Free Speech? What's That? (The Market-ticker)

 

So now the truth is an act subject to fines?

Did you call a transsexual person “he” or “she” when they preferred to be called “zhe?” According to a newly updated anti-discrimination law in New York City, you could be fined an eye-watering $250,000.

In the latest, astonishing act of draconian political correctness, the NYC Commission on Human Rights have updated a law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression” to threaten staggering financial penalties against property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.

What part of the First Amendment did you miss?

And exactly how does this square with both the truth and First Amendment, which is now an unlawful utterance?

Again, where are all the women tranny-cum-men who want to use the boys room?  I'll tell you where they are -- they're non-existent.  Now unless you happen to believe that "gender mis-identity" runs only one way, something that is extremely unlikely from both a statistical and scientific point of view.

So what's really going on here?  Simple: This is yet another attack on "traditional" or, if you prefer, "normal" people.  Yes, normal folks.  Not being normal doesn't mean you're bad, or inferior, or whatever -- it just means you not common -- that is, not normal.

The premise that everyone is the "same" and thus everyone is entitled to the same results is wrong.  It is wrong on facts and it is wrong on law.  Oh you can try to change the law to make it so but in doing so you destroy any reason for anyone to do business where that location is.

You're going to fine someone $250,000 for calling a person that is male "Mr."? Really?  So exactly why should I do business in NY, set up a business in NY, or do business with anyone in NY that is funding this particular piece of unconstitutional stupidity?

My response to this is simple: No.

And by the way, I still want to know where all those women who think they're men are, and why they're not in the men's room showing off their***** as they to***** standing up.

2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict (Zerohedge.com)

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

No year is ever easy to predict, if only because if it were, that would take all the fun out of life. But still, predictions for 2016 look quite a bit easier than other years. This is because a whole bunch of irreversible things happened in 2015 that were not recognized for what they are, either intentionally or by ‘accident’. Things that will therefore now be forced to play out in 2016, when denial will no longer be an available option.

A year ago, I wrote 2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age, and though that was more about geopolitics, it might as well have dealt with the financial press. And that goes for 2015 at least as much. Mainstream western media are no more likely to tell you what’s real than Chinese state media are.

2015 should have been the year of China, and it was in a way, but the extent to which was clouded by Beijing’s insistence on made-up numbers (GDP growth of 7% against the backdrop of plummeting imports and exports, 45 months of falling producer prices and bad loans reaching 20%), by the western media’s insistence on copying these numbers, and by everyone’s fear of the economic and financial consequences of the ‘Great Fall of China‘.

2015 was also the year when deflation, closely linked -but by no means limited- to China, got a firm hold on the global economy. Denial and fear have restricted our understanding of this development just as much.

And while it should be obvious that 2015 was the year of refugees as well, that topic too has been twisted and turned until full public comprehension has become impossible. Both in the US and in Europe politicians pose for their voters loudly proclaiming that borders must be closed and refugees and migrants sent back to the places they’re fleeing due to our very own military interventions.

And that said politicians have the power to make that happen, the power to close borders to hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings arriving on their countries’ doorsteps. As if thousands of years of human mass migrations never occurred, and have no lessons to teach the present or the future.

The price of oil was a big story, and China plays the lead role in that story, even if again poorly understood. All the reports and opinions about OPEC plans and ‘tactics’ to squeeze US frackers are hollow, since neither OPEC as a whole nor its separate members have the luxury anymore to engage in tactical games; they’re all too squeezed by the demise of Chinese demand growth, if not demand, period.

Ever since 2008, the entire world economy has been kept afloat by the $25 trillion or so that China printed to build overleveraged overcapacity. And now that is gone, never to return. There is nowhere else left for our economies to turn for growth. Everyone counted on China to take them down the yellow brick road to la-la-land, forever. And then it didn’t happen.

What 2015 should have made clear, and did in a way but not nearly clear enough, is that the world economy is falling apart due to a Ponzi bubble of over-production, over-capacity, over-investment, over-borrowing, all of which was grossly overleveraged. And that this now is, for lack of a better word, over.

Most people who read this will have noticed the troubled waters investment funds -hedge funds, mutual funds, money market funds et al- have recently landed in. But perhaps not many understand what this means, and where it may lead. These things tend to be seen as incidents, as is anything that diverts attention away from the ‘recovery just around the corner’ narrative.

Not only do the losses and redemptions at investment funds drive these funds to the brink, everything they’ve invested in also tumbles. Add to this the fact that most of the investments are highly leveraged, which means that typically a loss of just a few percent can wipe out all of the principal, and a notion of the risks becomes clear.

Of course, since many of the funds hold the same or similar investments, we can add yet another risk factor: contagion. Things will blow up first where the risk is highest. Then everything else becomes riskier. Low interest rates have caused many parties to chase high yields -junk bonds-, and that’s where risks are highest.

This is the 2015 story of investment funds, and it will continue, and aggravate, in 2016. Ultra low interest rates drive economies into deflation and investors into ever riskier assets. This is a process of unavoidable deterioration, unstoppable until it has played out in full. A 0.25% rate hike won’t do anything to change that.

Why do interest rate hikes pose such a problem? Because ZIRP has invited if not beckoned everyone to be up to their necks in debt. The entire economy is being kept lopsidedly upright, Wile. E style, by debt. Asset prices, even as commodities have now begun to fall in serious fashion, still look sort of OK, but only until you start to look at the amount of leverage that’s pinning it all up.

