DRINK CAREFULLY

 There is the well-known story about the frog and boiling water.

The frog gets put in tepid water and the heat slowly increased to the boiling point, but the frog never notices the change and doesn't jump out before it's too late. Some might say the tale is just a metaphor for subtlety.

Subtle changes like those flapping butterfly wings create big effects. There's another term that likewise begins with the letter "s" that's undergoing big changes today under what is becoming less and less subtle--sovereignty. In this case the rapidly growing loss of it.

Globalization is a term that 's been pushed by MSM. It's described as a modern day panacea for the globe's ills. But folks are starting to realize globalization is the antonym of sovereignty. Hardly what's it's been cracked up to be.

If you think otherwise, you have not been following the eurozone mess. Or for that matter other areas of the world where folks are becoming increasingly upset about the obliteration of local control and customs.

Walmart is the huge conglomerate people love to hate. If you look around today conglomerates, like robots, are taking over. In the U.S. corporate big boys like Walgreen's, CVS and RiteAid have all but captured the pharmacy business.Local mom and poppers followed the Edsel down the Oblivion Freeway. 

And much the same is happening all around us. What once was subtle is now--or it should be--blatantly overt, an outright assault on choice. And that's just another way of saying globalization is hardly your friend if you revere freedom of choice.

Some people we fear still believe milk is the only thing that's getting homogenized. Local not central is synonymous with sovereignty. Local not central is synonymous with choice. Like the best laid plans of mice and men, good intentions often beget not so good results.

What part of Washington or Brussels or Beijing or Moscow is local? The Greeks along with several of their peripheral EU members, notwithstanding their pathetic historical lack of fiscal probity, get it.

So here's a couple of questions for you, one about semantics, the other about money printing.

Are the words manipulate and titrate really fungible? The first, manipulate, denotes something unfavorable while the second, titrate, something acceptable.

And which is it that central bankers around the globe do--titrate or manipulate? If you sup regularly at the MSM trough you get the picture. You also get at which trough you're expected to slake your thirst.

But like that grade school warning about approaching railroad crossings most of us grew up with, stop, look and listen.

And drink carefully.

WITHOUT FEAR

Why do people doubt science? Because it 's been a false God, held up to be the savior of all saviors in the modern world not to be questioned and, in many ways, like the religion it warred with centuries ago that wasn't supposed to be questioned either.

In some ways scientific zealots have replaced their old religious foes.

Yet science can be--and is manipulated--by many. Hardly a month goes past that some scientific data, it turns out, is proved to have been manipulated.

Is this more a statement about humans rather than science? We don't think so. Science often turns out to be incorrect. A few decades ago science labeled cholesterol a villain. That proved wrong with time. Science despite its reverence for truth and law changes.

In the early days of the cholesterol frenzy eggs were the villain of choice. Later it became red meat. Now it's something else.

Science despite what its believers claim is subject to the same human frailties like greed and pride as any other discipline. Big pharmaceuticals is a classic example. Anyone who believes it takes three oral hypoglycemic medicines to control non-insulin diabetes is smoking the good stuff regularly on the way to their ATM.

A full 30% of the current flu vaccine making the rounds doesn't work. Why? Because the viruses are like you and me; they want to survive. But unlike you and me they're much better at mutating. 

Bacteria and viruses just bring the point home. So-called super bugs are testimony to man's folly of putting all their scientific eggs in one basket.

Screwing around with Mother Nature is never free. And that brings us to the latest popular frenzy pushed by the so-called scientific elite and MSM, climate change. Is the climate changing? Of course. Is it changing for the reasons these groups claim? Our response, not so fast.

Part of all frenzies is to force everyone on board, dissenters beware. A lot of the climate-change crowd come from the left--a fact, not a partisan statement. Dissenters absent the requisite doctorate get marginalized as ill-informed, non-experts.

So here's reminder for those on the left from one of their all-time idolized political icons, John F. Kennedy after his Bay of Pigs debacle, "How could I have been so stupid?"warning to "never trust the experts." 

Economists are supposed to be experts given all the time most spend in their econometric cellars. The air down there can get pretty thin. Maybe that's an excuse.

