Monday, March 27, 2017

Can't Eat Money

Cabbages and Kings,

Jenny N. sends this article about yard farming in Port Richey Florida. The city passed some reasonable laws, and it's seen as a good thing. Veggies are for sale, too.
Jim Kovaleski, 55, a self-proclaimed urban farmer, harvests fresh produce from his mother’s front yard recently in New Port Richey.

The "Great American Desert" became the "Midwest corn belt" in the 20th century, with wells to the Ogallala Aquifer, tractors and nitrogen fertilizer. The aquifer is pumped dry in some places, threatened in many others. Much of this corn feeds cattle in feedlots. Some makes ethanol. Some make high fructose corn syrup. Some goes to Mexico, where local farmers have been put out of business. What happens when the water goes away? People mostly leave.

Deaths from Diabetes, stroke and heart disease are linked about half the time to a few foods. 
I'm looking at you, Bacon, Soda and Hot Dogs! There are a few others, and some good foods like (I am what I eat) nuts, fruits and veggies.

Eleni sent this. The Pentagon can't say where $10 Trillion got spent. (Oh it's all so confusing and we keep such poor records at every level to begin with.)

This problem is nothing new. Donald Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion unaccounted-for on September 10 2011. The Pentagon had a crack team working on all the data. They got it all together in one place, but sadly, they all got killed the next day, when a plane or a cruise-missile, or something hit exactly where they were working and killed them all, destroying all their hard work.
"Just prior to September 11, 2001, a congressional committee was investigating unaccounted funds at the DoD. The section of the Pentagon destroyed is said to have housed records of DoD spending and the personnel for monitoring that spending."

Beyond mere conspiracy theories, leaked e-mails made available by Wikileaks from 2008 - one month before President Barack Obama won the 2008 election - reveal how Citibank's Michael Froman provided a list to John Podesta laying out virtually the entire cabinet of the soon-to-be president. The New Republic's October 2016 article, "The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton," would report (emphasis added): The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.  [Thanks Charles]

Look how well stocks are doing (But, hey, if their prices dropped by 50%, they would still be above historical price;earnings ratios. GULP!)

Russian banking has a SWIFT type electronic funds transfer system fully operational, in case it is ever needed (so that threat is no good any more).

Marine Le Pen is still expected to win the first round of French presidential elections and lose the second round (pretty sure of that...) "The European Union will die because the people do not want it anymore ... arrogant and hegemonic empires are destined to perish," Le Pen said to loud cheers and applause.  "The time has come to defeat globalists," she said, accusing her main rivals, centrist Emmanuel Macron and conservative Francois Fillon, of "treason" for their pro-EU, pro-market policies.

Greece can't (really can not) accept refugees back from EU countries, under the Dublin Accord, which says "tag-you're-it" to whichever country they first showed up in. Greece officially states this as policy. The rest of the EU seems to want the Dublin Accord enforced again, now.

Populism, the answer to decades of "Unpopulism" (catchy term explained here)

Ryan and Trump are in disagreement about tax cuts. They both like cuts for the top 5%, but Ryan wants to increase taxes on the top 40% of incomes, minus the top 5%. Make-the-middle-class-pay-for-it is the strategy again. How's that look to you?

Targeted Demographic

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