More This & That & Whatever.... The Best Of Intellectual Froglegs

[Ross]

A very interesting two hour and 6 minute debate.

[Ross]

He ain't related to me.
He's a highly educated idiot, IMO
How stupid can you be and be a Senator?
           This stupid!

[Warph]

12 Signs That Something Big Is Happening To The Earth's Crust
Under North And South America

By Michael Snyder, on March 30th, 2014

Why are fault lines and volcanoes all over North and South America suddenly waking up? 

Are we moving into a time when major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become much more common?  For the past several decades, we have been extremely fortunate to have experienced a period of extremely low seismic activity along the west coast of the United States.  You see, the west coast lies right along the infamous Ring of Fire.  Approximately 75 percent of all the volcanoes in the world are on the Ring of Fire, and approximately 90 percent of all global earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.  Scientists tell us that it is inevitable that "the Big One" will hit California someday, but people have gotten very apathetic about this because things have been so quiet out there for so many years.  Well, now it appears that things are changing in a big way - and not just along the California coast. 

The following are 12 signs that something big is happening to the earth's crust under North and South America...

#1 The 5.1 earthquake that shook Los Angeles on Friday was the worst earthquake that the city had seen in many years.

#2 Following that earthquake, there were more than 100 aftershocks.

#3 A 4.1 earthquake shook Los Angeles on Saturday.  Scientists are hoping that this earthquake swarm in southern California will end soon.

#4 Earlier this month, a 4.4 earthquake rattled Los Angeles so badly that it caused news anchors to dive under their desks.

#5 A 6.9 earthquake just off the coast of northern California in early March was the largest earthquake to hit the west coast of the United States since 2010.

#6 Up in Oregon, Mt. Hood recently experienced more than 100 earthquakes over the course of just a few days.

#7 During the past month, there have also been some other very unusual geologic events that have been happening up in Oregon...

•Two large landslides – one in the Columbia River Gorge dumped about 2,000 cubic yards of rock and debris on highway I84 just 3 miles west of the Hood River, and another blocked US30 near Portland.
•Loud booms and ground shaking reported by people from Lincoln to Tillamook Counties; some reported hearing a rumble, as well (No earthquakes recorded by the USGS in the area at the time.)
•A 20 ft. deep sinkhole swallowed a woman and her dog in her Portland backyard.

#8 A 4.8 earthquake rattled Yellowstone National Park on Sunday, and there have been at least 25 earthquakes at Yellowstone since Thursday.

#9 Scientists recently discovered that the Yellowstone supervolcano is now releasing far more helium gas than they had anticipated.

#10 Over the past month, there have been more than 130 earthquakes in the state of Oklahoma.  This is highly unusual.

#11 There have been several dozen earthquakes in Peru over the past month, including a 6.3 earthquake that made headlines all over the globe.

#12 Earlier this month, the northern coast of Chile was hit by more than 300 earthquakes in a seven day stretch.  41 of those earthquakes were stronger than magnitude 4.5.

Fortunately, the quake that hit Los Angeles on Friday did not cause too much lasting injury.  But it sure did shake people up.  The following is how the Los Angeles Times described the damage...

The quake, centered near La Habra, caused furniture to tumble, pictures to fall off walls and glass to break. Merchandise fell off store shelves, and there were reports of plate glass windows shattered.

In Brea, several people suffered minor injuries during a rock slide that overturned their car. Fullerton reported seven water main breaks. Carbon Canyon Road was closed.

Residents across Orange and Los Angeles counties and the Inland Empire reported swinging chandeliers, fireplaces dislodging from walls and lots of rattled nerves. The shake caused a rock slide in Carbon Canyon, causing a car to overturn, according to the Brea Police Department.

Why this particular earthquake is of such concern is because it occurred along the Puente Hills fault line. 

According to one seismologist, this is the fault line that would be most likely to "eat L.A."...

Experts said that the earthquakes occurred on the Puente Hills thrust fault, which stretches from the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Los Angeles.

Last night's quake was shallow, which 'means the shaking is very concentrated in a small area,' said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson.

