Shots Fired At High School North Of Seattle; 6 Reportedly Injured, Possible 2 Fatal

There is a large police presence at Marysville-Pilchuk High School  (Marysville, WA).
School officials said there is an emergency situation at the school and the building is locked down.
Three students and a teacher reported hearing gunshots.

 

As KIRO TV reports,

Casey Blakley and his daughter were driving by the school when they say the huge police response.

 

“About every 30 seconds school I had to pull over because there were so many cops and paramedics going by,” he said. “The road was blocked off from about two blocks away

 

“There were a bunch of kids on the next block that apparently fled the school. They were all huddled together talking to cars that drove by.”

Live Feed (via KOMO News) – click image for live feed

The Marysville School District released the following statement:

“The Marysville Pilchuck High School is currently in lock down due to an emergency situation. Police and emergency services have responded. The Marysville School District lock down procedures will remain in effect at Marysville Pilchuck until further notice from law enforcement. We will continue to forward communication in cooperation with law enforcement.”

School map:




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This One Neat Accounting Trick by the EU is Costing Its Members Billions!

European Commission 2013The
European Union boasts that 99 percent of its budget comes from the
EU’s “own resources,”
which include customs duties, the value added tax, and a tax on
gross national income. That last one is meant “to fund the part of
the budget not covered by other sources of income.” Unsurprisingly,
the EU explains that while “designed simply as a balancing system,
this has become the largest source of revenue.” It was 92.8 billion
Euros in 2010, the latest number given in the EU’s explainer.

Every year that “balancing system” means the 28 countries that
make up the EU get a bill for payment. Some get rebates. The bill
is based on the governments’ reporting of gross national income.
The EU also “adjusts” how much countries owe, and this year based
the adjustment on what it insisted was a “once in a generation
review” of how national incomes are calculated. That led to the EU
billing the
United Kingdom an additional 2.1 billion euros on top of its 10.9
billion euro payment. It demands the money by December 1.

David Cameron, the prime minister of the UK, says his country’s
not paying the bill. Reuters
reports:

He found some sympathy – a visibly furious Cameron told a news
conference that Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi had also
lambasted “bureaucrats without a heart”, who made it harder to
persuade citizens of the Union’s value.

“It’s an appalling way to behave,” Cameron said. “I’m not paying
that bill on Dec. 1. If people think I am they’ve got another thing
coming. It is not going to happen.”

EU ministers will hold an emergency meeting on the issue next
month. Cameron said he wanted to understand the technical
calculations and was also ready to mount a legal challenge.

“Wanting to understand” seems like a convenient way to leave the
door open to eventually paying the bill. There’s a by-election on
November 20, where a Conservative member of Parliament who resigned
is running to retake his seat with the UK Independence Party.
UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, called the EU a “thirsty vampire”
looking for taxpayer blood. All of Parliament goes up for elections
next May. Cameron promises a referendum on EU membership in 2017,
if he’s re-elected.

Italy sympathizes because it, too, now owes the EU more money,
as does Greece. France and Germany, meanwhile, are getting rebates,
according to Reuters. While Germany’s Angela Merkel said she felt
Cameron’s pain, other European leaders dismiss Cameron’s states
refusal to pay. “I think it’s very important that we don’t start
treating the EU as some sort of a simplified accounting exercise,”
Reuters quotes the Finnish prime minister, Alexander Stubb as
saying.

Yet an “accounting exercise” seems like exactly what the
“adjustment” (which the EU says is conducted by civil servants) is.
By the EU’s own description, the annual payments made by EU members
was supposed to “simply” be a “balancing system.” It’s now the EU’s
largest source of revenue. If anyone’s turned the EU into a
simplified accounting exercise, it would seem to be the
Eurocrats.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2014/10/24/this-one-neat-accounting-trick-by-the-eu
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Putin Warns Of Risk Of Major Conflict, Says Dollar Losing Reserve Currency Status

Having been relatively quiet for a while, Russia’s leader Vladimir, speaking in Sochi (following meetings with Middle East crown princes who confirmed Russia as a key partner – “isolated”?), has unleashed his most aggressive statements with regard the failing world order:

  • *PUTIN SAYS U.S. DOLLAR LOSING TRUST AS RESERVE CURRENCY
  • *PUTIN: WORLD WITHOUT RULES IS POSSIBILITY; ANARCHY GROWING

Adding that the risk of major conflicts involving major countries is growing, as well as the risk of arms control treaties being violated, Putin exclaimed that the US-led unipolar world is like a dictatorship over other countries and that “US leadership brings no good for others,” and calls for a new global consensus.

 

Having met Crown Prince Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi in Sochi, who confirmed that Moscow “plays a very important role in the Middle East,” and added that he had no doubts that his country and Russia “are bound by a privileged relationship,” it appears Russia is less “isolated” than the West would have many believe.