Once you see that, you understand how fragile it all is. Go one step further, and it becomes clear that this exponentially growing ‘machinery‘ can only be ‘sustained’ by ever more debt and leverage. Until it no longer can.

Commodities prices have nowhere to go but down for a long time to come. These prices have been propped up by the illusionary expectations for Chinese growth and demand, and now that growth is gone. So, too, then, must the over-leveraged over-investments both in China and abroad.

Growth that was expected to be in double digits for years to come has shrunk to levels well below that ‘official’ 7%. China’s switch to a consumer driven economy is as much a fantasy as the western switch to a knowledge economy has proved to be. If you don’t actually produce things, you’re done. And producing for export markets is futile when there’s no-one left to spend in those markets.

Ergo, commodities, raw materials, the very building blocks of our economies, from oil all the way to steel, are caught in a fire sale. Everything must go! Eventually, commodities prices will more or less stabilize, but at much lower levels than they -still- are at present. That we will need to figure this out in 2016 instead of 2015 is our own fault. We could have been healing, but we’ve yet to face the pain.

Trying to guesstimate how low oil will go is a way of looking at things that seems very outdated. It’s interesting just about exclusively for people who ‘invest’ in the markets, but the reality is that the Fed, BoJ, PBoC and ECB have first made sure through QE and ZIRP/NIRP that there no longer are functioning markets, and they are now losing their relevance because of these very ‘policies’.

Price discovery has already started (oil, commodities), and central banks have benched themselves. They could only re-enter the game if they quit interfering in the markets, but they’re too afraid, all of them, of the consequences that might have, not even so much for their economies but for their TBTF banks.

Yellen’s rate hike will mean some extra profits for those same banks at the cost of the rest of the financial world, but with growth gone to not return for a very long time, and with deflation hitting everything in sight and then some, there is no pretty picture left.

And none of this is really hard to process or understand. It’s just that there’s these concerted efforts to keep you from understanding, that keep you believing in some miracle salvation effort. Which would, so goes the narrative, have to come from the same central banks and the same Wall Street banks that put everyone and their pet guinea pig as deep in debt as they are.

If you have been reading the Automatic Earth over the past 8 years and change, you know what this is about. There are a few, but unfortunately only a few, other sources that may have put you on the same trail.

I was impressed with the following earlier this month from David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who now seems to have firmly caught up with the deflation theme Nicole Foss and I have been warning about ever since we started writing – pre-TAE – at the Oil Drum 10 years ago. Stockman today says that we are entering an epic deflation and the world economy is actually going to shrink for the first time since the 1930s. (!)

The End Of The Bubble Finance Era

There has been so much over-investment in energy, mining, materials processing, manufacturing and warehousing that nothing new will be built for years to come. [..] .. there will be a severe curtailment in the production of mining and construction equipment, oilfield drilling rigs, heavy trucks and rail cars, bulk carriers and containerships, materials handling machinery and warehouse rigging, machine tools and chemical processing equipment and much, much more.

It’s good to see people finally acknowledging this. It’s still rare. But there’s another, again interlinked, development that is very poorly understood. Which is that in a debt deflation, the ‘money’ that appears to be real and present in leveraged investments more often than not doesn’t get pulled out of one ‘investment’ only to be put into another, it just goes POOF, it vanishes.

And though it may seem strange, conventional economics has a very hard time with that. In the eyes of that field, if you don’t spend your money, you must be saving it. The possibility of losing it altogether is not a viable option. Or, if you lose it, someone else must be gaining it, zero-sum style.

But that view ignores the entire ‘pyramid’ of leveraged loans and investments and commodity prices, which precisely because that pyramid contained no more than a few percentage points of ‘real collateral’ to underpin everything it kept afloat, should have been a red flag. Because this is the very essence of debt deflation.

Just one little example of how and why this happens comes from this Bloomberg item. The key word is ‘evaporates’:

$100 Billion Evaporates as World’s Worst Oil Major Plunges 90%

Colombia is nursing paper losses of more than $100 billion after its oil boom fell short of expectations, wiping out 90% of the value of what was once Latin America’s biggest company. From being the world’s fifth-most valuable oil producer at its zenith in 2012, worth more than BP, state-controlled Ecopetrol now ranks 38th. Its market capitalization has fallen to $14.5 billion, down from its peak of $136.7 billion. “They just haven’t found oil, it’s as simple as that,” Rupert Stebbings at Bancolombia said from Medellin. “The whole oil sector got massively over-bought, and people assumed that one day they’d hit an absolute gusher.”

2016 will be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates. Trillions of dollars already have in the commodities markets, but, again, our media don’t tell us about it, or at least they frame it in different terms. They use deflation to mean falling consumer prices, but then insist on calling falling prices at the pump a positive thing. Without recognizing to what extent those falling prices eat away at the entire economy, and at society at large.

To summarize for now: we have elected to deny and ignore what has happened to our economies, our societies and our lives in 2015, only to be forced to face all of it in 2016. That makes the year an easy one to predict. But there are of course a lot of other possible spokes and wheels and other things.

Any government that sees its nation slide down into a deep enough pit will always consider going to war. One or more central banks may opt for a Hail Mary helicopter ride. A volcano may erupt. But none of these things will prevent the bubbles we have blown from deflating. They may divert attention, they may delay the inevitable a bit more, sure. But bubbles never last.

