Moody’s could downgrade U.S. debt in 2013

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/moodys-could-downgrade-us-debt-in-2013-report-2013-05-20

Moody Investors Service could downgrade U.S. debt this year if policymakers do not address rising debt ratios, according to Bloomberg News on Monday. While Moody’s released a report on Monday saying that new budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office were “credit positive,” Steven Hess, a senior vice-president at Moody’s told Bloomberg that Washington needs to do more from a policy standpoint. “The fact that it showed much lower debt levels going forward, we view as a positive development,” Hess told Bloomberg. “More needs to be done on the policy front to address this rising debt ratio.”

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oh..but the dow is at record highs?

*think

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Where are Gore’s hurricanes?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/08/sorry-global-warmists-but-extreme-weather-events-are-becoming-less-extreme/

Just about every type of extreme weather event is becoming less frequent and less severe in recent years as our planet continues its modest warming in the wake of the Little Ice Age. While global warming activists attempt to spin a narrative of ever-worsening weather, the objective facts tell a completely different story.

New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show the past 12 months set a record for the fewest tornadoes in recorded history. Not only did Mother Nature just set a record for lack of tornado activity, she absolutely shattered the previous record for fewest tornadoes in a 12-month period. During the past 12 months, merely 197 tornadoes struck the United States. Prior to this past year, the fewest tornadoes striking the United States during a 12-month period occurred from June 1991 through July 1992, when 247 tornadoes occurred.

The new tornado record is particularly noteworthy because of recent advances in tornado detection technology. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is able to detect more tornadoes in recent years than in prior decades due to technological advances. Even with such enhanced tornado detection capability, the past 12 months shattered all prior records for recorded tornadoes.

NOAA posted a list of the five “lowest non-overlapping 12 month counts on record from 1954-present.” Notably, each of these low-tornado periods occur since 1986, precisely during the time period global warming alarmists claim global warming is causing more extreme weather events such as tornadoes. According to NOAA, the lowest non-overlapping 12 month counts on record from 1954-present, with the starting month, are:

197 tornadoes – starting in May 2012

247 tornadoes – starting in June 1991

270 tornadoes – starting in November 1986

289 tornadoes – starting in December 2001

298 tornadoes – starting in June 2000

On a related note, a new record for the longest stretch of consecutive days without a tornado death occurred during 2012 and 2013.

Hurricane inactivity is also setting all-time records. The United States is undergoing its longest stretch in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, with each passing day extending the unprecedented lack of severe hurricanes, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

It has been more than 2,750 days since a major hurricane struck the United States. This easily smashes the prior record of less than 2,300 days between major hurricane strikes.

Although global warming activists and their media allies often claim global warming is making extreme weather events more frequent and severe, virtually all extreme weather events are becoming less frequent and less severe as our planet gradually warms.

Pretty much all other extreme weather events are becoming less frequent and less severe, also. Soil moisture is in long-term improvement at nearly all sites in the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank. Droughts are less frequent and less severe than in prior, colder centuries. The number of wildfires is in long-term decline despite a recent change in wildfire policy that no longer actively suppresses wildfires. Just about any way you measure it, extreme weather events are becoming quite rare.

Despite all this good news, a growing number of people believe global warming is causing an increase in extreme weather events. This is no accident. Fully aware of the objective facts, global warming activists are doing everything they can to distract people from the truth. Although extreme weather events are becoming less frequent, the Earth is a big place with a dynamic climate. There will always be some extreme weather events, even as they become less frequent and less severe. Global warming activists can always highlight some extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the planet and paint a false narrative that global warming must be to blame, even though extreme weather events are becoming rarer as the planet gradually warms and returns to pre-Little Ice Age norms.

Major hurricanes struck the U.S. Northeast on a fairly regular basis during the first half of the 20th century when temperatures were cooler. Now, as our planet warms, hurricanes of any sort almost never strike the U.S. Northeast. As a result, when even a minor hurricane like Sandy strikes the Northeast, it is a seemingly unheard of weather event. We can thank global warming for the fact that even a small hurricane like Sandy is a rare event in the U.S. Northeast. The same applies for tornadoes, droughts, etc.

