the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Cruise Industry COVID damage beginning to be felt. Being registered overseas blocked them from US Coronavirus Relief funds and now the Grim Reaper is beginning to collect...

Another cruise cut short; passengers offloaded in Bahamas​

pressherald.com/2022/02/01/another-cruise-cut-short-passengers-offloaded-in-bahamas/

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON February 1, 2022

MIAMI — A second ship from the embattled Crystal Cruises line has cut short its trip and offloaded passengers in the Bahamas as the company faces a legal dispute over millions of dollars in fuel bills.
The itinerary changes for the Crystal Serenity followed a judge’s order last month to seize the Crystal Symphony if it enters U.S. waters.

The Crystal Serenity was originally scheduled to take about 200 passengers on a three-and-a-half month expedition, but two days after leaving Miami on Jan. 17, the company announced it would suspend operations through April. The ship canceled several port calls since then.

Passengers were told the ship would end the cruise in Aruba, but then local officials did not allow the ship to dock this weekend, so the ship was diverted to Bimini, a company spokesman said. The cruise line then ferried the passengers to Fort Lauderdale and taken to hotel rooms Monday night.

The passengers will be reimbursed for any applicable airline change fees, said Crystal Cruises spokesman Vance Gulliksen.

“There are simply no words to express our deep regret and disappointment,” the company’s statement said.

The ship that had a seizure order, Crystal Symphony, was supposed to return to Miami on Jan. 22, but instead changed its course to Bimini, also offloading and ferrying passengers to Fort Lauderdale.

A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit that accuses the cruise line of failing to pay $4.6 million for fuel issued the warrant for the Crystal Symphony on Jan. 20. The maritime order authorizes U.S. Marshals to board a vessel and take charge once it approaches the U.S. coast.

In the complaint filed in a Miami federal court last month, Peninsula Petroleum Far East lists sales totaling $2.2 million of fuel to Crystal Serenity that were not paid. Gulliksen said there is no warrant against the Crystal Serenity.

Some passengers on the voyage, which would have ended in California in late May, said they were glad to leave.

“I’m delighted to be off that ship,” said Barry Shulman, 75, of Las Vegas.

The company announced it was suspending operations through late April to “provide Crystal’s management team with an opportunity to evaluate the current state of business and examine various options moving forward.”

The cruise line’s parent company, Genting Hong Kong, has been struggling with the effects of the pandemic on its shipping and cruise businesses. Last month, one of its shipyards filed for bankruptcy protection in Germany.
 
Never knew Cook's Endeavour was involved in our Revolution and was stationed in New England...

Wreck in Rhode Island is explorer James Cook’s ship, Aussies say​

pressherald.com/2022/02/03/wreck-in-rhode-island-is-explorer-james-cooks-ship-aussies-say/

Associated Press February 4, 2022
Australia_Historic_Ship_45561-1643937136.jpg


SYDNEY — Australian maritime experts said Thursday they believed they’ve found the wreck of one of the most important ships in the history of the South Pacific after it was scuttled in the U.S. more than 200 years ago.

But archaeologists in the U.S. quickly countered by saying the findings were premature and a breach of contract in their joint research.

For 22 years, maritime archaeologists have been investigating several ancient shipwrecks in a 2-square-mile area of Newport Harbor, Rhode Island. That’s where James Cook’s HMS Endeavour was believed to have been deliberately sunk by the British during the American Revolution.

Cook had earlier sailed the ship around the South Pacific in a pioneering voyage before landing on the east coast of Australia in 1770.

On Thursday morning, Kevin Sumption, the chief executive of the Australian National Maritime Museum, held a news conference in Sydney after alerting media that he’d be making “a major historic maritime announcement.”

Sumption said archaeologists were convinced they had found the wreck of the Endeavour after matching structural details and the shape of the remains to those on original plans.

“I am satisfied that this is the final resting place of one of the most important and contentious vessels in Australia’s maritime history,” Sumption said.

