Category: Monday Wake Up Call

Monday Wake Up Call – August 31, 2015

Today’s wake up is for Turkey. In addition to our geopolitical issues with them, they are waging a sub-rosa battle for water with Syria and Iraq. The Tigris-Euphrates river basin, which feeds Syria and Iraq, is rapidly drying up. It is drying up due to overuse, and because Turkey has dammed both rivers for its own use, both for agricultural irrigation and in some cases, for hydropower. For the geography-impaired, here is a view of the rivers and the countries:

Tigris and Euphrates

The water that now goes to farmers in Turkey used to flow down the Euphrates and Tigris to Syria and Iraq. In Syria, three drought years forced many farmers to leave the land. From Foreign Affairs:

By 2011, drought-related crop failure had pushed up to 1.5 million displaced farmers to abandon their land; the displaced became a wellspring of recruits for the Free Syrian Army and for such groups as the Islamic State (also called ISIS) and al Qaeda.

A 2010 study showed that today’s Syrian rebel strongholds of Aleppo, Deir al-Zour, and Raqqa were among the areas hardest hit by crop failure. In Iraq, the story is the same:

In Karbala, farmers are in despair and are reportedly considering abandoning their land. In Baghdad, the poorest neighborhoods rely on the Red Cross for drinking water. At times, the Red Cross has had to supply over 150,000 liters a day. Further south, Iraq’s central marshes, the Middle East’s largest wetlands, are disappearing again after being re-flooded after Saddam Hussein was ousted.

Syria and Iraq cannot solve the problem on their own. While there are agreements about minimum water flows between Turkey, Syria and Iraq, they are honored in the breach. Between 1975 and 1991, on three occasions, Syria and Iraq threatened Turkey with military action over reduced river flows due to Turkey damming the rivers.

Saudi Arabia and Russia mediated tensions among the three countries in the 1970s, but the challenge today is that no international or regional powers have been willing to force the countries to work together. Foreign Affairs says that 40 memoranda of understanding struck between Iraq and Turkey over water sharing at the height of the drought in 2009 have led to almost no concrete progress. More from Foreign Affairs: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Although current agreements between Syria and Turkey provide for 500 cubic meters per second, 46% of which goes to Iraq…According to Jasim al Asadi, a hydrologist with Nature Iraq, by the time the Euphrates reaches Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, a minimum of 90 cubic meters per second is required for municipal, industrial, and agricultural use. Sometimes, the flow can be as low as 18 cubic meters per second…Before major dam construction in the 1970s, [in Turkey] the average flow in the Euphrates was about 720 cubic meters per second. Now it is about 260 as it enters Iraq.

Nearly two-third of the water flow Iraq used to get is gone, and there is no way to replace it. Moreover what little water is currently still flowing may soon be gone as well: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Full implementation of [Turkey’s water plans]…could reduce the Euphrates’ flows to Iraq by 80%. Now, consider that Iraq relies on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for over 90% of its freshwater, and you can imagine the potential fallout of the [Turkish] plan on Iraq’s agricultural production.

Turkey has had its own issues with drought, but Turkey is not facing a national-level water emergency like Syria and Iraq. So is there a solution? Not today. Turkey won’t help Syria. There is some hope in Iraq, since relations between the countries is better now than at any point in the past 10 years.

But Turkey controls the headwaters of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. To ignore the imminent water crisis is to ignore another major fault line in the Middle East. Turkey needs to wake up and deal with the countries downstream who desperately need a larger share of water. To help them wake up, here is Jimmy Cliff doing “By the Rivers of Babylon” live in NYC in 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cjcNJRzD8c

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

NRA radio host says calling for new gun laws right after the VA shooting is gross. IT’S TOO SOON!!! Besides, as ANY red-blooded White Christian patriot will tell you, MOR GUNZ!!! The NRA has a radio station?

The Beatles 10 greatest guitar moments. Includes Wrongo’s favorite, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” from Abbey Road (1969).

The Onion reports that a gay teen is worried that he might be Christian. His father says, “No son of mine is going to try to get intelligent design into school textbooks.” He added, “I just want my normal gay son back.”

Alabama is trying to make it even harder to get a voter ID. As a budget cutting measure, they are shutting down the vast majority of DMV offices. The proposal to close dozens of DMVs across the state, starting in rural areas, could hurt voters who need an ID to vote.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, says the devil overplayed his hand with the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage. Pappy Cruz: “The basis for their decision was the 14th Amendment. That means they’re calling homosexuality a civil right…If they’re calling homosexuality a civil right, that means that the next obvious step is a homosexual may come to your church and demand to be hired.” Sadly, pappy Cruz and his hate-addled, homophobic son line their pockets as a result of this spew.