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“the past 12 months set a record for the fewest tornadoes in recorded history. Not only did Mother Nature just set a record for lack of tornado activity, she absolutely shattered the previous record for fewest tornadoes in a 12-month period.”

the reality doesnt gel with the hype..we arent getting worse extreme events..its not happening on any level..

“Fully aware of the objective facts, global warming activists are doing everything they can to distract people from the truth. Although extreme weather events are becoming less frequent, the Earth is a big place with a dynamic climate. There will always be some extreme weather events, even as they become less frequent and less severe. Global warming activists can always highlight some extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the planet and paint a false narrative that global warming must be to blame”

and thats what you are seeing on your tv news every night..always a weather story..no matter where its form..as long as there is one..take a look next time you watch the news..on mainstream..

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Enterprise Corruption: Private-Equity Firms Build Instead of Buy..The “New” Enrons?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/private-equity-firms-build-instead-030000929.html

A new dam at the headwaters of the White Nile, nearly 20 years in the making, generates almost half of this East African country’s electricity.

Its owner isn’t a state utility or an energy giant. It is Blackstone Group LP, best known for corporate takeovers.

The private-equity firm built the dam with partners and has a contract with energy-hungry Uganda to sell it power at rates that ensure profits for Blackstone for years to come.

The project, fraught with holdups that included a pirate hijacking and rituals to appease spirits before flooding an island, has little in common with the debt-fueled billion-dollar buyouts Blackstone helped popularize.

But the firm and its rivals increasingly are moving beyond the buyout playbook in search of other, sometimes unfamiliar sources of profit: drilling for oil in Oklahoma, building tract homes in North Dakota or shipping gasoline on the high seas.

“You’ve seen a radical shift in what private equity has done these last few years,” said Blackstone’s president, Hamilton “Tony” James. “You’re forced to cast your nets a bit wider and find things where the space isn’t so crowded.”

Private-equity firms long counted on buyouts for yearly returns of 20% or more. In such deals, they raise a buyout fund from investors, use that cash plus debt to take over a business, then aim to improve its operations, rejigger its finances and sell it after a few years for a big score.

In recent years, some firms are finding it difficult to survive on buyouts alone. Competitors have crowded into the buyout business, leaving fewer good candidates available. And large firms that have gone public want to show their shareholders steady earnings quarter after quarter—hard to obtain with buyouts, where the timing of a payoff is unpredictable.

“Conventional private-equity is a wonderful business in certain environments, but there are a lot of environments where, frankly, it doesn’t work right,” said Leon Black, chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management LLC, at an investor conference last year.

Buyouts remain the large firms’ bread and butter. Blackstone, although it ultimately decided not to go forward, recently considered mounting a $25 billion-plus offer for Dell Inc. In addition, while choppy markets limit the times when private-equity firms can cash out of past buyouts, a strong stock market has held that window wide open this spring.

Nonetheless, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR & Co. and Carlyle Group LP—all publicly held—now have operations far afield from their traditional financial plays. Only about a third of the investor assets Apollo manages now are tied to corporate buyouts—down from about 75% in 2007. At Blackstone, the portion of managed assets that is in buyout funds is below 25%, versus twice that nearly a decade ago.

Among the novel ventures, Carlyle raised a fund it is using to lend to companies that banks increasingly shun, which include a business that turns construction debris and old shipping pallets into power.

Apollo, for its part, is managing the investment of money that small savers put into fixed annuities promising them a steady rate of return. This is a business some insurers are retreating from, in the face of low returns on the high-quality corporate bonds that insurers invest in; Apollo is betting it can do better by putting the cash in higher-paying investments.

KKR, meanwhile, is making several bets on energy. It has teamed up with Chesapeake Energy Corp. to buy mineral rights from U.S. landowners, a deal that could allow KKR to drill for oil for years to come. KKR also created an in-house oil company to scout for its own drilling opportunities.

In addition, the firm has made billions of dollars in recent years flipping shale-field leases, many purchased from private landowners, to major oil companies. In yet another drilling-boom play, KKR is developing a tract of houses and apartments in Williston, N.D., for the oil workers pouring into that region.

In these ventures, the private-equity firms often are creating businesses from scratch, instead of making debt-fueled bids for existing ones at auctions. David Foley, who heads Blackstone’s energy investing, said his group is “building, not buying.”

