January 25, 2016

Phoenix cop only gets 60 days in jail after he’s busted for trying to impregnate underage girl

A Phoenix police officer who answered a social media post from a teen saying she wanted to have a baby was sentenced to 60 days in jail after agreeing to a plea deal that allowed him to avoid seven years in prison.

Justin LaClere, 33, was initially charged on two felony counts — child abuse and sex with a minor, but had those charges set aside in return for two lower-level felony charges, reports the Phoenix New Times.

According to a police investigation, LaClere responded to a posting by the unidentified 17-year-old on Whisper — a social media site that allows users to post pictures and chat anonymously with strangers — in 2014.

Police state that the teen posted a picture of a baby with the comment: “I want to get pregnant but I’m only a teen.” ..........(more)

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/want-a-baby-in-ya-phoenix-cop-only-gets-60-days-in-jail-after-hes-busted-for-trying-to-impregnate-underage-girl/

January 25, 2016

Martin Shkreli aspires to be the king of all a**holes

.....and wrest the title away from Trump

(Bloomberg) Disgraced biotech executive Martin Shkreli has shifted into full attack mode, simultaneously taking on the U.S. Congress and Ghostface Killah. Which antagonist poses more of a threat is open to debate.

A brief recap: Shkreli, 32, ran hedge funds and a pair of biotech drug manufacturers before gaining extreme notoriety last year for raising the price of a lifesaving AIDS drug by more than 5,000 percent. Then he got indicted for securities fraud. Most recently, Shkreli requested that a federal judge in New York intervene to help him avoid being charged with criminal contempt if he doesn't appear before a congressional committee. His appearance, initially scheduled for Tuesday, was postponed after a weekend blizzard inundated the nation's capital.

Shkreli’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in Brooklyn to step in after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued the former executive a subpoena to testify at the Jan. 26 hearing on drug pricing. The panel warned it would pursue criminal contempt charges against him if he does not show up.

The kerfuffle with Congress has a certain academic feel, as Shkreli has already said that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refuse to answer questions from lawmakers. His appeal to the New York judge refers to the terms of Shkreli’s $5 million bail package, which bar him from any travel. Shkreli’s lawyers asked the judge to quash or delay the congressional subpoena “if the court decides that Mr. Shkreli may not leave the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York in order to attend the committee hearing,” according to the filing.

With characteristic flair, Shkreli appears to be doing his best to irritate members of Congress. On Friday he tweeted to lawmakers: “You want me to go to DC to just say ‘I plead the 5th’? For your entertainment?” ...............(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-25/mr-shkreli-goes-to-washington-and-mocks-ghostface-killah

January 25, 2016

Milos Raonic channels his inner Steph Curry at Aussie Open

(ESPN) MELBOURNE, Australia -- The topics at tennis postmatch news conferences can be wide ranging, interesting and surprising. Monday at the Australian Open was a good example. During Victoria Azarenka's conference, the Belarusian player talked extensively about her passion for the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers, and how the Super Bowl between the two will be a "dream matchup."

Then there was Milos Raonic, the Montenegro-born Canadian who talked about how he will be playing in the celebrity game during NBA All-Star Weekend in Toronto next month.

"I think meeting Steph Curry would be great, especially the stratosphere that he's been in the last 16 months with his game," Raonic said after beating Stan Wawrinka in five sets to advance to the Australian Open quarterfinals. "Also, he wasn't the biggest prospect growing up. He was a later draft pick. He went to a smaller school in Davidson. He wasn't picked up by the Duke-type schools and so forth. And I wasn't a great junior myself. I think there's a great perspective if I could learn a little bit about what it took for him to get himself to where he is right now."

Raonic is off to a great start this year -- he has won all of his eight matches, including the final in Brisbane against Roger Federer -- but hasn't had nearly the success Curry has enjoyed in the past year. While Raonic did rise as high as No. 4 in the rankings last May, he also suffered a foot injury that sidelined him from a number of tournaments, including the French Open. He eventually fell to No. 14. The injury often left him depressed, but it also helped because it gave him time to consider working on improving different aspects of his game. ................(more)

http://espn.go.com/tennis/aus16/story/_/id/14642385/australian-open-2016-milos-raonic-channels-inner-steph-curry-upset-stan-wawrinka

January 25, 2016

Davos, Dalio, and a Depression?!