I have a whole list of key words I wanted to use in this, but I think I’ll turn them into a separate article. The main point is you understand the gist of it all. There are no markets, and what has posed as markets is crumbling before our very eyes, inexorably. The best we can do is say ‘see you on the other side’, if we’re lucky.

Average:

Was President Eisenhower Prescient on Global Warming Alarmists?

Michigan Capitol Confidential ^ | 12/8/2015 | Jack Spencer

Posted on ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2015‎ ‎8‎:‎53‎:‎46‎ ‎AM by MichCapCon

Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower passed away in 1969, long before claims of man-made global warming came into vogue. Yet in his farewell address, his most enduring speech, Eisenhower warned of what he called a scientific-technological elite that might, through unwarranted influence, achieve a position of unassailable ascendancy within the U.S. government.

In that 1961 speech, he said:

   Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

   The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

   When Eisenhower penned this speech, his focus and concern was that the nation could be misled and public policy manipulated in the name of national defense by what he called the military-industrial complex.” However, a closer look at what he was actually describing reveals a broader context.

Eisenhower was alerting the public to the danger that dogma could someday permeate and dominate their government. He envisioned the source for promoting this transcendent dogma as a scientific-technological elite, whose viewpoints and policy recommendations would become blindly accepted.

The clear implication behind Eisenhower’s words is that whether the motivation is sincerely held beliefs, cynical self-serving opportunism or both working in combination, the resulting impact of such pervasive and unchallenged dogma is bound to lead to the suppression of necessary debate. What he couldn’t possibly have foreseen was that within 50 years this dynamic could play out in the name of something called man-made global warming.

As we watch so many government officials and politicians passively submit to climate-crisis dogma, too fearful to challenge it, Eisenhower’s description of a scientific-technological elite wielding unwarranted influence over public policy seems clairvoyant. The degree to which policymakers uncritically follow the advice of this elite, as though its declarations were undeniable and its motives unimpeachable, shows that our 34th president profoundly understood the true nature of government.

All You Need to Know about the Gun Debate in Two Charts (Powerline Blog)

 

Gun “epidemic” the New York Times says? Well, we know they are data-challenged there, but for what it’s worth, take in these two charts from my old pal Mark Perry:

The only thing that appears to be an “epidemic” about guns right now is liberal hysteria. Have that many liberals gone vegan? Read more here from Mark Perry on the subject, including a clinic on the visual display of quantitative information (hat tip to Ed Tufte, though).

This is how They Lie to US (global warming)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lQqPQ0i_fl0

The Real Answer to Guns in America

OBAMA AND GUNS

The End of Academic Elites (American Thinker)

November 28, 2015

 

By Mike Konrad

The internet has changed everything, so much so that even I, a man who has been online for 19 years, am constantly amazed at the pace of accelerated change. The printing press changed the world in a few decades in the 16th century. The internet is even more revolutionary.

Even more so than the press, the internet has evaporated prior means of didactic instruction. The printing press created change, but only the rich could afford to buy one. For less than $100 today, one can get a domain and start a media empire on the web.

Kids now get their news from the internet. Prior to YouTube, news came from "respected" media sources. Now any kid with an iPhone can break a story. In America, videos of police brutality have become a cottage industry, with attendant consequences. I could have used an iPhone when I was a teen.

Craigslist has done a runaround on newspapers by offering free advertising, thus cutting their revenues. Newsprint is collapsing. Paper after paper has gone broke. The Media Elite are gone. Little mammals, like American Thinker, have overtaken the "venerable" dinosaurs of the liberal establishment.

The most noticeable change has been reporting from the Mideast. Until 15 years ago, Jews, by virtue of education, and presence in the media, could wield a moderating -- critics have claimed a suffocating -- influence. However, today every Arab in the contested areas seems to come equipped with an iPhone, ready to video every supposed Israeli "outrage." Anybody with an anti-Israel bent can open up a website. No one listens to Wolf Blitzer any more. The borderline anti-Semitic site Mondoweiss now has the new media's ear. There are more smartphones in the hands of Muslims than Jews available to contest the narrative. Horror or improvement, this is the present reality.

Beyond the death of the Mainstream Media, the value of a journalism degree has evaporated. So much for six years to a masters at the Columbia School of Journalism. Save yourself a fortune and open a YouTube channel. On the job training. Make money from adding commercials.

With the free Word Press platform -- a user friendly content management system -- anybody can open up a news site in a few hours, and soon compete with the BBC, which also uses Word Press, as well as the New Yorker, and the NY Times Blogs. The rise of Mondoweiss -- also run on Word Press -- is a glaring example of how the media has been overtaken by the technology. If you want to counter anti-Semitism, then ask Ted Belman. Israpundit runs on Word Press.

YouTube now outflanks, and scoops cameramen with 20 years of experience. Kids with a 16-megapixel Samsung smartphone camera are now obsoleting experts with ten thousand dollar rigs. Satellite uplinks have given way to snapping and shooting off to the cloud. Every teen is a star.

With Photoshop, high end photography has changed. Apple's Final Cut Pro, and Sony's Vegas have placed professional editting into the hands of people for less than a thousand dollars. If one is broke, Gimp and Kdenlive are quite capable freeware alternatives. Teens can outperform studied experts.

