Companies are born, live, thrive, dwindle, and then often die or are absorbed by other firms. Being 56 years old, I’ve seen a lot of that first-hand and have worked for several firms that no longer exist. Over at 24/7 Wall Street, Jon Ogg and Douglas McIntyre have picked ten brands that they think will go away one way or another in 2010. Here’s their list:

• Newsweek
• Motorola
• Palm
• Borders
• Blockbuster
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• Ambac
• Eastman Kodak
• Sun Microsystems
• E*Trade

I worked (on a consulting/contract basis) at two of the companies above — Sun and Fannie Mae. I enjoyed my time at both locations, but I’m not surprised at the struggles that either firm is having. In fact, I’m not surprised at any  of the firms on the list, though some are doing worse than I thought. The whole article is worth reading.  ..bruce w..

Big Government offers this chart of unemployment trends in post-WW II recessions.  Nice to see that the massive deficit spending on ‘stimulus’ has paid off so well.  ..bruce w..

It’s about to move into commercial real estate (emphasis mine):

Investors who bought into the deal were confident that real-estate manager Tishman Speyer would be able to greatly boost profits by raising rents in Manhattan’s sizzling apartment market. But today, the 56-building, 11,000-apartment property is suffering from a slowing New York economy, a lawsuit that has hindered the owner’s ability to convert rent-controlled units to market rentals, and the debt load.

Realpoint estimates that the property is worth only $2.1 billion now, less than half of the purchase price. By that measure, all the equity investors and many of the lenders, including Government of Singapore Investment Corp., or GIC; Gramercy Capital Corp.; and SL Green Realty Corp., are in danger of seeing most, if not all, of their investments wiped out. Hartford Financial Services Group, which bought $100 million of the debt tied to the property, said it has “sufficiently reserved for ths asset in the first half of this year.”

Ain’t we got fun?  ..bruce w..

Hat tip on the video to Matt Yuen, a long-time friend and fellow PMS Commando (that writeup in from world-famous author (and budding politician) Dan Gookin, another one of the Commandos). You jump out of the same plane together, and you definitely are friends for life . . . however brief that may end up being.

ITEM: Obama is losing the ACLU, which (along with the press) is unhappy with the limits on access to detainees at Gitmo:

American Civil Liberties Union Director Anthony Romero said the access problems grate against the administration’s pledges.

“It’s frustrating,” Romero told FOX News during an interview at the Navy base.

He said his organization has never been allowed inside the detention camps — not under the Bush or Obama administrations — but suggested that he was expecting more access since Jan. 20.

“Especially now in light of the Obama administration saying they wish to have greater transparency, it’s more than a bit ironic that members of the press are now being denied access to the camps when they had it before under President Bush,” he said.

The beat reporters who routinely cover the military commissions at the base used to be invited on military-planned side trips to the detention camps when court was not in session. The trips allowed journalists to film, photograph and write about conditions inside.

That is no longer the case. Several sources told FOX News the decision to discontinue the trips came from Washington and the Pentagon.

Where’s that hope, change and transparency now? Welcome to the Chicago Way.

ITEM: Joshua Zumbrum over at Forbes gives eight reasons to remain wary about the housing market, including the end of the housing tax credit, tightened credit standards among mortgage vendors, and the flood of foreclosures still to come. Read the whole thing.

On the other hand, Megan McArdle (my favorite tall female libertarian economist) sees positive signs:

Amid everything the government is doing in the economy, it’s easy to forget that they’ve been putting quite a lot of effort into supporting house prices.  (Supporting, a relative term, in this case meaning keeping them from falling farther).  The FHA has stepped in as the lender of last resort, while the first time homebuyer tax credits have encouraged at least a few people to jump into the market.  Meanwhile, the mortgage modification efforts have kept some foreclosures from happening–but since optimistic estimates place the projected redefaults at 35%, and more conservative estimates look for half or more of the modifications to fail, many of those foreclosures have simply been delayed, and will end up back on the market in winter and early spring.

We’ll see what happens.

