CBSSan Francisco reports supporters of a plan to hand out clean crack pipes to San Francisco drug users say they’re not swayed by city opposition and plan to hand them out anyway. Activists claim that such a program would have many of the same benefits of needle exchanges, essentially connecting users with services that could help them turn their lives around.

The city of San Francisco hands out 2.7 million clean needles a year to IV drug users. Advocates said clean glass pipes to crack users could also cut HIV and Hepatitis C cases.

Laura Thomas of the HIV Prevention and Planning Council has made a formal recommendation to the city’s health department. As KPIX 5 reported last week, city leaders have balked at the proposal.

More here

Click to enlarge.

The Fed wants 2% inflation per year. If real household median income and real household debt per capita can't get us there, then oil will have to do.

Here's the good news. If real household median income starts to fall again, then the Fed may help raise the price of oil to compensate again. In fact, the lower real median income goes, the more help they may offer! Genius!

Put another way, the less you make at work the more it may cost you to get to work! You know, just to balance it out and what not. This is such a great idea. Should give you all the motivation in the world to get paid more.

What label should we use to describe what's going on?

1. Deflation.
2. Inflation.
3. Stagflation.
4. All of the above.

You make the call. As for me, I'm calling it hyperdefstaginflation! We'll need two words to describe what we're feeling as well.

For the optimists: hyperdefstaginfelationed!
For the pessimists: hyperdefstaginfestationed!

As a side note, one can probably deduce the typical feeling based on how little it costs to fill one's gas tank as a percentage of net worth. The closer you are to the top 1%, the more you'll feel hyperdefstaginfelationed! Well, not always. There may be a little bit of whining involved.

January 28, 2014
VC legend Tom Perkins apologizes for comparing attack on rich to holocaust



File:If-us-land-mass-were-distributed-like-us-wealth.png (Stephen Ewen)

The 1% minority are being persecuted by that little red dot. Oh the humanity! Although none have lost their lives so far, there's been a great deal of emotional damage. When your net worth is over a billion dollars and you experience even 2% emotional damage, that's tens of millions of dollars! For a 200 pound billionaire, that's easily $6,250 per ounce in tainted self-worth! Don't the poor realize this?

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

January 14, 2014



Sometimes the best things in life really do come in small packages. :)

The first chart shows the annual change in new privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits for 1-unit structures. I'm using quarterly averages to smooth out the noise a bit.


Click to enlarge.

Can't we just blame it the weather and call it good?

The next chart shows just the data for Florida, Nevada, and Arizona (three of the previous housing bubble's largest hotspots).


Click to enlarge.

I guess it all depends on how much annual polar vortex activity there was in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona. As seen in the chart, the growth trend has been decelerating at a consistent pace for a full year. We'll therefore need a whole year's worth of polar vortex activity in three of the warmest states. Totally doable with the right spin!

Further, just look at all that volatility in the data since 2005. I can't even begin to tell you how much that fills me with confidence. Slow and steady is so overrated. Anarchy! Random profits and losses! That's what makes the casino life right for me!

This is not investment advice (especially that part about casino life being right for me).

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Building Permits for 1-Unit Structures (National)
St. Louis Fed: Building Permits for 1-Unit Structures (Florida + Nevada + Arizona)

Commentary by James Shott

An abortion-related event occurred last week, and if you were paying close attention to the news, you might have been aware of that. Hundreds of thousands of abortion opponents gathered in Washington, DC for the “March for Life,” protesting the grisly process that has terminated about 55 million future Americans in the womb since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

It wasn’t easy to find news accounts of this event. The Media Research Center reports, “the broadcast networks combined devoted a total of just 46 seconds to the March. ABC offered 24 seconds and NBC gave it 22 seconds, correctly noting the ‘huge turnout’ despite brutal weather conditions. CBS didn’t bother to cover it at all.”

This coverage totaled about 18 percent of the coverage the birth of a panda cub at National Zoo received a few days earlier. In the eyes of our dedicated network news people, one new panda is six times more important than 55 million aborted potential children, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who braved the cold to make their position known.

This helps confirm the long-held idea that we do not have a news media that furnishes the public with what it needs, but instead provides what it wants the public to know.

A fact sheet published by the Guttmacher Institute tells us that at least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45. Given that the cause of pregnancy is not a medical mystery, that is a shocking statistic.

Web4Health explains that sex without contraceptives carries an 85 percent likelihood of pregnancy, and if the most effective contraceptive methods are used properly, the chance of pregnancy drops to eight percent or less, but abstaining from sexual intercourse has a zero percent pregnancy rate, except for in vitro fertilization.

