A Good Way to Strengthen the Middle Class: Raise the Overtime Threshold

This idea will seriously close that income inequality gap and will probably help the economy quite well.

So let me be specific. To get the country back to the same equitable standards we had in 1975, the Department of Labor would simply have to raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid overtime when you worked more than 40 hours a week. That’s 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in their pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn’t want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack—slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages.

Unpaid overtime is rampant in corporate America from what I hear. It might make people happier to have the corporate culture change to one of looking out for your employees. If a company wants to make more money they have to hire more people instead of making the people there do more for no pay. Maybe the idea of compassionate capitalism needs to take root.

Social Media Strikes Again: GOP Staffer Resigns After Cyber-Bullying the Obama kids

She was an idiot for attacking the behavior of teenaged girls in the first place.

Elizabeth Lauten, the communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), resigned Monday following a Facebook post that criticized Malia and Sasha Obama's appearance at the annual White House turkey pardon ceremony, according to NBC News. 

According to screenshots posted by Gawker on Saturday, Lauten wrote to the first daughters, asking them to "try showing a little class"

My advice is to stop looking at the Obama kids skirt length and noting how many times they roll their eyes and cut my taxes already. I don't care about Mitt Romneys taxes you can cut them or leave them the same. I just want the GOP to stop with the social conservatism and get with the fiscal conservatism.  

Let the Run for the Border Begin: You have until Jan. 1, 2014 to get to the US to Avoid Prosecution

Well it looks like it is official Obama has made 5 million people de-facto American citizens by a stroke of his pen.

Obama will also press ahead with changes to the way the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforces deportations, aides said.

Currently, an undocumented immigration arrested for a broken taillight would be processed by local police, who would alert ICE. ICE would launch deportation proceedings. Under the new system, ICE would only move to expel individuals who fell into certain categories: if they had been convicted of a serious offense, for example, or had ties to extremist groups, or if they crossed the border after Jan. 1, 2014.

“We’re going to focus on deporting felons, not families,” one official said at the briefing.

This will probably now backfire because this is a green-light for people to stream across the border as fast as they can. That cut off date is quick but if they can get here by then they don't have to fear being deported by ICE for years, if ever. We might see a million people at the border just in time for Christmas. 

Whoops! Obamacare Overcounted Sign-ups

Well at least they are finally admitting it.

Administration spokesman Aaron Albright said that the overcount involved about 400,000 people.

Those consumers have separate dental coverage in addition to a medical plan, and were double-counted by mistake, said Albright. They had purchased both the medical and dental plans through HealthCare.gov and state insurance markets created under the law.

It makes you wonder how much more double-counting and statistical tricks are in the number of sign-ups as well. I guess we are too "stupid" catch these sorts of errors.

Paul Ryan to Chair Tax Writing Committee: Now Cut My Taxes!

This is very good news for the most part.

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has been tapped by Republican leaders to chair the tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives during the next congressional session.

Ryan, the outgoing head of the House budget panel and Ways and Means member since 2000, was recommended by the Republican Steering Committee on Tuesday for the post.

He knows his fiscal Ps and Qs so here is my wishlist for Paul Ryan and his tax committee:

1. Expand the earned income tax credit beyond $496 for people without kids. That would help quite a few millennials that have not formed families yet. That would be a massive stimulus by itself.

2. Cut corporate taxes to an average of the top 10 Industrialized countries. Then close as many industry specific loopholes and get rid of as many subsidies as you can. Companies should not be able to game the system to pay 0% tax like GE does. 

3. Allow companies to repatriate their income at some much lower rate. Maybe 15% or something. I want our multinationals to be able to move their cash from overseas and spend in in the US. This would get rid of inversions right there.

4. Remove capital gains taxes and taxes on interest for people making less than $150,000. The middle class should be able to invest in the stock market or buy bonds without Uncle Sam demanding his cut. I did all the research and took all the risk. The company I bought stock in has already paid their taxes. Why should I have to double pay this tax. This would also end the stupid tax pruning that people have to do in order to reduce their taxes.

5. Create a rental deduction. This would not be as high as a home owners interest and tax deduction but it should be higher than $0. Many younger people in America rent so this would go a long way toward helping them and encourage them to get out of their parents basements.

6. Allow people to refinance their student debt. 4.66% to 7.21% is outrageous in an era of 0% interest. Make this the prime rate plus a certain amount of basis points and that is it. The government should not be making money from student loans but they shouldn't be forgiven either.

The Far Right Pushes for Yet Another Government Shutdown

I just don't understand the thinking of the far right.

Rush Limbaugh is now telling his audience the federal government “damn well needs to be shut down” because President Obama intends to take executive actions on immigration policy. Erick Erickson is thinking along the same lines, pushing for a shutdown in a blog post, and reminding his Republican allies that their party has never actually faced adverse consequences from their previous shutdowns, so they have no incentive to back off now.

 The shutdown was a massive waste of time and this one will be too. Obama can take executive action on immigration policy no matter what the Congress does. The last time they shut down the government they wanted to get rid of Obamacare. That didn't happen and there was no end game in sight. So the GOP had to slink away and waste everyone's time and the market dropped. This is just a repeat of that sort of thinking.

The GOP shuts down the government against the wishes of their leadership and then Obama goes ahead and gives out amnesty anyway. Then what does the GOP do? Stamp their feet and jump up and down until Obama changes his mind? Cut off money to border security? It doesn't make any sense. 

What Rush and his cronies need to understand is that the best way to do immigration reform is to put a decent bipartisan immigration bill on Obama's desk and have him veto it. Then when Obama does his executive order he actually looks like an "imperial president" shunning the wishes of the Congress.

A Democrat Finally Admits that the Middle Class Doesn't Care about Increasing the Minimum Wage

It is nice to see a Dem strategist understand that raising the minimum wage has nothing to do with helping the middle class.

Democrats like to talk about a “populist” agenda that rails against the wealthy and supports the middle class. This year, the centerpiece of that agenda was raising the minimum wage. But tapping their anger against the 1 percent doesn’t engender hope or help middle-class Americans get ahead. While increasing the minimum wage is extremely popular — and we should raise it — I doubt many middle-class workers aspire to a minimum-wage job. We need an economic growth and upward-mobility agenda that offers middle-class families hope that their future will be better than the recent past.

Yeah taxing the rich more and spending it on the poor does not help the middle class for the most part. Middle class workers do not want a minimum-wage job at that is the bottom line. This guy, Al From, also talks about expanding the earned income tax credit which I would like. That move alone would put many thousands in the pockets of the middle class. Adjust that tax credit to inflation and it would be a nice little chunk of change for the economy every April.

Why the Dems Keep Losing the Gun Control Debate: Americans Think an Armed Home is Safer

I think this is common sense but the war on terror has changed the minds of many Americans.

Gallup recently conducted a survey on guns, and what Americans think of them. The results of the poll showed that shockingly, 63% of Americans think having a gun in the home makes the home safer. On the other side of the coin, only 30% of Americans say they feel guns make homes more dangerous, and around 6% say “it depends.”

That 30% are probably liberals that have not been around guns very much and are just reading the hype. If you get over the fear factor of owning a gun it does become a tool of protection and not some scary thing.