[UPDATED 09/30/09 -- 0625 MDT]

ITEM: Warmist Countdown Watch: Successive earthquakes have hit near Samoa (causing 99 deaths due to tsunamis) and now in Indonesia. These are tragedies in a geologically active part of the world. The question is: how long until some Warmists start claiming that these quakes are tied into climate change? (Don’t laugh — it’s an actual set of Warmist beliefs.)

ITEM: “The State doesn’t own my body!” Pro-choice protest? Well, of a sort:

New York is the first state in the country to mandate flu vaccinations for its health care workers. The first doses of swine flu vaccine will be available beginning next week. Much of it is reserved for state health care workers, but there is growing opposition to required innoculations.

Health care workers in Hauppauge screamed “No forced shots!” as they rallied Tuesday against the state regulation requiring them to roll up their sleeves.

I’m pro-vaccination, but it must be a bit disquieting to have health care workers protest and risk losing their jobs over receiving mandatory vaccinations.

ITEM: Andrew Malcolm, over at the LA Times’ “Top of the Ticket” political blog, is always worth reading. Wherever his political sympathies may lie, he’s willing to poke — and poke hard — at failings and foibles all across the political spectrum. His latest analysis of Obama’s growing struggle with Afghanistan is worth reading in full:

Signs are growing that Obama will seek to change the war goals, to redefine what is success and divert the discussion away from the more-troops measure. It’s not defeat in Afghanistan; it’s victory of a different kind. The president used a similar strategic argument recently when abandoning the Bush administration’s missile defense shield in Europe: it’s not less defense, it’s defense done smarter and cheaper.

Biden reportedly opposes additional forces. He was a senator when Obama was a sixth grader, and recalls too vividly the last Democratic administration to pour U.S. soldiers into a distant guerrilla war — and lose. That savagely split his party — and nation — and lead to 20 years of Republican presidents in the next 24.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, Sen. John Kerry, who succeeded Biden as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, began the Afghan redefinition.

Kerry, who was in the Vietnam war before he was against it, said that 1) things have changed in Afghanistan since last spring, 2) perhaps what we need is not more troops but a “well-honed counter-terrorism strategy,” 3) the recent Afghan election was deeply flawed and maybe it’s the fault of a weak, untrusted Afghan government if we can’t win militarily and 4) we need to plan how to get out.

As I said, read the whole thing.  Then go over to the Washington Examiner to check out the “ducks-in-a-row” approach the Obama Administration is taking (with a helpful assist from the mainstream media).

ITEM: As noted here a few days ago, much of Leftist thinking can be summed up as if you fervently hope for something good to come true, then it will. This is especially true in the “green/alternative energy” domain, where hopes for magical breakthroughs in solar and wind power ignore serious issues of energy density and production. As it turns out, there’s another big problem with many of these “new energy” ideas: they often require a lot of old-fashioned H2O:

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.

“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.

Read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

In interesting and complex story is unfolding, centered on Goldman Sachs, the large and highly profitable company that we all worked so hard to fund with bail out dollars. The story started as a small, throw-away technical story about a former Goldman employee named Sergey Aleynikov, who left the firm and was accused of taking source code with him. From a Reuters story on the subject from earlier this month:

That wealth is generated on computer systems that can handle greater trading volumes at ever increasing speeds. These platforms often rely on algorithms — a sequence of instructions used for calculation and data processing — that can spot unseen opportunities in the market and give their users a huge advantage measured in milliseconds.

Sergey created highly reactive real time trading code that likely was looking for “pockets of predictability” in the somewhat noisy sea of trades that happen every day. These are transient opportunities to make a small amount of money on trades that last for only a few moments to less than a day. On their own they are very small, but when orchestrated by high speed computer and constantly running, they can represent a substantial and steady stream of income for the firm or trader that is running them.

Where this starts to get strange is what Goldman did next, and how federal law enforcement became involved. This except from Zero Hedge:

Sergey Aleynikov was arrested at Newark airport by FBI agents, as he was coming back from a trip to Chicago, on what are basically industrial espionage charges. Sergey, or Serge as his Linked-In account identifies him, was VP of equity strategy.