But in a statement issued soon afterward, D.K. Abbass, the executive director of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, said her group was the lead organization in the study at Newport Harbor.

“What we see on the shipwreck site under study is consistent with what might be expected of the Endeavour, but there has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel, and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification,” Abbass wrote. “When the study is done, RIMAP will post the legitimate report.”

In a subsequent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Kieran Hosty, the Australian museum’s manager of maritime archeology, said he thought his group’s contract with RIMAP had ended in November but he couldn’t comment for certain. He gave further details that he said had convinced them it was the Endeavour, including the size of the timbers, that it was European-built, and the scuttling holes in the keel.

“So it tick all those boxes,” Hosty told the ABC. “So, we are very open to conversations with Dr. Abbass if she disagrees with our findings, their findings.”

Sumption had earlier said that the ship’s significant role in exploration, astronomy and science made it important not only to Australia, but also to New Zealand, Britain and the U.S.

“The last pieces of the puzzle had to be confirmed before I felt able to make this call,” Sumption said at the news conference. “Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I’m convinced it’s the Endeavour.”

Only about 15% of the vessel remains and researchers are now focused on what can be done to protect and preserve it, Sumption said at the news conference. He said that the museum was working closely with maritime experts in Rhode Island as well as with state and federal officials in the U.S. and Australia to secure the site.

But Abbass said that while her organization recognized the connection between Australian citizens of British descent and the Endeavour, its conclusions would be driven “by proper scientific process and not Australian emotions or politics.”

The ship was launched in 1764 as the Earl of Pembroke. Four years later, it was renamed Endeavour by Britain’s navy and was readied for a major scientific voyage to the Pacific.

From 1768 to 1771, the Endeavour sailed the South Pacific, ostensibly to record the transit of Venus in Tahiti in 1769. Cook then continued sailing the region searching for the “Great Southern Land.”

He charted the coastline of New Zealand. His first significant encounter with the Indigenous Maori people ended badly, with his crew killing several Maori. In 2019, the British government expressed regret over the killings but stopped short of a full apology.

He also charted Australia’s eastern coastline, before claiming the land for Great Britain in 1770.

The Endeavour was later sold to private owners and renamed Lord Sandwich. It was deliberately sunk in 1778 by British forces during the American Revolution.

A year later, Cook was killed in Hawaii during another Pacific voyage. In 1788, the so-called First Fleet of 11 ships, with hundreds of convicts aboard, arrived in Australia to establish a British colony.
 
Poor Joey, he's definitely in the crosshairs and Karma is striking hard. Actually feel a little sorry here, many of us, myself probably included too, have made comments in the past that don't cut it in the "World of Woke." He's just between a rock and a hard place being such a prominent blog on a music station that's populated by "Woke" artists...

Joe Rogan Apologizes for ‘Shameful’ Past Use of Racial Slur​

His apology came as listeners said that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast had been quietly taken off Spotify; the company has yet to comment on the reported removals.

As pressure has intensified on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported that the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.

In an Instagram video, Rogan — whose talk show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is Spotify’s most popular podcast, and has been available there exclusively for more than a year — addressed what he called “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.” A compilation video showed Rogan using the slur numerous times in past episodes of his show; it had been shared by the singer India.Arie, who has removed her catalog from Spotify in protest of what she called Rogan’s “language around race.”

Rogan said the compilation was drawn from “12 years of conversations” on his show, and that it looked “horrible, even to me.” The clips, he said, had been taken out of context, which he said included discussions about how it had been used by comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who were Black, and Lenny Bruce, who was white.

When posting the clip compilation, Arie said that Rogan “shouldn’t even be uttering the word. Don’t say it, under any context.” In his video, Rogan said that he had come to agree with that view. “It’s not my word to use,” he said. “I’m well aware of that now.” He added that he had not spoken the slur “in years.”

This week, Arie joined a small but influential boycott of Spotify led by the musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, who cited complaints by health professionals that guests on Rogan’s show had spread misinformation about the coronavirus.