One answer can be gleaned from previous forecasts. Back in 1995, economist and Financial Times columnist John Kay examined the record of 34 British forecasters from 1987 to 1994, and he concluded that they were birds of a feather. They tended to make similar forecasts, and then the economy disobligingly did something else, with economic growth usually falling outside the range of all 34 forecasters.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_undercover_economist/2008/08/the_wisdom_of_crowds.html 

The Queen of England famously asked why economists failed to foresee the financial crisis in 2008. "Why did nobody notice it?" was her question when she visited the London School of Economics that year

Economists' failure to accurately predict the economy's course isn't limited to the financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed. Macroeconomic computer models also aren't very useful for predicting how variables such as GDP, employment, interest rates and inflation will evolve over time. 
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-are-economic-forecasts-wrong-so-often/

Economics is often described as the ‘dismal science’. Unlike other traditional sciences, economics rarely provides a simple solution to present day issues. Furthermore economists have a poor record of predicting the future. Even notable economists such as Joe Stiglitz agree that economists only get it right at best around 3 or 4 times out of ten. However it should be acknowledged that economic forecasting is a difficult art at best – human behavior is forever changing and the economy is a complex mechanism with many working parts. Nevertheless I thought it would be entertaining to highlight some of the most wildly inaccurate forecasts in recent times. Here are some of the best… https://shaundacosta.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/when-economists-get-it-wrong-the-worst-economic-predictions-of-all-time

So how does this fit with Chairwoman Yellen's recent revelation that from here on out it all depends on the data? That should strike a cord of confidence in you as you drift off to sleep every night.

Predicting the courses of diseases or disease outbreaks isn't any better. And that includes those experts in epidemiology.

THE EBOLA epidemic that took off last year in three west African countries—Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone—is finally fading. The last three weeks have each seen around 120 new cases, the lowest level since July 2014. In total, around 22,000 people are thought to have been infected, and 9,000 to have died. But predictions last year were much higher, including a worst-case scenario by America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of 1.4m cases, reported and unreported, by January 20th. How are such predictions made, and how can they go wrong?

Disease predictions come from mathematical models that group the population at risk of a disease into categories and describe how people move between them. Both the categories and the flows depend on the disease. With Ebola, there is a long lag between infection and the first symptoms, during which it is not contagious. And recovered sufferers are immune. So an Ebola model will group the “susceptible” (who have not yet had the disease), “exposed” (infected but not yet showing signs of the disease), “infectious” (ill and contagious) and “removed” (no longer infectious because they have recovered or died). Estimates for the sizes of these groups and how people move between them—including how many people catch the disease from each infectious person, how long people remain infectious and how likely they are to die—are used to build a computer model showing how the spread of the disease is likely to unfold. The CDC’s Ebola model also sub-divided infectious people into three smaller groups: isolated in hospital, partially isolated at home or elsewhere in the community, and unisolated. And its highest predictions were swollen by the assumption that for every reported case, 1.5 more went unreported.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/02/economist-explains-3

But let's now leave out the current tribe of revered MSM favorites, central bankers.

Four months ago, when unemployment stood at 7.8%, the Bank of England issued forward guidance on interest rates. Threadneedle Street said it would not even start to muse about an increase in interest rates until the jobless rate hit 7%. According to the Bank, this was likely to be in early 2016.
 
Happily, the Old Lady's forecasts have proved spectacularly wrong. The recovery in the economy since the spring has proved to be jobs rich, with the latest report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that employment was up by 250,000 in the three months to October. Unemployment fell by almost 100,000 over the same period and the average jobless rate for the three months from August to October dropped to 7.4%.

The chart below is from the Washington Post, hardly a right wing publication. It's a scribe owned outright by a well-known lefty named Warren Buffet.



We could go on, but we won't. The purpose is a quote from an article from today's "Daily Bell," about the generically modified grains Monsanto produces: "Monsanto Laments Dwindling Faith in Science."

The Bell is a libertarian site and the Post a liberal one as is Slate and CBS.

On Twitter recently, someone asked the question "Why do people doubt science?" Accompanying the tweet was a link to an article in National Geographic that implied people who are suspicious of vaccines, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), climate change, fluoridated water and various other phenomena are confused, adhere to conspiracy theories, are motivated by ideology or are misinformed as a result of access to the 'University of Google.' ... Who tweeted the question and posted the link? None other than Robert T Fraley, Monsanto's Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. 
  
Our experience in science might not invalidate yours. But in no way does yours invalidate ours.

If you allow MSM and its scientific cohorts to silence you on these issues with their marginalizing tactics, you'll be doing a grave disservice to yourself and your loved ones. 

This is about much more than truth. It's about your legal right to openly dissent without fear of any private or government retribution.

