Trying to Shed Student Debt

Congress is again giving consideration to tinkering with the Bankruptcy-Law ban on walking away from student Loans. Read about it here.

Scientific revolutions, according to SSR, don’t occur when an apple happens to find the head of a genius, or when enough facts have slowly painted a new picture. Rather, in yet another of Kuhn’s inversions, new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm. For example, if your paradigm tells you that fire consists of the release of phlogiston embedded in flammable materials, then the fact that some metals gain weight when burned is an anomaly. When a new paradigm is conceived that makes sense of the anomalies, science is in for a revolutionary shift.

In short, SSR did a gestalt flip on just about every assumption about the who, how, and what of scientific progress.

Read the rest here.

The Dutch gov’t has effectively ended the marijuana tourism industry. Read about it here.

What would you do with access to the private email accounts of over 50 celebrities?

They’ve become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They’re also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood’s seamiest secrets—who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn’t realize was that he was being watched, too

It appears that the main problem for Walmart was that they did not note donate enough to Obama’s super PAC. Why else would the focus be placed on Walmart execs when five major Hollywood studios are allegedly guilty of the same crime?

The Hollywood studio run by one of President Obama’s biggest donors is under investigation by the Securities Exchange Commission for bribing Chinese officials to secure exclusive film rights in the communist country—rights secured in secretive negotiations that included Vice President Joe Biden.

The SEC is investigating at least five Hollywood studios—including 20th Century Fox, Disney, and DreamWorks Animation—for allegedly making illegal payments to Chinese officials, Reuters reported Tuesday.

DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg is the largest donor to the Obama reelection super PAC Priorities USA.

Read the rest here.

Via Bespoke, see the chart and read the analysis here.

From Institutional Investor, read about the 5 well-known fund managers who now have less than $1 billion AUM.

Naked Capitalism has linked to the study, skimmed it,  and offers some commentary about the bits that stick out, here.

This is the 2nd report recently out on the continued bundling of donor funds by Corzine for Obama.

As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Corzine helped Obama first win election to the Senate. He helped him win the presidency. He has been praised by Obama and by Vice President Joe Biden as a “go to guy” on financial, economic, and Wall Street issues. He’s as close to an insider as you can be without actually being in the White House or a member of the president’s cabinet.

To most of the media, however, he’s “Jon who?”

Perhaps the tide is turning…

Read the rest here.

With all of the talk by the Obama administration of the number of jobs they’ve created, I was surprised by the actual numbers:

Manufacturing has recovered only 21 percent of jobs losses, financial services 11 percent, retail and wholesale trade 25 percent, with construction faring the worst in the private sector, recovering only 1.1 percent of the 1.95 million job lost during the housing bust led recession.

Read the rest and see the charts here.

Read his commentary or watch his video with Aaron Task, here.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) took to the Senate floor today to draw attention to a video of a top EPA official saying the EPA’s “philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies – just as the Romans crucified random citizens in areas they conquered to ensure obedience.

Inhofe quoted a little-watched video from 2010 of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, admitting that EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies.

In the video, Administrator Armendariz says:

“I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

“It’s a deterrent factor,” Armendariz said, explaining that the EPA is following the Romans’ philosophy for subjugating conquered villages.

Soon after Armendariz touted the EPA’s “philosophy,” the EPA began a smear campaigns natural gas producers, Inhofe’s office noted in advance of today’s Senate speech:

“Not long after Administrator Armendariz made these comments in 2010, EPA targeted US natural gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming.

“In all three of these cases, EPA initially made headline-grabbing statements either insinuating or proclaiming outright that the use of hydraulic fracturing by American energy producers was the cause of water contamination, but in each case their comments were premature at best – and despite their most valiant efforts, they have been unable to find any sound scientific evidence to make this link.”

In his Senate speech, Sen. Inhofe said the video provides Americans with “a glimpse of the Obama administration’s true agenda.”

That agenda, Inhofe said, is to “incite fear” in the public with unsubstantiated claims and “intimidate” oil and gas companies with threats of unjustified fines and penalties – then, quietly backtrack once the public’s perception has been firmly jaded against oil and natural gas.

SOURCE

Nigel Calder

Today the Royal Astronomical Society in London publishes (online) Henrik Svensmark’s latest paper entitled “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth”. After years of effort Svensmark shows how the variable frequency of stellar explosions not far from our planet has ruled over the changing fortunes of living things throughout the past half billion years. Appearing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, It’s a giant of a paper, with 22 figures, 30 equations and about 15,000 words. See the RAS press release athttp://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive

Read the rest here.

via Dragonfly Capital

Greg Harmon’s take on the yesterday’s hollow red hammers on DIA and SPY.

Arends: Thousands of investors were duped into taking stock tips from a robot, the SEC says. Isn’t that business as usual?

By Tara Bahrampour, Published: April 23

A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.

“I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,” said Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, which has been gathering data on the subject for 30 years.

Nearly 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the United States to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, double the number who did so a decade earlier. The number of Mexicans who moved to the United States during that period fell to less than half of the 3 million who came between 1995 and 2000.

The trend could have major political consequences, underscoring the delicate dance by the Republican and Democratic parties as they struggle with immigration policies and court the increasingly important Latino vote.

Read the rest here.

The question is, on what is Soros betting to make him rich-er once he achieves his much sought-after Euro collapse? Answer that, and you too might be rich-er.

“Europe is similar to the Soviet Union in the way that the euro crisis has the potential of destroying, undermining the European Union,” he said in a debate on public policy education Tuesday. “With the profound social, economic and moral crisis that Europe is in, we can see a similar process of disintegration.”

Maybe no arrests have been made because Corzine is still bundling big money donors for Obama? Taibbi’s take on the whole matter…

The United States, like almost every other rich country in the world, is getting older and slower. But we have a natural advantage over the rest of the world, if only we’re wise enough to use it

By Caroline Liinanki

A growing understanding of the composition of hedge fund returns is letting investors capture the return streams of hedge funds through systematic exposure to persistent risk premia (returns above the expected risk-free rate of return). This provides investors with diversification away from equity market risk in a low-cost, liquid and transparent manner, but without the downsides of investing in a hedge fund.

For a long time, hedge fund returns were believed to derive purely from manager skill and clever investment decisions based on active management. However, the academic literature has identified that it is not so much skill as exposure to certain return sources that can explain the majority of returns in certain hedge fund styles.

Read the rest here.