Keystone XL Pipeline Might Get Approved to Save Mary Landrieu's Job

I guess that is a good a reason as any to generate some jobs and get things moving again.

Long-stalled legislation to build the Keystone XL pipeline got new life on Wednesday after Senate Democrats suddenly abandoned efforts to block the measure in hopes of helping endangered Sen. Mary Landrieu keep her seat in energy-rich Louisiana.

Republicans responded swiftly to Landrieu's maneuvering, scheduling a vote in the House on Thursday on an identical bill sponsored by Rep. Bill Cassidy, Landrieu's Republican rival in a Dec. 6 runoff.

I guess it will hit Obama's desk soon and we will see if he chooses environmentalists over his own party or not. My money is on an under bus treatment given to the green lobby. I mean they didn't help the Dems hold the Senate so they aren't worth it anymore. Jobs (especially Senator Landrieu's) trump ideology in big party politics.

It Seems Piketty Got it Wrong: They Forgot to Include Government Freebies in their Calculations

Hmm it seems that the wealth gap between the rich and the poor hasn't yawned as far as these academics think.

If that dark picture doesn’t sound like the country you lived in, that’s because it isn’t. The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.

And now, thanks to a new study in the Southern Economic Journal, we know what the picture looks like when the missing data are filled in. Economists Philip Armour and Richard V. Burkhauser of Cornell University and Jeff Larrimore of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation expanded the Piketty-Saez income measure using census data to account for all public and private in-kind benefits, taxes, Social Security payments and household size.

The result is dramatic. The bottom quintile of Americans experienced a 31% increase in income from 1979 to 2007 instead of a 33% decline that is found using a Piketty-Saez market-income measure alone. The income of the second quintile, often referred to as the working class, rose by 32%, not 0.7%. The income of the middle quintile, America’s middle class, increased by 37%, not 2.2%.

What is interesting is that the things the left out are the cornerstones of middle class living. Leaving out taxes which many Americans get back in the form of a sizable check every April 15th is an big miss in their calculations. Also the sale of a house is usually a massive transfer of wealth for many Americans who didn't turn their houses into a piggy bank. Some prudent families bought a house at reasonable rates 20 years ago and end up selling them for 10x or more gain. They kept building their home equity year after year and paid their mortgages off and suddenly they are sitting on $500K tax free. As housing recovers this kind of thing might happen again 20 years from now.

Ben Carson Might Run for President? Fox News Dumps him from Their Lineup in Anticipation

Hmm, it looks like the good doctor is going to make a run at the White House.

The scrutiny was probably inevitable after Fox dropped Carson as a contributor on Friday. The trigger there was the Baltimore physician’s plan to run an hourlong infomercial on local stations as a prelude to a possible presidential run.

I addressed the development on Sunday’s “Media Buzz”: “This was a smart move by Fox. Because a guy who is more or less running for president shouldn't be on a network payroll. Which means Fox also faces a decision about former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who is openly weighing a White House run as well.”

Yeah Huckabee will get his ass whooped by Carson if they both chose to run. I mean Carson is a neuro-surgeon and can diagnose Putin as a madman and maybe provide a prescription to take care of that sort of thing. Also an actual doctor might have quite a bit of gravitas when it comes to Health Care spending and medicare reimbursements and other topics. It would be nice to have a super-smart President as well. I was told Obama was smart but the jury is still out.

Paper Suggests Conservatives don't Like Climate Science because it Suggests Policies They Don't Like: Um Yeah Pretty Much

I think many Conservatives would be okay with some of what Climate Science has to say about Global Warming if it didn't include anti-growth measures in it.

So-called "solution aversion" colors conservatives' thinking about the science itself, the research found.
The researchers say they tested the theory using four different experiments.
In one experiment, two different groups of subjects across the political spectrum were given articles to read, one which talked about a government regulatory policy solution to climate change while another discussed a free market solution.

While Democrats in both groups viewed the science of climate change equally regardless of which article they read, the percentage of Republicans who believed the climate change was caused by humans was much lower among those who read about the regulatory solution. It isn't the science that is flawed (for the most part) but what the science will lead to.

I think the Conservatives viewed climate science remedies as yet another way for the government to control your life. I mean an anti-climate change measure can pretty much be used for any sort of draconian control you can think of. I mean the UN wants to extort billions from rich countries to give to poor countries to "combat climate change." I'm sure the poor countries will use that money wisely and every dollar will be accounted for by independent auditors. Yeah right.

Idiot Ted Cruz Calls Net Neutrality Obamacare for the Internet

I guess we might get some bad legislation from the know-nothing wing of the GOP.

This is an insanely cynical tactic that should worry all citizens regardless of political stripe, and it's coming from the guys at the top; Ted Cruz (R-TX) is a powerful member of the GOP in the Senate and a potential presidential candidate for 2016. Republicans just took over Congress and hold the keys to policymaking for at least the next two years. If the best they can continue to come up with is repeating "Obama is bad!" the internet is in serious trouble.

The only people that want to kill Net Neutrality are the ISPs who cannot wait to charge people depending on what they use the Internet for. So in other words if you are a gamer you will get a Gamer Fee for accessing "gamer packets" tacked onto your bill. Or if you watched lots of Netflix you will get a "Netflix streaming fee" added to your bill. That is strait-up anti-competitive and screws consumers so ISPs can make billions of extra money in fees.

What is especially galling is what idiots like Ted Cruz that want to kill Net Neutrality say they don't want to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. They attacked the since-failed Solyndra (and rightly so) as being hand-picked by the White House as a poster-child for a green company. They also attacked the Export Import bank about being the bank of Boeing.

Now they are pulling for the ISPs to be able to kidnap the Internet and hold it for ransom by charging you for what you want to do with it. That should be against the GOPs own view about the government picking and choosing winners in the economy. It will also potentially mess up businesses that use data in the Internet as well. I mean what is there to stop Comcast from charging companies "cloud access fees" or "big data processing fees?" That means everyone will have to pay more to make up for ISP greed.

#BanBlackFriday Or Why I Will Never Buy Anything on That Date Again

I was talking to my coworkers at lunch time about Sears opening at 6PM on Thanksgiving because Eddie Lampert is crazy and the company is nearly bankrupt. This got me thinking why should we play ball with these retailers that force their people to come in on a holiday and be away from their family? I think it isn't fair that they have to come in and miss Thanksgiving dinner.

Then we couple this with the fact that Jdimytai Damour a Wal-mart clerk died during a Black Friday stampede in 2008 and we have the recipe to avoid this terrible day. So I will not buy a single thing at a department store on Black Friday no matter how good the sales are. A cheap flat-screen TV is not worth a mans life or be the reason behind forcing some clerk to have to come in and miss Thanksgiving dinner.

Sears has broke this camels back and I hope other people will not buy from a department store on that day as well. I mean if you really want to buy something wait until cyber-Monday and let Amazon get your business. No one will have to get trampled and hopefully they will let their employees have Thanksgiving off so they can have dinner with their families.

Why the Dems Didn't Appeal to the Middle Class: The Middle Class Does not Make Minimum Wage

I was reading this postmortem on the midterms and this part jumped out at me.

