David Stockman has long warned that the stock market is on the verge of a massive collapse, and the recent price action has him even more convinced than ever that the bottom is about to fall out.
“I think it’s pretty obvious that the top is in,” the Reagan administration’s OMB director said Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.” The S&P 500 has traded in a historically narrow range for the better part of 2015, having moved just 1 percent higher year to date. “It’s just waiting for the knee-jerk bulls, robo traders and dip buyers to finally capitulate.”
Stockman, whose past claims have yet to come to fruition, still believes that the excessive monetary policy from central banks around the world has created a “debt supernova,” and all the signs point to “the end of the central bank enabled bubble,” which could cause a worldwide recession.
The Ridgewood Board of Education will hold a Regular Public Meeting on Monday, August 24 2015 at 5 p.m.
The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda and addendum for the July 20, 2015 Regular Public Meeting.
Meet the Manager – Thursday, August 13 4:30 – 7:30PM
Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld will hold office hours for Ridgewood residents and business owners on Thursday, August 13 between the hours of 4:30 to 7:30PM. This is an opportunity to share your thoughts and provide input to Roberta. These sessions will be scheduled at 15 minute intervals and will be held in the Court Room – on the Fourth Level of Ridgewood Village Hall. Please contact Beth Spinato at 201-670-5500, ext. 203 to make an appointment. Walk-ins are welcome but should realize that the schedule may already be booked. We will announce the schedule for these meetings on a monthly basis.
the staff of the Ridgewood blogRidgewood NJ, Porch Light Productions, a black box theatre in Glen Rock, NJ specializing in live theatre and professional theatre training, has been nominated for 10 New Jersey Association of Community Theaters (NJACT) Perry Awards. The NJACT celebrates outstanding achievements by artists of all disciplines involved in the performance and production of NJ Community Theater. Winners will be announced at the annual ceremony September 20 in Somerset, NJ. Porch Light is honored to have received the following nominations:
RED:
OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN OF A PLAY – Ryan Pifher
OUTSTANDING PROPERTIES OF A PLAY – Ryan Pifher & Peter Martino
OUTSTANDING SCENIC DESIGN OF A PLAY – Peter Martino
OUTSTANDING DIRECTION OF A PLAY – Ryan Pifher
OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A PLAY – Ryan Pifher & Jenn Pifher
OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN OF A PLAY – Zach Pizza
OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A PLAY – Ben Prayz
OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A PLAY – Jordan Zauha
MAB: A Retelling of Romeo & Juliet
OUTSTANDING YOUTH ACTRESS IN A PLAY – Tina Rivara
OUTSTANDING YOUTH ACTRESS IN A PLAY – Grace Rogers
Porch Light will be celebrating it’s 7th Season beginning in this fall with the hilarious musical, Avenue Q, opening October 2. For a full list of acting classes, theatre programs, private lessons and live shows, visit porchlightproductions.org or call (201) 857-3520.
WASHINGTON — President Obama had a tough message for theAmerican Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel group that is furiously campaigning against the Iran nuclear accord, when he met with two of its leaders at the White House this week. The president accused Aipac of spending millions of dollars in advertising against the deal and spreading false claims about it, people in the meeting recalled.
So Mr. Obama told the Aipac leaders that he intended to hit back hard.
The next day in a speech at American University, Mr. Obama denounced the deal’s opponents as “lobbyists” doling out millions of dollars to trumpet the same hawkish rhetoric that had led the United States into war with Iraq. The president never mentioned Aipac by name, but his target was unmistakable.
It was billed as The Donald Trump Show, and the Republican front-runner delivered. He mugged. He pouted. He projected outrage without being troubled by specificity or fact. When he got punched — and the moderators threw haymakers all night — he stuck out his chin and punched back.
Trump made it through the first Republican debate by avoiding the one mistake that could have seriously damaged his insurgent campaign: sounding like a professional politician. For that reason alone, he seemed to me the clear winner.
I watched the debate at the House of Blues in downtown Cleveland with a crowd of true-believer conservatives at a viewing party sponsored by the American Conservative Union. It might not have been a representative sample of Republican primary voters, and I should note that there was an open bar. So my observations should not be confused with actual political science.
Rigewood NJ, Tony Merlino, the Village’s Zoning Officer and Sub-Code Official, announced his retirement on Wednesday, August 5. Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld, who made the announcement during a Village Council Work Session, did not indicate what Tony’s last day on the job would be.
Tony began his employment with the Village of Ridgewood in August of 1986. He was “top dog” in the Building Department for many years until Thomas Yotka was hired into the that role late last year. The party line is that Tony got the boot because he moved too slow in computerizing building department processes. The backstory is that he ran afoul of a Village Council member regarding approval of final inspections on a home renovation project.
Although he did not have a very big fan club and received often heavy criticism from this blog. Tony is the one Village employee who many of should thank for playing by the rules. Observe the variations in “curb appeal” by driving around some residential neighborhoods a few other municipalities in Bergen County; then drive around ANY neighborhood in Ridgewood. Strict adherence to zoning laws & building codes does make a difference and makes Ridgewood a much nicer place to own a home and live in.
Thanks for your service Tony and best wishes in your retirement.
