Disclosure: I’m Long Natural Gas (UNG)
January 13th, 2012Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Update: Stopped Out, No Position in UNG
—End Update—
I bought a small amount of UNG near the lows this morning. Tight stop on this one. Up or out.
Haiti: Two Years After the Earthquake, Where Did the Money Go?
January 13th, 2012Via: Global Post:
Where those billions went following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that left a government-estimated figure of 220,000 people dead — and at least 1.6 million more homeless — remains a confounding mystery.
…
“In the end,” says Robert Fatton Jr., professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia and a son of and authority on contemporary Haiti, “if you read the reports — the UN Report and so on — you’ll see that actual Haitians got less than 1 percent of all the American money pledged.”
In other words, Fatton explained, “99 percent of [the US money spent] went back to the US military, the State Department, NGOs and contractors. The money was clearly intended for Haiti, but it ended up returning to the same place it came from.”
Research Credit: roaches
QE3?
January 13th, 2012Via: CNBC:
Federal Reserve officials are seriously considering giving the US economy—and especially the housing market—an added jolt with more quantitative easing.
Radioactive Metal Tissue Box Holders Pulled from NY Stores
January 13th, 2012Via: NBC:
Health officials said they’ve removed a dozen metal box tissue holders containing small amounts of radioactive material from four Bed, Bath and Beyond stores in New York.
None of the boxes were sold to the public, said the company.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission notified state health officials Tuesday that a shipment of metal box tissue holders to four Bed, Bath and Beyond stores were found to contain low levels of Cobalt-60.
Cobalt-60, a man-made product using cobalt, has been used to sterilize medical equipment and in radiation therapy for cancer patients.
The level of radiation exposure from holding the tissue box against the body for one hour would be equivalent to a chest X-ray, said state health officials.
The NRC said scrap metal containing Cobalt-60 could have inadvertently been incorporated into the product during smelting. The products arrived in a shipment from India on Dec. 27, and 220 were distributed to Bed Bath and Beyond stores nationwide.
U.S. Marines Urinating on Afghan Corpses
January 13th, 2012Via: Washington Post:
Top U.S. officials moved swiftly Thursday to try to prevent diplomatic damage and contain public disgust from the release of a video that appeared to show Marines urinating on three Afghan corpses — images that spread quickly around the globe.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he had viewed the video and considered it “utterly deplorable.” He telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and pledged a full investigation.
Prior to the call, Karzai described the video as “completely inhumane and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” His administration called on the U.S. military to “apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”
The video, which runs for less than a minute, depicts four Marines in combat gear laughing and joking as they urinate on three male bodies. The caption refers to the corpses as “dead Talibans,” but it is unclear whether the men were civilians or fighters killed after a battle.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed “total dismay” at the behavior depicted in the recording, and said the “vast, vast” majority of American military personnel would not engage in such actions.
NASA Senior Research Scientist on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (Cold Fusion): “It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.”
January 13th, 2012Via: PESN:
Dr. Zawodny: “It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.”
Narrator: “This clean form of energy is also power, able to support everything from transportation systems to infrastructure.”
Dr. Zawodny: “The easiest implementation of this would be for the home. You would have a unit that would replace your water heater. And you would have some sort of cycle to derive electrical energy from that. And then it would dump its waste heat into the water or air handing system for the building. So it would be a dual use thing. It would be sitting there producing heat; [and] you’d drive electricity from it to run your electronics, power the house, power the building, power the lights. And then the waste heat would be used for environmental control [e.g. heat pump / air conditioning] and warm water.”
Related: Slides From Sept. 22 NASA LENR Innovation Forum Workshop [Thanks, noguru]
Principal Charged After Hypnotizing Students Who Committed Suicide
January 13th, 2012Via: CBS:
North Port police have charged the town’s high school principal with two counts of second-degree criminal misdemeanors after students he hypnotized ended up committing suicide.
Over six months, the North Port Police Department conducted around 70 interviews with students claiming to have been hypnotized by Dr. George Kenney and 100 adults either from among the school’s staff or parent community after receiving a complaint from the Florida Department of Health Services.
In documents provided to CBS Tampa detailing the Sarasota School Department’s internal investigation, Kenney routinely hypnotized students in one-on-one sessions and in group settings. They often involved the school athletics teams or ROTC programs.
Kenney told investigators it allowed students to relax, improved their performance in tests and helped some with anger issues.