Davos, Dalio, and a Depression?!
by Bill Tilles and Len Hyman • January 23, 2016


[font color="blue"]So, how does a deflationary depression resolve itself?[/font]

By Bill Tilles and Len Hyman:


When Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, referred to a possible economic depression as he was being interviewed at the World Economic Forum at Davos, it does not mean what most people think it means.

Most of us think about recessions and depressions in a linear way. That is, a depression is a really, really bad recession featuring even higher levels of unemployment and lower overall levels of economic activity.

But for Mr. Dalio, recessions are kind of normal, business-cycle related economic events that regularly occur every 5-10 years or so. The economy begins to overheat, the Fed raises rates in response (the removal of the “punch bowl”), business activity slows perhaps a bit too much in response, and voila! A recession results.

Depressions on the other hand are secular or long term, occurring much less frequently. That’s because according to Mr. Dalio, it takes a long time (perhaps decades) to accumulate the excess levels of corporate and government debt that end up triggering this type of economic event. A depression is a condition where more debt cannot be added to the system and instead it must be reduced, or as we say, deleveraging must occur. A depression always threatens systemic solvency. .............(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/23/davos-dalio-economic-deflationary-depression/

January 25, 2016

“Some very critical things are hidden.”

This is Why Junk Bonds Will Sink Stocks: Moody’s
by Wolf Richter • January 24, 2016


[font color="blue"]“Some very critical things are hidden.”[/font]

After the white-knuckle sell-off of global equities that was finally punctuated by a rally late last week, everyone wants to know: Was this the bottom for stocks? And now Moody’s weighs in with an unwelcome warning.

If you want to know where equities are going, look at junk bonds, it says. Specifically, look at the spread in yield between junk bonds and Treasuries. That spread has been widening sharply. And look at the Expected Default Frequency (EDF), a measure of the probability that a company will default over the next 12 months. It has been soaring.

They do that when big problems are festering: The Financial Crisis was already in full swing before the yield spread and the EDF reached today’s levels!

And so, John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Research, has a dose of reality for stock-market bottom fishers:

For now, it’s hard to imagine why the equity market will steady if the US high-yield bond spread remains wider than 800 basis points (8 percentage points). Taken together, the highest average EDF metric of US/Canadian non-investment-grade companies of the current recovery and its steepest three-month upturn since March 2009 favor an onerous high-yield bond spread of roughly 850 basis points.

Moody’s EDF began spiking last summer and has nearly doubled since then to 8%, the highest since 2009. ...............(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/24/moodys-sours-on-stocks/

January 25, 2016

Chris Hedges: The Suicide of the Liberal Church

from truthdig:


The Suicide of the Liberal Church

Posted on Jan 24, 2016
By Chris Hedges


Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death. And decaying institutions, including the church, when consumed by fear, swiftly push those endowed with this moral courage and radicalism from their ranks, rendering themselves obsolete.

The wisdom of Tillich and Niebuhr has been borne out in the precipitous decline of the liberal church and the seminaries and divinity schools that train religious scholars and clergy. Faced with shrinking or nonexistent endowments, mounting debts, dwindling memberships, a lack of employment for their graduates and growing irrelevancy in a society that has little use for tepid church piety and the smug arrogance that comes with it, these institutions have fallen into physical and moral decay.

The number of adults in the mainline Protestant churches—Presbyterian, Unitarian-Universalist, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, Congregationalist—decreased from about 41 million in 2007 to 36 million in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the average age of the congregant is 52. The Catholic Church also is being decimated; its decline has been exacerbated by its decades-long protection of sexual predators within the priesthood and the Vatican’s relentless campaign, especially under John Paul II, to force out of the church priests, nuns and lay leaders who focused their ministries on the poor and the oppressed. The Catholic Church, which has lost 3 million members over the last decade, has seen its hold on the U.S. population fall to 21 percent from 24.