If one needs instruction in these software packages, they are available for free on websites and YouTube. Where then is the value of a film degree that cost tens of thousands?

In the 1960s, green screening chromakey required hundreds of thousands of dollars in a camera and rig. Now, a $50 webcam, some borrowed furniture, lights, and a green towel, with some freeware, can produce the same effect. With Audacity, and a used, cheap mixer, who needs training in audio engineering?

One can self-educate her or himself up to a Masters degree in civil or mechanincal engineering on the internet. Indeed, the only thing truly provided by schools today is a space for lab work. All else can be acquired online at little or no expense.

I taught myself HTML, CSS, PHP, and jQuery about nine years ago. Had I gone to school at that time, it would have cost me thousands of dollars. I learned them for free from a few websites.

Eight years ago, there was a great demand for the mid-level coder, who wrote individualized websites. It was heavy with teens who needed spending money. Now, coding is only useful for the back end of design platforms, where elite expertise is needed; and those experts are often non-degreed, but self-taught. With WIX, a computer illiterate can now design fancy sites in a few minutes. The mid-level profession has evaporated. So much for that training.

Even Word Press is now being assailed by simpler platforms like Weebly, which are making websites so easy that web design is now officially dead. A whole sub-industry was birthed, grew, and died out in less time that it took to even learn the skills.

The New Boston website offers complete courses in computer science, coding, math, and physics. The owner started the site when he realized that college was now a pointless waste of time. The Khan Academy is a free university. Other World Computing was teaching Apple computer repair -- and quite well –- until Apple started soldering parts a few years ago, probably in response to IFIXIT and DIRECTFIX, whose repair kits cut into Apple's profits.

Medical Degrees, which require training, will survive, but not without severe pruning of required attendance. Who is going to pay hundreds of thousands to go to Columbia Med School for a degree when he or she can learn the many of the skills for free. What is needed is apprentice/intern training, not fluff courses. More time as an intern, less time in redundant classes.

True, research has to be centralized, but everything up to a bachelor's can be achieved gratis. Entrance to graduate school will be solely by exam, along with a small syllabus of lab courses, and nothing more. To the enterprising student, this can be accomplished with home study, and a year in commercial labs in capacity as a trainee; an arrangement once familiar to medieval guilds, only this time defined by the net rather than tradition.

For budding clerics, the Blue Letter Bible is an online bible college, complete with interactive Greek and Hebrew interlinears, which give pronunciation. Aquinas and Luther would have killed for such tools.

Unlike the revolution started by the printing press which soon stabilized, internet changes are not merely drastic but continually accelerating.

In the liberal arts, one can practice Spanish with a native speaker in Argentina on Skype for free. No need for four years in college with an American professor who never learned how to trill an r. No need for a community college degree in graphic design, when Roberto Blake does a far better job of it for free on YouTube.

Academia will soon die out. The relic courses designed only to make work for obsolete professors will no longer be tolerated. The debt, and the social bloat, will have to collapse. Education has now become truly democratized. Only Engineering, the Sciences, and Medical Education will survive -- and these in only an abbreviated form.

This has the advantage of removing the last holdouts of a vestigial intellectual aristocracy which distorts our Republic with claims of expertise, and high salary requirements. However, the downside, as evinced by YouTube reporting, will be the total lack of responsibility. We will happily lose the Ivy League elite; but alas we may pay for this liberty with BDS coming out of every pore.

For those who say the servers can be shut down, you can learn how to set up your own for a few hundred dollars. In fact, older computers are perfect for such servers.

It will be interesting. I, for one, feel that it will be good to see ossified, overpriced universities disappear. I would rather exercise my own discretion than have choices made by some elite dinosaur. Academia was the last vestige of medievalism. Good riddance! Long live the internet.

Mike Konrad is the pen name of an American who is neither Jewish, Latin, nor Arab. He runs a website, http://latinarabia.com, where he discusses the subculture of Arabs in Latin America. He wishes his Spanish were better.

The internet has changed everything, so much so that even I, a man who has been online for 19 years, am constantly amazed at the pace of accelerated change. The printing press changed the world in a few decades in the 16th century. The internet is even more revolutionary.

Even more so than the press, the internet has evaporated prior means of didactic instruction. The printing press created change, but only the rich could afford to buy one. For less than $100 today, one can get a domain and start a media empire on the web.

Kids now get their news from the internet. Prior to YouTube, news came from "respected" media sources. Now any kid with an iPhone can break a story. In America, videos of police brutality have become a cottage industry, with attendant consequences. I could have used an iPhone when I was a teen.

Craigslist has done a runaround on newspapers by offering free advertising, thus cutting their revenues. Newsprint is collapsing. Paper after paper has gone broke. The Media Elite are gone. Little mammals, like American Thinker, have overtaken the "venerable" dinosaurs of the liberal establishment.

The most noticeable change has been reporting from the Mideast. Until 15 years ago, Jews, by virtue of education, and presence in the media, could wield a moderating -- critics have claimed a suffocating -- influence. However, today every Arab in the contested areas seems to come equipped with an iPhone, ready to video every supposed Israeli "outrage." Anybody with an anti-Israel bent can open up a website. No one listens to Wolf Blitzer any more. The borderline anti-Semitic site Mondoweiss now has the new media's ear. There are more smartphones in the hands of Muslims than Jews available to contest the narrative. Horror or improvement, this is the present reality.

