Creepy Mission: Obama “Lays Groundwork For Air Strikes” In Syria Next

What’s the opposite of ‘limited’ air-strikes? As The WSJ reports, The Pentagon is preparing to send surveillance aircraft, including drones, into Syrian airspace to gather intelligence on Islamist targets, laying the groundwork for a possible expansion of the limited U.S. military air campaign beyond Iraq, senior U.S. officials said. The ‘Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winner-In-Chief’ appears to have suddenly gone full hawk-tard – one wonders which little birdy whispered in his ear that, with the Fed pulling out, the whole ponzi is up unless the US undertakes a populist deficit-bursting war…

 

As WSJ reports, The Obama administration move to send drones over Syria…

…amounts to an acknowledgment that U.S. intelligence-collection efforts must be expanded to provide a better picture of the threat posed by the group calling itself the Islamic State, which holds large swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory.

 

The U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees American operations in the region, has requested more surveillance aircraft, including drones, to gather more intelligence on potential Islamic State targets, and officials said they could start flying missions over eastern Syria shortly.

But what about the Syrians?

U.S. officials said Syrian air-defense systems in eastern Syria won’t pose a threat because sensors are either sparsely located or inoperable. The drones would enter Syrian airspace without any Syrian regime approval or authorization, U.S. officials said.

Not like it’s the first time?

American officials have conducted at least some secret flights with drones and manned aircraft inside Syrian airspace in the past, including during a July raid to try to rescue a group of Americans held by the Islamic State.

*  *  *

So just to confirm… Putin is the “Hitler-esque” destroyer of nations and Nobel-Peace-Prize winner Obama, currently bombing (or planning to bomb) various nations, regardless of borders, is the world’s protector?

We are sure we must be over-simplifying this here… ah yes, it’s for humanitarian reasons… oh wait, is that Russian humanitarianism or American humanitarianism?




via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1mKdLMo Tyler Durden

The Kardashians And Climate Change: Interview With Judith Curry

Submitted by James Stafford via Oilprice.com,

Climate change continues to drive energy policy, despite the fact that there is no way to reconcile eradicating energy poverty in much of the world with reducing carbon dioxide emissions. This is one of the many conundrums of the climate change debate—a debate that has been taken over by social media and propaganda, while scientists struggle to get back into the game and engage the public.

Judith Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as the co-author of over 140 scientific papers. Her prolific writings offer a rational view of the climate change debate. You can find more of Judith’s work at her blog: JudithCurry.com

In an exclusive interview with Oilprice.com, Curry discusses:

•    The Koch-funded climate denial machine
•    Why the public is losing trust in scientists
•    How alarmist propaganda has skewed the climate debate
•    How climate change has contributed to a new literary genre
•    The impact of social media and the ‘Kardashian Factor’
•    Climate and the ‘clash of values’
•    Global warming or global cooling?
•    The Polar Vortex and ‘global warming’
•    Extreme weather hysteria
•    Why climate change should not drive energy policy

Oilprice.com: You've talked a lot about the role of communication and public relations in the climate change debate. Where do scientists fail in this respect?

Judith Curry: Climate science communication hasn’t been very effective in my opinion.  The dominant paradigm seems to be that a science knowledge deficit of the public and policy makers exists, which is exacerbated by the Koch-funded climate denial machine.  This knowledge deficit then results in the public failing to act with the urgency that is urged by climate scientists.

This strategy hasn’t worked for a lot of reasons. The chief one that concerns me as a scientist is that strident advocacy and alarmism is causing the public to lose trust in scientists.

Oilprice.com: What is the balance between engagement with the public on this issue and propaganda?

Judith Curry: There are two growing trends in climate science communications – engagement and propaganda. Engagement involves listening and recognizes that communication is a two-way street. It involves collaboration between scientists, the public and policy makers, and recognizes that the public and policy makers don’t want to be told what to do by scientists. The other trend has been propaganda. The failure of the traditional model of climate science communication has resulted in more exaggeration and alarmism, appeals to authority, appeals to fear, appeals to prejudice, demonizing those that disagree, name-calling, oversimplification, etc.