Ridgewood NJ, The number of people not in the labor force reached another record high in July, according to new jobs data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The BLS reports that 93,770,000 people (16 and older) were neither employed last month nor had made specific efforts to find work in the prior four weeks.This is an increase of 144,000 over June’s record when 93,626,000 were not in the workforce.
labor force participation rate remained the the same as June at 62.6 percent. Before last month the labor force participation rate had not been that low since October 1977, when the participation rate was 62.4 percent .Despite hovering near the 38 year low. the unemployment rate remained at 5.3 percent suggesting more people were searching for jobs during the 1970’s and the incentive not to work was not as high.
AUGUST 8, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
New Jersey middle and high schools start their day on average at 8 a.m. — on par with other schools in the nation but too early for students to get a good night’s sleep, according to medical experts.
And that, in turn, can contribute to a host of health problems for adolescents, those experts say.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a state-by-state analysis this week showing that school start times for 2012, the most recently available data, averaged 8:03 a.m.
The report came less than a year after the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools begin their days no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Only 17.7 percent of schools — and 14.9 percent in New Jersey — started at 8:30 a.m. or later.
“Getting enough sleep is important for students’ health, safety, and academic performance,” said Anne Wheaton, lead author and epidemiologist in the CDC’s Division of Population Health. “Early school start times, however, are preventing many adolescents from getting the sleep they need.”
Students should get 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep, according to the CDC. Insufficient sleep is common among high school students and is associated with such health risks as being overweight, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and using drugs — as well as poor grades, the agency said in its report.
In New Jersey, school start times have been debated for years, but the debate intensified after the pediatrics academy released its 2014 policy paper.
Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency
DAM ROGERS SCIENCE
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 08.06.15.08.06.15
TIME OF PUBLICATION: 1:24 PM.1:24 PM
IMAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.
In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”
Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010, two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a simulated search engine that displayed real articles.
GOP leaders say erratic attacks hurt Trump, but he vows to fight and win
By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa August 8 at 9:42 PM
Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.
Fearful that the billionaire’s inflammatory rhetoric has inflicted serious damage to the GOP brand, party leaders hope to pivot away from the Trump sideshow and toward a more serious discussion among a deep field of governors, senators and other candidates.
They acknowledge that Trump’s unique megaphone and the passion of his supporters make any calculation about his candidacy risky. After all, he has been presumed dead before: Three weeks ago, he prompted establishment outrage by belittling the Vietnam war service of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), only to prove, by climbing higher in the polls, that the laws of political gravity did not apply to him.
Still, Trump’s erratic performance during and after the first Republican presidential debate last week sparked a backlash throughout the party Saturday and a reassessment of his front-running bid. The final straw for many was Trump’s comment on CNN late Friday that Fox moderator Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
I admit that I share in the sense of revulsion that has gripped many of my fellow Americans, not all vegetarians, who cried out after news broke that dweeby 55-year-old Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer last month traveled to the African nation of Zimbabwe and murdered Cecil, a famous and beloved lion, in an illegal hunt.
“Is it that difficult for you to get an erection that you need to kill things?’’ late-night TV show host Jimmy Kimmel asked on air, tearing up theatrically — and playing the upsetting slaying of a 13-year-old lion for laughs. Actress Mia Farrow led the Internet equivalent of a pitchfork-and-torch charge by tweeting out (then deleting) the tooth man’s business address.
Palmer has soared to the top of the most-reviled humans list, a slot that, one would think, should be occupied by a human-child-killer rather than a lion-killer. But the king of the jungle benefits roaringly from a superior public-relations strategy. Now Palmer is the hunted, living in hiding, his practice closed. He’s forced to hire ex-cops to protect his Florida vacation house
from vandals who’ve spray-painted the words “LION Killer!’’ on the garage door and dumped pickled pigs’ feet in the driveway.
Do the severe punishments — probable financial ruin, effective exile from society, and Zimbabwean officials’ attempts to extradite him for criminal prosecution — fit the offense?
Sure — if you believe that all living beings, from furry critters to the despicable dentist — have the absolute right to live long and comfortable lives.
But how many of us eat meat, despite the well-documented animal-suffering in slaughterhouses? How many of us wear leather shoes, jackets and belts? How many of us have hunted deer? (Well, not me, but . . . )
Fair Lawn NJ, A fire that reportedly originated in an outdoor shed quickly spread to two (2) houses on Rys Terrace in Fair Lawn on Friday afternoon, 08/07. The fire was reported at approximately 3:45 PM and drew all fire companies in Fair Lawn plus help from departments in many neighboring communities.
The occupants of both homes were out at the time the fire struck. Both homes appear to be uninhabitable due to fire, smoke, and water damage. Fair Lawn PD and EMS were also at the scene. One (1) of the homes affected is located at 41-77 Rys Terrace, Fair Lawn
Contractor Airlifted to Hackensack University Medical Center after severed fingers
August 7,2015
the staff of the Ridgewood blogUpper Saddle River NJ, A contractor reportedly severed multiple fingers while using a power saw at a home in Upper Saddle River on Thursday afternoon, 08/06. He was airlifted from 1 Lake Street to Hackensack University Medical Center’s main campus shortly after 4 PM. Upper Saddle River PD, EMS, assisted in the victim’s treatment and transport. A paramedic unit from The Valley Hospital also responded.