In the 5 days immediately preceeding his departure from “Financial Institution” (potentially GS), Sergey allegedly downloaded 32 megs of ultra top-secret quant trading proprietary code, that, according to Special Agent McSwain’s affidavit, he then proceeded to encrypt and upload to a website in Germany, with a UK owner.

From the affidavit: “certain features of the [code], such as speed and efficiency by which it obtains and processes market data, gives the Financial Institution a competitive advantage among other firms that also engage in high-volume automated trading.The Financial Institution further believes that, if competing firms were to obtain the [code] and use its features, the Financial Institution's ability to profit from the [code]'s speed and efficiency would be significantly diminished."

Let me clarify - in the matter of a few days, Goldman Sachs was able to get federal law enforcement to arrest a programmer that had left its employ to work for one of its competitors. Those familiar with the workings of our justice system might be surprised at the speed at which this went from "we think he is up to no good" to "enjoy your jail cell, Serge". Since when does the FBI take marching orders from Goldman Sachs?

This becomes important because in the present day program trading (under the control of machines running programs like this) account for as much as 49% of all trades on the NYSE, with Goldman's programs taking up at least 60% of that volume according to Zero Hedge.

A few days later Bloomberg weighs in wanting to know just exactly what Goldman's code was doing that could so manipulate the markets? The video says, “It is amazing within one day of Goldman calling they had FBI agents at his driveway doing surveillance. The next day they arrested him…”

Last but not least, in the tin foil hat area of this evoloving puzzle is a set of wild speculation that was posted first on the daily KOS and later re-cycled via Denninger's market ticker, including such charges as:

...GS, through access to the system as a result of their special gov't perks, was/is able to read the data on trades before it's committed, and place their own buys or sells accordingly in that brief moment, thus allowing them to essentially steal buttloads of money every day from the rest of the punters world.

It would mean that Goldman was able to "see" transaction order flow - bid, offer, and execute messages - before they were committed in the transaction stream. Such a "SNIFF" would be COMPLETELY UNDETECTABLE by the sender or recipient of the message.

The implication of this would be that they would be able to front-run any transaction where the data was visible to them, thereby effectively "stealing pennies" from each transaction they were able to front-run.

Which are very heavy charges indeed. There is something strange wrapped inside this story, and if we are all lucky it will emerge over time. With this now a legal matter, this may end up unfolding in a direction that powerful forces such as Goldman and the NYSE would rather not have it go. Within the court system, much of what Sergey knows in relationship to this matter is now discoverable and available to be cross examined. All it would take would be for some enterprising legal mind to start pulling this thread and a great many interesting facts may come to light.

We may find that our hard earned tax money that did not go to send us back to the moon instead went to help firms like Goldman Sachs further loot and launder what is left of our shattered economy, all the while keeping their government cronies on warm standby to beat down anyone who might spill the beans.

Scientific minds will note that there are some interesting things going on at the intersection of climate science and economics. With an ongoing global recession, industrial production and output is down between 5% and 15% across the developed and industrialized world. For example

United States: -6.3%
Canada: -5.4%
Russia: -7.9%
Germany: -3.8%
United Kingdom: -4.9%
China: +6.1%
India: -6.1%

That is a lot few cars, refrigerators, container ships, aircraft and everything else being made. As a result less energy is being used and fewer things being transported around, burning fossil fuels.

For climate change advocates, this is very good news – as it likely means that the big dangerous greenhouse gas, CO₂, is being emitted less than it was a year ago. But word comes from a foreign exchanged focused blog, Reserved Place, about the actual trends in carbon dioxide. Seems that the author or an associate decided to dust off some college research and update the figures with most recent data on carbon dioxide levels at several measuring stations. The results are a bit surprising; no noticeable reduction in CO₂ appears on the charts yet.

Below are two graphs published on their site showing CO₂ trends at Mauna Loa and the South Pole, with prior recessions circled in green:

Something here clearly does not add up. If industrial activity and robust consumption are the cause of global warming, these charts should show a noticeable downward deflection. Perhaps this recession will help honest researchers better understand the Earth’s carbon sources and cycles – if they would just put politics aside for a while and focus on the facts.