There is a burgeoning field of social science research related to science communications.  Hopefully this will spur more engagement and less propaganda.

Oilprice.com: You've also talked about the climate change debate creating a new literary genre. How is this 'Cli-Fi' phenomenon contributing to the intellectual level of the public debate and where do you see this going?

Judith Curry: I am very intrigued by Cli-Fi as a way to illuminate complex aspects of the climate debate. There are several sub-genres emerging in Cli-Fi – the dominant one seems to be dystopian (e.g. scorched earth). I am personally very interested in novels that involve climate scientists dealing with dilemmas, and also in how different cultures relate to nature and the climate. I think that Cli-Fi is a rich vein to be tapped for fictional writing.

Oilprice.com: How would you describe the current intellectual level of the climate change debate?

Judith Curry: Well, the climate change debate seems to be diversifying, as sociologists, philosophers, engineers and scientists from other fields enter the fray. There is a growing realization that the UNFCCC/IPCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change/Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has oversimplified both the problem and its solution. The wicked climate problem is growing increasingly wicked as more and more dimensions come into play. The diversification helps with the confirmation bias and ‘groupthink’ problem.

Hopefully this diversification will lead to greater understanding and policies that are more robust to the deep uncertainties surrounding the climate change problem.
 
Oilprice.com: You've also talked about the "Kardashian Factor" … Can you expand on this?

Judith Curry: The Kardashian Factor relates to a scientist’s impact in social media.  There is a growing disconnect between scientists who impact within the ivory tower, as measured by publications and citations, versus those scientists that are tweeting and blogging. While some of the smartest people on the planet are university professors, most of them simply don’t matter in today’s great debates. The use of the term ‘Kardashian Factor’ is designed to marginalize social media impact as shallow popularity.

Social media is changing the world, and academia hasn’t quite figured out what to do about it. On issues relevant to public debate, social media is rivaling published academic research in its impact. Social media is leveling the playing field and democratizing science. The skills required to be successful in social media include good writing/communication skills and the abilities to synthesize, integrate, and provide context. Those who are most successful at social media also have a sense of humor and can connect to broader cultural issues – they also develop a trustworthy persona. These are non-trivial skills, and they are general traits of people that have impact.  

So, why do I do spend a lot of my time engaging with the public via social media? I’m interested in exploring social media as a tool for engaging with the public, group learning, exploring the science-policy interface, and pondering the many dimensions of the wicked climate problem. I would like to contribute to the public debate and support policy deliberations, I would like to educate a broader and larger group of people, and finally I would like to learn from people outside the group of my academic peers (and social media is a great way to network). I am trying to provoke people to think outside the box of their own comfort zone on the complex subject of climate change.

Oilprice.com: Does the current debate seem to lack 'layers' that get lost in the politics and socio-economics?

Judith Curry: The debate is polarized in a black-white yes-no sort of way, which is a consequence of oversimplifying the problem and its solution. Although you wouldn’t think so by listening to the Obama administration on the topic of climate change, the debate is becoming more complex and nuanced. Drivers for the growing number of layers in the climate debate are the implications of the 21st century hiatus in warming, the growing economic realities of attempting to transition away from fossil fuels, and a growing understanding of the clash of values involved.

Oilprice.com: How does the climate change debate differ, in your experience, in varying cultures; for instance, from the United States to Western Europe, or Canada?

Judith Curry: The U.S. is more skeptical of the idea of dangerous anthropogenic global warming than is Western Europe. In the U.S., skepticism is generally associated with conservatives/libertarians/Republicans, whereas in Western Europe there is no simple division along the lines of political parties. In the developed world, it is not unreasonable to think ahead 100 or even 300 years in terms of potential impacts of policies, whereas the developing world is more focused on short-term survivability and economic development.

Oilprice.com: How significant are cultural elements to this debate?

Judith Curry: The cultural elements of this debate are probably quite substantial, but arguably poorly understood. A key issue is regional vulnerability, which is a complex mix of natural resources, infrastructure, governance, institutions, social forces and cultural values.