Quote for the week:
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother”− (attributed to Albert Einstein)

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 24, 2015

There was a curious story in the NYT on Saturday. They quote former Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak in a new biography revealing that Israel came close to striking Iran’s military facilities in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The biographers spoke on Israeli television, saying that despite Barak’s and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to do so, the Israeli military refused.

Recorded interview excerpts between Barak and the biographers were aired by Israel’s Channel 2, which stressed that Mr. Barak had sought to prevent them from being broadcast, but that they had been approved by Israel’s military censor. Mr. Barak later confirmed that the recordings were authentic, but said he had provided the information on background to Ilan Kfir and Danny Dor, whose book, “Barak: The Wars of My Life,” came out this week in Hebrew.

The interviews confirmed a longstanding view that Israel’s security chiefs held back the political leadership, particularly in 2010. In 2012, the timing did not work out because of a joint US-Israel military exercise and visit by Leon Panetta, US defense secretary. Barak said he recalled “demanding” to postpone the joint military exercise. The NYT quotes Barak:

You ask, you demand that America respect your sovereignty to make a decision that you want to do that, even if America is opposed to that and it is against its interests…

The news is that the civilian leadership really wanted to start a war with Iran but first, the military leaders demurred, and then so did the Obama Administration. This confirms that the past 7 years have not been all Israeli bluster intended to play bad cop to our good cop. The bad news is that the administration has known for years that Netanyahu and his administration are off their collective rockers, yet Congress continues to send Israel weapons and billions of dollars every year.

The sad part is that there isn’t anything really new here. It has been well documented previously. Juan Cole reported in 2011 that: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Netanyahu appears to have forced out Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli spying agency Mossad… Dagan went on to accuse Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, of grossly exaggerating the threat from Iran, calling a [potential] strike on that country “stupid idea that offers no advantage.”

In 2012, apparently Obama stood firm in opposition to an Iran strike, since Israel didn’t have the capability to really damage Iran’s nuclear facilities and needed support from USAF in the form of B-52s and bunker buster bombs. Mr. Obama later compensated Israel for standing down by providing them with the bunker busters.

Here’s a thought worth polishing and spreading: That the unspoken concern of the US and the world is not so much that a nuclear armed Iran might someday attack Israel and further destabilize the ME, but that a nuclear armed Israel is now ready, able, and rehearsing their plans to attack Iran. Imagine for a moment the hysteria in Congress if the headline of this story was reversed: “Khomeini was on the verge of attacking Israel 3 times”.

It’s time to cut Israel loose, to eliminate the undue influence this nation has on American foreign policy.

So, wake up Congress Critters, modeling Netanyahu’s foreign policy behaviors will lead America to failure. To help with the wake-up, here is a photo that shows those in Congress just another example of life in the food chain:

Life in the Food Chain

(H/T Naked Capitalism)

Your Monday Hot Links:

This is how Bernie Sanders could win. OK it’s a long shot, but FiveThirtyEight says that if Hillary implodes, Sanders vs. Biden could be highly competitive. Clinton won’t drop out before the primaries and a Biden run could split the establishment vote, giving Sanders an opening.

Billionaires keep flocking to architect Robert A.M. Stern’s newest limestone creation at 220 Central Park South. Next is billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin, who we mentioned yesterday. Griffin’s new pad could cost him anywhere between $30 million and $160 million, which is really just chump change for the hedge funder who reportedly nets $2.2 million a day, and that’s after taxes!

In a related story in the Onion, a study finds it is easier than ever for American dollars to join the 1%.

First wolf pack found in California in nearly a century. On Aug. 9, the cameras photographed two separate black-furred wolves, believed to be adults. Five black wolf pups were photographed in the same spot. It was clearly a pack.

Doctors may have found a way to override the body’s evolutionary habit of storing fat with a discovery of a master switch for the body’s metabolism. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School discovered a new genetic pathway that controls human metabolism by prompting fat cells to store or burn away fat.

Grading Carly Fiorina’s tenure at HP. By a Silicon Valley journalist.

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Monday Wake Up Call – August 3, 2015

Today’s wake up is for the US neo-con policy makers who made so many mistakes in the 1960’s and 1970’s that some are still being uncovered. Last week, NHK Tokyo had a report about the US’ operation of a secret experimental nuclear reactor in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

We put a nuclear reactor in Vietnam? When there was a war underway?

The site was in the city of Da Lat, 120 miles northeast of Saigon, where Americans had installed a research reactor. It was a General Atomics TRIGA Mark II model. We began building the TRIGA in the 1960s as another example of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign at the end of the 1950s, just like the reactor we sent to Iran in 1967.

So many neutrons, so little peace.

