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Is That a Crashed Flying Saucer on the Seabed?

By Ray Villard

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

This week, the mainstream media is reporting an undersea radar image of a “saucer shaped” object on the seabed in Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. The discovery was made by Swedish oceanographers who say it’s nearly 200 feet across and lies 300 feet down.

The same object caused a stir last summer when it was originally spotted.

Team Ocean Explorer said this image shows 300m “drag marks” around an unidentified — possibly flying — object.

These most recent reports have renewed a firestorm of news reports and blogs saying that scientists have found something resembling a “classic flying saucer,” and that further investigation is needed. A sonar image of an “object of interest” (pictured above) shows what has an uncanny resemblance to Han Solo’s starship the Millennium Falcon from the film “Star Wars.”

The mystery was compounded later in the week by the report of a smaller disk-shaped object nearby. Both images are interpreted to show a rigid tail or drag marks more than 1000 feet-long. Some people have speculated these skid marks suggest that the object might have moved across the floor as it crashed.

Read the rest here.

 

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Kauffman Economic Outlook: A Quarterly Survey of Leading Economic Bloggers, First Quarter 2012

Despite a continued cloudy view of the U.S. economy, some top economics bloggers are beginning to see a ray of hope on the horizon. According to a new Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation survey, 14 percent of respondents now believe the economy is “strong and growing” or “strong with uncertain growth,” an improvement over last quarter.

For the Kauffman Economic Outlook: A Quarterly Survey of Top Economics Bloggers of 2012, the Kauffman Foundation sent invitations to more than 200 leading economics bloggers as identified in the Palgrave’s econolog.net December 2010 rankings about their views of the economy, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Looking ahead, only 33 percent now anticipate U.S. poverty to increase in the next three years, a significant positive change from previous surveys. Respondents also believe that employment and global output will rise faster than anything else and, surprisingly, some expect a higher marginal tax rate.

When asked to identify policy options to stimulate the economy, top economics bloggers overwhelmingly supported approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, with 77 percent in agreement (25 percent strongly agreeing), and 75 percent favor opening up more domestic areas to oil and gas exploration and drilling. Other preferred policy recommendations included giving states flexibility to set their own minimum wage (67 percent agreeing) and the revenue-neutral adoption of a value added tax (58 percent agreeing). Opinion remained split on raising the top marginal income tax.

Other research highlights include:

Read the rest here.

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The Liberal Enforcers

As Senator Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.

The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.

Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness raising” ribbon for breast cancer — as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness raising” ribbons: My current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.

Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast-cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.

But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Senator Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: “I’m reminded of the McCarthy era, where somebody said: ‘Oh,’ a congressman stands up, a senator, ‘I’m investigating this organization and therefore people should stop funding them.’” But Komen is not a congressman or a senator or any other part of the government, only a private organization. And therefore it is free to give its money to whomever it wishes, isn’t it?

Dream on. Liberals take the same view as the proprietors of the Dar al-Islam: Once they hold this land, they hold it forever. Notwithstanding that those who give to the foundation are specifically giving to support breast-cancer research, Komen could not be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion. We don’t want to return to the bad old days of the back alley, when a poor vulnerable person who made the mistake of stepping out of line had to be forced into the shadows and have the realities explained to them with a tire iron. Now Big Liberalism’s enforcers do it on the front pages with the panjandrums of tolerance and diversity cheering them all the way. In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy. The American Association of University Women announced it would no longer sponsor teams for Komen’s “Race for the Cure.” Sure, Komen has raised $2 billion for the cure, but better we never cure breast cancer than let a single errant Injun wander off the abortion reservation. Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women said Komen “is no longer an organization whose mission is to advance women’s health.” You preach it, sister. I mean, doesn’t the very idea of an organization obsessively focused on breasts sound suspiciously patriarchal?

Read the rest here.

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Chesapeake Energy Donated $26 Million to Sierra Club to Gun Down the Coal Industry

By

A Time magazine blogger reported Thursday that the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and most august environmental organization, accepted millions of dollars in donations from one of the nation’s biggest natural gas-drilling companies for a program lambasting coal-fired power plants as environmental evildoers.