Oilprice.com: Are we in a period of global warming or global cooling?

Judith Curry: The Earth’s surface temperature has been generally increasing since the end of the Little Ice Age, in the mid 19th century. Since then, the rate of warming has not been uniform – there was strong warming from 1910-1940 and 1975-2000. Since 1998, there have been periods exceeding a decade when there has been no statistically significant warming.

Continually increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse act to warm the planet, so why hasn’t the surface temperature been increasing? This seems to be caused primarily by a change in the circulation patterns in the Pacific Ocean, although solar cooling is also contributing to an extent that is uncertain.

Oilprice.com: What is the 'polar vortex' and what does it have to do with global warming?

Judith Curry: The polar vortex is a circulation pattern in the upper atmosphere that influences surface weather. Ideas linking changes in the polar vortex to global warming are not supported by any evidence that I find convincing.

Oilprice.com: How does the media take advantage of every major — or even semi-major — weather event to make dire climate forecasts or support one or another polarized side of this debate? Can you give us some recent examples?

Judith Curry: The impact of extreme weather events in raising concern about global warming became apparent following Hurricane Katrina. The psychology of immediate and visible loss is far more salient than hypothetical problems in the next century. Hence extreme weather events have been effectively used in propaganda efforts. This is in spite of the assessment of the IPCC that doesn’t find much evidence linking extreme weather events to global warming, other than heat waves.

Oilprice.com: Where should energy fit into the climate change debate, and how much of a concern to the climate is the energy resources drive? Does anyone really know?

Judith Curry: It has never made sense to me for climate change to be the primary driver for energy policy. Even if we believe the climate models, nothing that we do in terms of emissions reductions will have much of an impact on climate until the late 21st century.  Energy poverty is a huge issue in much of the world, and there is no obvious way to reconcile reducing CO2 emissions with eradicating energy poverty. Again, this conundrum is evidence of the wickedness of the climate change problem.

Oilprice.com: You can see our first interview with Judith here: The IPCC May Have Outlived its Usefulness – An Interview with Judith Curry

Polar bear

 




via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1t7AHfN Tyler Durden

The ISIS’ Top Line: $2 Million In Daily Revenue From “Oil Sales, Extortion, Taxes And Smuggling”

A few days ago when we commented, somewhat in jest, on the seemingly impressive strategic planning behind the Islamic State jihadists becoming a “commodities trading powerhouse” (when it was revealed that ISIS had sold the grain it had stolen from the Itaqi government back to the government), we described just how well-versed in the ways of the modern world ISIS was: “from quickly taking control of (i.e., robbing) a central bank, to capturing the latest and greatest in US military equipment, to staging an amazing blitz-campaign that has resulted in the creation of a caliphate and captured the bulk of northern Iraq and a third of Syria including all of the former country’s oil fields, to even having glossy year end annual reports, one would almost be forgiven in assuming that some vastly more strategic minds are behind what on paper at least would be a far more disorganized force.”

Now, thanks to Bloomberg we can quantify this particular strategy, and put top-line numbers with the ISIS faces, so to speak: “The Islamic State, which now controls an area of Iraq and Syria larger than the U.K., may be raising more than $2 million dollars a day in revenue from oil sales, extortion, taxes and smuggling, according to U.S. intelligence officials and anti-terrorism finance experts.“

In other words, a well-greased government machine, and not only that but one which has an infinitely greater net worth than the US, because with a net worth of some $2 billion (and rising by $2 million daily), the Islamic State has a “worth” of some $17+ trillion more than the United States, which instead of equity is funded entirely through debt, and ever more debt, thanks to the ongoing devaluation of the world’s reserve currency.

Some more on how ISIS became the world’s first self-contained, and funded, jihadist entity:

Unlike other extremist groups’ reliance on foreign donations that can be squeezed by sanctions, diplomacy and law enforcement, the Islamic State’s predominantly local revenue stream poses a unique challenge to governments seeking to halt its advance and undermine its ability to launch terrorist attacks that in time might be aimed at the U.S. and Europe.