According to NHK, as the North Vietnamese Army was approaching, Henry Kissinger ordered the site dismantled to keep the technology out of communist hands. The big news: In the event of an inability to dismantle the reactor, the NHK reports that, as a last-ditch measure, Kissinger ordered that the radioactive core be blown up rather than fall to the North Vietnamese.

NHK interviewed Wally Hendrikson, now elderly, who in 1975 was a nuclear fuel specialist at the Idaho National Laboratory. He was on the small team sent to recover the reactor’s fuel. When Hendrikson arrived at the US Embassy in Saigon:

We were told distinctly that if we could not remove the fuel and get it out of the country, we were to make it inaccessible and to pour concrete…to cover the core.

If all else failed, Hendrikson says,

We were to dynamite the core

Luckily, the team got the fuel out of Vietnam without needing to create a nuclear disaster. Vietnam later rebuilt the reactor, using technology and nuclear fuel from the Soviet Union. Today, the facility remains the only functioning research reactor in Vietnam.

How many times will we have to dodge bullets that the neo-cons and cold war warriors keep loading in guns that keep getting get pointed at America’s head? Wake up, neo-cons! To help you with your wake-up, here is #5 in our songs of summer series, Katrina and the Waves with “Walking on Sunshine”:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

A map of American swearing usage, produced by a lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK. Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states – together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – like using motherfucker. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts.

Earlier this year, Trump for President, LLC trademarked “Trumpocrat” and “Trumpublican.” Who knew that Trump wanted you to have a ball cap with “Trumpocrat” emblazoned on the front? Doesn’t Trumpocrat sound more like a plutocrat than Democrat? “Trumpocalypse” sounds correct, and has a nice ring to it, but it apparently isn’t one that they trademarked.

Exxon’s lobbying firm donated to Chris Christie’s Super PAC while Christie pushed for favorable 9to Exxon) NJ environmental settlement. Public Strategies Impact, the firm that represents Exxon’s interests in New Jersey, has donated $50,000 to “America Leads,” a super PAC supporting Christie’s presidential campaign. Christie’s proposed settlement, aims to reduce levies against ExxonMobil from $8.9 billion to just $225 million. Christie has defended the agreement as a good one for the state. NJ Democrats legislators have been seeking to block the settlement. Nothing to see here.

Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea proves 100% successful. The trials involved 4,000 people. Unlike using the randomized approach, taking a population at risk of Ebola and vaccinating half of them while giving the other half a placebo, this study used a “ring” design. When Ebola flared up in a village, researchers vaccinated all the contacts of the sick person who were willing to take the vaccine, family, friends and neighbors, and their immediate contacts. Children, adolescents and pregnant women were excluded because of an absence of safety data for them. In practice about 50% of people in these clusters were vaccinated.

To test how well the vaccine protected people, outbreaks were randomly assigned either to receive the vaccine immediately, or three weeks after an Ebola infection was confirmed. Among the 2,014 people vaccinated immediately, there were no cases of Ebola from 10 days after vaccination. In the clusters with delayed vaccination, there were 16 cases out of 2,380. Scientists, doctors, donors and drug companies collaborated to push the vaccine through a process that usually takes more than a decade in just 12 months. Merck owns the rights to the drug. Invest at your own risk.

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Monday Wake-Up Call – July 20, 2015

The Wrongologist is like many who tried to read “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon back in the day, and could not finish it. However, there is a wonderful thought in the book: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

That thought describes the campaign by those who are against the Iran deal. Get people thinking about anything but the deal, and there is a good chance it will not be approved in Congress.

But this isn’t only a US-Iran deal. Our Congress can’t derail the deal, it can only nullify US participation in it. If that happens, we will be the ones left out. For more than a decade, Iran has been near the top of our Middle East agenda. Along the way, the risks inherent in Iran’s nuclear program have been inflated, in part because it helps drive the prevailing Western view of Iran as a rogue state; in part, because it was crucial to the sanctions regime that the Western countries constructed, and ideally, it might have helped to topple the regime.

This view prevails today in Israel and Saudi Arabia as well as among Washington’s neo-cons, all of whom see Iran as the major source of disorder in the region.

Before getting bogged down in the debate about the deal, stop and appreciate the single most important accomplishment here. We live in a world where nuclear weapons are easy to develop or to purchase, which is a huge potential problem. We must have a non-proliferation program that the international community agrees on and will make every effort to enforce.

What’s key in the Iran deal is that the world united to say that it’s very important that we don’t sit back and do nothing while new countries get nuclear weapons. In this sense, the accomplishment isn’t really specific to Iran. The most significant thing is that we can agree that non-proliferation is the goal, and come together to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponry. If Turkey or Saudi Arabia decide tomorrow that they want a nuclear weapons program, there will be a credible system in place to deter them.

