SAR #15182

If it sounds too good to be true, Google it.

The Numbering of the Beast: For 5 years the Roman Catholic church in Norway inflated the number of congregates by several thousand annually in order to illegally obtain over $5 million in state aid. 
 
Cui bonō ? Documents released by WikiLeaks detail ten years of NSA's economic espionage against French businesses, including the details of every French business deal valued over $200 million. Which US corporations this information benefited were not identified.

Inoculated: California now requires that all students attending either private or public schools must be fully vaccinated regardless of the kookie beliefs of their parents. Just over the hill in Colorado, a court has ruled that public funds may not be used for private schools. Back East, New York has banned all hydraulic fracking. Let's hope that all this is contagious.

Seed Corn: Over the last year 90% of the free cash flow of SP500 companies has gone to shareholders, not into expanding the business, replacing equipment, or otherwise investing for the future. Maybe they know something.

The Beats Go On: Now that Fitbit and the Apple Watch are monitoring your heart rate, and Allstate wants to keep track of you through sensors on the steering wheel that detect heart rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram signals, how long before they couple all this and the GPS data and pass it on to the cops every time you spend more than 20 minutes in a bar?

Up Up And... “Of the five Federal Reserve districts which have released their June manufacturing surveys – two forecast weak growth and three are in contraction.” The Chicago PMI figure for June was the worst since 2008. 
 
Lies In These United States: Some jurisdictions in Alabama are so repulsed by the idea of equality that they have stopped issuing marriage licenses. Same in Texas, where clerks say that obeying the law is against their religion. In Louisiana it is the whole state judicial system that doesn't understand that the fight is over, and, just like the Big One, they lost. A legislator in Utah thinks the state should just do away with marriage altogether.