Some Democrats felt that the party didn’t offer enough obvious relief to middle class voters worried about their job and stagnant wages, a broad group Obama targeted relentlessly in his 2012 campaign.

“I’m a strong believer in raising the minimum wage and it needs to happen,” Democratic strategist Greg Greene told msnbc. “That said it’s not something people necessarily identify with when they see themselves as middle class. That in itself was not enough.”

This is the exact reason why some people in the middle class don't line up for the Dems. If you are middle class you do not want to be making the minimum wage at any time after you got out of high school or college. If you are making the minimum wage chances are you cannot be called "middle class." So when the Dems want to raise it then the middle class shrugs their shoulders because that rhetoric does not effect them.

Also attacking the rich does not resonate with middle class voters as much as the Dems think. I mean most middle class people would love to be upper middle class or rich and aspire to that goal. You won't be a billionaire but you will be comfortable in your old age. Many billionaires got there because of hard work and a knowledge set that many in the middle class cannot follow. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs and not many would want to.

So when the Dems go after the rich and give freebies to the poor they attack what the middle class aspire to while giving something to the class they no longer want to be. So raising the minimum wage would help some other guy and an 80% tax on the wealthy might just hurt the middle class in the long run.

Senate Democrats' Campaign Committee gives up Landrieu for Dead

Well it seems that the some of the big money men are jumping off one of the last Democratic Senate ships still afloat.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee initially had reserved $1.8 million in television advertising for after Tuesday's first round of voting. On Thursday, the DSCC dumped the bookings in the state's big cities.

I like this idea by Cassidy who is running against her.

Cassidy, meanwhile, attended an anti-abortion event slamming Landrieu for her support of abortion rights. He agreed to participate in one of the six debates Landrieu had proposed — on Dec. 1 — but threw in a twist: Cassidy said he'd agree to another debate date for every time Landrieu campaigns in Louisiana with the unpopular President Barack Obama.

I'm sure Obama is gassing up Air Force 1 and heading down there at once but the Landrieu people will tell them that the runways are totally full. She should toss caution to the wind though and have Obama hang around down on the bayou for the hell of it.

GOP Gets Smart and Rejects Tea Party Maneuvering on Debt Ceiling

The GOP is finally getting smart when it comes to the Tea Party.

Just days after their historic midterm victories, the Republican congressional leadership is sending out signals to the caucus that infighting and gridlock will not be tolerated.

According to Politico, incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested he will not go along with conservative calls to use the debt ceiling as leverage for spending cuts, an insistence by tea party members which triggered the government shutdown last year. 

It seems that they will be picking the low hanging fruit with Obama as well.

And in his victory speech Tuesday night, he made it clear he would also be extending the olive branch to President Barack Obama, saying the GOP has a "duty" to work with the White House on issues they agree on.
"I'm pretty familiar with our conference including the new members who are coming in," McConnell said, according to Politico. "The vast majority of them don't feel they were sent to Washington to fight all the time."
House Speaker John Boehner is telling colleagues he plans to be a "responsible leader," and that the party needs to be unified to take advantage of its political dominance, Politico reported.

So do the Asian trade deal, ISIS war-powers authorization, create a way for companies to pull money from overseas at a lower tax rate. Then they should send a Keystone XL pipeline bill through and have Obama veto it if he has to. After that stuff is done then work on some sort of immigration reform before Obama just executive orders amnesty. If Obama vetoes the legislation then does his own thing he looks even more like an out-of-touch dictator then he already does.

It Seems that Midterms are Good for the Market: Stocks are Positive 86% of the Time Since 1928

That would be nice and cheerful if we go up 16% from here.

Since 1950, the S&P 500 jumped 16%, on average, in the six months following midterms. The market was green following all 16 of them, points out Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at Nuveen Asset Management. 

Since 1928, the market advanced 7%, on average, and it’s been positive 86% of the time in the three months following midterms, notes Barclays Capital strategist Jonathan Glionna.

Why is this? Markets hate uncertainty, and elections remove uncertainty, says Doll. It doesn’t matter which party wins. 

I already think a nice Santa Clause rally is baked into this market unless Ebola gets very bad or we have an escalation (or a big-time terrorist attack) in the war with ISIS. You add low gas prices to this equation and it is like nearly every American gets a raise of a few percent going into the holidays. Hopefully, they will spend this money and feel a little richer and more confidant because of it.

What would be interesting is if the GOP lets Obama win a few like a free-trade agreement with Asia and maybe some tax reform before they go to war over immigration reform. The GOP wants a few wins to run on in 2016 and Obama probably would like a nice roaring economy to make us forget the last 6 years of malaise. Freer trade and tax reform would go a long way to accomplishing those goals. 

It Seems Americans are Saving More and Not Getting so Deeply in Debt

I guess one good thing came out of the Great Recession. Americans are gun-shy when it comes to debt and are actually saving some of their hard earned cash.

“Household Debt” is a combination of your mortgage payments plus the required payments you have to make on “consumer” debt- including credit card accounts- each quarter.  This amount is divided by your quarterly disposable (after income tax) income to find the percent or “ratio” of debt-to-income.

Henry points out that the Household Debt Service rate is the lowest it’s been since the Fed began measuring it.

They first measured it in 1980 so debt at 30 year lows which is awesome. Americans are also socking away the money for a rainy day.

In addition to reducing our reliance on debt. Henry points to another positive factor:  we’re saving more.  “In the mid-80s the personal saving rate peaked at 10%.  And then from there on it declined to 2% as the use of credit continued to expand.”   Again, it’s no coincidence that we sank to that all-time low in saving around 2005-2007-- just before the recession hit.

Since then, according to Henry, the personal savings has been rising.  It reached 6.7% in June 2009- more than twice the rate of December 2007.  By the end of the second quarter of this year it had declined to 5.6%.  None-the-less, Henry maintains that Americans’  “balance sheets have improved even though they’re saving less than [immediately] after the recession.”

It would be great to have a generation that values thrift and swears off most debt going forward. I mean the Millennials will be very wary of debt after they have to pay off $25K in tuition for a major that sometimes never pays them back. It would be hard to see that same person rack up $25k more worth of consumer debt after they have paid off that mountain.

Hmm Does the Double-Blind Test Need to be Used for Social Sciences? Maybe Climate Science Too?

This is an interesting article about the biases in the field of social sciences and how they might be influencing the field in general.

For studies and grants, though, even that may not be enough. What is needed in those cases is a blinding of the peer-review system—both in terms of applicants’ names and personal backgrounds and the hypotheses (or findings) of their research. If you want to research Democrats and Republicans, say—or any other ideologically loaded topics—call them Purples and Oranges for the duration of the paper. The methods and research structure will be evaluated without any ideological predispositions. Blind peer review in papers and grants would also solve a number of other bias problems, including against certain people, institutions, and long-held ideas. As for ideologically sensitive papers that have already been published, blind that data as well and reanalyze the premises and conclusions, pairing them with Tetlock’s turnabout tests. Is the opposite approach nonsensical? Chances are, then, that this one is, too.

