It looks like Hurricane Katia will make a turn, judging by the latest computer models, and may pose no threat to the East Coast:
Monthly Archives: September 2011
FLASH: Korea Down Nearly 3%
Short selling is banned in Korea. Hence, their markets are down the most.
This is planet of the Apes, looking at the statue of liberty, type shit.
Comments »Everybody Say the Word: Gen..Gen…Genocide
NOTE: chessNwine Commentary:
While Moammar Gadhafi is indeed a scumbag and likely behind the Pan Am flight 103 bombing that killed many Americans, the West could at the very least say that he is a known quantity, and a KNOWN evil. The headline on the DrudgeReport.com at the time of this writing is a link to THIS STORY detailing how rebel forces and armed civilians in Libya have rounded up and jailed black Africans, accusing them of supporting Gadhafi. There is no telling how ugly this will get, precisely because we are now dealing with an UNKNOWN enemy, not unlike the situation we saw earlier this year in Egypt. The coverage on CNN and other idealistic news networks has been misguided at best, and blindly ideological at worst. To imply that democracy loving, college educated, “OMG social media” using kids have overthrown these dictators should be called a Mickey Mouse operation of yellow journalism, but then again that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse. I have see few people consider the possibility that the events in Egypt and Libya, and throughout the Middle East during Arab Spring, could actually lead to even worse regimes.
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Asia Opens Lower; US Futures Dive
Asian stocks opened down between 1-2%. Even though US markets are closed tomorrow, futures are open for trade.
S&P futs are 8 points below fair value.
NEW VIDEO OF FLIGHT 93 FROM 9/11 SURFACES TEN YEARS LATER
The United States Postal Service May Stop Delivering the Mail
Five Guys Tops List as America’s Favorite Fast Food
Tropical Storm Lee Cuts Oil Production
Comments »Tropical Storm Lee made landfall on the Louisiana coast, lashing the state with heavy rain and wind after shutting more than half of the oil and natural gas production from the resource-rich Gulf of Mexico. Full Story here…
Hurricane Katia: Updated Models
How much is my O&G company worth?
Good link to see recent M&A activity in the industry. You can use this to get a ballpark figure for what companies are selling for on a $/production or $/reserves valuation. Deals are categorized by area as well.
Oil and Gas Financial Journal Link
Comments »HAL sues BP over Macondo
Will Washington Force Bernanke to Make the Next Move ?
Wikileaks Adds a New Level of Luster to Gold
BRAINWASHING U: Colleges’ Sick ‘Orientation’ Game
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK POST. ARTICLE BY ROBERT SHIBLEY
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Parents sending children off to college for the first time, beware: Their “freshman orientation” is all too likely to include being herded through a “tunnel of oppression” to learn about the evils of “white privilege,” being lectured about how they’re part of a “rape culture” or being forced to discuss their sexual identities with complete strangers — before they even meet their first professor.
That’s right: For all we hear about faculty ideological or political bias, campus administrators are often worse when it comes to brainwashing students.
Consider the shocking account from a student trained to be a dorm supervisor — a resident adviser, or RA — at DePauw University in Indiana. One of her first duties last fall was to lead her new students through a house decorated as a “Tunnel of Oppression,” where supposedly “realistic” demonstrations in each room taught lessons such as how religious parents hate their gay children, Muslims would find no friends on a predominantly non-Muslim campus and overweight women suffer from eating disorders.
Indeed, in her training to become an RA, “We were told that ‘human’ was not a suitable identity, but that instead we were first ‘black,’ ‘white,’ or ‘Asian’; ‘male’ or ‘female’; … ‘heterosexual’ or ‘queer.’ We were forced to act like bigots and spout off stereotypes while being told that that was what we were really thinking deep down.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. must be spinning in his grave.
Unsurprisingly, she turned down the school’s offer to be an RA this year — she’d rather find another job.
DePauw is no rare case. At least 96 colleges across the country have run similar “tunnel of oppression” programs in the last few years.
Perhaps the most infamous re-education program was the University of Delaware’s: Every single student in the dorms endured an Orwellian “treatment” (the school’s word) program to expunge supposedly incorrect beliefs. Delaware demanded that its RAs ask intrusive questions about students’ sexual identity and write reports about their responses while lecturing students on environmentalism and telling them that “citizenship” required them to recognize that “systemic oppression exists in our society.”
The “treatment” was shut down a few years back after a faculty whistle-blower turned materials for the program over to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (where I now work), which publicized the outrage. But a series of “Residential Curriculum Institutes” started by those in charge of the Delaware program continues to this day.
And the same spirit infects much of American higher education. In New York, Hamilton College last fall ordered all first-year men to attend a “She Fears You” presentation, designed to get them to acknowledge their personal complicity (after just a month on campus!) in Hamilton’s “rape culture” and to change their “rape-supportive” beliefs and attitudes. Not coincidentally, the program’s presenter is a speaker at this year’s Residential Curriculum Institute.