Besides power projects like the dam in Uganda, Blackstone has used billions of dollars of its investors’ money to buy foreclosed homes to spruce up and rent out. Blackstone has bought ships and gotten into ocean transport. It also selects hedge funds and allocates some of investors’ money to them.

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get the run down here: http://www.enterprisecorruption.com/

is this the new enron..the one we have been waiting for?

thanks to reinhardt and the enormous background work he does on these topics..the man has spoken..you would be encouraged to follow his advice..he knows his shit..he really does..

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The corruption of capitalism in America

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/sundown-in-america.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

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thanks to ghandiloquent for the link..

hes right to say we should be looking over our shoulder right now..highs are only precedents to lows..and this baby is riding a QE bubble..

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From high school drop-out to billionaire: Previously coy Karp cashes in on Tumblr

http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/from-high-school-dropout-to-billionaire-previously-coy-karp-cashes-in-on-tumblr-20130520-2jvtw.html?google_editors_picks=true

Five years ago, tech prodigy David Karp was determined that the business he founded in his mother’s small New York apartment would not be absorbed by a multinational firm.

“We would really rather not be gobbled up by a big media company,” then 21-year-old Karp, the creator of the blogging platform Tumblr, said in an interview with the New York Observer.

Karp, 26, now looks set to become the latest tech billionaire with reports that Yahoo’s board has approved a deal to purchase Tumblr for $US1.1 billion in cash.

It’s a mind-boggling amount of money for anyone, let alone a once socially awkward teenager who dropped out of high school at the age of 15.

Remarkably it was Karp’s mother, teacher Barbara Ackerman, who suggested her son drop out of high school at the age of 15 so he could be home-schooled and continue an internship at an animation production company, Frederator Studios.

Karp’s mother recognised that, while her son was not particularly engaged with his classes or his fellow students, he seemed to thrive at the internship where he could talk easily with the company’s coders and engineers.

It was a passion he had developed early, teaching himself how to code HTML at the age of 11.

Karp’s mother told the New York Times that she could feel the sense of relief through her hand on her son’s shoulder when she floated the idea to him.

Soon his career was taking off.

When an entrepreneur named John Maloney sought technical help with his start-up, UrbanBaby.com, a Frederator employee recommended Karp.

The project had to be done in a couple of days, but Karp did it in four hours. At the age of 16, Karp was made UrbanBaby’s head of product, and he was given some equity in the company.

The following year Karp moved to Tokyo, where he lived for five months on his own.

It was there that he cooled on the idea of making robots, and instead decided to become an entrepreneur.

He told The Guardian that initially he would lie about his age when dealing with clients.

“I was so silly – I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn’t have to meet them and give away how young I was,” he said.

“I lied about my age. I lied about the size of my team. I lied about my experience. I was so terribly embarrassed about it for so long. I should have just owned up.”

When he moved back to New York, Karp set up his own software consultancy company, Davidville.

But he soon became fascinated by a new short-form of blogging called a “tumblelog”.

Karp told the New York Observer that he “kept waiting” for one of the established blog platform players to set up a platform for tumblelogging and, when that didn’t happen, he did it himself.

Karp founded Tumblr in 2007 at age 21 from the bedroom of his mother’s apartment in New York.

Sometimes described as Twitter meets YouTube and WordPress, Tumblr lets its users curate pictures, videos and text in one place online. The site gained 75,000 users in the first fortnight.

Tumblr now says it has more than 108 million blogs, 50 billion postings in 12 languages and 175 employees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Karp

David Karp (born July 6, 1986) is an American web developer and entrepreneur living in New York City. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr. In 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. According to Forbes, Karp’s net worth exceeds $200 million, and Tumblr has been valued at $800 million. On May 19, 2013, the Yahoo board approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for Tumblr.

Karp grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents are film and television composer Michael D. Karp and teacher Barbara Ackerman. He has a younger brother named Kevin. His parents separated when he was 17. Karp attended The Calhoun School from age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calhoun_School

In 1896, The Calhoun School was founded by Laura Jacobi as the Jacobi School in a brownstone at 158–160 West 80th Street. Miss Jacobi came to this country from Germany with the help of her uncle, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College and Columbia. Through her uncle and her aunt, Miss Jacobi was exposed to a progressive circle committed to women’s rights, community health and civil reform. Initially, Miss Jacobi began her program as a “brother-and-sister” school, counting among its first students the son and daughter of Franz Boas, one of the founders of American cultural anthropology. It gradually evolved into a girls school, attracting the daughters of socially prominent Jewish families—including Peggy Guggenheim, the children of the Morgenthaus and the Strausses. The school’s nonsectarian curriculum emphasized languages and history.