This is what the biotech field does and it allows for totally unbiased testing for the most part. You have just the data and nothing else there to cloud the issue. Maybe this needs to be done for climate science as well. That way we don't have this supposed 97% consensus that people keep touting like it is gospel. Perhaps some of those 97% can say that it is happening but it won't be too bad after all. Or maybe they don't actually agree with the rest of them but are knuckling under so they won't be called heretics by their colleagues.

It would be nice to just see some dissenting theories be put forth without fear of repercussion. Some scientists even see benefits of warming but seem to be shouted down by the IPCC. When people are afraid to speak out because they will be dubbed a denialist there is a problem with the system. I always thought that questioning the status quo was heroic in science. But climate science (and social science in this article) seems like a monolith that keeps dissent out and only lets money and prestige go toward the catastrophic warming side and nowhere else.

Rate of Returns and Not Scare-Tactics is How High Global Warming Evanglistis Need to Sell Alternative Energy like Solar

This is exactly what environmentalists need to do to sell their ideas to the investment community.

In other words, Altus quickly morphed from using its own money for demos to selling investments in its building projects to commercially minded investors. And the principals developed a sales pitch that eschews talk of rising sea levels in favor of terms like IRR (internal rate of return) and cash flow. “The question any investor asks is how much cash flow they’ll receive,” Norell says. “We have delivered annual returns of 8 to 10 percent to our investors.” (The offering documents he showed me bore that claim out.) And in a world of exceedingly low interest rates—a 10-year U.S. government bond pays interest of only about 2 percent per year—that’s quite appealing.

 They don't have to appeal to scare-tactics that global warming will make the seas 100 feet higher by 2020 or other nonsense. This company Altus, is putting solar panels on roofs and cashing in tax credits and creating a revenue stream out of the power. This revenue stream is pretty solid and recession-proof too because these building owners will be paying their power bill in good times and bad. Also they probably won't be taking these panels off of their roofs if they are cutting their electricity bill by $200,000.

The only thing that would sink Altus would be a cut on solar subsidies. They need some powerful Democratic backers and this kind of thing might appeal to the GOP as well. That party doesn't like the idea of big government going to patronage like Solyndra but public/private partnerships is what the GOP loves. They can also look so anti-environment by backing the idea of solar panels popping up all over the US and allowing investors to make money in the process.

BlackRocks Plan to Have Millennials Convert Student Loan Debt into Home Mortgages Just Might Work

I like this kind of out-of-the-box thinking by a company that would love to get the fees that this transaction would start.

"Fiscal policy initiatives targeted at young workers with high levels of student indebtedness might, perhaps surprisingly to some, have an outsize impact in supporting the housing recovery and financial markets," Rick Rieder, co-head of Americas Fixed Income at BlackRock, wrote in a recent commentary.

BlackRock estimates there are about seven million people in the U.S. that would be eligible for an FHA-approved mortgage but are burdened by student loans. The thinking is that because they are devoting a large chunk of their income to pay down student debt, they probably aren't saving for a down payment on a house. 

If just one million of them are converted to homebuyers through some form of student debt forgiveness, more than three million jobs could be created, Rieder recently told CNNMoney.

You get to convert worthless debt into productive debt and you let millennial contribute that much more to the economy once they are home owners. They get that mortgage deduction and can get off the rental treadmill and actually build some equity.

It would be kind of a GI Bill for people with lots of college loan debt. Maybe the government could also back some loans at below market rates for first time loan buyers for people that were able to pay for college so they won't get left out. In any case this would be an interesting bipartisan bill because it will reduce debt, forgive crushing student loans, might pay for itself and create jobs.

Quantum Phenomena Might be Explained by Many 'Parallel' Everyday Worlds Theory: That Explains Ghosts

I read about how physicists might be changing their idea about parallel worlds.

The bizarre behavior of the quantum world — with objects existing in two places simultaneously and light behaving as either waves or particles — could result from interactions between many 'parallel' everyday worlds, a new theory suggests.

“It is a fundamental shift from previous quantum interpretations,” says Howard Wiseman, a theoretical quantum physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who together with his colleagues describes the idea in Physical Review X.

These worlds are supposed to behave similarity to our own and touch and interact with one another but very tenuously. This gives me a good idea of what ghosts are. They are images from a different quantum world that interacts with our own. So we will see a person from that other world for a split second and they might or might not see us as well. Most of the time we only see a ghostly image for a few seconds and then nothing. Maybe "haunted houses" are just areas where that other world bleeds into ours easier for some reason of another. I wonder if physicists did experiments in these sorts of places they would get stronger results?

Another Crowd Walks out on Obama: He is a Team That is 30 Points down

It is sad that a guy that can command a crowd and was a special orator way back when is getting the "beat traffic" treatment from his adoring fans.

For the second time in as many weeks, persons have walked out during a campaign speech given by President Barack Obama. Last week, it happened as the president spoke in Maryland – and this week, it happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to a WND report on Tuesday. It was apparent that the president was still delivering his speech as people were marching out of the venue where he was campaigning for Mary Burke, the Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate who is trying to take incumbent Gov. Scott Walker’s job away from him in the midterm election next week.

He is like a team that is getting blown out in the third quarter when you see streams of fans heading for the exits. I guess you can call him the Oakland Raiders of politics. They were great way back when but due to mismanagement they are perennial losers. 

One Good Thing About Millennials: They are Adding to 401Ks like crazy

They are finally getting jobs as the economy improves and are seeing that a 401K is a great way to save for retirement.

In the first half of 2014, the number of Millennials enrolling for the first time in a 401(k) plan jumped 55%, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 401(k) Wellness Scorecard. This twice-yearly report examines trends among 2.5 million plan participants with $129 billion of assets under the bank’s care.

The brisk initial enrollment pace is due partly to the sheer number of Millennials entering the workforce. They account for about 25% of workers today, a figure that will shoot to 50% by 2020. But it also reflects a broader trend toward 401(k) enrollment. Across all generations, the number enrolling for the first time jumped 37%, Bank of America found.

Those opt-out 401K forms (instead of the opt-ins of yesteryear) are doing wonders for 401K plan growth. Plus there are apps you can use to manage your account and keep tabs on the amounts going in and growing. I wonder what the numbers are for Millennials re-balancing their portfolios though. Do they set-it and forget it or do they look at it quarterly? Or do they change things around whenever they see something on TV?

Now what the government needs to do is allow people to put more money in 401Ks than ever before to encourage savings. The employee match is one of the few ways a person can accrue wealth tax free left in America and Millennials need to tap that source for all its worth.

Mom and Pop Investors Back in the Market? Is it Time to Sell?

Most of the time when Individual Investors buy stock in a big way the market will drop.

This means that approximately 35% of all household financial assets are “at risk.” In fact, we’re now getting back to investment market participation levels not seen since the third quarter of 2007, during which 34% of all household assets were invested. The two previous peaks before then were Q1 2000 (43%) and 1968 (31%). Bears will note that these moments coincided nicely with the onset of the last three major bear markets, 1966 to 1982, 2000 to 2002, and 2007 to 2009.