 

“The Islamic State is probably the wealthiest terrorist group we’ve ever known,” said Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury terrorism and financial intelligence official who now is director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They’re not as integrated with the international financial system, and therefore not as vulnerable” to sanctions, anti-money laundering laws and banking regulations.

This is bad news for banks such as HSBC, which will be unable to launder “donations” to the Islamic State, which does not need such services:

There are few reliable financial figures for the groups. A UN report estimated the Taliban raised about $400 million in 2011 through local taxes, donations, and extortion directed at drug smugglers, mobile phone operators and aid projects.  The Afghan Taliban smuggle opium, minerals and timber; Colombia’s Marxist FARC rebels export cocaine; and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, as well as the al-Qaeda offshoots in Yemen and North Africa, have raised millions by taking hostages for ransom.

 

The money that the Islamic State group receives from outside donors pales in comparison to its income from extortion, kidnapping, robbery, oil smuggling and the like, said a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

In short, ISIS would have simply been the latest entrant of the Petrodollar closed loop, if only it had somewhat better diplomatic relations with the US. As for the currency of choice, so far ISIS does not appear to have a particular predisposition toward dealing in greenbacks, which means that in the coming months one should expect strategic “scouting” missions by both Russia and China, deep below the radar of course, in the shadowy alleyways of Reqqa.

The revenue streams available to the Islamic State through its control of a vast oil-rich territory and access to local taxes dwarfs the income of other groups.

 

With its control of seven oil fields and two refineries in northern Iraq, and six out of 10 oil fields in eastern Syria, the terror group is selling crude at between $25 and $60 a barrel, Luay al-Khatteeb, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center in Qatar, said in a telephone interview. That reflects a discount from world market prices due to the risk faced by middlemen smuggling and brokering the oil. By comparison, Brent crude for October settlement fell 1 cent today to $102.28 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange.

Nations such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are hardly enjoying these dumping rates, but one person who will be truly displeased by a marginal seller who gives as much as a 75% discount will be none other than Vladimir Putin, for whom as is widely known, the stock market may go up and go down, but one thing matters critically: to keep the price of Brent as high as possible. And with ISIS impairing the supply and demand curves, one wonders how long before the Kremlin decides to make a move of some sort.

Based on al-Khatteeb’s interviews with contacts in Iraq, the extremist group controls Iraqi fields with a production capacity of 80,000 barrels a day and now is extracting about half that amount. The Islamic State, he said, is likely earning some $2 million a day from crude sales, paid in cash or bartered goods as the oil crosses into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Jordan.

 

One important financial battlefield for the Islamic State, said the U.S. intelligence official, is the Baiji refinery in northern Iraq, which produces roughly a third of the country’s total oil output. It’s been shut down since an attack by extremists in June, and remains the scene of heavy fighting between extremists and government forces.

So what about the use of funds from the oil sales: for now these appears to be going to “keep the war machine running, to maintain institutions.” in the territory the Islamic State has seized from the Iraqi and Syrian governments, and “the rest of the cash is going to recruiting,” al-Khatteeb said.

Robin Mills of Dubai-based Manaar Energy Consulting and Project Management, said in a telephone interview that authorities have begun cracking down on oil smuggling into the Kurdish region, meaning more of the crude will be used locally by the Islamic State and oil revenues will start to shrink.

 

A second source of revenue for the Islamic State is taxing residents of the densely-populated cities such as Mosul in the territory it controls, which is roughly the size of Wyoming, and controlling granaries and other critical resources. Criminal activity from bank and jewelry store robberies, extortion, smuggling and kidnapping for ransom is also an important source of revenue.

Another source of profit: the group may have raised $10 million or more in recent years from ransom payments alone, said one U.S. official.

While the U.S. military launches airstrikes in Iraq against militants and their weaponry — much of it American hardware abandoned by Iraqi forces — other agencies are seeking ways to deplete the Islamic State’s coffers.

But the punchline, and where one can be certain the western banks are involved, is the following:

“It’s not totally clear where they’re storing all this money, but there may be ways to actually go after it,” he said. Whether or not it’s in a bank account, “you’ve got to put it somewhere.”