Beyond the death of the Mainstream Media, the value of a journalism degree has evaporated. So much for six years to a masters at the Columbia School of Journalism. Save yourself a fortune and open a YouTube channel. On the job training. Make money from adding commercials.

With the free Word Press platform -- a user friendly content management system -- anybody can open up a news site in a few hours, and soon compete with the BBC, which also uses Word Press, as well as the New Yorker, and the NY Times Blogs. The rise of Mondoweiss -- also run on Word Press -- is a glaring example of how the media has been overtaken by the technology. If you want to counter anti-Semitism, then ask Ted Belman. Israpundit runs on Word Press.

YouTube now outflanks, and scoops cameramen with 20 years of experience. Kids with a 16-megapixel Samsung smartphone camera are now obsoleting experts with ten thousand dollar rigs. Satellite uplinks have given way to snapping and shooting off to the cloud. Every teen is a star.

With Photoshop, high end photography has changed. Apple's Final Cut Pro, and Sony's Vegas have placed professional editting into the hands of people for less than a thousand dollars. If one is broke, Gimp and Kdenlive are quite capable freeware alternatives. Teens can outperform studied experts.

If one needs instruction in these software packages, they are available for free on websites and YouTube. Where then is the value of a film degree that cost tens of thousands?

In the 1960s, green screening chromakey required hundreds of thousands of dollars in a camera and rig. Now, a $50 webcam, some borrowed furniture, lights, and a green towel, with some freeware, can produce the same effect. With Audacity, and a used, cheap mixer, who needs training in audio engineering?

One can self-educate her or himself up to a Masters degree in civil or mechanincal engineering on the internet. Indeed, the only thing truly provided by schools today is a space for lab work. All else can be acquired online at little or no expense.

I taught myself HTML, CSS, PHP, and jQuery about nine years ago. Had I gone to school at that time, it would have cost me thousands of dollars. I learned them for free from a few websites.

Eight years ago, there was a great demand for the mid-level coder, who wrote individualized websites. It was heavy with teens who needed spending money. Now, coding is only useful for the back end of design platforms, where elite expertise is needed; and those experts are often non-degreed, but self-taught. With WIX, a computer illiterate can now design fancy sites in a few minutes. The mid-level profession has evaporated. So much for that training.

Even Word Press is now being assailed by simpler platforms like Weebly, which are making websites so easy that web design is now officially dead. A whole sub-industry was birthed, grew, and died out in less time that it took to even learn the skills.

The New Boston website offers complete courses in computer science, coding, math, and physics. The owner started the site when he realized that college was now a pointless waste of time. The Khan Academy is a free university. Other World Computing was teaching Apple computer repair -- and quite well –- until Apple started soldering parts a few years ago, probably in response to IFIXIT and DIRECTFIX, whose repair kits cut into Apple's profits.

Medical Degrees, which require training, will survive, but not without severe pruning of required attendance. Who is going to pay hundreds of thousands to go to Columbia Med School for a degree when he or she can learn the many of the skills for free. What is needed is apprentice/intern training, not fluff courses. More time as an intern, less time in redundant classes.

True, research has to be centralized, but everything up to a bachelor's can be achieved gratis. Entrance to graduate school will be solely by exam, along with a small syllabus of lab courses, and nothing more. To the enterprising student, this can be accomplished with home study, and a year in commercial labs in capacity as a trainee; an arrangement once familiar to medieval guilds, only this time defined by the net rather than tradition.

For budding clerics, the Blue Letter Bible is an online bible college, complete with interactive Greek and Hebrew interlinears, which give pronunciation. Aquinas and Luther would have killed for such tools.

Unlike the revolution started by the printing press which soon stabilized, internet changes are not merely drastic but continually accelerating.

In the liberal arts, one can practice Spanish with a native speaker in Argentina on Skype for free. No need for four years in college with an American professor who never learned how to trill an r. No need for a community college degree in graphic design, when Roberto Blake does a far better job of it for free on YouTube.

Academia will soon die out. The relic courses designed only to make work for obsolete professors will no longer be tolerated. The debt, and the social bloat, will have to collapse. Education has now become truly democratized. Only Engineering, the Sciences, and Medical Education will survive -- and these in only an abbreviated form.

This has the advantage of removing the last holdouts of a vestigial intellectual aristocracy which distorts our Republic with claims of expertise, and high salary requirements. However, the downside, as evinced by YouTube reporting, will be the total lack of responsibility. We will happily lose the Ivy League elite; but alas we may pay for this liberty with BDS coming out of every pore.

For those who say the servers can be shut down, you can learn how to set up your own for a few hundred dollars. In fact, older computers are perfect for such servers.

It will be interesting. I, for one, feel that it will be good to see ossified, overpriced universities disappear. I would rather exercise my own discretion than have choices made by some elite dinosaur. Academia was the last vestige of medievalism. Good riddance! Long live the internet.