 The individual investor is usually holding the bag when the music stops and the pros flee the field. This article points out that these investors are going in using passive Index funds and other more conservative stuff. No pets.com or Nifty 50 or other mess as far as I can tell. At least the economy is improving so there really isn't a true reason for a massive drop or recession in our future. 

Darius Foster: The Face of a New GOP?

Well I like his political philosophy already.

With the bulky frame of a former linebacker and a warm, hearty laugh, Foster fashions himself as a Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt Republican.

"The fight-for-the-people Republican. That's what they were. I'm not sure where the Democratic Party was able to hijack that narrative from us. But they did. And they have it. I'm trying to bring it back," he says.

Foster is a 33-year-old business consultant. He's been active in the GOP since he founded a lonely chapter of College Republicans at the historically black Miles College in Birmingham. He's been tapped by the Republican National Committee as a future leader.

So he actually got in the trench and started a College Republican chapter at a historically black college. He also sounds like a happy warrior which the GOP sorely needs. Plus, the idea of the GOP fighting for the average American has been long overdue. Growing the economy so that people can find meaningful jobs and eventually become prosperous is the dream of many Americans. The so called "Compassionate Conservative" should be more than just a buzzword.

His wife has some of my political philosophy as well.

Over breakfast at their neighborhood IHOP, his wife, 28-year-old Setara Foster, a lawyer, talks about growing up black in Houston where her parents were union members and loyal Democrats.

She now identifies more closely with the GOP. But she says she tends to split her ticket.

"I think that when we as a group identify with one party, for one thing, all the time, that party never has to earn our vote. Ever. And so I think that by having a diversity of political ideology within ethnic, racial, gender, age groups, we force politicians to work," she says.

I agree with the GOP on some things (mostly economic growth and taxes) and disagree with them on other things (most social issues.) I think all Americans should have a little of Mrs. Foster's idea that no party should take your vote for granted and have to keep working for it. If minorities had more of this idea then the Dems couldn't just put them in their pocket and to keep doing nothing for them.

The First Outrage of the 2014 Election Season: Wasabi Ginger Wins the New Lays Flavor! #OUTRAGE

You got to be kidding me! I enjoy wasabi (with shoyu and ginger afterward) with sushi but on chips? No way!

The entry to the brand’s annual “Do Us a Flavor” contest beat out Mango Salsa, Cheddar Bacon Mac & Cheese, and—likely much to the relief of coffee expert Oliver Strand and Yahoo Readers everywhere—Cappuccino. The unique flavors have been on sale nationwide since late July, and chip lovers have been voting on them. We got the winner of the people’s choice award on the horn to tout her flavor combo. 

I cannot believe it beat out the very tasty Cheddar Bacon Mac & Cheese. I actually enjoyed the bacon taste of the chips and hope someone makes a bacon flavored potato chip in the US soon. There seems to be one in England but that doesn't help me when I go to Safeway on a chip purchasing mission.

One Way to Fight ISIS is with Mockery and these Iraqi Kurds are SNLing them

I hope the real SNL plays their because it is pretty funny.

“We are bearded, dirty and filthy. … We are brainless with nothing in our heads.”

“We are ISIS. We are ISIS,” the singers declare. “We milk the goat even if it is male.”

“Our music is without rhythm. And our leader is called Qaqa,” they sing. “Our pockets are full of Qatari money. Our language is bullets and cutting.”

Their leader is really named Qaqa? So many jokes and so little time.

Obama Just Wrote a GOP Attack Ad

I wonder of he is sabotaging their campaigns for some nefarious reason?

President Obama delivered a blow to Democratic Senate candidates looking to distance themselves from his flagging approval ratings Monday, saying lawmakers avoiding him on the campaign trail were “strong allies and supporters” who have “supported my agenda in Congress.”

The president said that Democrats faced a “tough map” and noted that many Democrats in crucial races “are in states that I didn’t win” during a radio interview with Rev. Al Sharpton.

He knows that these candidates are running away from him as fast as they can. So he goes ahead and damages their campaign for his own narcissistic reasons. I guess he figures that the Senate will go GOP and he will have 2 years to cruise and start planning his memoirs.

Could ISIS use Ebola to Attack America and Europe? Very Plausable

I recently read a book on the Black Death a while back called The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time.The book talked about how the Black Plague came to Europe through a biological warfare attack by the Mongols toward a city in Asia Minor call Caffa held by the Genoa in 1347. 

What Jani Beg (the Khan of the Golden Horde) did when the city of Caffa was under siege was use his catapults to toss plague corpses into the city in order to break the siege. The plague corpses infected a number of Genoese sailors who attempted to flee the city (and devestated Caffa) and thus inadvertently inflicted the Black Death on much of Europe. The Black Death caused the death of 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia.

An interesting side note was that Jani Beg was a Muslim. So this got me thinking that what if ISIS decided to send a number of their operatives to West Africa to get their hands on Ebola infected blood. Or maybe even worse infect themselves and become living (not for too long) "Jani Beg plague corpses." All they really need is a blood soaked rag from an Ebola patient in Liberia and every operative can potentially become a living "plague missile."

What these "ISIS plague missiles" could potentially do is send packages of Ebola to various victims in the US and Europe. It would only take a few blood or vomit soaked rags in an Amazon box to be sent to various people in the US and it might be worse than a letter bomb. 

What would be terrifying is that this attack would be nearly impossible to detect. You can detect bomb materials in a box sent in the mail but these are just rags and gauze and things. You cannot use a metal detector or some sniffer to catch this kind of biological warfare attack. Hell, they could just send a bunch of bloody rags that that are not even Ebola infected and it will create the same kind of panic.

The job of terrorists is to inflict terror and this would strait up terrify people. I know it would be fairly difficult to catch Ebola from a bloody rag made in Syria all the way in the US because of the nature of the virus. However, the fear it would cause would be devastating. Each one of those boxes would have to be checked out by health care officials and tested to make sure it isn't virulent. Then disease detectives would have to check the person that opened the box and everyone that person came in contact with. I wonder if the CIA and the FBI are checking to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen. I really hope they are because this attack would be scary in the extreme.

Study Says Natural Gas is Not the Bridge Fuel to Stop Global Warming: I Disagree

Well its seems that 5 sets of scientists are saying that natural gas might even make global warming worse for some reason or another.

Five teams of experts from around the world, using five different sets of computer model simulations, looked at what would happen if natural gas — also known as methane — remains cheap and plentiful and nothing else changes, such as policy mandates. They all came to the same conclusion.

"It doesn't reduce climate change," said study lead author Haewon McJeon, an economist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Two computer models even found that when considering other factors like methane leaks, cheaper natural gas could lead to more trapping of heat by greenhouse gases, the mechanism that drives global warming. Methane traps even more heat than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

First of all why are these models so different than one another? I guess two have methane leaks in them while the others do not. This is assuming that better pipeline leak-finding technology will never be available for 100 years for some reason. 

You figure that profit motive alone will have companies actively screening their pipelines for leaks. I mean a leak might costs $1000s of dollars if it goes long enough. I guess those studies want us to keep burning coal because a train car full of the stuff will not leak and create "greenhouse gasses."  

