SAR #14039

It would be nice to know how fast we are roasting our planet. - Jeremy Grantham

Click Your Heels: Spain has the following: Record unemployment – greater than during the Great Depression, disastrous youth unemployment – well over 50%, record levels of bad loans, record suicide rates, a broken social-welfare system, broken banks with over $3 trillion in loans to the now cratering emerging markets, and interest rates on their 30-year bonds that are lower than the US treasury pays for 10-year borrowing. It's magic, go figure.

Well, Damn: One of the right's big complaints about Obamacare was that it would create a nation of part-timers as companies cut hours to duck paying for healthcare. And they were right, except for the part about part-time jobs increasing. Last year we created only 1,835,000 full time jobs and a whopping 8,000 or so part-time ones. Check with Fox for the spin.

Quoted: "Fuck the EU." Victoria Nuland, America's top diplomatic representative to the EU.

Judgment Day: The mission to Mars cost $2.4 billion. The tax-exempt, taxpayer funded NFL took in $9 billion this season. China spent $132 million per event for their turn in the spotlight. All of this is dwarfed by the $5 1 billion Putin has paid his cronies to build the venue at Sochi. Priorities vary.

Asked & Answered: How many criminals have NSA's phone records busted? “Maybe one.”

Silver Lining: ”With the NSA's complete-and-total data-acquisition and mining infrastructure at its disposal, we might banish Medicare fraud, Welfare cheats, Defense contractor malfeasance, Co.'s flouting  environmental regulations, Govt contractor bid-riggings, bridge-closings, bogus analyst recommendations, HFT collusion, Bernie Madoff, self-detonating CDOs, and even incontrovertibly-nail GOOG, AMZN, & SBUX for rather obvious and cynical tax evasion ploys are surely just a hop, skip and several keystrokes away. No wonder the latter are becoming uncomfortable with their prior cooperation.”

Point Of View: The Vatican predictedly claims that the UN report on the Catholic Church's complicity in decades of sexual abuse of children is “prejudiced” against the church. Nope. We're prejudiced against child abuse, which shouldn't be the same thing, but too often is.

Translation: Bill Haslam, erstwhile truck-stop operator and governor of Tennessee is doing his best to prevent the UAW from invading the state and advocating better pay for tenant farmers workers employed by German auto makers. “We’re trying to be really clear,” he said, implying that fair working conditions and union membership would ruin a good thing for the foreign car companies and their political hacks.

Without Comment: “Walmart is getting too expensive for the middle class.” True.  And sad.

Kilroy Was There: On a Wednesday afternoon about 900,000 years ago, two guys, two or three ladies and some children walked along the shoreline near present-day Happisburgh, England, about 150 miles NE of London, leaving their footprints in the sand. They are the oldest human footprints found outside of Africa.

I Can Get It For You Wholesale: Apple bought up $14 billion of its own stock in the last two weeks, driving the price back above $500 a share. Too bad they didn't have anything useful to invest in.

Porn O'Graph: How big is big? Big, very big.

The Parting Shot:

 Spotted Drum, Equetus punctatus.