Mike Konrad is the pen name of an American who is neither Jewish, Latin, nor Arab. He runs a website, http://latinarabia.com, where he discusses the subculture of Arabs in Latin America. He wishes his Spanish were better.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/the_end_of_academic_elites.html#ixzz3snDBDMkk
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Singapore: the Power of Economic Freedom ( Cato Institute )

 

By Marian L. Tupy

The Telegraph ran a fascinating collection of photos from different statges of development of the Asian city state of Singapore. The first photo is from 1900, the second is from the 1970s and the last photo is contemporary. The incredible transformation of Singapore from a sleepy outpost of the British Empire to a global commercial and technological hub was partly facilitated by a very high degree of economic freedom. In 1970, the first year for which data is available, Singapore had the third freest economy in the world (behind Hong Kong and Canada). Singapore maintained a high degree of economic freedom over the next 45 years and ranks as the second freest economy in the world today (behind Hong Kong). As late as 1970, per person income in Singapore was 54 percent of the global average. Today it is 321 percent of the global average.

Topics:

International Economics and Development

(NASA Creates) A U.S. Climategate?

Skip to comments.

(NASA Creates) A U.S. Climategate?
Investors.com ^ | January 22, 2010 | INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY staff

Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel's founder accuse NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain's Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop?

We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.

In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.

As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."

(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...

NASA GISS Temperature Records Altered - Why?

by

Friedrich-Karl Ewert

1. Introduction

On January 26, 2012, a short report written by Steven Goddard dealing with the modification of temperature records was published in the German version at EIKE’s internet portal. By using the examples of Reykjavik (Iceland), Godthab Nuuk (Greenland) and all stations of the US, it was demonstrated that temperature curves were altered to produce the impression that the Arctic has been warming up since 1920.

The temperature records are made up of the monthly and yearly averages and the corresponding temperature curves. The temperature curves depict the temperature variations over time. The inclination of the trend line tells us whether the average temperature is flat, increasing, or decreasing. An inclined trend line yields a gradient given in °C/year, i.e. the yearly rate of temperature change.

Examples: Reykjavik and Godthab Nuuk

Fig. 1 compares the original temperature curves of the stations Reykjavik and Godthab Nuuk (left) from the year 2010 with those altered by NASA GISS in 2012 (right).

Example: USA

These newly altered Arctic region temperature records lead the observer to believe that the Arctic apparently became progressively warmer. However, this kind of alteration was not only applied to the Arctic. Steven Goddard also considered the overall temperature curve USHCN Version 1 of all 1221 stations in the USA introduced in 1990, published by James Hansen in 1999 as “USHCN v.1”, see Fig. 2

In Fig. 2 the left temperature curve very clearly shows the first warming phase of 1920 to 1940, which was then followed by cooling until, 1980 and then by the second warming period from 1980 to 1995. The first warming was stronger. The overall trend line shows a moderate inclination, indicating a rather small yearly warming.

The right temperature curve in Fig. 2 shows the opposite: the values of the first warming were lowered while those of the second one were adjusted upwards. The scale of the y-axis was modified as well, altogether producing a steeper overall trend line, i.e. a stronger warming. That alteration gives the appearance of a distinct warming for the entire USA.  This same data is available for over 100 national reporting stations.

This is the greatest fraud in history!

 

Friedrich-Karl Ewert

Diplom-Geologe

Prof. Dr.rer.nat.

Mozartstr. 15

33014  Bad Driburg

ewert.fk@t-online.de

T. +49-5253-3883

F. +49-5253-7145

Email him for complete study.

The Most Important Chart You've Never Seen: Tax Receipts Top-Tick The Stock Market (Zerohedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/04/2015 09:09 -0500

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

This time is always different just before a bone-crushing decline.

This may well be the most important chart you've never seen. Courtesy of longtime analyst-correspondent B.C., this chart reveals that real per capita tax receipts have reliably top-ticked the stock market since 1973.

Note that this is specifically real (i.e. adjusted for inflation) state and local income tax and sales tax receipts--not federal tax receipts--and that the chart show annualized changes smoothed over three different time frames: seven quarters, 6 years and 9 years.

Anyone who sold stocks once the 6-year annualized change in real local/state tax receipts started declining would have been spared the horrendous, bone-crushing losses of the Bear markets that subsequently shredded stocks.

This indicator even worked reliably to identify Bear market rallies that briefly boosted tax receipts before rolling over: the stock market rally of 1975 to 1977 reversed the annualized decline in tax receipts but when tax receipts rolled over in 1977, that was a reliable top-tick of a market that subsequently fell 25%.

The annualized 6-year change nailed the top of the market in 1989, 2000, 2008--and now, in 2015. This leaves current bulls with the task of explaining why an indicator that has reliably top-ticked every previous market top for over 40 years is suddenly and magically wrong in 2015.

This time is always different just before a bone-crushing decline.

The 7 Keys To Trapping As Many Americans As Possible In Poverty

Townhall.com ^ | November 3, 2015 | John Hawkins

Posted on ‎11‎/‎3‎/‎2015‎ ‎8‎:‎42‎:‎47‎ ‎AM by Kaslin

Keeping Americans poor in a prosperous country like America is not as easy as you think. After all, this is the "land of opportunity." Legal immigrants pay tens of thousands of dollars and wait years for the opportunity to come legally and illegal immigrants often risk their lives just so they can get here and do menial work. This is the country that made Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and even OPRAH into billionaires and it's a nation where you can have everything from hoverboards to medicine for your pet delivered right to your door. So when there's so much wealth and opulence everywhere, how do you lock Americans out of that success?

No matter what you do, there will always be a few poor people around, but to really maximize those numbers there are very specific government policies abetted by a few cultural attitudes that will make all the difference. You want to make as many Americans poor as possible? Then start by ....