What actually invalidates much of these studies conclusions is the term "and nothing else changes" which doesn't make sense to me. Solar and wind energy is taking off like never before because if economic incentives. If you put a solar panel on your roof you need less power from the natural gas fueled power plants and thus they burn less of the fuel.

I cannot fathom the idea that technology will stand still for a 100 years. I mean the changes in the last 50 or even the last 20 are mind boggling to say the least. Hell, Lockheed Martin is looking to build a fusion power plant and might get one done in 10 years. A few neighborhood fusion reactors or even a backyard one the size of a water heater will do more to change global warming than 100 studies by scientists ever could.

Why Does Alison Lundergan Grimes Keep Ducking the Did You Vote for Obama Question?

She should just admit she probably voted for him twice and put the issue behind her.

It might seem an odd question for a Democrat to keep ducking: Did you vote for President Barack Obama or not?

Can that be so hard?

In her Kentucky Senate debate Monday night with Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, Alison Lundergan Grimes said she won't answer that question "as a matter of principle" because doing so would compromise constitutional rights.

It just makes her look like she is hiding something for pretty much no reason. She is a Democrat and probably voted Democrat for much of her life. I would be shocked if she voted for Romney in the last election. It is sad that people cannot even admit to voting for Obama. I bet she was just besides herself happy to have voted for the first black President back in 2008. Then she doubled down on him in 2010 like many Americans. I voted for the other guy but was proud that our nation elected a black person for the first time in 2008. Too bad he turned out to be such a disaster.

Climate Models off By 17%: Turns out its Plants

It seems that the terrible Climate Change Apocalypse coming in 20 years will be great for plants.

In this new effort, the researchers took a new look at the photosynthesis process and how it might be altered in the presence of increasingly higher concentrations of CO₂. They found that as CO₂ levels rose, plants altered the way they processed the gas, saving more of it to use as a fertilizer, which allowed the plants to grow bigger or to become more robust, which in the end meant more CO₂ was taken out of the atmosphere. Not coincidently, the researchers note, their research showed that when plants were exposed to the same higher levels of CO₂ as actually occurred over the past century, they were able to absorb on average 16 percent more CO₂, which very nearly coincides with the 17 percent error difference earth scientists have found with their climate models.

Sounds like the forests and fields of the Climate Change future will be quite verdant and thus take more of the CO2 out of the atmosphere then the models predict. In any case it seems that models that are wrong so much of the time need to be fixed in order for us to get the complete picture.

Holy Crap! 1.4 Million People Might Have Ebola by January! 70% Mortality Means 980,000 DEAD!

It isn't the Black Death (17 to 200 million dead) or the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic (25 million in the first 2 years) but these numbers are pretty sobering.

Meltzer helped produce a report in late September that said that at current rates of infection, as many as 1.4 million people would become infected by January. That number, officials stressed, was a straight extrapolation of the explosive spread of Ebola at a time when the world had managed to mount only a feeble response. The more vigorous response underway is designed to bend that curve.

At least people are moving quickly on it and can get this thing under control before it gets worse.

Antikythera shipwreck Yields New Treasures: No Ancient Computer This Time Though

Too bad they couldn't have moved more of the sediment to see what other wonders this shipwreck held.

The vessel, which dates from 70-60BC, was famously first identified by Greek sponge divers more than 100 years ago.

Its greatest treasure is the remains of a geared "computer" that was used to calculate the positions of astronomical objects.

The new archaeological investigations have retrieved tableware, ship components, and a giant bronze spear.
This weapon was probably attached to a warrior statue, the dive team believes.

Previous expeditions have found several such statues made of bronze and marble.

This article also says that the ship carried a bride and her dowry. It just seems strange to me that a bunch of statues and a geared computer were found in that dowry. You would think it was the contents of a temple being moved from one place to another. Maybe to flee warfare and pillaging in some part of Asia Minor where the ship was from. 

A Ton of Eyes on Comet Flyby of Mars

I'm kind of hoping the comet hits Mars but it is still cool how close a shave it will give the Red Planet.

The space agency has already trained a number of its science assets on Comet Siding Spring, which will zoom within 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of Mars on Oct. 19 — about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon. And NASA's fleet of Red Planet orbiters and rovers will be watching on the big day, studying the comet and its influence on Mars' atmosphere.

It seems we have a ton of eyes on Siding Spring as well.

But the real show will begin Oct. 19. NASA's three Mars orbiters — Mars Odyssey, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the newly arrived MAVEN spacecraft — will observe Siding Spring's flyby from space, while the agency's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers will watch from the Red Planet's surface.

It's pretty cool that Opportunity and Curiosity are getting in on the act as well. That will be the first time a comet will be photographed from the surface of a planet that is not the Earth.

North Carolina College Republican Chairwoman Leigh Thomas Needs to Resign After Trying to Stopping Voter Registration

What is funny is that she seems to have tried to stop a conservative voter registration drive. In fact this group has much of the same values as I have regarding fiscal responsibility, free markets and a brighter future for America. I would probably be a member if they had them around when I was in college. In any case this is what Leigh Thomas said.

North Carolina College Republican Chairwoman was caught on camera allegedly suppressing the voter registration efforts of a non-profit, conservative student group Wednesday afternoon.

The video, obtained by Campus Reform, captures the interaction between Turning Point USA representative Bree Binder and the Chairwoman of the High Point University College Republicans, Leigh Thomas.

Binder asks Thomas for permission to enter the private liberal arts campus in North Carolina, to conduct a routine voter registration drive.

“We’re just registering people to vote,” Binder says. “I can show you all the forms and everything.”
"I understand the registration process,” the College Republican Chairwoman responded, “I'm just not sure if this is something I would want to have on this High Point University campus, the registration of voting [sic]."

When asked why, Thomas clarified that she does not approve of registering students to vote on campus.
“I don’t want to have any voting registration happening on this campus with students,” Thomas says.

“[T]he registering students, it’s just...if it’s not done the way that we did it back in 2012, I’m not—I’m not good with it,” Thomas says.

“I understand the forms, I’ve seen the forms before, it’s not about that. I just do not want to have people being registered to vote whatsoever,” Thomas tells Binder.

Now that last part that I put in bold is something that should get her canned. She might have misspoke here but registering people to vote is the lifesblood of Democracy. In fact I believe that all Americans should be allowed to vote simply by filing a tax return. If you give your hard-earned money to this country you should be able to vote automatically. You paid the bill so you should be allowed to vote on who divvies up the money. 

ODB err OGD in Charge of North Korea? And Kim Jong-un out?

Wouldn't be something of the ghost of Ol' Dirty Bastard was in charge of North Korea. However it seems that Kim Jong-Un is Out.

According to what Vice are reporting, Jang Jin-sung, a former senior North Korean official who worked as part of the the previous leader's propaganda machine, has said that the Organization and Guidance Department (OGD) have stopped taking orders from Kim Jong-un. 

The OGD answered only to Kim Jong-il and are extremely powerful and have "effectively taken control of the country", with factions within them arguing over keeping a strict reign over the economy, or opening up slightly to get more money through foreign trade. 