The total take for John Muir’s conservation group? A whopping $26 million over four years from Chesapeake Energy and its subsidiaries, mostly through Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon.

The news rocked the environmental movement, sent the Sierra Club headlong into explanation mode, angered coal companies that the organization targeted with natural gas money, and had free-market advocates shaking their heads.

The episode “raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past,” wrote Time’s Bryan Walsh.

The Daily Caller asked Chesapeake Energy spokesman Jim Gipson whether his company’s donations were made with the expectation that the Sierra Club would attack the coal industry, and whether the company has subsidized other green groups that oppose generating electricity by burning coal. Gipson did not respond to the email.

The Sierra Club launched its “Beyond Coal” campaign in 2001 on a shoestring budget, aiming to shut down as many coal-fired power plants as it could. McClendon’s money appears to have helped that campaign during a critical time when it was firing on all cylinders, lobbying against new power plant construction and working to close existing facilities, all the while hammering clean-coal advocates and blaming “big coal” for mercury pollution, asthma and assorted unforgivable ecological sins.

In 2007, the natural gas industry was also engaged in trying to persuade the federal government that its product was a more environmentally benign alternative to coal. Having the Sierra Club as a compatriot didn’t hurt.

Read the rest here.

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2012 Super Bowl: Point Spread Could Be Tightest In 30 Years

by Jonathan Tjarks

With marquee teams featuring top bill QB’s playing in two of the biggest cities in the US, anticipation for Super Bowl XLVI has reached a fever-pitch.

And if Las Vegas is correct, fans may be treated into another nail-biter similar to the New York Giants 17-14 defeat of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.

The line, with New England now only favored by 3, is the tightest in 30 years, when the San Francisco 49ers were one-point favorites over the Cincinnati Bengals in 1982.

That game, a 26-21 49ers victory that featured Joe Montana at the height of his powers, is widely remembered as one of the greatest Super Bowls in NFL history.

Now, 30 years later, Tom Brady and Eli Manning have a chance to cement their legacies next Sunday and put themselves in truly rarefied air.

Read the rest here.

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Greece on ‘Razor’s Edge’ as Debt Talks Drag On

By Marcus Bensasson, Maria Petrakis and Natalie Weeks

Greece’s efforts to win a second bailout from international creditors teetered in the balance as negotiations in Athens failed to clinch an agreement.

“The distance between success and failure, which could come from misfortune or misunderstanding, is very small,” Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told reporters in Athens yesterday after consultations with euro area finance ministers. “We are on razor’s edge.”

Venizelos said while agreement had been found on issues such as bank recapitalization and state asset sales, the government and the so-called troika of international creditors were still at odds over labor reforms and fiscal measures for this year. The talks with euro-area finance ministers were “very difficult,” he said.

With the country’s stability at stake, the government is racing to clinch agreement on a plan that’s been in the works since July, with talks between international monitors and Greek officials running in parallel with discussions among caretaker Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s coalition members and Greece’s government and its private creditors.

Read the rest here.

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Century of Ocean Warming Good for Corals, Research Shows

From: The Australian

 

A GOVERNMENT-run research body has found that the past 110 years of ocean warming has been good for the growth of corals spanning more than 1000km of Australia’s coastline.

The findings undermine predictions that global warming will devastate coral reefs, and add to a growing body of evidence showing corals are more resilient than previously thought – up to a certain point.

The study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, peer-reviewed findings of which were published today in the leading journal Science, examined 27 samples from six locations from the West Australian coast off Geraldton to offshore from Darwin.

At each site, scientists took cores from massive porites corals – similar to a biopsy in humans – and counted back to record their age in much the same way tree rings are counted.

Although some cores extended to the 18th century, they focused on the period from 1900 to 2010.

The researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, warmer waters had not negatively affected coral growth.

In fact, for their southern samples, where ocean temperatures are the coolest but have warmed the most, coral growth increased most significantly over the past 110 years.

For their northern samples, where waters are the warmest and have changed the least, coral growth still increased, but not by as much.

“Those reefs have actually been able to take advantage of the warmer conditions,” said Janice Lough, a senior AIMS research scientist and one of the study’s authors.