1) Making Sure Taxes And Regulations Are Sky High: The biggest enemy of poverty is economic growth, which creates more jobs and higher wages. How do you slow down economic growth? One of the best ways to do it is to ratchet up the taxes and start pouring on the regulations. Let small business owners spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if they're in compliance with some law they've never heard of instead of how to improve their service. Let them spend years working to make a profit and then take such a big chunk of the money they make that they want to give up. Make these small businesses spend thousands of dollars complying with nearly useless regulations instead of hiring new employees. Nobody is pulling himself out of poverty without a job and so the more jobs you kill, the better!

2) Encouraging Dependency: You want to keep people poor over the long haul? Then get them dependent on a government payment that will always keep them poor. Start them young! Get as many kids as possible used to taking handouts with free breakfast and lunch programs. Then when they're adults, make it as easy as possible to get on the dole and stay on it. In fact, you should spend millions on advertising campaigns letting people know that they're eligible to become dependent on the government. This keeps people stuck in a no man's land where they're still poor, but they're just comfortable enough that they don't feel compelled to work to get more. In fact, you may have people AVOIDING work that would get them out of poverty because they would lose their "benefits." It also helps create the kind of entitlement mentality that causes people to demand their employer pay them more money instead of learning new skills or just moving on to another job. Get that hook stuck deep enough in their mouth and they'll be lucky if they ever get it out.

3) Encouraging People To Have Babies Out Of Wedlock: You can put as happy a face as you want on it, but parenting is a two person job. When one person has to do it alone, it can be a backbreaker. Not only are kids' time sinks, they are incredibly expensive.

That's why it's important to drench the culture in sex so that people feel like they're missing out, right this second, because they're reading this column instead of hooking up. Put welfare in place so that poor women don't feel like they need to marry a less than ideal partner if they have a child and praise single mothers to the skies to help encourage young girls to get pregnant out of wedlock. Then you undermine marriage at every opportunity. Put a "marriage penalty" in tax law, encourage no fault divorce, support gay marriage. Let those marriages disintegrate and then not only do you have the parent struggling, but a child raised by a single parent is much more likely to do drugs, go to jail and have mental problems, all of which make it more likely that he will be poor as well. In other words, you often can get a poverty twofer: the parent AND child.

4) Demonizing Success: Slam rich people, corporations and anyone having any success as "greedy," "evil," and claim they're "not paying their fair share." The idea is to falsely portray success as "luck" at worst or at best, something people should feel guilty over. Not only does this keep poor Americans from trying to learn anything from the most financially successful people in society, it causes them to actually resent success. You want people protesting outside the banker's office and demanding that his money be given away, not actually trying to pull themselves out of poverty by becoming bankers. Once financial success is viewed as evil, then by definition, only the poor can be virtuous and financial success will be de facto evidence of immorality.

5) Screwing Up The Education System: As the economy has become more dependent on educated workers, it has become more important than ever to keep kids from getting a good education if you want to keep them poor. This requires a two-pronged approach.

First, it's important to keep pouring money into the public school system. That gives middle class Americans the false impression that something is being done to improve education; yet it never actually seems to improve education in our public schools. Additionally, kids who are homeschooled or go to private schools consistently outperform kids who go to public schools, which makes it very important to fight to keep as many children as possible stuck in failing public schools. A kid who can't read is likely to stay poor.

Then on the college level, we should keep encouraging college kids to spend big money getting degrees that typically only help them get low paying jobs. As a practical matter in the world of Skype and FaceTime, there's already no reason why an outstanding professor couldn't cheaply teach 50,000 students across the country at the same time with a little planning. Obviously, that would be a disaster when we're getting students to go $100,000 in debt on student loans to get philosophy, fine arts and women's studies degrees. Good luck getting out of poverty when you have all that debt and are making $25,000 a year.

6) Having Massive Immigration: Supply and demand is the simplest law of economics. How does that help make Americans poor? Well, the more replaceable any worker is, the less money you need to pay him. Why pay an engineer a decent salary if you can easily replace him with an H-1B visa worker from India or China who'll work for $30,000 less per year? It's also no coincidence that America's workforce participation rate is at a 38 year low (62.8%) while immigrants make up the largest share of America's population (13.3%) that they have in the last 108 years. It's vital to keep bringing in as many new immigrants as possible while so many Americans are unemployed to make sure that those people don't get jobs. This is doubly true for illegal aliens, who are often competing for jobs with even poorer Americans while they are able to work even cheaper because they don't have to pay for Obamacare or car insurance and they can cheat on their taxes with impunity. Any time someone suggests we start putting American workers first when it comes to immigration, call them racist and keep those floodgates wide open!

7) Ratcheting Up Their Expenses: Of course, if you want to create more poor Americans, it's best to tax the middle class as much as possible, but in a country where they can vote you out of office, you have to be careful about directly reaching into their wallets. So, how do you take their money without their realizing that you're responsible?

Have the Federal Reserve print money non-stop, which drives up inflation. Over time, that reduces the purchasing power of the middle class as the cost of everything seems to creep up. It’s also important to go after cheap sources of energy like oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Not only does that drive up the cost the middle class pays across the board for products, it also hits people directly when they heat and cool their homes. Exploding medical costs are also helpful and Obamacare has done an amazing job of this. Medical costs are skyrocketing for the middle class and helping to drive them towards poverty. As an extra added bonus, middle class Americans who can no longer afford to pay for their medical care because of Obamacare will also be hit with a tax penalty. If your goal is to hurt middle class Americans financially, you could not do much better than Obamacare.