LOSS OF LOCAL

A friend toils on the workman’s compensation side of medicine. He’s been doing it for nearly three decades.

For the unfamiliar WC is all about work-related injuries. When people are injured on the job their employer usually pays for work-related medical care. And a claim gets filed with the state and insurers.

Each state has its own regulations and each state is different. But it’s big business that involves essentially the public trough, a place where many sup, perhaps not the least of whom are PI or personal injury attorneys.

You might remember the name of John Edwards, the former Democrat candidate for president a few elections back. That's what he did, personal injury, where he made his millions. 

You might also recall he was the guy who got his paramour pregnant, cheating on his wife while she was dying of cancer, the sort of guy you want to find yourself sitting next to in your pew next time you venture to church. Excellent presidential timber.

Drive into or out of just about any airport in America and you’ll see the billboards. On the rare chance you miss them there, check out late night infomercials and talk radio. Vultures can smell decay. 

My friend though he owns three clinics is a mom-and-popper in a declining mon-and-popper industry that’s being swallowed whole by big conglomerates. Just like Costco and Walmart in retail to farming and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to you name it, the genie is out of the neighborhood bottle.

And if you're an animal lover it's happening in the veterinarian world also. Like most things in life there's good and bad here. Loss of choice or some might say freedom is one bad aspect.

Price monopoly is another. The good part? Maybe you spend a few minutes less than you would waiting in an emergency room. These conglomerates are profit driven, run by bean counters.

This is not to suggest that profit is a nasty word, just to point out despite much of Hollywood's misguided themes, greed is alive and well in more places than Wall Street.

It’s a big, cold, indifferent business despite the marketing. Vultures can also smell money. But we’ll leave that for another time.

There's another point here, about the loss of local. Local, whether you realized it or not, is about sovereignty, choice and globalization. Local and globalization are antonyms. Remember that the next time you head to the polls.  

Besides worker-related injuries most of these clinics do other tasks like pre-employment physical exams and drug screens and even urgent care to a degree. In some ways they are far more sensitive to changes in the economic landscape than all the economists with all their econometric minutiae together.

Pre-employment physicals have to do with jobs. And the number fluctuates not only with the seasons but the times. Even drugs screens are a decent economic indicator. A positive test usually results in a non-hire, especially in harder times like the low point of the recession.

But before the recession when the economy was percolating things were so tight employers were hiring applicants with positive tests. They needed bodies. In short, it’s a cycle. 

The other neat feature is one gets to talk to lots of business owners, large and small. It’s an informal survey, a snapshot, but it’s much closer to where the surf and the sand unite than econometric models.

During good times work-related injuries usually increase. And foot traffic, not unlike, say, retail, tends to decrease during slower periods. It probably makes too much common sense for the cognoscenti.

And besides it’s much more difficult for them and MSM to manipulate.

REPRESSION ON THE RISE

 
Some Americans would have trouble locating Venezuela on the map let alone spelling it.

There might not be trouble in paradise yet, but if the country with one of the largest oil reserves in the world and an OPEC member pictured your idea of paradise, then there's trouble, serious trouble.

Suppression of dissent, not too different from what's going on in China, represents serious trouble. Last week Venezuelan police jailed Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma. Ledezma's alleged crime, plotting with again the alleged help of U.S. aid to dismantle Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's presidency.

Jailing opposition leaders seems to be a registered patent for the Maduro administration as Ledezma in not the first to be carted off to the clinker. In the meantime, the bolivar sank from 50 to 170 to the U.S. dollar. That's a big devaluation.

As the country struggles with a collapsing economy and falling support for the incumbent administration, Maduro has increased repressive measures against his dissenters bringing criticism from outside the country. 

Repression of dissenters appears to be on the rise. And it's not just rising in what many view as third world nations.

DOLLAR PAIN

Pain by any other name is pain.

And there's been enough lately to go around on the earnings front for U.S. multinationals like Coca Cola and Mondelez. 

Hewlett-Packard is the latest to queue to the complaint window. 

The perp, as they say in television crime shows, is the rallying dollar.

Unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates were blamed for part of the company's disappointing earnings as approximately 65% of earnings come from outside the U.S. 

Toss in beggar-thy-neighbor currency devaluations and you have the ingredients for more pain. The long U.S. dollar trade some believe is getting long in the tooth and looks a bit overcrowded. 

According to one report, it is now three standard deviations from its 10-year average.