In other words the OGD members got tired of answering to a megalomaniac that might literately throw them to the dogs. I think looking right next door at the fact that nearly everyone at the highest level of government are billionaires might have tipped their hands. Maybe there was a little help (probably a lot) from the Red Chinese and let the scramble for wealth begin. The upside is the North Korean people can stop eating bark and join the rest of the world.

Good Job Obama: You Just Tied Candidates that Are Running Away from You at Full Speed Directly to You

I think part of him wants the GOP to win the Senate. Then he can just blame the last two years on the GOP legislature and start decorating his house and getting his post Presidency speaking engagements ready.

"Now, I am not on the ballot this fall," Obama said in remarks intended to motivate Democrats to vote. "But make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot — every single one of them."

Republicans strongly agree and have been expressing the same thought for months. Their candidates have spent the better part of a year trying to plaster Democratic opponents with the unpopular Obama and his agenda in an effort to gain the six seats required to take the Senate majority.

So Obama just made it a referendum election when it really isn't one. Talk about an own goal.

Obama and the Blame Game: He said there was 10% unemployment when He Started. It was 7.8%

Obama just cannot say he was wrong not matter what happens.

A few minutes later, “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft asked the president about the economy…
The president said that he was fixing a problem he inherited from President George W. Bush 43.

Again, he said, “it’s not my fault, folks” … I inherited a lousy economy from Bush. But this time.. The president crossed the line: "when I took over unemployment was up at 10%..."

My head almost exploded. I know what the unemployment rate was in January, 2009 because that’s what I do -- I follow the money.

Fact check! In Jan 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.8%.

I can't believe that he is still talking about the Bush economy after 6 years in office. Many people don't even remember the Bush years anymore. The unemployment rate actually rose for the first 6 months of the Pax Obama(yeah that was a real thing.) In any case I think more people would actually back Obama if he once said "the buck stops here" instead of constantly blaming others.

Oh Great the Aussies are Fudging their Temperature Readings: I Wonder Which Other Countries Have Done the Same?

You can't trust these people as far as you can throw them.

Burnett reports that the Australian Board of Meteorology (ABM) was forced to admit that it routinely alters the temperatures recorded at all of its official weather stations in Australia. The reason the organization gave for its tampering with the numbers is that anomalies arising from outside the realm of climate beset the official data.

But as The Australian and The Weekend Australian reported in a scathing series of news articles that exposed the scam, it so happened that when the Board of Meteorology massaged the numbers to account for the anomalies, it just so happened that nearly all of the official temperatures turned out much higher than they would have been otherwise. 

My question is what other organizations like the ABM are routinely rounding up their numbers? How long has this been happening? Can you trust any of the numbers that Climate Change gurus throw at you?  This "settled science" is supposed to lead to billions of dollars/Euros/Reminbi in spending and altering everyone's lives. Climate Scientists need to make sure their numbers are 100% correct or what little credibility they have left is going away permanently.

Climate Change to Turn Alaska into Florida by 2047

I wonder if the model this guy used was the same one that didn't predict global warming for the past 17 years or so?

"If you do not like it hot and do not want to be hit by a hurricane, the options of where to go are very limited," said Camilo Mora, a geography professor at the University of Hawaii and lead author of a paper published in Nature last year predicting that unprecedented high temperatures will become the norm worldwide by 2047.
"The best place really is Alaska," he added. "Alaska is going to be the next Florida by the end of the century."

This has to be the most scare-mongering thing I have read in a long time. We might as well just buy land in the arctic already because we are "all going to burn up" according to this geography professor.

It Seems the Millennials Want Experiences over Goods

Marketers need to savvy up and start backing events instead of goods.

The Harris/Eventbrite researchers found that 78% of millennials would rather spend money on a desirable experience than buy coveted goods. Reinforcing that point, 72% of millennials said they want to increase their spending on experiences during the next year, in lieu of physical things.

The reason why they would rather have the experience rather than the good is thus:

A major reason for dashing off to all these parties, festivals, road races and taco-eating contests: the fear of missing out. With the rise of social media, Eventbrite analysts point out, skipping the big event doesn’t just mean missing an afternoon of good times; it also means being reminded on Facebook, Tumblr and the like of how much fun everyone else had.

You can see a case-in-point with things like the Spartan Race, the Ice Bucket Challenge, and (as this article points out) Burning Man. So what markets need to do is sponsor Love Festivals, and Concerts and things and the Millennials might show up in droves. For no other reason than to take a bunch of selfies for Instagram.

Change ISIS to Daesh? Sounds Like a Good Idea. Especially Because They Hate the Term

Well ISIS hates being called Daesh so lets call them that.

The Associated Press recently reported that the group were threatening to cut cut out the tongues of anyone who used the phrase publicly, and AFP have noted that the term "Daeshi" has been used a derogatory term in some parts of the Middle East. Some analysts have suggested that the dislike of the term comes from its similarity to another Arabic word, دعس, or Das. That word means to trample down or crush.

Trample down and crush sounds like what much of the world would like to do to them.

We Spent $22 Trillion and We haven't budged on the Amount of Poor People in this Country?

I guess we lost the war on poverty because these numbers are staggering.

Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

That is a LOT of money.

But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.

I guess people that are categorized as in poverty has changed since 1967.

According to government surveys, the typical family that Census identifies as poor has air conditioning, cable or satellite TV, and a computer in his home. Forty percent have a wide screen HDTV and another 40 percent have internet access. Three quarters of the poor own a car and roughly a third have two or more cars. (These numbers are not the result of the current bad economy pushing middle class families into poverty; instead, they reflect a steady improvement in living conditions among the poor for many decades.)

Those are some really nice items and I think part of it is because of our tax system. That earned income tax credit allows a poor person to get a big chunk of cash at tax time. Many of these people don't bank that money for a rainy day or buy an Vanguard S&P500 Index Fund or something. Instead they put a down-payment on a new car or truck or simply blow that money on a new LCD TV instead. I wonder how these numbers would look if the government just changed that lump sum tax credit to a monthly salary instead?

This part was interesting:

The intake of protein, vitamins and minerals by poor children is virtually identical with upper middle class kids. According to surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the overwhelming majority of poor people report they were not hungry even for a single day during the prior year.

This is actually a good thing in my eyes. The greatest nation in the world should not have any citizen be hungry for any period of time. We should at least make sure that every American has a full belly day after day no matter what. I guess in this one thing you can say the war on poverty has one at least one battle.

Ancient Crecent of Stone Found in Israel. The Thing is Freaking Big Too

I can't wait for archaeologists to dig up this monster.

Located about 8 miles (13 kilometers) northwest of the Sea of Galilee, the structure is massive — its volume is about 14,000 cubic meters (almost 500,000 cubic feet) and it has a length of about 150 meters (492 feet), making it longer than an American football field. Pottery excavated at the structure indicates the monument dates to between 3050 B.C. and 2650 B.C., meaning it is likely older than the pyramids of Egypt. It was also built before much of Stonehenge was constructed. 

Ancient peoples seem to be really good at moving massive stones all over the place and building huge monuments. My money is on a long-forgotten form on telekinesis but I might be wrong.

Students Protest Against Dress Code that Affects Mostly Women

It seems that the students are rebelling against a dress code that seems to target mostly women.