And if blocking Iran from making a nuclear bomb was the real goal, this deal offered the best choice. Despite what Netanyahu and American chicken hawks believe, we cannot eliminate their nuclear program by bombing Iran. The West cannot invade Iran and succeed with that goal. either. If you take Netanyahu and the neo-cons at their word, sanctions won’t work.

So, it is not surprising that the deal’s opponents offer NOTHING as an alternative.

Time will tell if the deal delivers on what it’s supposed to do. Iran has been an implacable foe of the US (and vice-versa) for 36 years, and that isn’t going to change overnight. But there is the real potential for a thaw in the hostile relations between our two countries, and this makes Israel and our (Sunni) Arab friends and enemies very uncomfortable. This deal also gives us a chance to take a look at the mess in the ME within a new paradigm. The old paradigm has not worked. It created a hole so deep that the region is at risk of never being able to crawl out of it.

While our traditional allies are understandably anxious, they’ve come by their anxiety honestly. And, if we take Einstein’s definition of insanity being the belief that doing the same thing over and over again will give you a different result, then our allies and their friends in Congress are insane.

The most prominent arguments against the deal aren’t really arguments at all. The people making them don’t like the deal because they don’t like Iran, and because the deal has some upside for Iran. That is, of course, the nature of deal-making. The chicken hawks don’t want to come out and say they oppose diplomacy in all forms and simply want a war with Iran, so we get their reframing and bluster instead.

Peacemaking has risks. War also brings risk.

The one lesson Americans never ever seem to learn is probability assessment. Our politicians always lock into one factor they are sure will predict the future with certainty.

Well, it’s time for them to grow up. If the Iran deal is a curtain, it is a deal that allows us a good amount of time to figure out what’s behind the curtain.

Behind every curtain is another curtain, the future, and nobody knows what’s back there. So, wake up Congress, debate the deal, but approve it.

Here to help wake them up is #3 in our songs of summer series, here is “Summertime” by Janis Joplin from 1969:

If your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good lookin’, you better not cry.

If you read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

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Monday Wake Up Call – July 13, 2015

Today’s wake-up call is for the Eurozone. Despite Wrongo’s generally pessimistic worldview, it was hard to imagine that we’d arrive at the insane juncture we have now reached, that of a Grexit (Greek withdrawal from the Eurozone), but it is all but certain. As this column is written, the Guardian is reporting that a four-page proposal is now circulating in Brussels that indicates that Greece could be offered a ‘temporary’ exit from the Eurozone if it doesn’t agree to a deal with its creditors.

If a Grexit comes to pass, it would be catastrophic, most of all for the Greek 99%. But it should blacken the names of everyone involved, most of all German Prime Minister Merkel. This sorry trajectory is occurring despite the Greek government prostrating itself, offering to meet much more stringent conditions than its voters overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum less than a week ago. Krugman writes that Greek PM Tsipras allowed himself to be convinced, some time ago, that euro exit was impossible. It appears that Syriza (the leading Greek political party) didn’t do any contingency planning for a parallel currency. This has left PM Tsipras in a hopeless bargaining position.

But surrender isn’t enough. There’s a substantial faction of the other Eurozone leaders that want to push Greece out. Germany seems willing to welcome them as the most Southern province of the new German Empire. They are asking for control of $50 billion of pledged Greek assets. This really means control of Greece.

It gives the Eurozone leaders a failed state as an object lesson for the rest of Europe’s near-deadbeats.

Since there are only terrible alternatives at this point, here is a wake up tune for the Eurozone leaders. Perhaps it will help Merkel find a way to offer a less destructive plan to Greece. Perhaps she can remember the debt relief and credit support given to post-Nazi Germany by the Allies, who wrote off 93% of the Nazi era debt in the early 1950s and stretched out the pre-Nazi debt incurred during World War I and the Weimar period well into the 21st century.

Here is our 2nd song of summer, Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecW0nSrMEY4

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can see the video here.

Sample Lyrics:
My friend the communist
Holds meetings in his RV
I can’t afford his gas
So I’m stuck here watching TV
I don’t have digital
I don’t have diddly squat…

Your Monday Hot Links:

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took the first detailed photos of Pluto. The image below was taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles away, with a resolution of 17 miles per pixel. It took nine and a half years to get this close, but at this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features:

COW Pluto

 

London has become the money-laundering center of the world’s drug trade. According to an internationally acclaimed crime expert, UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called “know your customer” rules designed to curb criminals’ abilities to launder the proceeds of crime. The National Crime Agency (NCA) states:

We assess that hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year.

