A wealthy Swedish businessman was surprised to learn on Wednesday that the grounds near his luxurious home appear to feature a giant penis visible only from the sky.

“It may be distasteful, but it’s not illegal,” Nicholas Rundbom, a spokesperson for Hitta.se, the Swedish directory and map website which published the phallus-filled aerial photograph, told The Local.

The picture came to Rundom’s attention when he was contacted by a reporter with business news website Realtid.se who was writing a story about a posh villa belonging to Swedish business icon Per-Olof Söderberg.

Söderberg, founder of the Söderberg & Partners insurance brokerage and board member of the Ratos private equity firm founded by his grandfather in 1933, had put his home up for sale, prompting the news website to take a closer look at the property using Hitta.se

Much to the surprise of the journalist, the grounds near Söderberg’s home featured a symbol in the shape of a massive penis, as well as a star, mowed in the grass.

Söderberg, whose home is adjacent to the tennis-court-sized penis, was also clueless about the sex-themed shape in the grass surrounding his compound.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Söderberg told the Expressen newspaper in reference to the newly-discovered phallus.

Following the report, technicians with Hitta.se contacted Metria, the company that supplied the images, to verify that the image, which was taken on April 18th of this year, had not been doctored.

“All six experts said it was clearly real grass and they all used the word ‘boyish prank’,” Metria spokesperson Johanna Ahlmark told Realtid.se.

“Someone was clearly having fun when mowing the lawn.”

Rundom from Hitta.se marveled at the coincidence that has resulted in the penis-prank being given a long-lasting afterlife on the internet.

“It’s highly improbable that those who came up with this creative stunt and cut the grass in that way did so just before a satellite flew overhead and snapped a picture,” he told The Local.

Read the rest here.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzB7gKvYmwo&feature=player_embedded

He cites continued stress on his family due to the false allegations made in the media. Claims he won’t be silenced and he won’t be going away.

Plan B – The Cain Solutions . com

Developing…

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A team of scientists have used the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite to confirm major reductions in the levels of a key air pollutant generated by coal power plants in the eastern United States. The pollutant, sulfur dioxide, contributes to the formation of acid rain and can cause serious health problems.

The scientists, led by an Environment Canada researcher, have shown that sulfur dioxide levels in the vicinity of major coal power plants have fallen by nearly half since 2005. The new findings, the first satellite observations of this type, confirm ground-based measurements of declining sulfur dioxide levels and demonstrate that scientists can potentially measure levels of harmful emissions throughout the world, even in places where ground monitoring is not extensive or does not exist. About two-thirds of sulfur dioxide pollution in American air comes from coal power plants. Geophysical Research Letters published details of the new research this month.

These maps show average sulfur dioxide levels measured by the Aura satellite for the periods 2005-2007 (top) and 2008-2010 (bottom) over a portion of the eastern United States. The black dots represent the locations of many of the nation’s top sulfur dioxide emissions sources. Larger dots indicate greater emissions. (Credit: NASA’s Earth Observatory)
› Larger image (2005-2007)
› Larger image (2008-2010)

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Peter Schweizer discusses the pattern of those that have friends on Capital Hill usually escape consequences for ethics violations. He also talks about the case where the FBI stopped investigating congressmen when they were threatened with budget cuts.

Watch the video here.

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“hide the decline” – worse than we thought

Some background from the original “hide the decline” from Steve McIntyre here

Despite relatively little centennial variability, Briffa’s reconstruction had a noticeable decline in the late 20th century, despite warmer temperatures. In these early articles [e.g. Briffa 1998], the decline was not hidden.

For most analysts, the seemingly unavoidable question at this point would be – if tree rings didn’t respond to late 20th century warmth, how would one know that they didn’t do the same thing in response to possible medieval warmth – a question that remains unaddressed years later.

He writes now in Hide-the-Decline Plus

Indeed, they did not simply “hide the decline”, their “hide the decline” was worse than we thought. Mann et al did not merely delete data after 1960, they deleted data from 1940 on, You can see the last point of the Briffa reconstruction (located at ~1940) peeking from behind the spaghetti in the graphic below:

Detail from Mann et al (EOS 2003) Figure 1. Arrow points to Briffa series peeking out from behind the spaghetti

Had Mann et al used the actual values, the decline would have been as shown in the accompanying graphic:

Figure 3. Re-stated Mann et al (EOS 2003) Figure 1 showing the decline.

Had Mann and his 13 co-authors shown the Briffa reconstruction, without hiding the decline, one feels that von Storch (and others) might have given more consideration to Soon et al’s criticism of the serious problem arising from the large-population failure of tree ring widths and density to track temperature.