Did Hamilton warn incoming female students of the campus “rape culture” before it took their tuition? I doubt it. But publicity did force administrators to make the seminar optional — just minutes before it started.
How many other schools host similar events that no one off campus ever hears about?
How to fight this indoctrination? First, warn your children or grandchildren about it — and remind them that every public college (and most private colleges) must leave students free to make up their own minds on such controversial ideas as “all white people are racists” or “all men are responsible for rape.” College is supposed to teach you how to think, not what you must think.
And, for the many students who do go through a creepy orientation program, please save any documents you’re given on the program and tell us about it at FIRE (thefire.org).
Justice Louis Brandeis famously opined that sunlight is the best disinfectant. If students go into orientation with their eyes open and a willingness to alert outsiders, we can hope to purge the infection of thought reform on America’s campuses.
Robert Shibley is senior vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education..
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Tropical Storm Lee Heading Toward Land
Comments »Bands of heavy rain continue to stream ashore from extreme eastern Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Soaking rain is also wrapping around the circulation in central and western Louisiana. Isolated tornadoes will continue to be possible as well (see tornado watches/warnings). Full Story…
Hurricane Katia: Updated Models
Labor’s Dwindling Share of the Economy and the Crisis of Advanced Capitalism
Charles Hugh Smith publishes Foreclosure Crisis Weekly, dedicated to documenting the often-amazing foreclosure crisis.
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All attempts to reform the Status Quo of advanced finance-based Capitalism will fail, as its historically inevitable crisis is finally at hand. It is self-evident that conventional economics has failed, completely, utterly and totally. The two competing cargo cults of tax cuts/trickle-down and borrow-and-spend stimulus coupled with monetary manipulation have failed to restore advanced Capitalism’s vigor, not just in America, but everywhere.
Conventional econometrics is clueless about the root causes of advanced finance-based Capitalism’s ills. To really understand what’s going on beneath the surface, we must return to “discredited” non-quant models of economics: for example, Marx’s critique of monopoly/cartel, finance-dominated advanced Capitalism. (“Capitalism” is capitalized here to distinguish it from “primitive capitalism.”)
All those fancy equation-based econometrics that supposedly model human behavior have failed because they are fundamentally and purposefully superficial: they are incapable of understanding deeper dynamics that don’t fit the ruling political-economy conventions.
Marx predicted a crisis of advanced Capitalism based on the rising imbalance of capital and labor in finance-dominated Capitalism. The basic Marxist context is history, not morality, and so the Marxist critique is light on blaming the rich for Capitalism’s core ills and heavy on the inevitability of larger historic forces.
In other words, what’s wrong with advanced Capitalism cannot be fixed by taxing the super-wealthy at the same rate we self-employed pay (40% basic Federal rate), though that would certainly be a fair and just step in the right direction. Advanced Capitalism’s ills run much deeper than superficial “class warfare” models in which the “solution” is to redistribute wealth from the top down the pyramid.
This redistributive “socialist” flavor of advanced Capitalism has bought time–the crisis of the 1930s was staved off for 70 years–but now redistribution as a saving strategy has reached its limits.
To read the rest and see some nice chart porn, go here.
Comments »Leveraging a Hurricane: The real story behind the political theater over disaster relief.
This week the left-wing press has been attacking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for holding disaster relief funding “hostage.” A more accurate way to put this is that Senate Democrats won’t approve new funding for disasters unless they get the funding they want for corporations that make electric cars.
Here’s the story: In June, House Republicans passed the 2012 Homeland Security appropriations bill, which included an amendment adding $1 billion to the Disaster Relief Fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In a sensible move for taxpayers, the amendment offsets this new disaster funding by cutting spending on the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. This may ring a bell with readers as the funding conduit for one of Washington’s adventures in crony capitalism.
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One reason the House bill has less funding for Democratic priorities is because, even before the hurricane, Republicans had decided that the President’s budget didn’t have enough money for the Disaster Relief Fund. So they funded it at $850 million above the President’s request. Then as they realized that the damage in places like Joplin, Missouri would put additional strain on the fund, the GOP added the amendment that provided still more disaster assistance and cut funding for Mr. Biden’s beloved electric cars.
The White House hasn’t asked for more funding, though White House budget director Jacob Lew wrote to lawmakers Thursday suggesting it could be well north of $5 billion. But so far Mr. Cantor is being blamed for opposing disaster relief because he has been trying to spend more than the President, and to place that above other spending priorities.
Read the whole story here.
Comments »The Equity Markets Hold Their Breath for Bundesverfassungsgericht
Wednesday September 7th, is an important day for equity markets and bank stocks specifically. The German high court has a chance to rule on continued bailouts for the Euro zone. It is expected that they will rule in favor of the German government to continue bailing out bankrupt countries in the zone.
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