Makes as much sense as any of the financial plans coming out of Congress and the Administration these days. ..bruce w..

I honestly don’t blame the administration for talking up the economy over the past few months. I am sure they wanted to see if they could nudge Americans into coming out of the bunkers and buying again. It worked for George Bush after 9-11, maybe they can give it one more go?

Sadly, Sally and Joe Sixpack are tapped out. Any spare money they have is either going to pay off their debt or being salted away, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

While talk in the press as of late has been that some have seen “green shoots” of a nascient recovery, the larger indicators are showing a different story; a story of a prolonged and deepening crash around the world. Consider this story from the New York Times, Cargo Ships Treading Water Off Singapore, Waiting for Work:

One of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles here just outside one of the world’s busiest ports, marooned by the receding tide of global trade. There may be tentative signs of economic recovery in spots around the globe, but few here.

So many ships have congregated here — 735, according to AIS Live ship tracking service of Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay in Redhill, Britain — that shipping lines are becoming concerned about near misses and collisions in one of the world’s most congested waterways, the straits that separate Malaysia and Singapore from Indonesia.

The root of the problem lies in an unusually steep slump in global trade, confirmed by trade statistics announced on Tuesday.

The gathering of so many freighters “is extraordinary,” said Christopher Pålsson, a senior consultant at Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay Research, the consulting division of Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay. “We have probably not witnessed anything like this since the early 1980s,” during the last big bust in the global shipping industry.

The global shipping fleet lies rusting at anchor in the Malacca Straights, hoping one day to have cargo to cary. Many of these ships were built in the last 10 years by conglomerates and global funds hoping to cash in on the global trade boom they thought would never stop. Those ships were financed through large banks in Europe and the US. What do you think happens whey they can’t make the payments because there are no work for the ships? Subprime super tankers anyone?

No matter how much anyone tries to talk the economy out of the slump, the fundamentals are still showing the worst is yet to come. As we cored out whole industries and sent them over seas, we lost the ability to manufacture our way out of it. All we produce now is debt and crazy derivatives on debt. The market for them disappeared well over a year ago and won’t likely ever come back.

That other shoe? It’s still waiting to drop.

We're coming for you.

MORNING LINKS

ITEM: Speaking of swine flu hysteria, this may be a good time to invest in pork belly futures – there may be a shortage soon.

ITEM: Yet another way in which Western Europeans are looking for the US to help them financially.

ITEM: Here’s a slideshow of items from the Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch auction. Some interesting, some amusing, some downright creepy. Hat tip to the Drunk Report.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: With rising panic over the swine flu, here’s a statistic to keep in mind: about 36,000 people already die each year from flu right here in the US.  It will be interesting to see how many actual swine flu deaths we have here in the US. Bet it won’t be 36,000.

ITEM: Or should I say “H1N1 flu deaths“? Just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Kind of like “man-caused disasters”. Hmm…maybe “porcine-induced disaster“? (For SK fans out there: yes, ‘trips’ was deliberate.)

ITEM: What is most telling about Arlen Specter’s party switch is not the move itself; it’s his blatant hypocrisy after denying such a switch just five weeks ago and proposing changes to Senate rules back in 2001 after Jeffords’ defection. But here’s the real kicker: Joe Biden talked him into the switch. It’s one thing to be persuaded by the charisma and rhetoric (if a teleprompter is handy) of Obama — but Joe Biden?  It doesn’t say much for Specter. Of course, neither does this.

ITEM: The economic collapse has made wildcatters of us all:

In 1993, Chevron Corp. gave up the ghost and turned the field over to the city. “We go for big oil fields,” a Chevron spokesman says, and Whittier just “wasn’t economical.” Whittier, for its part, saw its legacy in President Richard M. Nixon — who attended college here when he couldn’t afford Harvard — and the city was glad to be rid of the pumps.

But then last year, as tax revenues plunged and oil crept up toward $150 a barrel, Bob Henderson, the town’s mayor, had a revelation.

