buyers hit a RECORD percentage of purchases. This is extremely bizarre and somewhat disconcerting given that we have no way of knowing who these buyers are. For all we know, they could be the Federal Reserve itself or other US Government entities buying “off the radar.”
Indeed, on that note, we know that the US Federal Reserve accounted for 11% of the total purchases. Folks, you’re not dealing with a healthy debt auction when the Fed accounts for 10% of purchases.
However, far, FAR more worrisome is the pathetic Indirect Buyer takedown: 28%. Historically this number has been more around 40% (Tyler at ZeroHedge notes that the average Indirect purchase of the last four long-term Treasury auctions was 39.9%). To see such a MASSIVE drop off in Indirect Buyers (40% down to 28%) is a MAJOR warning sign that Foreign Governments are no longer willing to buy long-term US debt.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/188380-the-u-s-land-of-the-free-and-home-of-a-nearly-failed-treasury-auction-of-its-own?source=article_sb_popular

New aerial 911 photos released

Just released.  Interesting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1249885/New-World-Trade-Center-9-11-aerial-images-ABC-News.html

ClimateGate Gets Even Worse

The unraveling continues.  At what point do these guys and their complicit IPCC lackeys have zero credibility.

Strange case of moving weather posts and a scientist under siege

It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute. Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?
But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN's top climate science body.
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed.

Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanisation influence … is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim. They were convinced that the urban effect was much bigger, even though it might not change the overall story of global warming too much. After all, two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, and the oceans are warming, too.

But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be "unduly burdensome", they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: "The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres"; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that "there were 'few if any changes' to locations is a fabrication". He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/dispute-weather-fraud

Rx for Decongestants; Police State Gone Wild

The Pyrrhic 'war on drugs' has no bounds. Because prescriptions have done so much to stop prescription narcotics trafficing, the police state is going after my pseudophed. Imagine having to visit your doctor to get a decongestant- aren't we supposed to be trying to contain healthcare costs? How much human suffering must we all endure to appease them?

State and local efforts to thwart methamphetamine production by further limiting consumer access to a popular decongestant are pitting law enforcement against pharmacists and patients.

New ordinances in some Missouri communities and legislation pending in several states would require consumers to get a prescription to buy cold and allergy pills containing pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed and Claritin-D. The medicines still are being purchased at pharmacies to make methamphetamine, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), despite an earlier nationwide effort to track sales.

The goal is to eliminate meth labs — often in homes or hotel rooms — that use a mixture of toxic chemicals that can explode or catch fire, putting bystanders at risk and requiring costly cleanups.

"I don't think I've ever been involved in my entire career in law enforcement in something that's more important than this," said Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics Director Marshall Fisher, who supports a bill the Mississippi House passed last week. Mississippi seized 590 meth labs in 2009, he said, up from about 300 the previous year.

About 15 million Americans use pseudoephedrine products. Requiring prescriptions will delay access to the quick-acting medication and drive up costs to consumers through more doctor visits and co-pays, said Ron Fitzwater of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, which opposes prescription laws.

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, which represents makers of over-the-counter medication, also is against the restrictions. It wants to pay for states to install electronic tracking systems to detect and stop excessive purchases.

Oregon is the only state that requires prescriptions. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wants to mandate prescriptions nationwide. He notes Oregon had just 10 meth lab seizures in 2009.

Nationwide, cold and allergy sufferers already must show ID and sign pharmacy logs to buy restricted quantities of medications with pseudoephedrine. Those rules increasingly are being thwarted by illegal drugmakers who send people to multiple pharmacies to make small purchases. "It's a huge problem," said Gary Boggs of the DEA.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-01-decongestant_N.htm