According to Guttmacher, fifty-four percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method (usually the condom or the pill) during the month they became pregnant. Among those women, 76 percent of pill users and 49 percent of condom users report having used their method inconsistently. Forty-six percent of women who had abortions used no contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.

Other factors contribute to unwanted pregnancy. Some men and women are uneducated about how to have responsible sex, and contraceptives can be expensive for some.

Abortion was, in fact, the solution for more than a million women who got pregnant unintentionally last year. But as long as abortions are an easy corrective for bad luck, carelessness or bad judgment, it seems unlikely that more responsible use of contraceptives will occur.

The problem with abortion is that at some point in the pregnancy the fetus will have developed enough to be justifiably considered a human being. That point may or may not be the same point as when the fetus can survive outside the womb, but whenever that point occurs and afterward, abortion is murder. The debate goes on over just when the fetus reaches that point.

It is commonly accepted that at 20 weeks the fetus can feel pain during an abortion, and at least one researcher believes that as early as eight weeks after conception the neural structures needed to detect certain stimuli are in place. As science progresses more and more becomes known about fetal development, pushing backward toward conception the point at which the fetus is a person.

Be that as it may, it is absolutely scandalous that in America in the 21st century so many women get pregnant who don’t want to, and that so many of them choose to abort the developing life inside them.

It ought to be a point of humiliation that the great majority of unwanted pregnancies result from carelessness or negligence in the use of contraceptives, or not using contraceptives at all.

A major provider of abortions is Planned Parenthood for America, and it receives more than $500 million each year in taxpayer funds to deliver “vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of women, men, and young people worldwide,” according to its Website, “the key program [of which] provides essential health care to women, the Title X Family Planning Program.”

Planned Parenthood provided 360,000 abortions in 2013. Providing abortions to women who are pregnant and don’t want to be is not planning for parenthood.

There are couples all across this nation who cannot conceive a child and would gladly adopt an unwanted child given up for adoption. Perhaps Planned Parenthood could shift its focus from abortion to adoption, and nurture women through their unwanted pregnancy to an end that both honors life and helps those who want children, but can’t have their own.

How many great writers, scientists, artists, inventers, athletes, etc., have been summarily snuffed out before they got started?

A young pregnant wife was hospitalized for a simple attack of appendicitis and had ice applied tfso her stomach. Afterward, doctors suggested that she abort the child, because the baby would be born with disabilities. The young wife decided not to abort, and the child was born. That woman was the mother of Andrea Bocelli.

Cross-posted from Observations

The following chart shows real monthly manufacturers' new orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft per civilian employed (December 2013 dollars). I am using quarterly averages to smooth things out a bit.


Click to enlarge.

Green trend lines represent growth.
Yellow trend lines represent stagnation.
Red trend lines represent "soft patches."

What's the worst that could "unexpectedly" happen again?

January 28, 2014
Durable goods orders unexpectedly plunge in December


Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

It’s over!  The Fat Lady is singing!  Game, Set, and Match!  Whatever you wanna call it, President Obama’s presidency is essentially over because he’s lost the trust of the American people because of his dishonesty. 


It’s all over but the shouting!

Truth Revolt reports on the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union Address, a new poll from Washington Post-ABC News showsthat fully 63 percent of Americans have either little to no confidence Obama will make the right decisions. The public is evenly split on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy, with 49 percent of Americans answering in the affirmative, and 48 percent answering negatively.

A bare majority of Americans, 52 percent, feel Obama does not understand the problems of people like them – a shocking downward turn for Obama on an important likeability issue in which he dominated in 2012. A majority of Americans, 51 percent, also believe Obama is not a strong leader. His disapproval rating stands currently at 50 percent, with 41 percent disapproving strongly – only 23 percent support him strongly. 50 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the president.

More here

Expres and Star reports six teenagers as young as 14 have been charged after mosque worshippers including pensioners and a schoolboy were slapped and kicked.

Members of the Cradley Heath Mosque & Islamic Centre were targeted, sparking an investigation from officers.

Today, West Midlands Police revealed a sales assistant aged 17 had been charged with three counts of racially-aggravated assault.
He is accused of punching and kicking men aged 68 and 70 in attacks on October 16 and 17, and slapping an eight-year-old boy outside the mosque on October 24.

Two 16-year-olds, two 15-year-olds and a 14-year-old, all boys from Cradley Heath, have also been charged with racially-aggravated harassment and criminal damage to a motor vehicle.

The six, who cannot be named, have been bailed to appear at Sandwell Youth Court on Monday.

Sgt Mandy Morgan said: “We pride ourselves on the close working relationship we have with our local community and will always to seek prosecute people suspected of committing crimes of this nature.
"It is totally unacceptable."

"Officers have been working closely with the local Mosque and continue to offer reassurance to local residents.

More here