As if getting dressed for high school wasn’t tough enough already, for some students in Staten Island, N.Y., wearing summer’s hottest trends — crop tops, cutoff shorts, and flip-flops — could mean detention slips. But many are fighting against the policy, and nearly 200 students have already worn their favorite threads in protest and proudly served time for it, according to the New York Post.

I guess this is why some schools are implementing uniforms.You don't have to worry about crop tops when everyone is wearing the same polo shirts to school.

National Center for Science Education Blast Global Warming Teaching in Texas Textbook

It seems the settled science is the only acceptable thing to teach kids these days.

The text goes on to present students with excerpts from two articles on climate change, one written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the other by the Heartland Institute, a conservative advocacy group. “This misleads students as to good sources of information, pitting an ideologically driven advocacy group … against a Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientific body,” the NCSE reviewers write.

Um, both of these groups are ideologically driven advocacy groups. The IPCC sometimes made mistakes when it came to global warming and are pretty clear that they are advocates of man-made climate change.

State Department Threatens Foley Family About Paying Ransom for Their Now Deceased Son

This has to rankle the family when they felt like they could have done something to save their sons life.

Diane Foley, James Foley's mother, offered a rare interview to ABC News this week in which she admitted the family considered a ransom payment to ISIS to secure her son's safe return. However, she also says White House officials told the family they would face criminal charges for supporting terrorism in the event a ransom was paid. The message came directly from a high-ranking military official on the White House National Security Council. The last threat came just days before the video of Foley's beheading surfaced. 

However, you have to understand that the US is not supposed to negotiate with terrorists. Instead the White House waited forever and then missed the hostages because of bad intel. In any case this will all go down the memory hole now that Obama is going to bomb ISIS at long last.   

I'm Sorry Marc Faber McDonalds is No Longer a Proxy for the World Economy

This might well have been true about a decade ago.

For Faber, those results are a perfect example of the damage being done by central banks—and the harbinger of more bad news to come. 

"Nobody knows for sure" what will cause stocks to collapse, but "the earnings may disappoint. We had, essentially, very poor sales from McDonald's. Now, McDonald's is a very good indicator of the global economy. If McDonald's doesn't increase its sales, it tells you that the monetary policies have largely failed in the sense that prices are going up more than disposable income, and so people have less purchasing power." 

I think McDonalds poor sales is more of switch to healthy eating than anything else. Quite a few people are starting to shun McDonalds supposedly unhealthy food for Chipotle and other restaurants. The tasty and healthy burritos gives Chipotle revenue growth of 27% and earnings growth of 30% in 2014. No one can say that people aren't eating at Chipotle because their disposable income is in the dumper. Just anecdotally, the last time I walked by a Chipotle there was a line out the door and down the street. So the purchasing power of the proles might not be as big an issue as Faber is talking about.

California to Become Pre-Revolutionary France?

It seems to be slowing heading that way as the Tech Oligarchs distance themselves from the common man.

The oligarchs feel free, and even entitled, to choose the direction of society in the name of a greater good, but somehow their policies seem mostly to make the oligarchs richer and more powerful. Meanwhile, once-prosperous middle-class communities, revolving around manufacturing industries that have now moved overseas, either sink into poverty or become gentrified homes for the lower-upper class. The middle class itself, meanwhile, is increasingly, in Kotkin's words, "proletarianized," with security vanishing and jobs moving downscale.

Plus some of those same oligarchs are "disrupting" their jobs away at a record pace. This article also points out that there is a Californian First and Fourth Estates in this Pre-Revolutionary French model.

The oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the "clerisy" class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses. The clerisy isn't as rich as the oligarchs, but it does pretty well for itself and is compensated in part by status, its positions allowing even its lower-paid members to feel superior to the hoi polloi.

The article talks about these people as either teaching someone how to get a license in whatever field or are there to check the licenses. This clerisy keeps themselves in place and keep the poor man down thusly:

And as Radley Balko notes in the Washington Post, a thicket of petty regulation helps to keep the poor, poor. Traffic fines, fines for not using a city-approved garbage service, even parking tickets all provide revenue for municipal machines that support jobs for the clerisy — social workers, police, etc. — even as they make it harder for poor people to keep their heads above water, or find the kind of work that would let them rise above poverty.

This clerisy also has skin in the game if these same poor people are kept on a perpetual dole. I mean who will be regulating how much dole to give each poor person? Who will be making charts and compiling data and writing and revising regulations when it comes to this dole? Who will print the dole checks and man the dole disbursement sites? The clerisy of course. So they have a financial incentive to keep the poor poor and the oligarchs in place. Hopefully, things don't go the same way that revolutionary France did.

Jack the Ripper Revealed? It turns out it was a Polish Barber Aaron Kosminski

Hmm this makes some sense.

But after extracting DNA from a shawl recovered from the scene of one of the killings, which matched relatives of both the victim and one of the suspects, Jack the Ripper sleuth Russell Edwards claims the identity of the murderer is now beyond doubt.

He says the infamous killer is Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish emigre from Poland, who worked as a barber.

Edwards, a businessman interested in the Ripper story, bought a bloodstained Victorian shawl at auction in 

2007.

The story goes that it came from the murder scene of the Ripper's fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, on September 30, 1888.

I wonder if a barber would have enough knowledge to cut organs out of a woman like the Ripped did? He probably had the manual dexterity to do it but the anatomy knowledge is iffy. Also why did he stop after the 5th victim? The article said he entered a workhouse in 1889 and the last murder was Friday 9 November 1888. He then went from the workhouse to the insane asylum where he died in 1919. He might have never had a chance to commit future murders and stopped after 5 because of this confinement.

I Guess a Picture is Worth an Indefinite Suspension. Ray Rice Cut and Suspeded after TMZ releases Awful Knock-Out

The NFL is so full of crap when it comes to suspensions.

All the support the Baltimore Ravens gave Ray Rice this offseason as he dealt with his domestic violence incident evaporated after TMZ released video of the running back knocking out his wife.

The team cut him on Monday afternoon.

The NFL was told he knocked out his wife and dragged her out of an elevator. Did the NFL think he held up his fist and she fainted daintily onto a divan or something? He knocked her out and only got a 2 game suspension. Aldon Smith was drunk and disorderly at the airport and got an 8 game suspension. Now the NFL sees the actual video footage and suddenly they rush to suspend him indefinitely. I guess a video is worth more than the words of what actually happened.

Its a Fricken Laser! Boeing Introduces the Drone/Missile Killer Known as the HEL MD

I would like to have it called the Hell Beam.

The aerospace giant recently conducted testing on its High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) against aerial targets at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And we’re pleased to say it works, quite well.

Effectively, the HEL MD is a giant high-energy laser outfitted atop a 500-horsepower Oshkosh 8×8 tactical vehicle. In its most recent testing, Boeing focused its 10-kilowatt laser on more than 150 airborne bogeys, which included both mortars and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Inducing a high level of heat on contact, the laser system burns the target until it either blows up – in the case of the mortars – or crashes.

They are planning on rolling out a 50-60 kilowatt laser in the future. I'm sure the IDF would like to purchase a few of these in order to deal with Hamas missile-fire. The Iron Dome now laser powered!