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i am a cynical bastard but i just dont think this guy fluked his way into this..they always seem to be selected..he ticks quite a few boxes when you dig deep..welcome to the billionaires club..

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Pentagon plans to fight “War on Terror” for another 20 years

http://rt.com/usa/terror-al-qaeda-pentagon-war-397/

Even after cutting off the head of al-Qaeda, the United States Department of Defense doesn’t believe an end to the war on terror is in sight. On Thursday, one Pentagon official predicted the mission against al-Qaeda could continue for another two decades.

Speaking to the Senate Armed Services early Thursday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Michael Sheehan said the Pentagon has no plans to pull out of its almost 12-year-old war overseas.

When asked for his take on how long the war on terror could go on for, Sheehan told lawmakers, “At least 10 to 20 years.”

According to US President Barack Obama, the last combat troops will move out of Afghanistan in 2014. If remarks from Sheehan and others are at all accurate, though, in reality the war could last through the 2030s.

Sheehan was being grilled by members of the Senate committee on Thursday over not just the future of the war, but what rules are in play to continue the operation. Congress granted then-President George W. Bush the power to go after al-Qaeda in 2001 by signing the Authorization to Use Military Force, a legislation that essentially gave the go-ahead to use America’s might by any means necessary to avenge the attacks of 9/11. Nearly 13 years later, though, some members of the Senate saw that the overly broad powers extended to the commander-in-chief through the AUMF are being used to justify a widening war that now has soldiers targeting insurgents in venue like Yemen and Somalia.

The scope of America’s counterterrorism program, Sheehan said, stretches “from Boston to the FATA,” referring to the region of Pakistan considered a hotbed of terrorism. Because of that widening arena, some senators said it’s time to rewrite the law.

“It has spread throughout North Africa, throughout the Maghreb,” Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) said during the hearing. “The situation’s changed dramatically.

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“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

- George Orwell

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Oklahoma monster tornado

http://rt.com/usa/tornado-usa-midwest-deadly-535/

At least 51 casualties including children have been reported after a historic tornado swept through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, devastating hundreds of buildings including two schools. Meteorologists reported winds up to 200 miles per hour.

A large tornado touched down in Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City on Monday, causing catastrophic damage to several housing developments, and at least two schools in the area. Local television news deployed a helicopter to track the tornado as it moved through the area, and then began to survey the extensive destruction to the region.

Monday’s storm appeared to be the deadliest tornado since 2011, and one of the worst in the last 20 years according to The Atlantic. The town lies well in the center of “Tornado Alley,” an area running from north Texas to South Dakota and west of the Mississippi river, known for frequent and powerful tornado systems.

“The whole city looks like a debris field,” said Mayor Glenn Lewis of the city of Moore.

Officials say that 75 children and teachers took shelter at Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore, which was essentially flattened by the passing tornado, and was the site of a rescue effort for several hours after the storm had passed.

Winds from the tornado tore the roof off, and parents had to be kept back as it was too loud to hear screams for help. Several children were pulled out alive from the debris during the day, with officials reporting that teachers had shielded students with their own bodies.

Students in fourth, fifth and sixth grade were evacuated to a church, but students in lower grades had sheltered in place, KFOR reported. Several dozen children are thought to have been killed at Plaza Towers as rescue teams continued to sift through the remains of the structure.

Seven students at the elementary school were found drowned at the bottom of the wreckage Monday evening, and no additional survivors were expected according to local media at the scene.

Meanwhile, students at another local school, Briarwood Elementary, had been accounted for and moved to a safe location.

Moore was last hit hard by a tornado in 1999. That storm had the highest winds ever recorded near the earth’s surface. That storm’s winds were measured at 302 miles per hour, and left 36 people dead. 

The National Weather Service initially classified Monday’s storm as an EF4, the second-strongest type with winds of up to 200 mph. Local reporters who were present for the 1999 storm, however, believe that the damage caused by this tornado appears to be considerably worse.

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incredible scenes of destruction..and the most bizarre fact is that this has happened before in the very same place..

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