In his latest video, Rogan also discussed a clip from another podcast episode, which he said he had deleted, in which he described seeing “Planet of the Apes” at a theater in a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. “I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said it was like we got out and we were in Africa. It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes,’” he said, adding that it was an “idiotic” thing to say that “looks terrible even in context.”

Listeners noticed that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” had been quietly removed in recent days by Spotify. Neither Rogan nor Spotify has given an explanation, and representatives of the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. Commenters on Reddit speculated that some of the missing episodes may have contained the slur, although that was unclear.

Rogan, a comedian and sports commentator, began his show in 2009 and built a huge following on YouTube before signing an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify in 2020, for a reported $100 million or more. According to the website JRE Missing, which tracks the show, the latest round of removals means that a total of 113 episodes — out of more than 1,700 since the podcast began — have been deleted from Spotify since Rogan’s show became an exclusive offering there.

Since Young called for his music to be removed from Spotify on Jan. 24, the company has come under growing pressure from musicians and other podcasters over Rogan’s show; the dispute has also resurfaced musicians’ longstanding complaints over low royalty payments.

Spotify responded by publishing its content policies and said that Rogan must abide by them. But Daniel Ek, the company’s chief executive, has resisted calls to drop Rogan, and also pushed back against arguments that Spotify acts as Rogan’s publisher, saying that Spotify is rather a “platform” that lacks any advance editorial control over Rogan’s show.
 
Roccus7 said:
Never knew Cook's Endeavour was involved in our Revolution and was stationed in New England...

Wreck in Rhode Island is explorer James Cook’s ship, Aussies say​

pressherald.com/2022/02/03/wreck-in-rhode-island-is-explorer-james-cooks-ship-aussies-say/

Associated Press February 4, 2022
Australia_Historic_Ship_45561-1643937136.jpg


SYDNEY — Australian maritime experts said Thursday they believed they’ve found the wreck of one of the most important ships in the history of the South Pacific after it was scuttled in the U.S. more than 200 years ago.

But archaeologists in the U.S. quickly countered by saying the findings were premature and a breach of contract in their joint research.

For 22 years, maritime archaeologists have been investigating several ancient shipwrecks in a 2-square-mile area of Newport Harbor, Rhode Island. That’s where James Cook’s HMS Endeavour was believed to have been deliberately sunk by the British during the American Revolution.

Cook had earlier sailed the ship around the South Pacific in a pioneering voyage before landing on the east coast of Australia in 1770.

On Thursday morning, Kevin Sumption, the chief executive of the Australian National Maritime Museum, held a news conference in Sydney after alerting media that he’d be making “a major historic maritime announcement.”

Sumption said archaeologists were convinced they had found the wreck of the Endeavour after matching structural details and the shape of the remains to those on original plans.

“I am satisfied that this is the final resting place of one of the most important and contentious vessels in Australia’s maritime history,” Sumption said.

But in a statement issued soon afterward, D.K. Abbass, the executive director of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, said her group was the lead organization in the study at Newport Harbor.

“What we see on the shipwreck site under study is consistent with what might be expected of the Endeavour, but there has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel, and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification,” Abbass wrote. “When the study is done, RIMAP will post the legitimate report.”

In a subsequent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Kieran Hosty, the Australian museum’s manager of maritime archeology, said he thought his group’s contract with RIMAP had ended in November but he couldn’t comment for certain. He gave further details that he said had convinced them it was the Endeavour, including the size of the timbers, that it was European-built, and the scuttling holes in the keel.

“So it tick all those boxes,” Hosty told the ABC. “So, we are very open to conversations with Dr. Abbass if she disagrees with our findings, their findings.”

Sumption had earlier said that the ship’s significant role in exploration, astronomy and science made it important not only to Australia, but also to New Zealand, Britain and the U.S.