Hauksson revealed that the earthquake was unusual because the 5.1 quake was preceded by the weaker foreshock.

Scientists such as Hauksson are very concerned about the Puente Hills fault because it runs directly under downtown Los Angeles.

'This is the fault that could eat L.A.,' seismologist Sue Hough told The LA Times in 2003.
The fact that this fault appears to be waking up is really bad news.

According to seismologists, a major earthquake along this fault line could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage...

Video simulations of a rupture on the Puente Hills fault system show how energy from a quake could erupt and be funneled toward L.A.'s densest neighborhoods, with the strongest waves rippling to the west and south across the Los Angeles Basin.

According to estimates by the USGS and Southern California Earthquake Center, a massive quake on the Puente Hills fault could kill from 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. Under this worst-case scenario, people in as many as three-quarters of a million households would be left homeless.

For years, we have watched as the rest of the Ring of Fire has been absolutely ravaged by major seismic events.

We all remember the earthquakes that caused the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the Japanese tsunami of 2011.

And the world mourned when major earthquakes devastated New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Japan and the Philippines.

Scientists assured us that it was only a matter of time before the west coast started to become seismically active again, and now it is happening.
If you live on the west coast, I hope that you will consider these things very carefully.

Just because the earth under your feet has been relatively quiet for a very long time does not mean that it will always be that way.

Something big appears to be happening to the earth's crust, and you won't want to be in the "danger zone" when things finally break loose.

[Warph]

Debt while Obuma has been in office:

(Debt Held by the Public vs. Intragovernmental Holdings)

Current Debt Held by the Public - Intragovernmental Holdings - Total Public Debt
01/20/2009 6,307,310,739,681.66    4,319,566,309,231.42         10,626,877,048,913.08


Current Debt Held by the Public - Intragovernmental Holdings - Total Public Debt 
03/27/2014 12,569,570,170,165.53    4,964,009,645,908.60        17,533,579,816,074.13

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/search?startMonth=01&startDay=20&startYear=2009&endMonth=03&endDay=27&endYear=2014

[Warph]

Yellowstone Area Rattled By Small Earthquakes

(Caused by global warming or fracking?)

Via KRTV
http://www.krtv.com/news/yellowstone-area-rattled-by-small-earthquake/


The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a 4.8 magnitude earthquake occurred near West Yellowstone on Sunday morning.

The quake was centered about 23 miles east-northeast of West Yellowstone at about 6:30 a.m.; that is about 65 miles south-southeast of Bozeman.

The quake was reported at a depth of 4.2 miles.

The USGS website reports that people felt the quake in Gardiner, Montana; Jackson, Wyoming; and Rexburg, Idaho.

Several smaller quakes, ranging from 2.5 to 3.1, were also reported in the region on Sunday morning.

There have been no reports of injuries or damage.

Montana is one of the most seismically-active states; the vast majority of earthquakes are minor, primarily of interest only to geologists and researchers.

But occasionally, Montana earthquakes can be larger – and deadly. In 1935 there were a series of earthquakes between Yellowstone and Helena that killed four people and caused more than $4 million dollars worth of damage.

The 1959 "Hebgen Lake" earthquake in Montana killed 28 people, and caused more than $11 million dollars worth of damage.

[Warph]

Concerns Over Measurement of Fukushima Fallout

By DAVID MCNEILL | THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

One of the abandoned towns

A decontamination worker at the entrance of Futaba, an abandoned town near the Fukushima nuclear plant