“I was sitting at home, just idly thinking about this possibility of oil drilling and suddenly thought: ‘Oh, my God, when I purchased the old Chevron property, we demanded they give us the oil rights.’ ”

The demand was made so Whittier could convert the area into a wilderness preserve. Says Mr. Henderson: “It’s home to an awful lot of animals — bobcats, coyotes, hundreds of birds.”

Goodbye Bambi, hello oil rigs. Cha-ching!

ITEM: And pirate attacks have made heroes of us all:

Tayler and the others rushed to the railing and also saw what he described as five or six men sitting in a roofless pirate boat. One started climbing a rope to the deck beneath them. “He was already halfway up,” says Tayler. One passenger screamed: “Pirates!”

Without hesitation, passengers began to grab whatever they could find around them. “We immediately began throwing tables and deck chairs at the rope,” said Tayler. One hit a pirate scaling it. He fell off and the boat turned around, Tayler recalls.

The skirmish between the passengers and the pirates lasted for several minutes, he says. Suddenly, the pirates opened fire — Tayler says he counted three salvos of 25 to 30 rounds each.

Again and again, the pirate boat would approach the ship and disappear under the stern, only to reemerge. Tayler and his fellow passengers continued to throw chairs despite the gunfire. One passenger was shot in the leg and one bullet grazed the head of a crew member. The armed security staff finally turned up six to eight minutes into the skirmish, passengers claim.

Good for them.

ITEM: And the continuing market in credit default swaps (CDSs) may yet again make paupers of us all:

Wall Street looks to be quietly making gains in its attempt to keep regulatory interference to a minimum in a $30 trillion derivatives market at the heart of the financial crisis.

The fact that I haven’t even mentioned the name of the market yet speaks to one of the main reasons Wall Street is winning: it is benefitting from the fact that Main Streeters and their representatives in Congress are too bored by the topic to do anything about it.

Credit default swaps, or CDS — there, I said it — are a really geeky business. They are essentially promises by one party to pay another, if some third party should fail to pay its debts.

ITEM: Quick, which car manufacturer do you think will be #1 in global new car sales ten years from now? I’ll bet you weren’t thinking of this one.

ITEM: Speaking of manufacturing, here’s one of my all-time favorite SNL commercials. The best part is watching Sam Waterston struggle to keep a straight face.

ITEM: And finally, this is just too cool for words:

One man, living his dream.

Thanks for stopping by!  ..bruce w..

The new face of America!

MORNING LINKS

[Welcome to AoS readers, and thanks to Genghis for the links and the kind words! Feel free to bookmark ASIP! Also, my Saturday links are posted here, my Monday links are here, my Tuesday links are here, and my Wednesday links are here.]

ITEM: Remember me quoting Machiavelli (“It is better to be feared than loved.”)  a few days ago with regards to the Obama World Tour? Well, the Economist just did the same thing. Great minds think alike, and all that.

ITEM: Speaking of being feared, here’s more advice, all of it sensible, on how to deal with ongoing piracy on the high seas. Y’know, if Obama were wise (as opposed to being merely smart or clever), he would follow these steps. It would make a lot of our enemies (and allies) nervous and would win him great approval here in the US.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: Yet another reason why I will probably never move back to my home state of California — now they want to regulate how big your TV can be, all in the name of “global warming.” Talk about fiddling while Rome burns….

ITEM: Ouch, ouch and ouch. Vanity Fair weighs in the on the question of whether Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. should be running the New York Times, but the real knife-between-the-ribs is the photo at the start of the article:

Yep, that's him on the right.

That’s gotta leave a mark.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: My laptop isn’t dead. Yet.

ITEM: As per the photo above, Charles Krauthammer takes Obama to task for his recent swing through Europe:

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country? He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Another comedy of errors from the White House. Hat tip to TOTUS; be sure to read his version of events. Also, TOTUS has the real scoop on Joe Biden calling President Bush to task.

ITEM: A call to bring US troops home from Europe. I’ve been arguing for this since the fall of the USSR 20 years ago, particularly given the rampant anti-Americanism in (western) Europe. Yeah, the Russian Bear has been growling a bit lately, but I think it’s time for the EU to cowboy up and take care of their own borders.