Google’s algorithm shows prestigious job ads to men, but not to women. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University built an app that found that when Google presumed users to be male job seekers, they were much more likely to be shown ads for high-paying executive jobs. Google showed the ads 1,852 times to the male group, but just 318 times to the female group. Well, you know Google’s use of its corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil”, ended in 2012 so this is probably OK.

Utah Valley University creates a ‘texting lane’ for busy staircase:

COW Texting Lane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good idea? You be the judge.

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 29, 2015

Mylan, a generic drug maker based outside Pittsburgh, abandoned its status as a US corporation, gaining tax advantages by moving its headquarters to the Netherlands. The move reduced the taxes the company pays on profits from sales of drugs overseas, but Mylan continues to maintain most of its operations in Pennsylvania.

Mylan was viewed by some in Congress and the Obama administration as a symbol of corporate greed when they undertook a corporate inversion that placed profits above any commitment to its home country.

But now, Mylan is demanding that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) protect it from a hostile takeover bid by an Israeli company, Teva Pharmaceuticals. Mylan asked the FTC to examine Teva’s purchase of Mylan stock for possible violation of the requirement that large purchases of stock of US firms must be reviewed by antitrust authorities, because Mylan is still listed on the NYSE. The company claims that its principal office remains in Pennsylvania, which makes it a “US issuer” of stock for federal anti-trust purposes.

The irony of this is not lost in Washington. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee said:

Mylan is trying to have its cake and eat it too…It is an intolerable abuse of a loophole when US corporations pretend they are based overseas in order to get out of paying their fair share and duck their responsibilities to the United States. It’s just plain hypocrisy when one of those same inverted companies claims that it is actually a US company because it needs the special protections US law gives to American companies.

Mylan may have a case. Its plea for help from the US government could pass legal muster but, the optics of a company that abandoned its US citizenship in order to pay less in federal taxes, and then seeking the protection of a federal agency is problematic.

Compounding the farce, Mylan is attempting its own hostile takeover of Perrigo, in order to stave off Teva.

Mylan’s unabashed lack of shame is impressive. Maybe the FTC’s decision-making on this case should take quite a while.

So, wake up Congress, and deal conclusively with corporate inversions! Our wake-up calls for the next few weeks will be songs about summer. We start with the Lovin’ Spoonful’s only #1 hit, “Summer in the City”:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

The return trip often seems shorter than the initial trip, even though the distance traveled and the actual time spent traveling are identical. This is called the “return trip effect”. Two studies say it is real, but you already knew that.

Trucker jobs will be the first casualty of driving robots. Trucker salaries average $40,000/year. Most truck accidents are due to user error: Driving too fast, driving while tired, or driving while intoxicated. Robots don’t drink, don’t get tired, and won’t drive unsafely in order to get to a destination faster. Drivers will still be needed for inner-city driving (at least initially), but most long-haul operations will quickly vanish as soon as licensing is complete in most states.

Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2032, slightly more than Germany has today. The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce—and their domestic consumption has been rising at 7% a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and make the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.

Privail Diagnostics, has developed a simple, portable blood test that can detect the HIV virus (not antibodies) for the first time. That means an earlier diagnosis, and reduced infection rates. Privail’s at-home testing device is like a diabetes test, needing only one drop of blood. It shows the results in a color bar, like an at-home pregnancy test or digital output, like a diabetes meter. Invest at your own risk.

Hackers have apparently cracked the computer systems responsible for issuing flight plans to pilots of every airline. The apparent weak link? The flight plan-delivery protocol used by every airline. Ground computers calculate the appropriate flight plan for planes, and someone on ground approves the plan before distributing it to pilots. Pilots receive plans before taking off, as well as enroute, when a change occurs during a flight. Plans are uploaded to planes via a datalink. Once a hacker figures out those protocols, it is possible to issue a bogus flight plan. But, the industry says, not to worry.

Your thought for the week: Giving money to poor people is socialism, or even communism…..giving money to AIG or Goldman Sachs is capitalism, and that’s what made this nation grrrreat!!!

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 22, 2015

Wrongologist reader Rene asks: “why doesn’t the Wrongologist say something about the Greek crisis”?

Most people believe that Greece needs debt relief. The creditors should discount some of the amount that Greece owes, since there’s no way they can pay it all back. But, that hasn’t happened and it’s unlikely that it will, since it’s politically impossible. Why? It is very hard to explain in a short post, but Forbes has a great summary of the facts:

The money is owed to the taxpayers of other European Union and Euro Zone countries. And what’s more, [their] taxpayers know this.

So, this is the issue: To solve the Greek debt problem, something like 50% of their debt has to be written off. That would equal 1.5% to 2% of GDP for each country in the Euro Zone. So it’s not happening.