TOKYO — In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama's initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government's Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear accident.
Two months later, as Mr. Aoyama prepared to publish his findings in a short, nonpeer-reviewed article for Nature, the director general of the institute called with an unusual demand — that Mr. Aoyama remove his own name from the paper.
"He said there were points he didn't understand, or want to understand," the researcher recalled. "I was later told that he did not want to say that Fukushima radioactivity was worse than Chernobyl." The head of the institute, who has since retired, declined to comment for this article. Mr. Aoyama asked for his name to be removed, he said, and the article was not published.
Continue reading the main story
The pressure he felt is not unusual — only his decision to speak about it. Off the record, university researchers in Japan say that even now, three years after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, they feel under pressure to play down the impact of the disaster. Some say they cannot get funds or university support for their work. In several cases, the professors say, they have been obstructed or told to steer clear of data that might cause public "concern."
"Getting involved in this sort of research is dangerous politically," said Joji Otaki, a biologist at Japan's Ryukyu University who has written papers suggesting that radioactivity at Fukushima has triggered inherited deformities in a species of butterfly. His research is paid for through private donations, including crowdfunding, a sign, he said, that the public supports his work. "It's an exceptional situation," he said.
Continue reading the main story
The precise health impact of the Fukushima disaster is disputed. The government has defined mandatory evacuation zones around the Daiichi plant as areas where cumulative dose levels might reach 20 millisieverts per year, the typical worldwide limit for nuclear-power-plant workers. The limit recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection is one millisievert per year for the public, though some scientists argue that below 100 millisieverts the threat of increased cancers is negligible.
In an effort to lower radiation and persuade about 155,000 people to return home, the government is trying to decontaminate a large area by scraping away millions of tons of radioactive dirt and storing it in temporary dumps. Experts at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology put the cost of this project at $50 billion — widely considered an underestimate.
The chance to study in this real-life laboratory has drawn a small number of researchers from around the world. Timothy A. Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina who has written widely on Chernobyl, studies the impact of radiation on bird and insect life. He has published papers suggesting abnormalities and defects in some Fukushima species. But he said his three research excursions to Japan had been difficult.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
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In one case, a Japanese professor and two postdoctoral students dropped out of a joint research paper, telling him they could not risk association with his findings. "They felt it was too provocative and controversial," he said, "and the postdocs were worried it could hamper their future job prospects."
Mr. Mousseau is careful to avoid comparisons with the Soviet Union, which arrested and even imprisoned scientists who studied Chernobyl. Nevertheless, he finds the lukewarm support for studies in Japan troubling: "It's pretty clear that there is self-censorship or professors have been warned by their superiors that they must be very, very careful," he said.
The "more insidious censorship" is the lack of funding at a national level for these kinds of studies, he added. "They're putting trillions of yen into moving dirt around and almost nothing into environmental assessment."
Long before an earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima meltdown, critics questioned the influence of Japan's powerful nuclear lobby over the country's top universities. Some professors say their careers have been hobbled because they expressed doubts about the nation's nuclear policy and the coalition of bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and elite academics who created it.
Mr. Aoyama, who now works at Fukushima University, sees no evidence of an organized conspiracy in the lack of openness about radiation levels — just official timidity. Despite the problems with his Nature article, he has written or co-written eight published papers since 2011 on coastal water pollution and other radiation-linked themes.
But stories of problems with Fukushima-related research are common, he said, including accounts of several professors' being told not to measure radiation in the surrounding prefectures. "There are so many issues in our community," he said. "The key phrase is 'don't cause panic."'
He is also critical of the flood of false rumors circulating about the reach of Fukushima's radioactive payload.
Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's department of marine chemistry and geochemistry, in Massachusetts, who has worked with Mr. Aoyama, said he has spent much of his professional energy fighting the rumor mill. The cause is not helped, he added, by institutional attempts to gag Japanese professors.
"Researchers are told not to talk to the press, or they don't feel comfortable about talking to the press without permission," Mr. Buesseler said. A veteran of three post-earthquake research trips to Japan, he wants the authorities to put more money into investigating the impact on the food chain of Fukushima's release of cesium and strontium. "Why isn't the Japanese government paying for this, since they have most to gain?"
One reason, critics say, is that after a period of national soul searching, when it looked as if Japan might scrap its commercial reactors, the government is again supporting nuclear power. Since the conservative Liberal Democrats returned to power, in late 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun trying to sell Japan's nuclear technology abroad.
Much of the government funding for academic research in Japan is funneled through either the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science or the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Proposals are screened by government officials and reviewed by an academic committee.
Yusuke Shoji, a spokesman for the ministry, cannot say how many proposals for studying the impact of radiation had been greenlighted, but he insists that the application system is fair. ''The screening is conducted by peer review, so we don't direct or don't favor one particular research field,'' he said. ''We assess applications purely from the scientific point of view.'' The Japan Society also says its applications process is not politicized.
Professors, meanwhile, say that rather than simply defend what is a piecemeal approach to studying the disaster, the government should take the lead in creating a large, publicly financed project.
"If we've ever going to make any headway into the environmental impact of these disasters, statistical power, scientific power, is what counts," said Mr. Mousseau of the University of South Carolina. "We get at it with massive replication, by going to hundreds of locations. That costs money."