Uhm, just braintsotmring here, but has anyone thought to check HSBC and JPM’s “private client” services database? Like we said, just a thought: clearly the world’s largest banks would never stoop so low as to fund and launder money for the world’s most barbaric and feared terrorist organizations.




via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1nvrgQ2 Tyler Durden

States With Medical Marijuana Laws Have Lower Opioid Overdose Rates

Fatal
overdoses involving narcotic painkillers are about 25 percent less
common in states with medical marijuana laws than in states that do
not allow patients to use cannabis for symptom relief, according to
a study
published online today by JAMA Internal Medicine. In 2010
alone, the authors calculate, that difference translated into 1,729
fewer deaths than would otherwise have been expected.

The researchers, led by Marcus A. Bachhuber, an internist at the
V.A. Medical Center in Philadelphia, looked at data for all 50
states from 1999 through 2010, a period when opioid overdose deaths
nearly doubled. That upward trend was less pronounced in the 13
states that enacted medical marijuana laws during those years.
Furthermore, “such laws were associated with a lower rate of
overdose mortality that generally strengthened over time.” On
average, states saw a 20 percent reduction the first year after
implementing medical marijuana laws, a difference that rose to more
than 33 percent by the sixth year. “Although the exact mechanism is
unclear,” Bachhuber et al. conclude, “our results suggest a
link between medical cannabis laws and lower opioid
analgesic overdose mortality.”

The authors suggest a few possible explanations:

Patients with chronic noncancer pain who would have
otherwise initiated opioid analgesics may choose medical cannabis
instead….In addition, patients already receiving
opioid analgesics who start medical cannabis treatment may
experience improved analgesia and decrease their opioid dose, thus
potentially decreasing their dose-dependent risk of overdose.
Finally, if medical cannabis laws lead to decreases in
polypharmacy—particularly with benzodiazepines—in people taking
opioid analgesics, overdose risk would be decreased.

Notably, Bachhuber et al. found that state policies aimed
at preventing nonmedical use of opioids, such as prescription
monitoring programs, were not associated with lower overdose rates.
“If the relationship between medical cannabis laws and
opioid analgesic overdose mortality is
substantiated in further work,” they write, “enactment
of laws to allow for use of medical cannabis
may be advocated as part of a comprehensive
package of policies to reduce the population risk
of opioid analgesics.”

University of Maine psychologist Marie J. Hayes, who
co-authored a commentary
that accompanied the study,
told Reuters that doctors generally have strong misgivings
about recommending marijuana to patients. Still, she said,
Bachhuder et al.’s findings could be important. “We don’t put
[marijuana] in Rite Aid because we’re confused by it as a society,”
she said. Yet “everything we’re doing [to reduce opioid overdoses]
is having no effect, except for in the states that have implemented
medical marijuana laws.”

[Thanks to Paul Armentano for the tip.]

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1vHHStb
via IFTTT

Venezuela to Fingerprint Supermarket Shoppers

When artificial price controls fail to bring food to the poor
and instead lead to catastrophic shortages for everyone, what do
you do? If you are Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, you don’t
admit that the socialist policy you inherited from the late Hugo
Chavez is a failure, you double-down by ordering all supermarket
shoppers to be fingerprinted as a means of preventing “fraud.”

Revolutionary rationing

From the BBC: 

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela has announced a mandatory
fingerprinting system in supermarkets to combat food shortages and
smuggling.

He said the system would stop people from buying too much of a
single item.

But the opposition in Venezuela rejected the plan, saying the
policy treated all Venezuelans as thieves.

Critics said fingerprinting consumers of staple products was
tantamount to rationing and constituted a breach of privacy.

Fingerprinting follows only four months after Marduro mandated
all Venezuelans to use a “Secure Food Supply” card, which according
to
The Guardian:

will limit Venezuelans to once-a-week shopping and will set off
an alarm to halt any transaction if a purchaser breaks the rules.
The government wants to prevent individual shoppers from
“over-buying” in a country hit by acute shortages of basic items
including milk, sugar and toilet paper. Critics say it is an
admission of failure of economic policy in one of the world’s big
oil-producing nations.