Any disappointment in the consumer price index could cause some scrambling. Meanwhile, HPQ's stock took a bit hit after announcing its recent earnings expectation for the year.

At this stage unexpected events could inflict even more pain.

THEN YOU REALIZE

At first you think they can't be serious. Then you realize they are, those Brussels bureaucrats.

Brussels has granted a reprieve to France and Italy after they violated budget rules, a decision that underlines the readiness of the bloc to bend its fiscal rules to achieve economic growth. The term undermines seems more appropriate given all the Greek mess going on.

The EU decided against fining France under its so-called tougher budget rules, meanwhile claiming France is the "eurozone country in most need of remedial measures to put its public finances in order."

According to the report, France was given until 2017 to meet the EU's limit on debt to three percent of economic output or GDP. Some in France were seeking even longer, lobbying for an additional year to hit the three percent marker.

For the first time ever the new rules allow for fining the recreants who violate fiscal and budget parameters. France is a known recidivist.

Italy's debt level at 130 percent of GDP is second only to Greece.

France and Italy, the second and third largest economies in the a EU. no doubt view themselves as special, a point not lost on those fiscally wayward Greeks.

At first you think they can't be serious. then you realize.....

NOT MUCH

In Texas there's a popular dance called the Texas Two-step

At the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington there's another dance going on, the Yellen Half-step.

Some apparent Yellen fans, like today's editorial in the Financial Times, "Yellen's 'patient' retreat from zero interest rates," note: "Fed chair is right to be open-minded about the turn in US cycle."

Open-minded in some quarters is synonymous with clueless. We'll be a bit kinder and say flying by the seat of her drawers.

So far, Ms Yellen is doing a good job of it. Little by little she is acclimatising us to the prospect of a gradual turn in the US interest rate cycle. The markets this week reacted calmly to her hint that the Fed will drop the word 'patient' from its guidance at its next meeting in March. In other words, the Fed would no longer pledge to keep its policy rate at zero for at least the next two meetings. From now on its actions will be dictated wholly by the data. This keeps open the possibility of a tightening of monetary policy as early as June.

There's so much wrong with this pathetic little-kid-talk paragraph it's difficult to know where to start.

Guidance, the market needs guidance about something that's been rehashed in the news for months? The only folks who don't know about it are those who don't want to know about it.

Some might refer to them as the blessed.

"Actions wholly dictated by the data," what have they been doing all these months, playing a game a economic charades? These folks get paid some decent taxpayer-funded money to collect and decipher data. And yes, lo and behold, occasionally utter some straight forward sentences in straight-forward English.

But taking this stance is not the same as forecasting a definite rate rise. This is how it should be. Ms Yellen deserves credit for sharing a degree of humility about the precise strength of the US recovery. 

In this case, humility is to clueless as the sand is to the sea. Take a look at that "little by little" sentence. There's enough hedging in there to start a Wall Street fund.

If nothing else, this is a good example of what bureaucrats,  politicians and MSM think of the masses. Not much.

BIG BENEFACTOR

Christopher Morley once noted that the only good life is to live it in your own way. The same holds for the truth. If you really want it, you're going to have to look for it yourself.

Here's a read if you have any sense of wanting to ever discover the truth one should plow through. The glorious year of 1913 birthed two huge whammies on the American public, the IRS and the Federal Reserve.                                                       

Some claim it's been downhill ever since. Take the time to do your homework and then decide for yourself. Don't let some MSM wag decide for you. MSM is on its last legs. This is only one reason they're coming after the Internet so strongly.

Given the recent call for auditing, there's a bunch of ruffled Federal Reserve feathers of late. A cynic might ask: "What's up with that?"

Hardly anyone watches television any more and many of those who do program what they watch. Advertising revenue has taken a huge hit and the moguls are getting their silk panties twisted in a bunch.

The panic will arrive later when the end becomes crystal clear. These boys and girls will have to find a new gig, a nettlesome problem for all.

 A recent Financial Times article, "Switch to on-demand TV alarms broadcasters," had the sub-headline: "Concerns grow over falling audiences for 'linear' television and the impact it will have on advertising revenue."

A sidebar noted the growing viewer switch to DVDs, Netflix and catch-up services. Hello Bill O'Reilly and Brian Williams. The nightly news with few exceptions has been a joke for a long time.
If it gets any more filtered it will wind up in its rightful place, a late night infomercial.