Read the rest here.

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Analysis: Stock-picking Makes a Comeback as Macro Tides Fade

By David K. Randall and Edward Krudy

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stock-picking once again matters on Wall Street.

After a year in which stocks moved in near-lockstep regardless of individual merit, the herd mentality is crumbling away.

The move away from a frenzied rush in and then back out of the market is a welcome sign for stressed-out fund managers and lay investors alike.

“If I think something looks cheap I’m more prepared to own it because I think that will matter. Before, I would throw up my hands and say, ‘So what? If it’s perceived as a higher risk asset then it’s going to crater with any nasty news out of Europe,'” said Art Steinmetz, chief investment officer at OppenheimerFunds in New York.

The change reaffirms the diversification strategies that underpin trillions of dollars worth of savings meant for college tuition and retirement. When just about everything is moving in the same direction, investors have fewer ways to cushion market swoons.

In 2011, daily activity in individual stocks was less dependent on company reports than on action in European government debt markets, and the equity, currency and commodities markets traded in tandem.

Now that stocks are going their own way, it’s been good for so-called active fund managers, those who decide what individual stocks are best to hold rather than follow an index.

In January, about 70 percent of active managers outperformed the S&P 500, compared with just 23 percent in 2011, according to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch data.

“Our traders have had their best month since 2009 because of the fall-off in correlation,” said Don Bright, a director and trader at Bright Trading in Chicago. “We’re doing a lot of homework on earnings since fundamentals are driving individual stocks again.”

Read the rest here.

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Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust

By Juliet Eilperin

John Doerr was crying. The billionaire venture capitalist had come to the end of his now-famous March 8, 2007, TED talk on climate change and renewable energy, and his emotions were getting the better of him. Doerr had begun by describing how his teenage daughter told him that it was up to his generation to fix global warming, since they had caused it. After detailing how the public and private sectors had so far failed at this, Doerr, who made his fortune investing early in companies that became some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Netscape, Amazon.com, and Google, among others—exhorted the audience and his peers (largely one and the same) to band together and transform the nation’s energy supply. “I really, really hope we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent, and all of our influence to solve this problem,” he said, falling silent as he fought back tears. “Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation I’m going to have with my daughter in 20 years.”

As usual, Doerr’s timing was perfect. Just weeks earlier, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had won an Oscar for best documentary. (Gore is now a partner in Doerr’s green tech team at the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.) Interest in climate change had never been higher. And as the economy recovered from the dual shocks of the Internet bubble and 9/11, Doerr’s fellow Silicon Valley VCs were already looking to clean technology as the next big thing. What followed was yet another Silicon Valley gold rush, as the firms on Sand Hill Road were pulled along by the promise of new fortunes and the hope that they would be the ones to wean America off of fossil fuels. The entrepreneurs and tech investors who had transformed media and communications were ready to make Silicon Valley the Saudi Arabia of clean energy.

Never mind the fact that green technology had been struggling to achieve critical mass for decades. “You had folks who came in with the hubris to say, ‘I know these guys have been working on this for 50 years,’” says Andrew Beebe, chief commercial officer for Suntech, the Chinese solar manufacturer. “‘But I’ve got $50 million and I can blow the doors off this thing.’”

In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.

Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels. The fallout has hit almost every niche in the clean-tech sector—wind, biofuels, electric cars, and fuel cells—but none more dramatically than solar.

Read the rest here.

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High Society: Washington’s Love Affair With Marijuana (No Wonder Gov’t is Dysfunctional)

By Alexandra Robbins

Medical marijuana is set to arrive in DC this summer. But the drug is already a much bigger part of upper-middle-class life here than you might think.

At 8 o’clock on a chilly autumn weeknight, Sara makes her way across DC’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to deliver a cutely wrapped package to the home of a high-powered attorney.

Despite the drugs in her car, she doesn’t look nervous, even when she makes an illegal left turn a few blocks after she passes a police van. “Can I do this?” she says. “Is this legal? I can’t tell. I’m doing it!”