Even though the money has already been lost by lending it to Greece in the first place, the response by the Euro Zone is troubling. From Ambrose Bierce in the Telegraph:

The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the IMF, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

Worse, Europe is now provoking a Greek bank run in their effort to force Greece to its knees, issuing a report that warned of an “uncontrollable crisis” if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, “an exponential rise in unemployment”, and a “collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership”.

So Europe’s guardians of financial stability are deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state, saying they are out of the Euro Zone if they don’t comply.

The IMF is forcing a contradictory austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment. Moreover, they are applying a completely different standard in Ukraine, announcing on Friday, that it will: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Continue to support Ukraine through its Lending-into-Arrears Policy even in the event that a negotiated agreement with creditors in line with the program cannot be reached in a timely manner.

This despite the fact that the IMF, by its rules, does not lend to nations that are likely to default.

In the case of Greece, the creditors are acting in concert. They are doubling down, assuming (possibly rightly) that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the last hour.

The European governments must approve any bailout extension, but we are now so close to the expiration of the second bailout on June 30th that it is too late to get a deal approved by then. But IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has 30 days before she has to report a Greek non-payment of €1.5 billion on June 30th to her board, the real drop dead date appears to be July 20th, when a €3.5 billion payment is due to the ECB.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how the two sides will agree to anything other than a short-term deal before the July 20th date. Any “third bailout” of restructuring Greek debt as suggested in the Forbes article above, may be impossible.

In the words of Woody Allen:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

So wake up Euro Zone! To help with a gentle wake-up, here as we start summer, is the last in our series of spring bird visits to the fields of Wrong. Here is the Song Sparrow:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

Dispatches from the Clown Car:

Rick Santorum says Iranians can’t be trusted because they are theocrats. Sure. We all know that Christian theocrats are trustworthy.

Jeb Bush says a tolerant country should allow religious discrimination. Day is night. Black is white. Discrimination is tolerance. Welcome to the fun house that is Conservative politics today.

Rick Santorum Argues Heterosexual Parents Are Every Child’s ‘Birthright. Really? Aren’t caring, loving parents a birthright? Why should we care about parents’ sexuality as long as they’re committed to loving and protecting their children?

Chinese physicists have developed a laser-based deep space propulsion system that harnesses more power than conventional solar sails. China is actually developing/investing in science, technology and innovation. Has anybody alerted our misleaders in Congress? Maybe we can find something else to develop besides military weapons.

Cambodia is training an elite squad of African rats to sniff out landmines. A team of 15 rats were imported from Tanzania with the help of a Belgian NGO, which trains rats to sniff out mines. The rats will try to locate the huge quantities of unexploded mines that have killed nearly 20,000 people since 1979.

Heinz says they’re sorry for a code on a ketchup bottle that links to porn site. A Heinz Ketchup buyer was exposed to porn from a website similar to www.watchmygf.xxx after Heinz allows a domain to lapse, and an adult entertainment firm buys it.

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 15, 2015

You may vaguely remember that President Obama went to the Tomb of the Unknowns’ on Memorial Day. You probably don’t remember that he said:

Today is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.

Yet, just two weeks later, he sent more “advisers” to Iraq. This will bring the number of US locations in Iraq to five. Mr. Obama and his own advisers continue to believe that the US should defeat or degrade ISIS in Iraq without significant help of Iran and the Shi’ite militias.

Most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment is pushing Obama to “win” in Iraq. To do that, he must exercise at least as much influence with Baghdad as Iran. He must keep a US-friendly leadership in power, and keep the Iraqi military engaging ISIS outside of Baghdad.

Obama’s decision to locate a new base in Anbar province between Ramadi and Fallujah conforms to the FP establishment’s program. The new location only makes sense if American troops are there for some kind of combat role. If they were only going to Iraq to train Sunnis, (the stated role), it could be located anywhere in the country. But, as the Wrongologist has reported, the new advisers will be stationed at Taqqadum, an Iraqi base near the city of Habbaniya, where they will act as a trip-wire for ISIS advances.

Add to this what General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week about creating a string of “lily pads”, American military bases around Iraq:

You could see [them] in the corridor from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk to Mosul.

General Dempsey acknowledged that such sites would require many more troops than those already authorized by Mr. Obama. Unfortunately, it didn’t work against the Taliban in Afghanistan, so a good question is why it will work in Iraq. The “lily pad” idea will increase the already high likelihood that the American forces will soon be shooting, and being shot at. This means Gen. Dempsey is suggesting an open-ended American presence in Iraq engaging an open-ended insurgency by ISIS. Any decision to plant additional lily pads will certainly require more US troops in Iraq.