As Bloomberg reports:

  • *PUTIN SPEAKS AT MEETING OF VALDAI CLUB IN SOCHI
  • *PUTIN SAYS WORLD GROWING LESS SECURE, PREDICTABLE
  • *PUTIN SAYS NO GUARANTEE OF GLOBAL SECURITY
  • *GLOBAL SECURITY SYSTEM IS WEAK, DEFORMED: PUTIN
  • *COLD WAR ENDED WITHOUT PEACE BEING ACHIEVED: PUTIN
  • *PUTIN SAYS COLD WAR `VICTORS’ DISMANTLING INTL LAWS, RELATIONS
  • *U.S. HAS WORSENED DISBALANCE IN INTL RELATIONS: PUTIN
  • *PUTIN SAYS U.S.  ACTING LIKE NOUVEAU RICHE AS GLOBAL LEADER
  • *PUTIN SAYS WORLD LEADERS BEING BLACKMAILED BY `BIG BROTHER’
  • *U.S. LEADERSHIP BRINGS NO GOOD FOR OTHERS: PUTIN
  • *PUTIN SEES GLOBAL MEDIA UNDER CONTROL, UNDERMINING TRUTH
  • *PUTIN SAYS WEST CLOSED EYES TO INTL TERRORISM ENTERING RUSSIA
  • *PUTIN CALLS U.S. SELF-APPOINTED LEADER
  • *PUTIN: UNIPOLAR WORLD LIKE DICTATORSHIP OVER OTHER COUNTRIES
  • *PUTIN SAYS MANY COUNTRIES DISENCHANTED W/ GLOBALIZATION: PUTIN
  • *PUTIN SAYS U.S. DOLLAR LOSING TRUST AS RESERVE CURRENCY
  • *RUSSIA WON’T BEG FOR ANYTHING: PUTIN
  • *SANCTIONS UNDERMINING WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION RULES: PUTIN
  • *RUSSIA ISN’T WALLING ITSELF OFF FROM WORLD, PUTIN SAYS
  • *RUSSIA READY FOR DIALOGUE ON NORMALIZING ECONOMIC TIES: PUTIN
  • *PUTIN: WORLD WITHOUT RULES IS POSSIBILITY; ANARCHY GROWING
  • *PUTIN CALLS FOR NEW GLOBAL CONSENSUS, INTERDEPENDENCE
  • *PUTIN: CONTINUED USE OF FORCE IN UKRAINE MAY LEAD TO DEAD END
  • *PUTIN SAYS U.S. CAN’T HUMILIATE ITS PARTNERS FOREVER

*  *  *

Fighting talk?

*  *  *

Escalation? It seems sabre-rattling is picking up as The Washington Times reports,

Russian military provocations have increased so much over the seven months since Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine that Washington and its allies are scrambling defense assets on a nearly daily basis in response to air, sea and land incursions by Vladimir Putin’s forces.

 

Not only is Moscow continuing to foment unrest in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials and regional security experts say Russian fighter jets are testing U.S. reaction times over Alaska and Japan’s ability to scramble planes over its northern islands — all while haunting Sweden’s navy and antagonizing Estonia’s tiny national security force.

 

 

“What’s going on is a radical escalation of aggressive Russian muscle flexing and posturing designed to demonstrate that Russia is no longer a defeated power of the Cold War era,” says Ariel Cohen, who heads the Center for Energy, National Resources and Geopolitics at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Washington.

 

“The more we retreat, the more we are encouraging Russia to behave in a more aggressive way,” Mr. Cohen said. “We need to be engaging more deeply with our Central Asian allies, but instead we are in the process of abandoning turf to Russia, and it’s wrong — it’s against our interests geopolitically to let Russia feel that they all of a sudden have won all the turf without firing a shot.”

*  *  *




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Caption Contest: “No Tongues” Edition

To ‘prove’ everything is fine, President Obama met with and hugged Ebola-survivor Nina Pham today… The White House confirms no bodily fluids were exchanged during the meeting…

  • *EARNEST SAYS OBAMA SAW NO RISK HUGGING NURSE CURED OF EBOLA

“No Tongues!”




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Goldman and Blackstone Enter Spanish Real Estate – Pain and Suffering for Poor People Immediately Ensues

Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 11.47.54 AMLast year Madrid’s city and regional governments sold almost 5,000 rent-controlled flats to private equity investors including Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. At the time, the tenants were told their rental conditions would remain the same.

But as old contracts expire, dozens of people have received demands for higher rent, been told their rents will increase dramatically, been threatened with eviction or moved out to escape the insecurity. Thousands of Spain’s poor now depend for their homes on the generosity of private equity.

– From today’s Reuters article: Why Madrid’s Poor Fear Goldman Sachs and Blackstone

Less than a month ago, I warned the people of Spain that U.S. financial oligarchs had their sights set on the nation. The post was titled, Your Wall Street Slumlord Arrives in Europe – Goldman and Other Financial Firms Launch “Buy to Rent” in Spain, and in it I wrote:

continue reading

from Liberty Blitzkrieg http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2014/10/24/goldman-and-blackstone-enter-spanish-real-estate-pain-and-suffering-for-poor-people-immediately-ensues/
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Chart Of The Day: Jeff Bezos “Value Creation” Edition

Yesterday, we summarized all that was wrong in Amazon’s worst quarter in history where apparently one can no longer “make up for negative profits with volume.”