[Warph]

Obumacare Provision: SOB Obuma's "Forced" Home Inspections

Joshua Cook August 14, 2013

"Clearly, any family may be visited by federally paid agents for almost any reason."

According to an Obamacare provision millions of Americans will be targeted.

The Health and Human Services' website states that your family will be targeted if you fall under the "high-risk" categories below:

■Families where mom is not yet 21.
■Families where someone is a tobacco user.
■Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities.
■Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.

There is no reference to Medicaid being the determinant for a family to be "eligible."

In 2011, the HHS announced $224 million will be given to support evidence-based home visiting programs to "help parents and children." Individuals from the state will implement these leveraging strategies to "enhance program sustainability."

Constitutional attorney and author Kent Masterson Brown states:
"This is not a "voluntary" program. The eligible entity receiving the grant for performing the home visits is to identify the individuals to be visited and intervene so as to meet the improvement benchmarks. A homeschooling family, for instance, may be subject to "intervention" in "school readiness" and "social-emotional developmental indicators." A farm family may be subject to "intervention" in order to "prevent child injuries." The sky is the limit.

Although the Obama administration would claim the provision applies only to Medicaid families, the new statute, by its own definition, has no such limitation. Intervention may be with any family for any reason. It may also result in the child or children being required to go to certain schools or taking certain medications and vaccines and even having more limited – or no – interaction with parents. The federal government will now set the standards for raising children and will enforce them by home visits."

Part of the program will require massive data collecting of private information including all sources of income and the amount gathered from each source.

A manual called Child Neglect: A Guide for Prevention, Assessment, and Intervention includes firearms as potential safety hazard  and will require inspectors to verify safety compliance and record each inspection into a database.

Last session South Carolina Rep. Bill Chumley introduced a bill, H.3101 that would nullify certain provisions of Obamacare. The bill would give the state attorney general the authority to authorize law enforcement to arrest federal agents for trespassing. It would make forced home inspections under Obamacare illegal in South Carolina. It passed in the House but died in the senate.

Kent Brown and Rep. Rick Quinn discuss "forced" home inspections under Obamacare in the video below:

UPDATE: Politifact has said this article is a lie. Snopes has claimed it is false. Both are left leaning sites, of course, but we have refutation of their claims from Constitutional attorney Kent Brown. Click here to read the refutation.

[Warph]

Disaster Is Coming

By

Michael Snyder, on April 8th, 2014

Sometimes I think that I sound like a broken record.  I am constantly using phrases such as "get prepared while you still can" and "time is running out".  In fact, I use them so often that people are starting to criticize me for it.  But the truth is that only a small percentage of people out there are actively taking steps to get ready for what is coming.  Most of the country is not prepared at all.  In many ways, it is just like 2007 all over again.  There were many people that could see what was about to happen and were doing all they could to warn people, but most did not listen.  And then the great financial crisis of 2008 struck and millions of people lost their jobs and their homes.  Unfortunately, the next great wave of the economic collapse is going to be even more painful than the last one.  It is imperative that people get prepared for what is on the horizon, but for the most part it is just not happening.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that we have such short memories and such short attention spans in America today.  Thanks to years of television and endless hours on the Internet, I find myself having a really hard time focusing on anything for more than just a few moments.  And we are accustomed to living in an "instant society" where we don't have to wait for anything.  In such a society, we are used to "news cycles" that only last for 24 hours and very few people take a "long-term view" of anything.

And another one of the big problems that we are facing is something called "normalcy bias".  The following is how Wikipedia defines it...