“The last pieces of the puzzle had to be confirmed before I felt able to make this call,” Sumption said at the news conference. “Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I’m convinced it’s the Endeavour.”

Only about 15% of the vessel remains and researchers are now focused on what can be done to protect and preserve it, Sumption said at the news conference. He said that the museum was working closely with maritime experts in Rhode Island as well as with state and federal officials in the U.S. and Australia to secure the site.

But Abbass said that while her organization recognized the connection between Australian citizens of British descent and the Endeavour, its conclusions would be driven “by proper scientific process and not Australian emotions or politics.”

The ship was launched in 1764 as the Earl of Pembroke. Four years later, it was renamed Endeavour by Britain’s navy and was readied for a major scientific voyage to the Pacific.

From 1768 to 1771, the Endeavour sailed the South Pacific, ostensibly to record the transit of Venus in Tahiti in 1769. Cook then continued sailing the region searching for the “Great Southern Land.”

He charted the coastline of New Zealand. His first significant encounter with the Indigenous Maori people ended badly, with his crew killing several Maori. In 2019, the British government expressed regret over the killings but stopped short of a full apology.

He also charted Australia’s eastern coastline, before claiming the land for Great Britain in 1770.

The Endeavour was later sold to private owners and renamed Lord Sandwich. It was deliberately sunk in 1778 by British forces during the American Revolution.

A year later, Cook was killed in Hawaii during another Pacific voyage. In 1788, the so-called First Fleet of 11 ships, with hundreds of convicts aboard, arrived in Australia to establish a British colony.
Click to expand...

A few weeks ago when driving over the Pell bridge, got the feeling something important was going on when I saw the ships working to the south,
 
here we goooo

Conservative pastor holds ‘witchcraft’ book-burning event targeting Harry Potter and Twilight​

The book burning comes as school districts around the country ban various titles​

 
The smell of snow, and they're not talking about cocaine...

Climate change is altering the smell of snow​

Its scent is getting stronger as both the atmosphere and the land get warmer, researchers say​


How would you describe the scent of winter?

Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers in bloom, beaches, decaying leaves), the current season is marked by the scent of nothing. Nothing’s growing. Nothing’s dying. It’s a kind of olfactory pause.

But snow has a scent, and researchers say that scent depends on what’s in the ground and the air. And as both the atmosphere and the land are getting warmer, the scent of snow is getting stronger.

Johan Lundstrom, a professor of clinical neuroscience who describes himself as a “smell researcher” at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said because snow’s smell reflects the impurities in the air, the flakes in Wisconsin smell different from snow in Sweden, and from snow in a city.

Lundstrom said that people notice smells more in the summer because the humid and warmer air intensifies odor molecules, in the same way perfume smells more intense and different on the skin than when it is sprayed in the air. But the cold and dry air of winter makes for a “poor odor environment.”

“It’s the same reason why the worst place to smell things is on a transcontinental airplane,” he said. “You have dry air, you have different air pressure, and it’s often colder than we would normally have in a room.”

The snow — particularly the top layer covering the ground — picks up compounds mostly from the air, Lundstrom said. As time passes, the snow absorbs more of those odor compounds, increasing the scent. And some molecules hit the nose harder than others.

“For example, decaying biological material creates the chemical geosmin, a chemical we are so sensitive to [it’s the odor of mold] so that if you take one drop and put that in an Olympic-size swimming pool and stir the water well, you can still smell the odor,” he said. “In other words, it often does not take much pollution for us being able to smell it.”

Climate change is affecting the way snow smells, said Parisa A. Ariya, a chemist and chair of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at McGill University. As the ground and air get warmer, that encourages the circulation — and intensity — of the odor molecules.

Climate change is also affecting the amount of snow that the United States receives. Nationally, the contiguous United States has warmed 1.7 degrees since the 1901-1930 period, when climate normals were first calculated, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That means it’s getting wetter, but not snowier, with 80 percent of weather stations seeing a decrease in snow, according to an Environmental Protection Agency analysis.