Venezuela continues to be plagued by staggering murder rates,
inflation and scarcity of many basic cooking staples. Anger over
empty supermarket shelves in a country with
the world’s largest oil reserves was a primary cause of the
massive protests from earlier this year, which were violently
suppressed by government forces. 

Even one-time “revolutionaries” of Chavez’s
Bolivarian Revolution, which was supported by most of
Venezuela’s poor, are growing weary with failed top-down
economic policies. Also from
The Guardian:

For some, the recent move is nothing short of a Cuban-style
rationing card that will sooner or later hamper citizens’ economic
freedoms.

“I don’t want to be told what I can buy and when I can buy it.
That’s what I work for. I am a revolutionary but I didn’t go into
this wanting it to become Cuba,” says Mercedes Azuaje as she exits
a corner shop with an almost empty bag of groceries.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1vgy2RS
via IFTTT

The Winner-Take-All Economy

When the majority of Americans examine the world around them, they see a stock market at record highs and modest apparent improvement in the economy, but, as John Hussman notes, they also have the sense that something remains terribly wrong, and they can’t quite put their finger on it.

Exceprted from John Hussman’s Weekly Market Comment,

According to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve, 40% of American families report that they are “just getting by,” and 60% of families do not have sufficient savings to cover even 3 months of expenses. Even Fed Chair Janet Yellen seemed puzzled last week by the contrast between a gradually improving unemployment rate and persistently sluggish real wage growth.

We would suggest that much of this perplexity reflects the application of incorrect models of the world.

Before the 15th century, people gazed at the sky, and believed that other planets would move around the Earth, stop, move backwards for a bit, and then move forward again. Their model of the world – that the Earth was the center of the universe – was the source of this confusion.

Similarly, one of the reasons that the economy seems so confusing at present is that our policy makers are dogmatically following models that have very mixed evidence in reality.

…

Several factors contribute to the broad sense that something in the economy is not right despite exuberant financial markets and a lower rate of unemployment. In our view, the primary factor is two decades of Fed-encouraged misallocation of capital to speculative uses, coupled with the crash of two bubbles (and we suspect a third on the way). This repeated misallocation of investment resources has contributed to a thinning of our capital base that would not have occurred otherwise. The Fed has repeatedly followed a policy course that sacrifices long-term growth by encouraging speculative malinvestment out of impatience for short-term gain. Sustainable repair will only emerge from undistorted, less immediate, but more efficient capital allocation.

In recent years, the U.S. has experienced a collapse in labor participation and weak growth in labor compensation, coupled with an increasingly lopsided distribution of whatever benefits the recent economic recovery has generated. This is not well-explained by Phillips Curves or simplistic appeals to “insufficient demand,” and it is unlikely to be improved by endless monetary “stimulus” (the targets that clearly occupy the Fed’s thinking). While our economic challenges can be largely traced to more than a decade of persistent Fed-enabled misallocation of capital, most of the costs of this misallocation have fallen on labor because of a) shifting composition of labor demand that has resulted from an increasing share of international trade with countries with heavy populations of relatively unskilled labor; and b) economic features that increasingly create a “winner-take-all” distribution of economic gains. 

One of the key results in international economics is that as trade opens up between nations, those nations will tend to export goods that intensely use the factor (skilled labor, unskilled labor, capital) with which they are relatively well-endowed. In a world where we have opened up trade with countries that are densely populated with unskilled workers, and where the U.S. is relatively better endowed with skilled labor and capital, the result has been something of a hollowing out of the middle class among households that aren’t themselves endowed with skilled labor or capital. Essentially, the U.S. obtains the services of low-skilled labor more cheaply from abroad than domestically. There is no great debate on this point.

Meanwhile, transfer payments like welfare and unemployment compensation allow many households to maintain consumption despite being out of those jobs, and given the ability of households to take on debt, even if they are actually living paycheck to paycheck, the produced goods get purchased, companies make a profit, government runs a deficit, the Fed keeps interest rates low which allows all the debt to be serviced, and everyone is pleasantly, if unsustainably, happy. That’s particularly true as long as nobody asks how the debt will be repaid, which is certainly what Fed policy encourages.