With YouTube to watch, Instagram pictures to take and Facebook, Snapchat and other social media platforms to explore, a generation   of young Americans that used to turn on television for entertainment is finding its fix elsewhere.

Isn't that what the so-called news has become, entertainment.

TV executives started  sounding the alarm last autumn when Viacom, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, and Walt Disney began reporting lower advertisi9ng revenues for some or all of their networks.

According the the report the trend has continued to the latest financial results.

BET, which is aimed at African-American audiences, fell 22 per cent, the children's network Nickelodeon was down 17 per cent and MTV fell14 per cent.

As one mogul put it, "Its no secret there are far-reaching shifts taking place in our industry."

Yes, indeed there is. And one of the biggest benefactors with any luck may be the truth. 

.http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/janet-yellen-freaking-audit-fed-100-reasons

OVERSTRETCHED

So the Brussels bureaucrats granted Greece four months to show its true economic colors.

Not that Greece shouldn't have been granted the time, it most likely won't matter, but does anyone think it will really make a difference?  Meanwhile, the market celebrates. That's a pretty thin margin to get all bubbly about.

If there's anything more in the news than deflation it has to be the Janet Yellen circus and interest rates hikes. Central banks have flooded the world with easy money and now Ms Big is about to finally remove the punch bowl.

Once again kudos to Financial Times writer James Mackintosh's "Short View" for calling a lexicographer a lexicographer, apparently a person the Fed doesn't have on staff.

"For lexicographers specializing in central bank-speak, yesterday was a big day," Mackintosh writes. "Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the US Federal Reserve, defined what the Fed means by 'patient': not raising rates for the next two meeting."

Bill Clinton fans will love Yellen for taking a page from the former president's definition of "is" being pretty much what members of the elite class say it is. On this stage Yellen's an elite player, fumbling and stumbling with the purse strings of real people.

So perhaps a bit more bureaucratic confusion is okay. But then again maybe it isn't.

"We have to be forward looking," she noted. "We have highly accommodative policy that has been in place for some time." Yet most of the indicators she and her band of merry bankers use are backward looking.  "Data dependent" is rear view mirror.

The first rate hike won't amount to much. As Mackintosh points out, what's important is the market's perception of the trend. In other words, as in past examples will there be a series of consecutive hikes.

We use the tern examples euphemistically as in past mistakes.

The most hated firm on the planet, Walmart, just hiked wages. Look for the next retail shoe to fall of a lemmings-see-a-lemmings do. The dot plot may misconstrue all those part-timers--firms for obvious reasons love--who actually want full time work.

We had to hazard a guess, once interest rates strart up, the Fed will error on the overdone side and that should cause to think about start placing your portfolio on what's cheap now versus what's, to use a kind term, overstretched. 

NOT SO FAST

Kudos to the Chicago voters who forced their socialist mayor Rahm Emanuel into a spring run-off election.

Hopefully, when the time comes they will find the courage to take back their city and run him off completely.

Emanuel received only 45.4% of the votes, unable to get the required 50% pus one one vote to return to office. The run-off comes despite Emanuel greatly outspending his opponent, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, a Cook County Commissioner, and bringing in his big brother from Washington, President Obama.
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Who says little folks can't do seemingly big things? California is the largest state in the U.S. and home of what many believe is the seventh largest economy on the globe. It's also a trend setter of sorts.

Last year without benefit of a public debate legislators and the governor rammed a bill to ban use of plastic bags in grocery stores through that was set to become law this July. It would be the nation's first statewide ban on use of the bags.

Not so fast. Opponents of the bill--however one feels about it--recently met the qualifications for a referendum on the law to be on the November 2016 ballot. The bill also called for extending the ban to liquor and convenience stores in 2016.
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From recent letters to the editor, here's one to the WSJ from Pamela S. Hyde, administrator Samhsa U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, Md.

Related: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/maryland-millionaires-per-capita-answer-might-make-angry

Samhsa is the government acronym for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. Hyde, apparently taking objections to a recent comment she claims "mischaracterized the important work" of Samhsa, expresses her disappointment that someone questions Samhsa's work.

Hyde's last paragraph in her rebuttal says everything you want to know about government obfuscation and meaningless verbiage.

We are continually seeking  opportunities to better meet the complex needs of people wuith serious mental illnesses, including individual and systemwide coordination. The president has taken important steps to increase the capacity of the mental-health system in the U.S. We look forward to continuing our work to help all Americans--including those with serious mental illness--lead healthy,m full and productive lives in their communities.