When snow falls, Ariya said, it’s “a snapshot of the atmospheric process.” In 2017, she helped conduct a study looking at how snow absorbs the pollution from gasoline engine exhaust, which could then contaminate the water and soil on the ground as it melts.

What’s on the ground gets pulled into the air, so a polluted area might see more trace metals in the snow, and an agricultural area might have more nitrogen [from fertilizer], Ariya said. Once the snow melts, some of that pollution is released into the soil, the water supply and back into the atmosphere. And the cycle begins again.

“The increases in temperature have been suggested to increase the toxicity of certain contaminants and enhance the chemical reaction rates and degradation processes,” Ariya said.

The reason people often say they can “smell snow coming” is similar to differences in the air when a thunderstorm comes in during the summer, Lundstrom said. The air feels a little warmer, and gets more humid, which carries scent better, and there’s a change in the barometric pressure.

Lundstrom, who heads two research centers, one at Monell, another at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, said that snow in the city has an odor to it, whether it is exhaust from cars or the rubber from tires.

But when he goes to his cabin in Bjurstrask, which is about 60 miles from the Arctic Circle, it smells “extremely clean,” he said.

It’s not only snow that carries a scent, he said. Ice does as well. Think of old ice in the fridge — it smells odd and musty, as it has absorbed food odors. But ice can also carry fragrances that invoke happy memories.

When Lundstrom was 4 years old, growing up in Sweden, he would go ice fishing with his father and grandfather. He distinctly remembers the smell of the ice shavings as they drilled a hole for perch and pike.

“I would lie on a reindeer fur, and your face is right there next to the hole and you smell the shavings, and it smells like the lake,” he said, adding that it’s a sweet water lake, so ice smells fresh with a tinge of sea grass and sediment. “So every time I go back with my daughter and make a hole in the ice I’m right back, I’m 4-years-old lying on the reindeer fur trying to get fish. It’s a very positive emotion.”

Trying to explain what snow smells like is a challenge. When perfumer Christopher Brosius was creating the scent he called “Snow,” he was looking for a burst of something fresh and cold. Nothing really worked — until he talked to a friend about her first snow.

“She reminded me of a line from a French book, ‘Claudine at School,’ where she bites into a snowball and says ‘It always smells a little of dust, this first [snow]fall,’ ” Brosius, founder of the “CB I Hate Perfume” line, said. “So I had something that was earthy and wet and slightly green, but the thing missing was dust. That’s when I grabbed a bunch of bottles out of the archive and started creating.”

The result, which he created for his former perfume line Demeter, won awards for both male and female fragrance of the year in 2000. Brosius, who goes by “CB,” later created other snow iterations, including “Winter 1972,” and “Walking in the Air,” each of them slightly different based on the place and time of the snowfall.

In 2018, he created an art installation based on the smell of snow for the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum based in New York. The project involved a room with a wool carpet below and pale blue balls of felted wool above, both of which were infused with a scent of snow. Compared with his other “snow” scents, he described this one as “fresher, wetter, more frozen and colder.”

“It was about that smell of snow when you put woolen mittens up to your face to keep your nose warm, with a bit of pine trees that were about 50 to 75 yards away at the edge of a field,” CB said. “Some people said that it even smelled cold.”
 
Not a WTF, but a No Chit Sherlock! headline...

Inflation has Fed critics pointing to spike in money supply​

But central bank officials say economy has changed since high-inflation days of the 1970s​


Over the past two years, as the Federal Reserve fought to rescue the economy from the clutches of the coronavirus, the central bank’s emergency remedies increased the nation’s money supply by an astonishing 40 percent.

That was almost four times as much new money as had been created during the two years that preceded the pandemic and, to some Fed critics, explains why the United States is experiencing its highest inflation since 1982. All that money chasing after limited supplies of goods such as cars, computers and furniture is inevitably bidding up prices, they say.