Documents show, however, that Kenney occasionally raised tempers and eyebrows within the school’s community.
He was limited to hypnotizing students during psychology classes and then only with parent-signed permission slips and another teacher in the classroom — conditions insisted upon in 2009 by Steven Cantes, executive director of high schools for the Sarasota County School System.
Kenney’s many supporters expressed gratitude for his help and admiration of his character throughout the report.
U.S. Debt Limit Will Increase by $1.2 Trillion
January 12th, 2012Via: Washington Post:
President Obama formally notified Congress on Thursday of his intent to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion, two weeks after he had postponed the request to give lawmakers more time to consider the action.
Congress will have had 15 days to say no before the nation’s debt ceiling automatically is raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion.
In a letter to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama wrote that ”further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments.”
Bay Area Company Creating Massive Vehicle Location Database from Police License Plate Scanning
January 12th, 2012Here’s one for your Retroactive Surveillance file folder.
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
Capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing trends in law enforcement, a private company in Livermore has compiled a database bulging with more than 550 million bits of information that let police know when and where specific license plates of both innocent and criminal drivers were spotted.
The technology has raised alarms among civil libertarians, who say it threatens the privacy of drivers. It’s also evidence that 21st century technology may be evolving too quickly for the courts and public opinion to keep up. The U.S. Supreme Court is only now addressing whether investigators can secretly attach a GPS monitoring device to cars without a warrant.
A ruling in that case has yet to be handed down, but a telling exchange occurred during oral arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts asked lawyers for the government if even he and other members of the court could feasibly be tracked by GPS without a warrant. Yes, came the answer.
At the same time, police around the country have been affixing high-tech scanners to the exterior of their patrol cars, snapping a picture of every passing license plate and automatically comparing them to databases of outstanding warrants, stolen cars and wanted bank robbers.
The units work by sounding an in-car alert if the scanner comes across a license plate of interest to police, whereas before, patrol officers generally needed some reason to take an interest in the vehicle, like a traffic violation.
But when a license plate is scanned, the driver’s geographic location is also recorded and saved, along with the date and time, each of which amounts to a record or data point. Such data collection occurs regardless of whether the driver is a wanted criminal, and the vast majority are not.
While privacy rules restrict what police can do with their own databases, Vigilant Video, headquartered in Livermore, offers a loophole. It’s a private business that is not required to operate by those same rules.
The company sells its own brand of license plate readers and has customers around the nation, including the cities of Springfield, Ill.; Kings Point, N.Y.; and Orange, Conn. But Vigilant distinguished itself from competitors by going one step further and collecting hundreds of millions of scans to create what is known as the National Vehicle Location Service.
‘Scream Rooms’ Inside Connecticut Elementary School
January 12th, 2012Via: CBS:
Parents in a Connecticut suburb are outraged over disturbing disciplinary actions at a local elementary school.
They claim students are being locked in unsupervised “scream rooms,” where some children have harmed themselves, reports CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez.
The Middleton School District is on the hot seat as furious parents are demanding to know what’s going on behind closed doors at Farm Hill Elementary School.
“My daughter is telling me that there’s kids being taken out in ambulances, by stretcher,” parent Sean Archer told CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez on Wednesday.
Disturbing allegations have surfaced of teachers locking students in closet-sized concrete “scream rooms” for punishment.
“Kids come home and they cry, because they’re afraid to go to school. And it’s often,” parent Brian Robillard said.
“She can hear the kids screaming at the top of their lungs, while she’s trying to read and she asks her teacher what’s going on and they never give her an answer. They tell her to ignore it,” said Liz Archer, the sister of one Farm Hill student.
Parents said their children have witnessed teachers placing unruly students into the tiny “time-out” rooms to calm down.
“From what I heard it’s more traumatizing for the child than it was as a help,” parent Jeff Daniels said. “Kids were hitting their heads on the concrete wall. Kids were urinating in the room.”
School Superintendent Michael Freschette said allegations of children harming themselves in the timeout rooms are not true. However, the Board of Education is investigating. The chairman spoke to CBS 2’s Sanchez by phone Wednesday night.
“We certainly are concerned with these allegations and I’m looking into every single one of them to be certain that our staff is providing a safe environment for our students,” Gene Nocera said.
Related: Public School as Kafkaesque Nightmare