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

Over the past several years, the U.S. economy has been relatively stable.  And that is a good thing.  But it has also lulled millions upon millions of people into a false sense of security and complacency.  At this point, most Americans consider 2008 to be a temporary bump in the road, and most assume that the U.S. economy will always be strong.

Unfortunately, that is not the truth.  As I have written about previously, the long-term trends that are destroying our economy have continued to get worse since 2008, and none of the problems that caused the last financial crisis have been fixed.

We are steamrolling toward the edge of an economic cliff, and most people in our entertainment-addicted society are totally oblivious to what is going on.  So they are not doing anything to get ready for the immense economic pain that is coming.  The following are 16 signs that most Americans are completely unprepared for the coming economic collapse...

#1 Could you come up with $2000 right now?  According to a shocking study that was just released, 40 percent of Americans could not...

Forty percent of individuals in the U.S. said they could not or probably could not come up with $2,000 if an unexpected need arose, according to research by Atif Mian of Princeton University and Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

#2 In that same study, Americans were asked the following question...

"Do you have 3 months emergency funds to cover expenses in case of sickness, job loss, economic downturn?"
An astounding 60 percent of people that responded said that they do not.

#3 Another study found that less than one out of every four Americans has enough money stored away to cover six months of expenses.

#4 Some people are actually trying really hard to get ahead, but admittedly that is really tough to do when we are all being taxed into oblivion.  In fact, it was reported this week that Americans now spend more on taxes than they spend on food, clothing and housing combined.

#5 Right now, more Americans are dependent on the government than ever before.  In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that currently gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government.

#6 It is estimated that less than 10 percent of the entire U.S. population owns any gold or silver for investment purposes.  That is a stunning number.

#7 It has been estimated that there are approximately 3 million "preppers" in the United States.  But that means that almost everyone else is not prepping.

#8-16 The following are nine more statistics that come from a survey conducted by the Adelphi Center for Health Innovation.  As you can see, a significant portion of the population is not even prepared for a basic emergency that would last for just a few days...

•44 percent don't have first-aid kits

•48 percent lack emergency supplies

•53 percent do not have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home

•55 percent believe local authorities will come to their rescue if disaster strikes

•52 percent have not designated a family meeting place if they are separated during an emergency

•42 percent do not know the phone numbers of all of their immediate family members

•21 percent don't know if their workplace has an emergency preparedness plan

•37 percent do not have a list of the drugs they are taking

•52 percent do not have copies of health insurance documents

What do you think is going to happen to these people once the economy collapses and there is chaos in the streets?

How are they going to survive?

After all of these years of writing about the coming economic collapse, nothing has changed as far as the long-term outlook is concerned.

We are still heading toward a complete and total economic meltdown.

But most Americans continue to have faith in the system, and the mainstream media keeps assuring them that everything is going to be just fine.

And in this "dumbed-down" society of ours, most people are perfectly content to let others do their thinking for them.  In America today, only one out of every six Americans can even find Ukraine on a map of the world.  That is how far we have fallen.

In this day and age, it is imperative that we all learn how to think for ourselves.  The foundations of our society are crumbling, our economic system is failing and the blind are leading the blind.  If we do not learn to make our own decisions, we are just going to follow the rest of the herd into oblivion.

In addition, we all need to start taking a long-term view of things.  Just because the economic collapse is not going to happen this month does not mean that it is not going to happen.  When you step back and take a broader view of what is happening, it becomes exceedingly clear where we are heading.

Sadly, most Americans will never do that.

[Warph]

What In The World Is Happening To The Nasdaq?

By Michael Snyder, on April 7th, 2014

All of a sudden, the Nasdaq is absolutely tanking. 

On Monday, it fell more than 1 percent after dropping 3.6 percent on Thursday and Friday combined.  At this point, the Nasdaq is off to the worst start to a year that we have seen since 2008, and we all remember what happened back then.  So why is this happening?  In recent years, the Nasdaq has been ground zero for "dotcom bubble 2.0".  The hottest stocks in the entire world are on the Nasdaq - we are talking about stocks like Yahoo, Netflix, Apple, Tesla, Google and Facebook.  Those stocks have gone to absolutely incredible heights, but now they are starting to fall.   Some are blaming insider selling, and without a doubt the "smart money" is starting to flee the stock market.  Just check out this chart... 