Nearing the lawyer’s home, she says, “If you don’t look or act nervous, no one will know.” She explains how she regularly brings her deliveries through security at law firms and government agencies: “I look and act professional, I smile, I’m friendly, and you think I’m a legitimate business owner.”

Fit, pretty, and just shy of 40, Sara’s not what most people picture when they think of a drug dealer. In her Banana Republic sweater and Joe’s Jeans, she seems more like a delivery girl for a high-end bakery.

She uses a pseudonym that plays off baking and marijuana—we’ll call her Sara Leaf—and is one of a handful of women known as the Nancy Botwins of Washington, after Mary-Louise Parker’s character on Showtime’s Weeds, a suburban single mom who deals pot to support her family.

Two years ago, Sara quit her marketing job “because I was sick of the grind, spending 2½ hours commuting to do something I didn’t love anymore.” Finding herself with a lot of time, she parlayed a talent for baking into a new job.

Now she bakes marijuana into brownies, cookies, candy, and other treats and sells them—often to people who are chronically or terminally ill and who take the edibles to ease pain and alleviate side effects from chemotherapy and other treatments.

Sara doesn’t consider herself a drug dealer, though. When I ask what she calls herself, she pauses. “A gourmet cook? A baker? It’s a good question,” she says. “The reason I do what I do is to help people. My husband jokes that I’m a ‘pharmaceutical redistributor.’ ”

The distinctions should soon grow even hazier. The DC Council passed a measure in 2010 that legalized medical marijuana for people with certain conditions. According to the DC Department of Health, which will oversee the new medical-marijuana program, dispensaries could open this summer. As the program nears readiness, it has become clear that our area—in the federal government’s back yard—is probably the most complicated place in the country in which to regulate medical marijuana.

Legal or not, the plant already plays a big role in Washington. A 2011 report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that about 14 percent of DC residents over age 12 and about 10 percent in Maryland and Virginia had used pot in the past year. The marijuana use cuts across racial and socioeconomic lines.

“This is a town where I could probably kill 200 major careers if I wanted to be a complete prick,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which is headquartered on K Street. “Politicians, members of Congress and the Senate, many of their principals—legislative directors, chiefs of staff, communications directors—people in the private sector, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Brookings, police, any number of notable journalists from television, print, radio, many brand names most Americans would recognize pretty quickly—I’ve smoked with all of them. There is more smoke in DC closets than there is sex.”

Marijuana shows up at high-society parties in DC’s tony Kalorama and on back patios at embassy functions. It’s a staple at both a guys’ poker night for well-known DC power players and a moms’ Friday-night get-together in Bethesda. About twice a month, one Georgetown businessman hosts after-hours parties at his home where pot and cocaine “are in abundance,” says an attendee. Some of the Georgetown elite, professional athletes, Redskinettes, and Playboy centerfolds have been known to stop by.

Read the rest here.

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The Wall Street Gene: What Makes a Top Trader? Researchers Point to Dopamine

By Jonah Lehrer

It’s been a tough few years for Wall Street. Traders got big bonuses for taking foolish risks, while taxpayers got stuck with the bill. But without the financial industry’s machinations, Facebook couldn’t go public, your neighbor couldn’t get a mortgage and we’d all be stuck buying cars with cash.

How can we ensure that Wall Street doesn’t get carried away as it did before the 2008 meltdown?

This raises the obvious question: How can we ensure that Wall Street doesn’t get carried away as it did before the 2008 meltdown? That traders aren’t seduced by foolish risks in the near future?

One approach has been increased governmental regulation, such as the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which attempts to reign in the excesses of the financial industry with new rules and restrictions. Only time will tell if this strategy works.

A different approach to reducing the irrationality of Wall Street can be found in new research led by Steve Sapra and Paul Zak, neuroeconomists at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Zak got the idea for the paper after spending time with leading analysts and traders at a conference. “These guys are a pretty weird bunch,” he says. “They’re very rational and very competitive.”

Dr. Zak wanted to see if he could find the genetic signature of this personality type. Did certain genes correlate with investment success? What’s the difference between the prudent decisions of somebody like Warren Buffett—he’s famously unwilling to invest in bubbles—and the reckless bets that cause so many other traders to lose vast sums of money?