Here is another way of deconstructing Amazon’s love-hate relationship with profitability: in all of its 20+ year history, Amazon has generated under $2 billion in Net Income. The offset? Jeff Bezos’ net worth, which according to Bloomberg is about $30 billion (that was the number in April, when Bezos had lost a whopping $6.5 billion due to the collapse of AMZN, by now the number is surely far lower making Bezos the biggest billionaire loser in 2014). Still, for indicative purposes, the data is good enough.

In short: this is what Jeff Bezos’ value creation looks like (one does wonders if Amazon has purposefully been a perennial “bottom-line loser” for decades simply to avoid paying taxes).

 

And as a bonus chart, this from the WSJ:

Inspired by @ReutersJamie




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Despite Ebola Fears, DHS Unprepared for a Pandemic After Spending a Bundle, Warns Inspector General

Ebola gearDespite years of warning,
planning and spending, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is
unprepared for the sort of pandemic that has been occupying
Americans’ minds of late, DHS Inspector General John Roth told the
House Oversight Committee today. The feds have stockpiled plenty of
gear and supplies, but they don’t know if it’s the right gear, in
the right quantities, or whether it’s in usable condition, because
there’s no game plan to speak of.

In testimony on the government’s response to “the
Ebola crisis,”
Roth described the results of an audit conducted just two months
ago:

During our audit, we found that DHS did not adequately conduct a
needs assessment before purchasing protective equipment and
antiviral drugs. DHS reported spending $9.5 million on pandemic
protective equipment beginning in 2006, yet did not identify its
needs for protective equipment. Moreover, DHS spent $6.7 million
for antiviral drugs, but did not have clear and documented
methodologies for determining the types and quantities of
medication it should purchase. In other words, we could not
determine the basis for DHS’ decisions on how much or what types of
pandemic preparedness supplies to purchase, store, or distribute.
The balance of the funds was spent on pandemic research, exercises,
and storage.

By not identifying its needs, the Department cannot be sure its
protective equipment stockpiles are adequate or determine whether
it has excess supplies on hand.

Roth pointed out that DHS has stockpiled 350,000 white coverall
suits and 16 million surgical masks without actually coming up with
a justification for those numbers. The same is true of the
department’s horde of antiviral drugs—although it actually has
estimates for its needs in this area that it didn’t actually
follow. Too many? Too few? Maybe we’ll find out the hard way.

Oh. And the DHS’s antibiotics have apparently been warehoused
without any thought to how they’re supposed to be stored so that
they remain usable.

Of the DHS’s stockpile of hand sanitizer, 84 percent is
expired—so are 200,000 respirators. The entire respirator
supply is expected to be unusable after next year. So is most of
that antiviral stock.

All of which may be irrelevant, since DHS can’t find the stuff
anyway. “DHS did not readily know how much protective equipment it
had on hand or where the equipment was being stored,” Roth told the
committee.

The full
August 2014 audit is here.

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Ronald Bailey Argues that Practicing Virtual Eugenics Is Just Great

GenePeeksChildbearing is a lottery. The good
news is that most babies are winners who are born without major
structural or genetic birth defects. But wouldn’t it be good to
stack the odds further in favor of having a healthy baby? That’s
the aim of the new genetic testing company GenePeeks. The company’s
Matchright service simulates fertilization by combining genetic
screening information from women wanting to use donated sperm with
the same information from donors to generate the genomes of
thousands of virtual children. Based on that information, the
company steers women clients toward donors with whom they are more
likely to have healthy children. While some object and trot out the
tired “designer baby” trope, Reason Science Correspondent
Ronald Bailey argues that there is no good reason to stand in the
way of prospective parents who want to use this technology to
increase the odds that their kids will be born healthy.

View this article.

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Does Anyone Else Think The Stock Market Is Living On Reds, Vitamin C And Cocaine?

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The stock market's wild swings of sentiment have got me thinking it's living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine. This is a famous line from the Grateful Dead song Truckin'.
 

I've marked up a one-month chart of the S&P 500 (SPX) to illustrate what I mean:
 
 
Reds are slang for barbiturates, a class of depressants/sedatives (downers). Cocaine induces euphoric highs in which the cokehead feels he possesses god-like powers–for example, he might imagine he is a Federal Reserve member, or even its chairperson.

There are multiple interpretations of the role of vitamin C in the lyric, but for the purposes of the chart it serves as a modest dose of something healthy to keep the drug-ravaged market from crashing.
 
After multiple swings between cocaine highs brought to earth by downers, the market seems to be tripping on acid again. Though no one can know precisely what hallucinations are spinning through the manic-depressive sentiment of the market, it seems the market has responded to the withdrawal of its free-money cocaine–supplied of course by the Federal Reserve–by entering a drug-induced fantasy that everything's been fixed in the global economy: Europe is growing again, China's housing crisis has passed, U.S. corporate profits will feed corporate buybacks forever, and so stocks can loft higher again–a Bull Market without end.
 

This state of delusion would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic. The acid will wear off soon enough, and a mega-dose of vitamin C will not be enough to restore the shattered health of a manic, drugged-out market careening between euphoria and fear.

 




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