Others are blaming low expectations for first-quarter earnings or the tapering of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve.  But whatever is causing this decline, it is starting to get alarming.  The Nasdaq just experienced its largest three day fall since November 2011.

No stock can resist gravity forever.  What goes up must eventually come down.  This is especially true for stock prices that become grotesquely distorted.

On Wall Street, a price to earnings ratio of 20 to 25 is usually considered fairly normal.  In recent years, the price to earnings ratios for many of these "hot tech stocks" have gone way, way beyond that.  For example, posted below is a screen capture from Bloomberg TV that was featured in a recent Zero Hedge article...

There is no way in the world that such valuations are justified.

We have been living in another dotcom bubble, and it was inevitable that it was going to burst at some point.

The following is how one financial industry insider described the carnage that we have seen on the Nasdaq over the past few days...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2014/04/07/stocks-monday/7412731/

...Gary Kaltbaum, president of money-management firm Kaltbaum Capital Management, describes the carnage of once high-flying "growth" names in the Nasdaq composite, that have come crashing down to earth: "The best we can describe what we have been recently seeing in 'growth-land' is a 50-car pileup," Kaltbaum told clients in a morning research note. "Call them what you want ... risk areas, growth stocks, froth areas ... they are melting away."

And of course it isn't just the Nasdaq that has been seeing declines over the past few days.  On Monday, some of the biggest names on the Dow also fell precipitiously...

"Dow Down 300 in 3 days: Here's what's killing the Dow"
http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2014/04/07/down-300-in-3-days-heres-whats-killing-the-dow/

...Visa, Goldman Sachs and Boeing are among the biggest drags on the Dow Monday, falling 2.1%, 2.9% and 1.4% respectively. Weakness in these stocks is especially problematic since the Dow gives greatest weight to the stocks with the highest per-share prices. And at $203.41, $158.56 and $125.59 respectively, Visa, Goldman and Boeing are the stocks that really matter to the measure.

And the trouble in these stocks isn't just today. So far this year, Visa is down 8.7%, Goldman is off 10.5% and Boeing is down 8.0%.

This recent decline has many analysts groping for answers.

Some believe that it is simply a "rotation" as investors leave growth stocks that have become overvalued and move into safer, more traditional stocks.

Others are pointing their fingers at the Federal Reserve...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101561316

...Peter Boockvar, chief market strategist at Lindsey Group, believes it's all about the Fed. "I'm still amazed at the complacency with the Fed taper, and a lot of people still don't think it's a big deal," he said. "I just don't think it's a coincidence that the high-fliers are getting popped when the Fed is half way done with QE. We've got tightening smack in front of your face with the taper."

In fact, some believe that the really big stock market decline will happen later this year when the Fed starts to wrap up quantitative easing completely...
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101534213

...Once the Fed begins to truly reduce its massive bond buying program later this year, markets could see a quarter of their value wiped off the books, a private equity pro told CNBC on Friday.

Jay Jordan, founder of the Jordan Company, issued the dire warning during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box," saying a 25 percent drop could extend to all asset classes. He blames the monetary policies of former Fed chair Ben Bernanke for artificially inflating asset prices through super-low interest rates.

Yet others point to the fact that we are now moving into earnings season, and it is being projected that corporate earnings will come in at very poor levels.  In fact, it is being estimated that overall earnings for companies in the S&P 500 for the first quarter will be down 1.2 percent.

So what should we expect to see next?

Whether it happens this month or not, at some point a massive stock market correction is coming.  In recent years, the financial markets have become completely and totally divorced from economic reality, and that is a state of affairs that cannot last indefinitely.

Many have compared the current state of affairs to 2008, but to me what is happening right now is eerily reminiscent of 2007.  The Dow soared to record heights quite a few times that year, but there were constant rumblings of economic trouble in the background.  Stocks began to drop steadily late in the year, and 2008 ultimately turned out to be an utter bloodbath.