Read the whole article Hide-the-Decline Plus

Source

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CTVNews.ca Staff

Date: Sun. Nov. 27 2011 10:08 PM ET

Read the rest here.

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Michael Barone

November 28, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Taxing high earners won’t make the poor less poor.

What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn’t include such tax increases.

Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.

They didn’t make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income taxes but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs, which have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.

Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.

First, reductions in some transfer payments haven’t hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.

Second, Americans aren’t trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income-tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.

Read the rest here.

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***Turns out this John O’Sullivan is purposefully deceptive, can’t read well, doesn’t understand Japanese, or all three. My apologies for posting a bunk piece of crap disguised as something legitimate*** Wood.

By: John O’Sullivan

Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan’s scientists is to be believed.

Japanese national broadcaster, NHK World broke the astonishing story on their main Sunday evening news bulletin (October 30, 2011). Television viewers learned that the country’s groundbreaking IBUKU satellite, launched in June 2009, appears to have scorched an indelible hole in conventional global warming theory.

Standing in front of a telling array of colorful graphs, sober-suited Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies told viewers, “The [IBUKU satellite] map is to help us discover how much each region needs to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions.”

Industrialized Nations World’s Lowest CO2 ‘Polluters’

Indeed, the map at which JAXA spokesman Sasano was pointing been expected by most experts to show that western nations are to blame for substantial increases in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, causing global warming. But to an officious looking TV interviewer Sasano turned greenhouse gas theory on it’s head.

According to UN science the greenhouse gas theory says more CO2 entering the atmosphere will warm the planet, while less CO2 is associated with cooling.

Gesturing to an indelible deep green hue streaked across the United States and Europe viewers were told, “in the high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere emissions were less than absorption levels.”

Sasano proceeded to explain the color-coding system of the iconic maps showing where regions were either absorbing or emitting the trace atmospheric gas. Regions were alternately colored red (for high CO2 emission), white (low or neutral CO2 emissions) and green (no emissions: CO2 absorbers).

Bizarrely, the IBUKU maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations revealing that the least industrialized regions are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet.

Yes, you read that correctly: the U.S. and western European nations are areas where CO2 levels are lowest. This new evidence defies the consensus view promoted by mainstream newspapers, such as the New York Times.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had long claimed that, “there is a consensus among scientists that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are harming global climate.”

The Japanese satellite map shows regions colored the deepest leaf green (net absorbers of CO2) being predominantly those developed nations of Europe and North America; thus indicating built up environments absorbed more CO2 than they emitted into the atmosphere.

By contrast the bulk of the regions colored red (so-called ‘carbon polluters’) were in undeveloped, densely forested equatorial regions of Africa and South America.

Huge Headache for Climate Policymakers

JAXA boasts that, “we can reduce the error of the estimated values when we introduce IBUKI’s observation data compared to that of the values calculated in a conventional way based on ground observation data.”

To all policymakers who study the Japanese maps it is apparent that the areas of greatest CO2 emissions are those regions with least human development and most natural vegetation: Equatorial Third World nations.

The Japanese evidence also disproves the often-cited hypothesis that Siberia and other areas of northern Russia were natural vents for large scale CO2 outgassing, exacerbating global warming fears.

 In effect, this compelling new data appears to show that the asphalt and concreted industrial nations are ‘mopping up’ carbon dioxide faster than their manufacturers and consumers can emit it. If this is confirmed, it means a cornerstone of man-made global warming may be in serious doubt.

Read the rest here.

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Fitch Ratings kept its pristine AAA rating on the U.S. on Monday, but the credit-ratings company downgraded its outlook to “negative” in the wake of the Supercommittee’s failure to find $1.2 trillion in spending cuts.

The development, which had been hinted at last week, could have been worse for the U.S. as McGraw-Hill’s (MHP: 41.20, +0.66, +1.63%) Standard & Poor’s slashed its credit rating for the first time ever in August.

However, the negative outlook indicates a “slightly greater” than 50% chance that Fitch downgrades the U.S. over the next two years.

“Failure to reach agreement in 2013 on a credible deficit reduction plan and a worsening of the economic and fiscal outlook would likely result in a downgrade of the U.S. sovereign rating,” David Riley, a managing director at Fitch, said in the report.

Fitch warned that its revised fiscal projections call for federal debt held by the public to exceed 90% of gross domestic product and debt interest payments making up more than 20% of total tax revenues by the end of the decade.

