Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wasters -its not their money! - Lawmakers from N.J. and N.Y. outraged over Port Authority spending, call for rollback of toll hike
Quasi-government - not responsible to anyone and waste without any check.
Tolls in the tunnels are now $12 per car and toll takers sit in toll booths, even when it is EZ-Pass-only, and collect up to $100,000+ in pay a year.
By
February 09, 2012
Citing an audit critical of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, lawmakers from the two states are calling on the two governors to back bills intended to boost accountability at the agency.
The lawmakers — New Jersey Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Bergen) and New York State Senator Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island) — are also calling for a rollback of the Port Authority toll hike imposed in September.
"Yesterday’s report on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is nothing short of an indictment of Port Authority operations," Lanza said in a statement Wednesday.
The report outlined the first phase of a financial review ordered by Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a condition of their approving a multi-year toll hike in August.
-more at link-
Caution, train wreck in progress
In September, MF Global Holdings Ltd.'s management sent a memo to the securities firm's 2,800 employees: Start printing on both sides of paper.
Now my opinion: Greece is screwed. The new debt accord won’t hold, austerity measures won’t be fully implemented, and the Greek government will formally default within six months. And stocks are rising as powerful people and organizations prop up share prices just long enough to unload their own positions, leaving the little guys to drown.
-Robert X. Cringely
More news later today on my new/old book project, but for a moment let’s look at what’s happening in Greece, because I’ve become quite convinced that markets have gone completely mad and the world economy is about to suffer for that madness. In fact I am sure of it. That’s because stocks are up today on word of a second debt bailout for Greece — a bailout that has no more hope of standing than the one before it. Greece is bound to default, beginning a likely fall of economic dominoes across Europe. And while that news is not explicitly about technology, it will certainly affect all of us interested in technology, because Greece is screwed along with much of southern Europe....
The Greek budget deficit is stuck near 8-9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) because the country’s economic base is shrinking so fast.
Yet shares are rising on markets across Europe supposedly on the idea that Greece will this time fulfill its obligations under the new debt accord — obligations that will continue until 2020 when the country will still be prostrate with public debt at 120 percent of GDP — if everything goes perfectly?
-read on at link-
No such thing - All a Big Hoax- Breaking Global Warming Taboos: 'I Feel Duped on Climate Change'
The False Religion of Global Warming with its grand poobahs, 'climate heretics' and all!
2-8-12
Will reduced solar activity counteract global warming in the coming decades? That is what outgoing German electric utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt claims in a new book. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science.
The articulate utility executive is nervous at the beginning of the conversation. He is groping for words -- not a common occurrence for the practiced provocateur. After all, Fritz Vahrenholt, 62, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has been a rebel throughout his life. "Perhaps it's just part of my generation," he says.
He is typical of someone who came of age during the student protest movement of the late 1960s, and who fought against the chemical industry's toxic manufacturing plants in the 1970s. His party, Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), chose him as environment senator in the city-state of Hamburg, where he incurred the wrath of the environmental lobby by building a waste incineration plant, earning him the nickname "Feuerfritze" (Fire Fritz). He worked in industry after that, first for oil multinational Shell and then for wind turbine maker RePower, which he helped develop. Now, as the outgoing CEO of the renewable energy group RWE Innogy, he is about to embark on his next major battle. "I'm going to make enemies in all camps," he says.He wants to break a taboo. "The climate catastrophe is not occurring," he writes in his book "Die Kalte Sonne" (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week.
He has only given the book to one climatologist, Jochem Marotzke, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, to read prior to its publication. Marotzke's assessment is clear: Vahrenholt represents the standpoints of climate skeptics. "A number of the hypotheses in the book were refuted long ago," Marotzke claims, but adds, on a self-critical note, that his profession has neglected to explain that global temperatures will not increase uniformly. Instead, says Marotzke, there could also be phases of stagnation and even minor declines in temperature. "This has exposed us to potential criticism," he says.
While books by climate heretics usually receive little attention, it could be different in Vahrenholt's case. "His fame," says Marotzke, "will ensure that there will be a debate on the issue."
-more at link-
Not Melting - Climate Hoax - Earth's Polar Ice Melting Less Than Thought
They act shocked about believing their own lies!
Phony models resulted in phony results, what a surprise.