The Fed agreed with that view the last time the United States had a serious inflation problem. In 1979, then-Fed Chair Paul Volcker clapped a lid on the money supply and drove inflation from a peak of 14.8 percent to 2.5 percent three years later, at the cost of two punishing recessions.

But the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has dismissed claims that the Fed’s money-printing is fueling today’s price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions associated with reopening the economy. Like his most recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a link between the amount of money circulating in the economy and rising prices.

“Now, we think more of just the imbalances between supply and demand in the real economy rather than monetary aggregates. … It’s been a different economy and a different financial system for some time,” Powell said in December.

The persistence of inflation, now running at an annual rate of 7 percent, has provided ammunition to conservative critics of the central bank known as “monetarists” for their adherence to the writings of economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman, a Nobel Prize recipient, taught that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” and said central bankers should prevent the supply of money from growing faster than economic output.

Robert Heller, who served under Volcker on the Fed Board of Governors in the 1980s, said Powell is erring by ignoring the lessons of that era.

“Neglecting to pay attention to the money supply is again leading the Fed into dangerous inflationary territory — just like half a century ago,” he wrote via email.

The Fed’s broadest measure of the money supply, called M2, is more than $21.6 trillion today, up from $15.5 trillion in February 2020.

To ease credit during the pandemic, the central bank helped increase the money supply by buying nearly $5 trillion in mortgage-backed and government securities. The Treasury Department pitched in by borrowing trillions more to send stimulus checks to most Americans.

But a big chunk of that new money wasn’t spent. Instead, the financial institutions that the Fed paid for those bonds parked more than $2 trillion in their accounts at the central bank while American households banked much of their stimulus checks and now sit on an estimated $2.7 trillion in savings.

That’s one reason that the Fed’s money creation isn’t driving inflation, according to many economists. Yes, there is a great deal more money stored in various forms. But it is moving through the economy more slowly than at almost any time in 65 years.

“The money supply went up, but the velocity went down,” said former Treasury official David Beckworth, now with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “They’ve parked it. They’re not spending it.”

Before Volcker changed course in the 1980s, the Fed set targets for the money supply to grow roughly in line with economic activity. If the amount of money available to the public — currency, coins, checking accounts and certificates of deposit — exceeded the target, the Fed would raise interest rates to cool things off.

If the money supply grew too slowly, the Fed could cut rates to spur economic growth. But for at least the last three decades, Fed chiefs have tracked prices and the labor market rather than the money supply to determine whether interest rates should be raised or lowered.

After saying throughout 2021 that inflation would prove “transitory,” Powell in the last few months has grown more alarmed about rising prices.

Speaking last month to reporters after the Fed’s most recent policy meeting, he signaled that the central bank would probably raise its key interest rate as soon as March.

At almost every appearance on Capitol Hill over the past year, Powell has been prodded by Republicans about the surge in money. During a January Senate Banking Committee confirmation hearing for two Fed nominees, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) complained about “too much money chasing too few goods.”

Powell told a House committee in December that the once-strong link between the money supply and inflation “ended about 40 years ago.” Financial deregulation and innovations such as interest-bearing checking accounts and mutual funds meant that traditional measures of the money supply no longer provide reliable signals of future price trends.

Determining how much “money” exists at any moment is harder than it sounds. Depending upon the circumstances, “money” can mean actual dollar bills, travelers’ checks, money market mutual funds or even Treasury bills. Not all can be immediately used in a business or consumer transaction, making it hard to predict their economic consequences.

“You saw a whole set of innovations in the banking industry that made it almost impossible for the Fed,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “It’s an exercise in futility.”

Powell’s stance reflects mainstream economic thinking. But a determined monetarist faction insists that the Fed should develop new tools to track how much money is being created.

Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, said the extra funds that the Fed has pumped into the economy are causing an inflationary reaction that will linger longer than the central bank expects. Once the pandemic passes, all the funds that consumers and financial institutions are sitting on will start to circulate again, driving prices higher, he said.