“In Fitch’s opinion, such a level of government indebtedness would no longer be consistent with the U.S. retaining its ‘AAA’ status despite its underlying strengths,” Riley said.

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Will they hold their gains through the night?

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Any increase in funding of the IMF, which is already under-funded, has to be approved by the U.S. Congress. Anyone think ‘Mericans are going to approve sending hundreds of billions over to Italy?

Source.

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In a sentence, plans are taking shape to socialize all the losses over in the Euro Zone. 

———————————————————————————————————–

Euro zone states may ditch plans to impose losses on private bondholders should countries need to restructure their debt under a new bailout fund due to launch in mid-2013, four EU officials told Reuters on Friday.

The possible move helped push stocks up in Europe and the U.S.

Discussions are taking place against a backdrop of flagging market confidence in the region’s debt and as part of wider negotiations over introducing stricter fiscal rules to the EU treaty.

Euro zone powerhouse Germany is insisting on tighter budgets and private sector involvement (PSI) in bailouts as a precondition for deeper economic integration among euro zone countries.

Commercial banks and insurance companies are still expected to take a hit on their holdings of Greek sovereign bonds as part of the second bailout package being finalized for Athens.

But clauses relating to PSI in the statutes of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) — the permanent facility scheduled to start operating from July 2013 — could be withdrawn, with the majority of euro zone states now opposed to them.

The concern is that forcing the private sector bondholders to take losses if a country restructures its debt is undermining confidence in euro zone sovereign bonds. If those stipulations are removed, most countries in the euro zone argue, market sentiment might improve.

“France, Italy, Spain and all the peripherals” are in favor of removing the clauses, one EU official told Reuters. “Against it are Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.” Austria is also opposed, another source said.

A third official said that while German insistence on retaining private sector involvement in the ESM was fading, collective action clauses would only be removed as part of broader negotiations under way over changes to the EU treaty.

Berlin wants all 27 EU countries, or at least the 17 in the euro zone, to provide full backing for alterations to the treaty before it will consider giving ground on other issues member states want it to shift on, officials say.

Germany is under pressure to soften its opposition to the European Central Bank playing a more direct role in combating the crisis, and member states also want Berlin to give its backing to the idea of jointly issued euro zone bonds.

German officials dismiss any suggestion of a ‘grand bargain’ being put together, but officials in other euro zone capitals, including Brussels, say such a deal is taking shape and suggest Berlin will move when it has the commitments it is seeking, although it’s unclear when that will be.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after meeting French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Strasbourg on Thursday that there was no quid pro quo being set up.

“This is not about give and take,” she said.

Euro zone finance ministers will discuss the ESM at a meeting in Brussels on Nov. 29-30, including the implications of dropping collective action clauses from its statutes.

Complications

While most euro zone countries just want to forget about enforced private sector involvement, some are adamant that there must be a way to ensure banks and not just taxpayers shoulder some of the costs of bailing countries out.

Read the rest here.

 

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By LIZ ALDERMAN

PARIS — For the growing chorus of observers who fear that a breakup of the euro zone might be at hand, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has a pointed rebuke: It’s never going to happen.

But some banks are no longer so sure, especially as the sovereign debt crisis threatened to ensnare Germany itself this week, when investors began to question the nation’s stature as Europe’s main pillar of stability.

On Friday, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Belgium’s credit standing to AA from AA+, saying it might not be able to cut its towering debt load any time soon. Ratings agencies this week cautioned that France could lose its AAA rating if the crisis grew. On Thursday, agencies lowered the ratings of Portugal and Hungary to junk.

While European leaders still say there is no need to draw up a Plan B, some of the world’s biggest banks, and their supervisors, are doing just that.

“We cannot be, and are not, complacent on this front,” Andrew Bailey, a regulator at Britain’s Financial Services Authority, said this week. “We must not ignore the prospect of a disorderly departure of some countries from the euro zone,” he said.

Banks including Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Nomura issued a cascade of reports this week examining the likelihood of a breakup of the euro zone. “The euro zone financial crisis has entered a far more dangerous phase,” analysts at Nomura wrote on Friday. Unless the European Central Bank steps in to help where politicians have failed, “a euro breakup now appears probable rather than possible,” the bank said.

Major British financial institutions, like the Royal Bank of Scotland, are drawing up contingency plans in case the unthinkable veers toward reality, bank supervisors said Thursday. United States regulators have been pushing American banks like Citigroup and others to reduce their exposure to the euro zone. In Asia, authorities in Hong Kong have stepped up their monitoring of the international exposure of foreign and local banks in light of the European crisis.

