Thursday, August 13, 2015

SAR #15225


 
Game, Set & Matched: Jebbie wants to blame Hil and That Guy In The White House for ISIL. No way. Besides, no Bush should say anything about Iraq. 
 
Ham Sandwiches: California has become the first state to remove grand juries from the investigation of police shootings – mainly because they are wholly creatures of the prosecutor who presents only carefully selected evidence, tells the jury what it means, then tells them what to decide. 
 
With Two You Get Egg Roll: On Monday China devalued the yuan by 2% against the dollar. On Tuesday it devalued it another 1.6%. Nah, we're not having a currency war. Not yet.

Brownshirts: A British reporter in Ferguson wonders why white guys walking around with assault rifles and handguns are ignored by the cops, who are busy arresting peaceful black demonstrators. Or worse, charging reporters with “trespassing and interfering with a police officer” when simply reporting on the riots. 
 
No Means No: Republican candidates Marco Rubio and Scott Walker want to ban all abortions under all circumstances. No abortion. Criminal penalties for the women and the doctors. No presidential nominee has ever held such a savage and unyielding position. Stock up on hangers just in case.

On Second Thought: A study published in the British Medical Journal adds support to the growing suspicion that most of the prevailing guidance on healthy diets is misguided at best - well-intentioned but not supported by evidence. Recent large scale studies have found no link between eating saturated fats (meat, cheese, butter, eggs or chocolate) and heart disease, strokes or type-2 diabetes. However, trans-fats, the darling of the food-like substance manufacturing folks, did not get a passing grade.

Nutshelled: In the US, worker productivity has surged while labor costs have dropped, so naturally the Fed is afraid of wage-driven inflation. Which is total nonsense, made vaguely palatable by the manipulated employment data
 
Privatization Rules! Only 11% of US college students study at for-profit institutions, yet they make up 44% of those defaulting on their student loans. Maybe that's because employers are far less likely to hire applicants from for-profit online schools than graduates of boring old public colleges. 
 
Rose By Any Other Name: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms declines to process Freedom Of Information requests because the Act applies to government agencies and it is a government bureau. Will was right, first we kill the lawyers.

Oops: At the moment, Mr. Sanders is outpolling Ms. Clinton among NH voters 44 to 37%.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Germany and China don't play nice. Both of them in their press have ranted on about Greece (and the USA) failing to save.

There is a huge amount of confusion that plagues most discussions about savings, and even economists regularly make this mistake. They confuse household savings with total savings, and explain changes in savings by assuming that there have been changes in household savings preferences.

Ask them why German savings rose in the last decade and they will give you a story about German prudence and thriftiness, but in fact the main reason German savings rose was because after growing faster than GDP in the 1990s, worker’s wages grew more slowly than GDP in the last decade. The same thing is true about China for most of the past four decades until around 2011-12. In both cases the median household share of GDP declined, and with it household consumption declined as a share of GDP.

Because most consumption is household consumption, the result is that in both countries total consumption declined as a share of GDP, which is the same as saying total savings rose as a share of GDP. What happened to household thrift didn’t matter, even though nearly every explanation of German and Chinese savings stresses cultural preferences for thrift.

Either way, both countries are sitting on huge piles of US bonds, and both have used tricks in setting currency rates to benefit their own trade. Driving Greece into the hole has done miracles for stalled German export by lowering the exchange rate of the Euro.

Rick said...


Seems like your kind of story:


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/

Keep up the good work - your site is one of my few everyday reads.

kwark said...

RE "Rose by any other Name": Wait a minute. . . the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Bureau of Reclamation respond to hundreds of FOIA requests each year as do all the other "Bureaus" of the Department of Interior. What brainiac among the Senior Executive Service dweebs at ATF decided this was a good approach? Good job Brownie! Time to promote him/her!