Now, looking at nations as a whole, academic economists proudly derive various theorems to prove that both nations actually benefit in aggregate from international trade. The problem, however, is in the distribution of those gains. This is particularly true in what might be called “winner-take-all” economies.

Why do professional athletes, movie actors, and even some 23-year-old computer programmers earn so much more than teachers, nurses, and factory-line workers? The answer is simple. They’ve found a way to spread the impact of their efforts over a very large number of individuals, while the teachers, nurses, and factory-line workers can apply their efforts to a dramatically smaller number of “units,” be they students, patients, or boxes of Corn Flakes. For massive too-big-to-fail banks, the units are dollars. The downside is that as certain winners are able to spread their efforts over an enormous number of people, the required number of winners declines – ask anyone who has ever tried to become a movie actor or a pro-basketball player. International trade and internet communications, among other developments, have significantly increased that tendency toward winner-take-all outcomes. When that effect is expanded through international trade, the result is that yes, each country benefits in aggregate, but you also observe a “hollowing out” of the middle class, particularly for families that don’t have labor or capital that shares in the distribution.

…

As for the U.S. economy, QE-induced speculation misallocates resources that might otherwise contribute to long-run growth, and while conditions could certainly be worse, the benefits of this economic recovery have been highly uneven. Again, 40% of families report that they are “just getting by,” with the majority essentially living paycheck to paycheck without enough savings to cover even a few months of expenses. We could be, and should be doing better, except that this complex adaptive system of ours responds to good incentives as well as bad ones, and has been repeatedly crippled by policies that have produced waves of malinvestment, bubble, and collapse. The economy is starting to take on features of a winner-take-all monoculture that encourages and subsidizes too-big-to-fail banks and large-scale financial speculation at the expense of productive real investment and small-to-medium size enterprises. These are outcomes that our policy makers at the Fed have single-handedly chosen for us in the well-meaning belief that the economy is helped by extraordinary financial distortions. The Federal Reserve is right to wind down quantitative easing, and would best terminate reinvestment of maturing holdings, ideally beginning in October or quickly thereafter. The issue is not whether the U.S. economy does or does not need “life support.” The issue is that QE is not life support in the first place.




via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1nvhQEg Tyler Durden

Your Tax Dollars Are Funding a Database of Political Tweets, ‘Misinformation’

Obama TwitterThe federal government is sponsoring a creepy
social media research project: The aim is to produce a database of
politically disfavored tweets, misinformation, and “other social
pollution.” The grant for the project—made by the National Science
Foundation to Indiana University—was discovered by The Washington
Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington,
who writes:

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a
web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it
considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on
political activity online.

The “Truthy”
database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed
to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and
other social pollution.”

The university has received $919,917 so
far for the project.

The fact that the project is called Truthy—the word Stephen
Colbert used back in 2005 to lambaste Republicans’ distortions of
facts—is the first hint about its political leanings. The next
comes courtesy of the project’s explanation on its own
website:

We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears,
astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution. While the
vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven
by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered
by the shady
machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns. Truthy
uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social
network analysis, and complex networks models. To train our
algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to
flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on
the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!

The above passage reeks of a
people-who-disagree-with-me-are-liars perspective. What counts as a
political smear, and why do smears automatically count as social
pollution? What’s the difference between an organic and inorganic
meme? Is “forged grass-roots activity” just a synonym for “Koch
stuff”?

The grant’s
abstract claims that Truthy will “assist in the preservation of
open debate” by detecting “hate speech and subversive propaganda.”
Those seem like conflicting goals, even if pursued in a totally
apolitical way.

Do Americans really want the government to sponsor a website
that collects their Tweets and determines whether they are socially
harmful? Like it or not, taxpayers have already contributed nearly
$1 million to such a project.

If you Tweet this story, please watch your manners, get all you
facts straight, and don’t create any inorganic memes. Thanks.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1nvh8GY
via IFTTT