But banks in big euro zone countries that have only recently been infected by the crisis do not seem to be nearly as flustered.

Banks in France and Italy in particular are not creating backup plans, bankers say, for the simple reason that they have concluded it is impossible for the euro to break up. Although banks like BNP Paribas, Société Générale, UniCredit and others recently dumped tens of billions of euros worth of European sovereign debt, the thinking is that there is little reason to do more.

“While in the United States there is clearly a view that Europe can break up, here, we believe Europe must remain as it is,” said one French banker, summing up the thinking at French banks. “So no one is saying, ‘We need a fallback,’ ” said the banker, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Read the rest here.

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British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.

By James Kirkup, Deputy Political Editor

10:00PM GMT 25 Nov 2011

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• 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
• Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a ‘strong message’
  
• Critics claim: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’
• Scientist asks, ‘What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’

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In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. The idea of digital money—convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks—had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. Ecash, an anonymous system launched in the early 1990s by cryptographer David Chaum, failed in part because it depended on the existing infrastructures of government and credit card companies. Other proposals followed—bit gold, RPOW, b-money—but none got off the ground.

One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. If a digital dollar is just information, free from the corporeal strictures of paper and metal, what’s to prevent people from copying and pasting it as easily as a chunk of text, “spending” it as many times as they want? The conventional answer involved using a central clearinghouse to keep a real-time ledger of all transactions—ensuring that, if someone spends his last digital dollar, he can’t then spend it again. The ledger prevents fraud, but it also requires a trusted third party to administer it.

Bitcoin did away with the third party by publicly distributing the ledger, what Nakamoto called the “block chain.” Users willing to devote CPU power to running a special piece of software would be called miners and would form a network to maintain the block chain collectively. In the process, they would also generate new currency. Transactions would be broadcast to the network, and computers running the software would compete to solve irreversible cryptographic puzzles that contain data from several transactions. The first miner to solve each puzzle would be awarded 50 new bitcoins, and the associated block of transactions would be added to the chain. The difficulty of each puzzle would increase as the number of miners increased, which would keep production to one block of transactions roughly every 10 minutes. In addition, the size of each block bounty would halve every 210,000 blocks—first from 50 bitcoins to 25, then from 25 to 12.5, and so on. Around the year 2140, the currency would reach its preordained limit of 21 million bitcoins.

When Nakamoto’s paper came out in 2008, trust in the ability of governments and banks to manage the economy and the money supply was at its nadir. The US government was throwing dollars at Wall Street and the Detroit car companies. The Federal Reserve was introducing “quantitative easing,” essentially printing money in order to stimulate the economy. The price of gold was rising. Bitcoin required no faith in the politicians or financiers who had wrecked the economy—just in Nakamoto’s elegant algorithms. Not only did bitcoin’s public ledger seem to protect against fraud, but the predetermined release of the digital currency kept the bitcoin money supply growing at a predictable rate, immune to printing-press-happy central bankers and Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation.

Nakamoto himself mined the first 50 bitcoins—which came to be called the genesis block—on January 3, 2009. For a year or so, his creation remained the province of a tiny group of early adopters. But slowly, word of bitcoin spread beyond the insular world of cryptography. It has won accolades from some of digital currency’s greatest minds. Wei Dai, inventor of b-money, calls it “very significant”; Nick Szabo, who created bit gold, hails bitcoin as “a great contribution to the world”; and Hal Finney, the eminent cryptographer behind RPOW, says it’s “potentially world-changing.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for digital privacy, eventually started accepting donations in the alternative currency.

The small band of early bitcoiners all shared the communitarian spirit of an open source software project. Gavin Andresen, a coder in New England, bought 10,000 bitcoins for $50 and created a site called the Bitcoin Faucet, where he gave them away for the hell of it. Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida programmer, conducted what bitcoiners think of as the first real-world bitcoin transaction, paying 10,000 bitcoins to get two pizzas delivered from Papa John’s. (He sent the bitcoins to a volunteer in England, who then called in a credit card order transatlantically.) A farmer in Massachusetts named David Forster began accepting bitcoins as payment for alpaca socks.

When they weren’t busy mining, the faithful tried to solve the mystery of the man they called simply Satoshi. On a bitcoin IRC channel, someone noted portentously that in Japanese Satoshi means “wise.” Someone else wondered whether the name might be a sly portmanteau of four tech companies: SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola. It seemed doubtful that Nakamoto was even Japanese. His English had the flawless, idiomatic ring of a native speaker.

