Saturday, May 4, 2013

SAR #13124

Nothing else matters as long as the stock market keeps going up, right?

Survey: Do you know where your shirts were made? Should you hide some of them? Go look. Great, none from Bangladesh. What do you know about work conditions in Vietnam, Pakistan, Cambodia...

Victory: The Labor Department is now pretending that unemployment has reached a four-year low at 7.5%, once about 17 million unemployed are disappeared one way or another. But when will we get back to 'normal' and what's that? How would Wall Street, the financial elite, mainstream economists, institutional investors and financial analysts react if the Fed announced its target unemployment rate was 3%, as it once was?

Schizophrenia: The late snowstorm is not disproof of global warming – it is another installment of the drought-flood cycles predicted for the Mississippi and Missouri drainage areas by climate scientists.

Pirates All: JPMorgan is caught in another mess of its own making, engaging in not one, not two, but eight different schemes that transformed “money-losing power plants into profit centers.” When caught, a senior executive lied about it gave “false and misleading statements” under oath. That's perjury, but no one will go to jail – we're all bankers here.

Takes One To Know One: Colin Powell's chief of staff while he was Secretary of State cautions that the use of chemical weapons in Syria might well be “an Israeli false flag operation.”

Go With The Flow: Heads up: it does not matter how much energy we have in reserves, it's what we've got at the corner station that counts. Fossil fuel reserves of any sort – oil, coal, gas – are reserves and are not available now, today.  And maybe they never will be. Today's production – the flow – is all that you get to use. Claims, generally unverified and unverifiable, are hypothetical, sketchy, guesstimated, undeveloped, often undiscovered resources imagined to be in the ground by agencies and companies that have a financial interest in convincing you that salt is sugar.

And Another Thing: Paul Erhlich makes a good point: we may kill ourselves and destroy civilization in any number of ways before global warming gets us.

Lawyer Up: In a display of stupidity solidarity, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of utilities in the state to charge customers for future improvements – like,say, nuclear power plants - even if they never get built.

Just the Facts: The suicide rate among white middle-aged people increased by 40% between 1999 and 2010. The report did not give their employment status nor comment on their housing situation.

Speaking of Peaking: Oil output from Alaska's North Slope fell 4.9% y/y in March, to 530 thousand barrels a day (kbd). The North Slope peaked at 2 million barrels a day in 1987, fell to 981 kbd by 2000 and has now declined 73.5%.

Improv: Explain how Fox News guests can equate birth control with statutory rape, or claim that science and the Enlightenment lead to the Holocaust.

Porn O'Graph: Looks like we're in for nasty weather...

The Parting Shot:

130504

Sweet Anise, Osmorhiza longistylis

2 comments:

HS said...

Speaking/Peaking: If you ever really wonder what's going on in the North Slope, as opposed to what the teevee insinuates, get yourself a copy of BPT's annual report.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

Now, now, HS, Don't be a tease... If you've got something to share with the class, speak up.