Mainline seminaries and divinity schools have been merging or closing, and enrollment at such schools has declined by 24 percent in the last decade. Andover-Newton, founded in 1807, recently shut down. Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Pa., and Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia plan to merge. Union Theological Seminary, where black liberation, feminist, womanist and queer theologies have their roots, appears to be on the verge of selling “air space” to a developer to construct a luxury 35-to-40-story condominium building on its campus. General Theological Seminary in New York City, a school founded in 1817, has sold much of its property to developers, and it ended tenure for its faculty after the professors went out on strike to demand the removal of Dean and President Kurt Dunkle. Dunkle, who epitomizes the infusion of corporatism into the church, worked for many years as a lawyer doing commercial litigation before being ordained. .................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_20160124

January 25, 2016

By 2050, our oceans will hold more plastic than fish

(NEWSER) – Use of plastic has increased 20-fold in the past half-century; production of the ubiquitous material is expected to double again in the next 20 years (and nearly quadruple over the next 50). And, CNN Money reports, nearly a third of all plastic packaging "escapes collection systems."

As for where the rest goes, more than 8 million tons of plastics end up entering our oceans each year, where the pieces can survive for hundreds of years. There are believed to be 165 million tons of it in the ocean right now. We're dumping the equivalent of one garbage truck's worth into the ocean per minute; that's projected to jump to four per minute by 2050, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. And that report has an ominous warning: We're on track to have more plastic than fish, by weight, in the world's oceans by 2050. (Right now, the ratio is about 1:5, plastics to fish.)

And the discarded plastic that doesn't end up in the ocean is likely be put in a landfill; those two resting places end up holding about 70% of our plastic, the Washington Post reports. Just 5% of plastics are effectively recycled, according to the Guardian. It's not just a problem of pollution. .................(more)

http://www.freep.com/story/news/2016/01/24/oceans-more-plastic-than-fish/79267192/

January 23, 2016

Can Hillary Clinton Be Trusted to Regulate the Banks That Made Her Rich?

Published on Jan 21, 2016

Former regulator Bill Black and Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown say Hillary's track record gives no indication that she will fulfill any promise in her 2016 campaign to implement regulations on Wall Street

January 23, 2016

Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

(The Intercept) After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.

Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.

Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.

Watch the video:

https://vimeo.com/152786370

During one of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, Clinton reportedly reassured the crowd and told them that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish, according to a Politico report based on accounts offered by several attendees. ............(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/23/clinton-goldman-sachs-laugh/

January 23, 2016

Why Do We Expose Ourselves?

(The Intercept) AMONG CRITICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURVEILLANCE, there are two allusions so commonplace they have crossed into the realm of cliché. One, as you have probably already guessed, is George Orwell’s Big Brother, from 1984. The other is Michel Foucault’s panopticon — a vision, adapted from Jeremy Bentham, of a prison in which captives cannot tell if or when they are being watched. Today, both of these touchstones are considered chillingly prophetic. But in Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt has another suggestion: Both of them are insufficient.

1984, Harcourt acknowledges, was an astoundingly farsighted text, but Orwell failed to anticipate the role pleasure would come to play in our culture of surveillance — specifically, the way it could be harnessed, as opposed to suppressed, by powerful interests. Oceania’s “Hate Week” is nowhere to be found; instead, we live in a world of likes, favorites, and friending. Foucault’s panopticon, in turn, needs a similar update; mass incarceration aside, the panopticon — for the rest of us — has become participatory, more of an amusement park or shopping mall than a penal institution. Rather than being coerced to reveal secrets, today we seem to enjoy self-exposure, giving away “our most intimate information and whereabouts so willingly and passionately — so voluntarily.”

Exposed is a welcome addition to the current spate of books about technology and surveillance. While it covers familiar ground — it opens with brief accounts of Facebook’s methods of tracking users, USAID’s establishment of ZunZuneo (a Twitter-like social network) in Cuba, and Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s PRISM program — Harcourt’s contribution is uniquely indebted to critical theory. Riffing on the work of another French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and his evocative 1992 fragment “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Harcourt settles upon the phrase “Expository Society” to describe our current situation, one in which we “have become dulled to the perils of digital transparence” and enamored of exposure. This new form of expository power, Harcourt explains, “embeds punitive transparence into our hedonist indulgences and inserts the power to punish in our daily pleasures.” .................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/23/surveillance-bernard-harcourt-why-do-we-expose-ourselves/