Perhaps, it was suggested, Nakamoto wasn’t one man but a mysterious group with an inscrutable purpose—a team at Google, maybe, or the National Security Agency. “I exchanged some emails with whoever Satoshi supposedly is,” says Hanyecz, who was on bitcoin’s core developer team for a time. “I always got the impression it almost wasn’t a real person. I’d get replies maybe every two weeks, as if someone would check it once in a while. Bitcoin seems awfully well designed for one person to crank out.”

Nakamoto revealed little about himself, limiting his online utterances to technical discussion of his source code. On December 5, 2010, after bitcoiners started to call for Wikileaks to accept bitcoin donations, the normally terse and all-business Nakamoto weighed in with uncharacteristic vehemence. “No, don’t ‘bring it on,’” he wrote in a post to the bitcoin forum. “The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

Then, as unexpectedly as he had appeared, Nakamoto vanished. At 6:22 pm GMT on December 12, seven days after his Wikileaks plea, Nakamoto posted his final message to the bitcoin forum, concerning some minutiae in the latest version of the software. His email responses became more erratic, then stopped altogether. Andresen, who had taken over the role of lead developer, was now apparently one of just a few people with whom he was still communicating. On April 26, Andresen told fellow coders: “Satoshi did suggest this morning that I (we) should try to de-emphasize the whole ‘mysterious founder’ thing when talking publicly about bitcoin.” Then Nakamoto stopped replying even to Andresen’s emails. Bitcoiners wondered plaintively why he had left them. But by then his creation had taken on a life of its own.

“Bitcoin enthusiasts are almost evangelists,” Bruce Wagner says. “They see the beauty of the technology. It’s a huge movement. It’s almost like a religion. On the forum, you’ll see the spirit. It’s not just me, me, me. It’s what’s for the betterment of bitcoin.”

It’s a July morning. Wagner, whose boyish energy and Pantone-black hair belie his 50 years, is sitting in his office at OnlyOneTV, an Internet television startup in Manhattan. Over just a few months, he has become bitcoin’s chief proselytizer. He hosts The Bitcoin Show, a program on OnlyOneTV in which he plugs the nascent currency and interviews notables from the bitcoin world. He also runs a bitcoin meetup group and is gearing up to host bitcoin’s first “world conference” in August. “I got obsessed and didn’t eat or sleep for five days,” he says, recalling the moment he discovered bitcoin. “It was bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin, like I was on crystal meth!”

Wagner is not given to understatement. While bitcoin is “the most exciting technology since the Internet,” he says, eBay is “a giant bloodsucking corporation” and free speech “a popular myth.” He is similarly excitable when predicting the future of bitcoin. “I knew it wasn’t a stock and wouldn’t go up and down,” he explains. “This was something that was going to go up, up, up.”

For a while, he was right. Through 2009 and early 2010, bitcoins had no value at all, and for the first six months after they started trading in April 2010, the value of one bitcoin stayed below 14 cents. Then, as the currency gained viral traction in summer 2010, rising demand for a limited supply caused the price on online exchanges to start moving. By early November, it surged to 36 cents before settling down to around 29 cents. In February 2011, it rose again and was mentioned on Slashdot for achieving “dollar parity”; it hit $1.06 before settling in at roughly 87 cents.

In the spring, catalyzed in part by a much-linked Forbes story on the new “crypto currency,” the price exploded. From early April to the end of May, the going rate for a bitcoin rose from 86 cents to $8.89. Then, after Gawker published a story on June 1 about the currency’s popularity among online drug dealers, it more than tripled in a week, soaring to about $27. The market value of all bitcoins in circulation was approaching $130 million. A Tennessean dubbed KnightMB, who held 371,000 bitcoins, became worth more than $10 million, the richest man in the bitcoin realm. The value of those 10,000 bitcoins Hanyecz used to buy pizza had risen to $272,329. “I don’t feel bad about it,” he says. “The pizza was really good.”

Read the rest here.

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From the latest ClimateGate 2.0 email dump, we are presented this little gem. University of East Anglia’s Dr. Phil Jones, keeper of the time series of the instrumental temperature record and whose work has been featured in both the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, cannot use Excel to plot a trend.

Perhaps even more shocking is that he is not able to simply Google up the answer. My first search instantly yielded this: Constructing a least squares graph using Microsoft Excel.

Remember, this is one of the leaders of the people who want to tax our citizens in order to generate $37 trillion in green energy technologies by 2030. Yes, $37 trillion is correct.

Source.

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Above is a 5 minute bar chart of the S&P E-minis. The futures have opened lower and are near to breaking to lower lows this evening.

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