Wake up America, these DC Hawks will never end the war in the Middle East. To bring you gently into consciousness, here is another spring visitor to the fields of Wrong, the Magnolia Warbler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_dm5InFg1g

If you read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:
Homosexual mounting is a common behavior in bed bugs as male sexual interest is directed towards any newly fed individual. Mounted males discharge alarm pheromones, while mounting males consider the alarm signal a major sex identification cue, suggesting that male bed bugs use alarm pheromone communication to avoid homosexual harassment and mounting. Who funds this crap??

Disney World upped their prices to get in to $125. But it’s the cross-selling that takes the Disney experience to a new price level. Their Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques sell a $195 pampering for little girls that includes a makeover, hair-styling, a costume and a princess sash. Sounds like some Wall Street Dad’s idea. Not judging, people can spend their $$ however they want.

Costco has surpassed Whole Foods to become the biggest organic grocer, selling more than $4 billion last year. That means more than 1 out of every 10 dollars in organic food sales are made at a Costco since trade association estimates of the total market are ~$36 billion. But you have to buy a bushel of organic mangoes when you want just one.

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 last week, according to The Guardian. The updated findings means that the total is on track to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2015 – and that people are being killed by officers at more than twice the rate most recently detected by the much-criticized FBI system, which recorded 461 killed in 2013.

The Onion said the US has run out of options and that continued intervention will only prolong the US’s suffering. Experts say the best course of action is to keep the US as comfortable as possible until the end. Here is a quote:

We need to accept the fact that the US doesn’t have long—simply helping it pass that time in comfort is the humane thing to do…letting it meet its end naturally is the merciful decision here.

Totally agree. Put us out of our misery. Please.

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 8, 2015

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you can do and what you should do.” – Justice Potter Stewart

It looks like Scrooge McDuck runs human resources at Disney. Disney World laid off 250 tech workers, who were American programmers and computer operators that have been replaced by Indian techies with H-1B visas. The techs were supplied by HCL America, an Indian outsourcing firm.

H-1B visas are intended for high-level professionals who, in concept, fill jobs for which no Americans are available. 85,000 of these visas are granted each year, and they are in high demand. Technology giants like Microsoft, Facebook and Google repeatedly press Congress to add to the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.

In Disney’s case, the Americans were not only available, they were actually working in the jobs.

The H-1B visa program has been great for tech innovation, and the Wrongologist supports it, but this is an egregious abuse of the corporate right to employment at will, and of the spirit of the H-1B visa laws. From the NY Times:

The chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Robert A. Iger, is a co-chairman with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corporation, in the Partnership for a New American Economy, which pushes for an overhaul of immigration laws, including an increase in H-1B visas.

Companies speak a lot about teamwork, esprit de corps, and group identity, all in the context of helping the company reach its goals. But the Disney lesson is that we’re really good at ignoring those lofty ideals, while driving an anti-employee, mean-spirited chase of a marginal dollar of profit.

If employers really need a foreign employee resource, they should be charged an annual fee of $50K for each H1-B visa they use. For truly unusual skills, it would be worth the fee. For Disney, who is just looking to buy labor for a few dollars less than the going rate for American citizens, it would remove the economic advantage. We need to ask our corporations to stop defending the indefensible.

Republicans shout from the mountaintops about illegal immigrants, while on the other hand, they are quite willing to add to the numbers of H-1B visas, immigration of a kind. Furthermore, H-1Bs allow for chain migration (kids and spouses) as well, and thanks to new rules, H-1B spouses can work as well.

Time to wake up America! Disney’s H-1B’s are the first step in a process. They have been brought in by Disney so that they can gain the experience to manage Disney’s IT operation. And some time down the road, Disney’s Florida HCL people will work with HCL’s India-based IT workers, allowing Disney to move most of their IT operation over there at a fraction of the cost that Disney pays here.

Corporatism has inverted Henry Ford’s mantra to pay his workers enough to afford his cars. The new mantra is, pay only a few employees enough to afford your goods, and let the government worry about the rest of them.

America has to be more than a spreadsheet and a flag.

Today’s wake-up is another in our spring bird collection. It is the Orchard Oriole, the smallest of North America’s orioles, it builds hanging, pouch like nests during its breeding season. We get both the Baltimore Orioles and these guys in Mid-May:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

The Wall Street Journal had a blog post open letter to consumers asking why consumers didn’t spend more money. Imagine their concern, since mean US family income is stuck at the same level as in the late 1990s. Remember that the WSJ supports the TPP trade legislation, like the last deal that outsourced millions of middle class jobs. Please, WSJ, go back to talking to companies, and leave consumers alone.

A list of the top 50 restaurants in the world. 5 are in the US. Wrongo and Ms. Right are going to #49 later this month.