ITEM: Speaking of anti-Americanism – “I think the fact that Canada continues to exist is proof of the kindness of America as a nation”:

ITEM: The current Somali pirate hostage situation should remind us that there are tried and true methods for dealing with pirates that actually work quite well (as opposed to, say, holding hearings in Congress). Which is not to say that there haven’t been effective steps taken already.

ITEM: Good news! The economy could recover sooner than expected! Bad news! No, it won’t! Worst news: even if it does, we’ll probably make all the same mistakes all over again. Related news: China, who owns just about 25% of the total US debt, is having economic troubles of its own.

ITEM: Speaking of make the same mistakes over and over again, Congress is still in session:

Self-proclaimed victims of global warming or those who “expect to suffer” from it – from beachfront property owners to asthmatics – for the first time would be able to sue the federal government or private businesses over greenhouse gas emissions under a little-noticed provision slipped into the House climate bill.

Environmentalists say the measure was narrowly crafted to give citizens the unusual standing to sue the U.S. government as a way to force action on curbing emissions. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sees a new cottage industry for lawyers.

“You could be spawning lawsuits at almost any place [climate-change modeling] computers place at harm’s risk,” said Bill Kovacs, energy lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I’m not sure which is worse: whether this was deliberately intended, or if it’s just a byproduct of the increasingly disfunctional legislative process.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: Congress also wants to take control of the Federal Reserve Board. That is a truly terrifying thought. I may not always agree with the Fed’s course of action, but giving Congress any hint of control or oversight would be a disaster.

ITEM: Speaking of disaster (and I’m referring to the subject, not the author), Woman On Fire Megan McArdle starts her latest article with:  “America’s public sector pensions have been a scandal for years.” They sure have, but the mainstream media has studiously ignored this problem because, as McArdle notes, “Politicians had gotten into the habit of promising generous pensions as a ‘cheap’ giveaway to powerful unions.” And unions can do no wrong as far as the MSM is concerned.

By the way, guess where a lot of those pension funds were invested?

With the holes laid bare, public pension funds scrambled to find some way to fill them without making politicians do something ridiculous, like raise taxes to pay for all the promises they’d made.  Many of them seem to have hit on the notion of pulling the money out of boring old bonds and putting them in something that paid a nice, high return–not just equities, but hedge funds and exotic securities. . . .

. . . the current underfunding in public plans, which cover about 22 million workers, seems to be something north of a trillion dollars.  And they’re not insured.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: In the meantime, the PPIP plan for helping banks rid themselves of toxic assets fails some very elementary game theory analysis:

Game theory tells us that a risk neutral gambler would pay $50 dollars for a coin flip that paid $0 for Heads and $100 for Tails. Game theorists would call $50 the value of the bet.

Suppose someone is willing to fund your gambling problem, and lend you $80 at zero interest. Better still, if you lose the bet you don’t have to pay him back. Under that scenario, the same gambler would pay $90 for the bet, giving him an even chance of winning or losing $10.

This is a microcosm of what the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) is intended to do: create an incentive for investors to pay $90 for a bet that is only worth $50. It is bad economics and bad public policy and it is probably fraudulent. Congress should act pre-emptively to halt Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s latest scheme.

ITEM: Take it from the father of nine chidren (plus a few semi-adopted daughters) — if you think having children is going to make your marriage easier or more pleasant, think again. But what this article — and the study behind it — does not touch upon is that there are (or can be) deep joys from your children not found anywhere else in life. But the commitment is for a lifetime.

ITEM: For the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone would be surprised that the US trade deficit keeps dropping. If people lose net worth and/or are unemployed or at risk of losing their jobs, they’re not going to spend as much (assuming they have money to spend). And since vast amounts of what we buy are manufactured (or grown) outside the US (read: China), it only stands to reason that we’d import less.

ITEM: Speaking of China, this photo shows the world’s tallest statue, located in eastern China. Here’s the Google Maps view. (Hat tip to the Drunk Report.)

ITEM: The Daily Bayonet is back from being under the knife and has his Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up posted.

More in the morning, I believe.  ..bruce w..