There was reason to think that such a link might exist. Previous research had shown, for instance, that 29% of the variation in whether or not people invest in stocks depends on their DNA. Studies of professional traders had demonstrated that approximately 25% of individual variation in portfolio risk is due to genetics. Other scientists had found correlations between testosterone levels and risk-taking—more hormone equals more risk—and shown that, at least among London traders, men with higher hormone levels in the morning generate larger profits.

Drs. Sapra and Zak began by analyzing the genes of 60 professional traders working in five major Wall Street firms. (They collected the DNA samples in 2008—only three of the firms are still in business.) The scientists focused on a short list of genes that are known to affect the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain.

In recent years, it’s become clear that dopamine helps to regulate decisions involving risk and reward, allowing us to experience both the thrill of getting what we want and the pain of losing it all.

Read the rest here.

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Hernquist: My Seatbelt Light For US Equities Just Turned On

Posted by on February 4th, 2012

Everyone knows the following:

1) Stocks are in a raging uptrend showing no signs of letup

2) They’ve travelled a long way in a short time and are entitled to a break

As traders, we constantly walk a tightrope between identifying an emerging opportunity and recognizing when it’s too obvious. I’ve learned through many mistakes that obvious doesn’t mean sell(or cover); for me, it just means find something else to buy or short. Is there a way outside of the fuzzy sentiment polls to measure “obviousness”?

Keep in mind that the market is made up of intraday, swing, and position traders, and also covers the spectrum from mean reverters to trend followers. The successful traders I’ve seen lean heavily to one side or the other but acknowledge that the other side has the power to steamroll their best idea at any moment. Having relied on “gut feel” for years, I needed ways to quantify “obviousness” to prevent me from giving myself(or the other side) too much credit. I read the polls but more for entertainment than anything; the best real-time sentiment indicator is price itself.

One such measure I apply across my universe is “Change in ATR over X periods”, which I track on a 6-8 day basis, 5-7 week basis, and 5-7 month basis as I find that’s the time needed to turn doubters into believers in their respective timeframes. As I’m plowing through charts looking for trends, this is a simple and objective way for me to make sure I’m not chasing someone’s expiring idea. I’ll highlight the weekly one today because it’s the one that just went “obvious” on Friday. Take a look at the following chart of $SPX:

Read the rest and see the graph here.

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Most Overbought S&P 500 Stocks

via Bespoke

There are now 24 stocks in the S&P 500 that are trading more than 20% above their 50-day moving averages.  That’s a high number.  As shown below, Netflix (NFLX) is the farthest above its 50-day at 50.96%.  Genworth Financial (GNW) is the second most overbought at 34.67% above its 50-day, followed by Whirlpool (WHR), Eastman Chemical (EMN), Bank of America (BAC), and Textron (TXT).

Long investors have done extremely well over the last month or so.  Rest assured, however, that there will one day be a pullback again!  The problem with waiting for a pullback to buy is that the market can go a lot higher before that pullback occurs, just as the market can go a lot lower while waiting for a bounce to sell.

See the list here.

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Maher: Occupy Protesters Are ‘Douchebags’ Who Need To ‘Get A Job’

Bill Maher turned his ire toward the “Occupy” protests that took place across the country in the fall and continue in some locations today. Maher says he find himself “almost in agreement with Newt Gingrich” and tells them to “get a job.”

Maher said they initially did a good job, but now the “movement” is “just a bunch of douchebags who think throwing a chair through the Starbucks window is going to bring on the revolution.” Read what he said below.

“Similar to Afghanistan, when you occupy anything for too long people do get pissed off,” Bill Maher said about the “Occupy” protests on his HBO program “Real Time.”

“As I watch them on the news now, I find myself almost in agreement with Newt Gingrich, like, ‘You know what, get a job.’ Only because the people who originally started it, I think they went home. Now it’s just these anarchists stragglers. And this is the problem when your movement involves sleeping over in the park. You wind up attracting the people who were sleeping over in the park anyway. And I think this is where we are with the ‘Occupy movement'” Maher said on this week’s broadcast.

Read the rest and watch the video here.

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