The money supply is growing at a 13 percent annual rate, which until the pandemic was the fastest growth since the late 1970s. Even if the Fed acts quickly to cut that increase in half, annual inflation will top 6 percent through 2024, said Hanke.

“It’s like a doctor. If you have a defective thermometer, your prescription could be way off,” said Hanke. “The Fed’s thermometer is defective.”

William Barnett, an economist with the nonprofit Center for Financial Stability, developed an alternative measurement of money supply called the Divisia series while working for the Fed in the Volcker years. Unlike the Fed gauge, which simply totals up all the different types of money, Barnett’s measuring stick gives greater weight to those that are more “liquid,” or available for immediate use.

Yet even Volcker, who pioneered the use of monetarism at the Fed, ultimately abandoned a strict reliance upon money supply growth in managing the economy.

In his inflation fight, Volcker in 1980 raised interest rates to 20 percent. The public outcry was fierce as mortgages became virtually unaffordable and joblessness swelled. Home builders famously mailed two-by-fours to the Fed’s Washington headquarters in protest.

Two years later, with unemployment approaching 10 percent, Volcker reversed course. Although money supply growth had been above the Fed’s target for most of that year, he agreed to cut interest rates rather than raise them as monetarism demanded.

Several years later, when low interest rates encouraged Americans to move their money from traditional savings accounts and CDs into mutual funds that offered higher returns, the Fed ditched its remaining monetary indicator.

Those new investment funds were not counted in the Fed’s broader measure of the money supply known as M2. So, even as the economy grew rapidly, the Fed’s money supply gauge — which overlooked the popular investment funds — was signaling recession.

“The historical relationships between money and income, and between money and the price level have largely broken down, depriving the aggregates of much of their usefulness as guides to policy,” then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan told Congress in 1993.

To all but the monetarists, the years after the end of the 2008-2009 recession cemented that verdict.
The Fed’s broadest money supply measure rose by about 45 percent from the start of 2010 to the end of 2015, significantly faster than the growth in economic output. Yet consumer price inflation began that period at 2.6% and ended it at 0.7% — the opposite of what monetarism would have predicted.

Hanke says the problem lies with the Fed’s metrics: The Divisia measure shows that the money supply grew much less during that period than the traditional data suggests. But he acknowledges he has made few converts at the central bank.

“We’re talking a different language,” he said.
 
www.yahoo.com

‘Body’ found along national forest trail in Georgia turns out to be a life-sized doll

Officials ask that, in the future, people dispose of their items more responsibly.
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

A “body” found along a trail in Georgia turned out to be just a “case of littering.”

Deputies responded Thursday, Feb. 3, to a report of what was believed to be a body in Hitchiti National Forest, according to a Facebook post from the Jones County Sheriff’s Office. They arrived to find “what appeared to be the body of a deceased female wearing white socks.”

Investigators were called to the scene but soon discovered the “body” was a life-sized doll — “complete with accessories” :oops::Dand a model number.

“Never missing the opportunity, the crime scene was appropriately processed and the evidence was collected and brought to the Sheriff’s Office,” the Facebook post read.

Deputies named the “victim” Selena. They said she is “a little under the weather” but expected to fully recover.
:ROFLMAO:

“In all seriousness, thank God for small blessings in that this just turned out to be a case of littering,” the sheriff’s office said. “If you know Selena or are responsible for her whereabouts, rest assured no DNA was collected and you are safe.”
:unsure::whistle::rolleyes::oops::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:

The sheriff’s office just asks that, in the future, people dispose of their items more responsibly.

Jones County is about 16 miles from Macon.
 
cancel JESUS

"The former president’s son has a message for the tens of millions of evangelicals who form the energized base of the GOP: the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers," Peter Wehner writes. "The teachings of Jesus have 'gotten us nothing.' It’s worse than that, really; the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go."
The Gospel of Donald Trump Jr.

THEATLANTIC.COM
The Gospel of Donald Trump Jr.
The Atlantic
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