21 Shocking Facts About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America

zero hedge ^ | 11/3/15 | tyler durden

Posted on ‎11‎/‎3‎/‎2015‎ ‎1‎:‎29‎:‎40‎ ‎PM by Nachum

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

What you are about to see is more evidence that the growth of poverty in the United States is wildly out of control.  It turns out that there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and it is getting worse with each passing year.  During this election season, politicians of all stripes are running around telling all of us how great we are, but is that really true? 

As you will see below, poverty is reaching unprecedented levels in this country, and the middle class is steadily dying.  There aren’t enough good jobs to go around, dependence on the government has never been greater, and it is our children that are being hit the hardest.  If we have this many people living on the edge of despair now, while times are ‘good’, what are things going to look like when our economy really starts falling apart?  The following are 21 facts about the explosive growth of poverty in America that will blow your mind.

#1 The U.S. Census Bureau says that nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.

#2 Other numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau are also very disturbing.  For example, in 2007 about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps.  Today, that number is one out of every five.

#3 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America”, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day.  That number has doubled since 1996.

#4 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.

#5 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

#6 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

#7 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.

#8 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.

#9 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#10 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.

#11 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations that UNICEF looked at.

#12 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.

#13 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#14 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.

#15 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.

#16 There are simply not enough good jobs to go around anymore.  It may be hard to believe, but 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#17 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

#18 Owning a home has traditionally been a signal that you belong to the middle class.  That is why it is so alarming that the rate of homeownership in the United States has been falling for eight years in a row.

#19 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.

#20 At this point, 25 percent of all Americans have a negative net worth.  That means that the value of what they owe is greater than the value of everything that they own.

#21 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.

If we truly are “the greatest nation on the planet”, then why can’t we even take care of our own people?

Why are there tens of millions of us living in poverty?

Perhaps we really aren’t so great after all.

It would be one thing if economic conditions were getting better and poverty was in decline.  At least then we could be talking about the improvement we were making.  But despite the fact that we are stealing more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day, poverty just continues to grow like an aggressive form of cancer.

So what is wrong?

Why can’t we get this thing fixed?

Homicide Rates Cut In Half Over Past 20 Years (While New Gun Ownership Soared) (Zerohedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/01/2015 19:15 -0500

ubmitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The Pew Research Center reported last week that the murder rate was cut nearly in half from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2013. Over the same period, overall gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) have fallen by one-third from 15.2 to 10.6 per 100,000.

In spite of this, Pew reports, the American public believes that homicides and gun deaths are increasing in the United States. Those who think violence is getting worse should probably watch less television and look around them instead. The murder rate in the US is currently similar to 1950s levels.

Meanwhile, the number of privately owned guns (and gun commerce in general) in the United States has increased substantially in recent decades.

Source: Firearms Commerce in the US, Annual Statistical Update. (From BATF)

According to the World Bank, here are the homicide rates in the US since 1995:

Here's the homicide rate graphed against total new firearms (manufactured plus imported) in US (indexed with 1995 =100):

Meanwhile, in Mexico, where the US Consulate counsels Americans to not even carry pocket knives in the face of "Mexico’s strict weapons laws." There is exactly one gun store in Mexico. In short, the Mexican experience is a perfect example of the effect of prohibition. A lack of legal access to guns leads to a need for illegal access.

The murder rates in Mexico:

Mexican politicians complain that weapons are easily smuggled from the United States, and that is the source of their problem. But if access to guns is the problem, shouldn't murder rates be much higher in the United States? Moreover, if gun smuggling is such a problem in Mexico, this is just another piece of evidence showing the weakness of prohibition laws in preventing access to the intended target of prohibition.

Naturally, we can't blame everything on gun prohibition in Mexico, nor can we attribute the murder rate decline solely to more guns in the US. But we can say two things for sure: (1) Gun restriction in Mexico has not prevented enormous increases in the murder rate, and (2) increases in gun totals in the US have not led to a surge in the murder rate.

How to Assess Risk

 

 

Doctors

 

 

 

 

(A)  The number of physicians in the U.S. is                           700,000. (B)  Accidental deaths caused by Physicians                   per year are 120,000. (C)  Accidental deaths per physician                        Is 0.171 Statistics courtesy of  U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>        Now think about this:             Guns (A)  The number of gun owners in the U.S.                                          Is  80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million) (B)  The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups,                                            Is 1,500. (C)  The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188 Statistics courtesy of FBI >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> So,   statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.' >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> FACT:  NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN,                            BUT Almost everyone has at least one doctor. This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor as by a gun owner!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Please alert your friends to   this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Out of concern for the public at large,       We withheld the statistics on              lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention!

How to Assess Risk

Short and Profound

Short and Profound   These three statements tell you a lot about our culture:   1. We are advised by the Liberals to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works. And another statement for consideration-- 2. We constantly hear about how CPP (Canada Pension Plan) is going to run out of money..  How come we never hear about welfare running out of money? What's interesting is the first group "worked for" their money, but the second Didn't. Finally   3. Provincial Social Services (welfare payments) is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free money ever . Meanwhile, the Parks Branch, asks us "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." The stated reason for this policy is because "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."   That ends Today's Lesson On Irony