In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University Of Virginia School Of Medicine have found that the brain is directly connected to the immune system.

Owning a home no longer plays the same role in the lives of Americans that it has in the past. And it is clear that many middle-income Americans cannot realistically aspire to become homeowners anytime soon. A recent survey conducted by the American Institute of CPA’s found that most Americans are now more concerned about having enough money to retire than about becoming a homeowner.

China has 30,000 tons of gold, (which is almost more gold than the rest of the world’s central banks, combined). It’s also important to make explicit that the Chinese are slowly laying the groundwork for it to take over the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency sometime in the future.

Chinese state media has warned that war with the US may be “inevitable.” Beijing published a policy paper detailing how its military will shift its focus from land and coastlines to the open seas. They criticized “external countries…busy meddling in South China Sea affairs. The money quote:

We do not want a military conflict with the United States, but if it were to come we have to accept it.

 

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Monday Wake Up Call – June 1, 2015

How many hours does it take to make rent at the minimum wage? The National Low Income Housing Coalition looked at the number of hours minimum-wage employees have to work per week in each state just to rent an apartment and survive financially. Their headline conclusion is there is no state where a minimum wage worker can earn enough to make the fair market rent for a two-bedroom place on 40 hours a week. West Virginia tallied the fewest hours at 63 to make the average fair market rent. Hawaii was 175 hours. California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Washington, DC were all over 130 hours. So, no chance to get an average place for a family while working 40 hours. Here is a chart from their report:

Min Wage rental

The Wrongologist would have preferred if the study had used median rents rather than average rents. The red bars show the gap in hourly wages between the state’s minimum wage and the cost of an average two bedroom place. This is another artifact of the Great Recession. Let’s recap what has happened since it ended:

• The percentage of people employed in the US has never recovered
• All income gains went to the top 1%
• There has been a huge bull market in stocks, despite stagnant income for all but the top few

If we don’t wake up, America will be a banana republic, with the emphasis on the “banana”, since the “republic” is already dying. The US will be small enclaves of massive wealth run by a few oligarchs. Think of it as Manhattan, a few square miles where the Corporations and their top employees reside, surrounded by a sea of low wage cast-offs.

None of this is inevitable. We could increase wages, we could rebuild our decaying infrastructure. This approach is dismissed as “Keynesian” by our right-wing brothers. The only kind of Keynesian stimulus they will accept is military Keynesianism. It’s not that peaceful Keynesian stimulus doesn’t work, it’s just that they won’t benefit from it. They see war as prosperity. China is next in their battle sights.

Wake up America, time is running out to keep us on a course that avoids our demise as a middle class economy. The next election may be the most important in our lifetimes. Here is today’s wake-up call, Amy Speace, a folk singer featured in a NYT Money section article. Here is her song, “Spent,” about trying to make rent:

Sample lyric:
We’re head over heels,
In over our heads,
We borrow and steal
To pay the rent.
How are we gonna save any money
When it’s already spent?

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Today’s breakfast links:

Study shows human attention span now lags that of a goldfish. Who is behind the study? Microsoft, who wants to learn how modern technology impacts the attention span of people who use it. (Insert your own joke here)

Sudden loss of ice in Antarctica was large enough to affect Earth’s gravity. The ice loss causes small changes in the gravity field of the Earth, which were detected by a satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

What do you get if you take the blades off a wind turbine? A better wind turbine. This new turbine is a hollow straw that sticks up 40 feet up in the air and vibrates like a guitar string when the wind blows. Its 50% cheaper than blade turbines, and while it is also 30% less efficient at capturing energy, a wind farm can double the number of bladeless turbines that occupy a given area. That’s a net energy gain of 40%. The company is Vortex Turbines. Invest at your own risk.

A new salt reactor will use spent nuclear fuel to make energy. This nuclear reactor generates 75 times the electricity per ton of uranium compared to today’s light-water nuclear reactors, since it burns 96% of its fuel, compared with only 4% in light-water reactors. The company is the venture-funded Transatomic Power. They hope to build a 20-megawatt demonstration reactor by 2020. With nearly 80,000 tons of radioactive waste in the US (and with 2,000 tons added every year), it could turn something toxic into something useful. Invest at your own risk. With this being said, it could be as simple as doing some research into something like uranium mining stocks and finding out about this sector in this particular industry. The more people know about investing, hopefully, the more clued up they will become and potentially make better decisions.

A PA newspaper published a letter calling for President Obama to be executed, but now they’re apologizing. The paper says: “We will strive to do better in the future.” Another example of our media’s inexorable descent. They are only sorry they got caught.

Here is a list of Zagat’s best brunches in Manhattan.

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