2-8-12 By JASON KOEBLER
Better technology yields better data. The bad news is the extra water from 2003-2010 would fill Lake Erie eight times
Nearly 230 billion tons of ice is melting into the ocean from glaciers, ice caps, and mountaintops annually—which is actually less than previous estimates, according to new research by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
If the amount of ice lost between 2003 and 2010 covered the United States, the whole country would be under one-and-a-half feet of water, or it'd fill Lake Erie eight times, researchers say. Ocean levels worldwide are rising about six hundredths of an inch per year, according to researcher John Wahr.
-more of this limited story at link-
[How about the vast quantities of ice that is freezing?]
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Forgetting Adam Smith at all our peril. Farewell to the Free Market?
Every choice, but the right ones. They have failed to get out the way in a misguided attempt to replicate FDR, as taught in schools, how he saved America in the Depression. The reality was just the opposite. Unlike the romantic bilge perpetuated in American schools and economic texts, FDR failed miserably, perpetuating the economic failures throughout the depression and institutionalizing his failures with new, wasteful and regulatory bureaucracies.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? ♘
Western governments have compounded the economic crisis by rejecting the one force that can end it.
Winter 2012
Winter 2012
In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day. Through their actions, which have lately involved everything from European debt to the American financial system to house prices in Britain, government officials around the world have revealed a disturbing assumption: that they can decide how to allocate resources better than markets can. No longer, it seems, do Western governments use investor signals as valuable feedback in devising effective policies; instead, they ignore those signals and plow ahead with their policymaking, leaving chaos in their wake. Often, in fact, public officials actively mute market signals in a vain but destructive attempt to impose their own will on struggling economies.
The rejection of markets helps explain the strange inertia of 2011. Across the free world, the year went out just the way it had come in. In December, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy convened a breakthrough summit to rescue Europe’s single currency and its debt-crushed nations from speculators—just as they had done a year earlier. President Barack Obama ended the year bickering with Congress over short-term stimulus measures to jump-start recovery—just as he had done a year earlier. British prime minister David Cameron concluded 2011 promising to do something about bank executives’ rewarding themselves with massive bonuses while refusing to lend to home buyers and small businesses . . . just as he had done in late 2010. Global stock indices were stuck in limbo, at best, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average listlessly flirting with 12,000 as 2011 came to a close, just as it had 12 months previously.
Western leaders’ attack on free markets has made perfect sense to them. After all, the dominant narrative of the crisis has described the alleged failure of capitalism. As Obama put it in a December speech, the Great Recession struck because “everybody [was] left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” Sarkozy lamented back in 2008 that “financial capitalism” had “imposed its logic on the whole economy.” People close to Merkel tell reporters that she feels “duped” by investors. Yet free markets aren’t to blame for the various problems threatening Europe, America, and Britain, and abandoning market economics will weaken the West in ways that will be hard to reverse.
-read on at link-
The Surreal World of Asma al-Assad
The Rosett Report » The Surreal World of Asma al-Assad
by Claudia Rosett 2-7-12
In 2009, the Huffington Post featured a spread of her top fashion looks. A year ago, Vogue profiled her as a “Rose in the Desert,” with her Chanel necklace and Louboutin silk handbag. And just last March, she was patroness and keynote speaker at a Damascus conference of the Harvard Arab Alumni Club.
Then Syria erupted in revolt against the dynastic dictatorship of her husband, Bashar al-Assad, and Syria’s First Lady, Asma al-Assad, pretty much vanished from view. More than 5,000 Syrians have died, as the government has descended to the brute depths of shooting and shelling its own people, in its own cities — this brutality abetted by the Quds Force of Iran. For the past 11 months of mass protest and bloody repression, Asma al-Assad has been an elusive figure, rumored to be in London, then perhaps back in Syria, then reported last month as in Damascus but trying — unsuccessfully — to escape.
Now the Times of London is reporting having received an email from Asma, or at least from an intermediary in her office, saying her husband “is the President of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the First Lady supports him in that role.” The Times is a subscribers-only site, but the Telegraph reports on the Times’s story, quoting the unverified email as saying that Asma’s “very busy agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she has been involved with” as well as “supporting the President as needed,” and “bridging gaps and encouraging dialogue” as she “listens to and comforts the families of the victims of the violence.”
What to believe? Did Asma al-Assad actually author that email? Or authorize it? Did someone in her husband’s office decide it was time to put the First Lady on the record, again — for the first time in quite a while — as supporting the dictator?
-more at link-
Things that do matter to us - Why Does Arnold Bread Have Forty Different Kinds of bread?
"There ought to be a law." But should it be for or against? Doesn't matter to our legislators and regulators (and judges too). They will pass two laws, one for and one against. Some laws will combine 'for' and 'against'. ♘
And what did I tell you!
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