I believe that what is happening right now is setting the stage for another financial bloodbath.  I truly believe that we will look back on this two year time period and regard it as a major "turning point" for America.

And as I have written about previously, we are in far worse shape as a nation than we were back in 2008.  We have far more debt, the "too big to fail banks" have a much larger share of the banking industry, the derivatives bubble has gotten completely and totally out of control, and our overall economy is far weaker than it was back then.

In other words, we are now even more vulnerable.  When the next great financial crisis strikes us, it is going to be absolutely crippling.

Now is not the time to get complacent.

Now is the time to get prepared, because time is running out.

[Warph]

$6 Billion Dollars Vanishes From State Dept. Under Hillary Clinton

April 07, 2014

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/04/6-bil-vanishes-from-state-dept-under-hillary-clinton/

In a mind-boggling example of how the government blows—or perhaps steals—our tax dollars, billions vanished from the U.S. State Department mostly
while Hillary Clinton ran it, according to a new alert issued by the agency's inspector general.

Could the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be using the $6 Billion in cash to fund an upcoming presidential campaign?

In all, $6 billion are missing and it's highly unlikely any of the money will ever be recovered. The cash was supposed to be used to pay contractors but it just disappeared and documents that could help track the dough cannot be located. How convenient! The paper trail, which federal law says must be maintained in the case of government contracts, has been destroyed or was never created to begin with.

How could this possibly happen? Like a lot of government agencies, outside contracts are a free-for-all at the State Department with virtually no oversight. Hundreds of millions of dollars are doled out annually for a variety of services and no one bothers to follow up on the deals. This "exposes the department to significant financial risk," according to the State Department Inspector General, which issued a special management alert this month outlining the lost $6 billion. The watchdog further writes that "it creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file."

Among the examples listed in the memo is a recent investigation of the closeout process for contracts involving the U.S. mission in Iraq. Investigators could not locate 33 of the 115 contract files totaling approximately $2.1 billion. Even of the files they found, more than half contained insufficient documents required by federal law. In one billion-dollar deal involving the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in Afghanistan, the actual contract was determined to be "incomplete."

In one alarming case a contract file conveniently omitted that a $52 million deal was awarded to a company owned by the spouse of another State Department contractor employee performing as a specialist. In other cited cases a contracting officer actually falsified government technical review information in a $100 million deal and a contracting officer's representative allowed nearly $800,000 to be paid on a deal with no official documents to support the payment. It's the free-flow of public funds under extremely suspicious circumstances.

At the very least the State Department is violating its own policy, according to the inspector general, which divulges that it's found "repeated examples of poor contract file administration over the years." The watchdog confirms that "it is the Department's policy that all contracts, regardless of dollar value, be properly documented so as to provide complete record of: pre-solicitation activities; the solicitation, evaluation, and award process; and [sic] the administration of the contract through closeout."

This unbelievable report documenting the mysterious disappearance of $6 billion from the coffers of a major government agency brings to mind a similar and equally enraging story reported by Judicial Watch a few years ago. The Pentagon somehow lost $6.6 billion sent to Iraq for post-invasion "reconstruction."

The money was bundled in chunks of $100 bills and transported in turboprop military cargo planes known as C-130 Hercules. About $2.4 billion fit in each aircraft and 21 flights made trips, transporting a total of $12 billion in American currency to Iraq. More than half the money has never been recovered, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

A year later nearly half a billion dollars in oil destined for the Afghan National Army vanished. We will never know what happened because the Pentagon improperly shredded records that could have solved the mystery, according to a federal audit that exposed the fraud. The oil was part of a $1 billion fuel program largely funded by the U.S. government, which of course, means it was mostly Americans who saw their tax dollars blown in yet another government corruption scheme.

Waste and fraud are par for the course in most bloated government agencies and JW has exposed a number of alarming examples over the years, both domestically and internationally. They involve practically all agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) scandal-plagued food-stamp program, Medicare and Medicaid, the famously corrupt U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and President Obama's fraud-infested $787 billion stimulus boondoggle, to name a few.