Vladimir Putin has lost control of Russia's economy and may be forced to impose Soviet-style exchange controls after "shock and awe" action by the central bank failed to stem the collapse of the ruble.

"The situation is critical," said the central bank's vice-chairman, Sergei Shvetsov. "What is happening is a nightmare that we could not even have imagined a year ago."

The currency spiked from 71 to 98 against the euro yesterday (12/16) in the biggest one-day drop since the default crisis in 1998 as capital flight gathered pace, despite a drastic rise in interest rates to 17% the day before (12/15) intended to crush speculators and show resolve. It closed at 87, and at this writing today (12/17) is at 83.

Yields on two-year Russian bonds spiraled to 15.36%, while credit default swaps are pricing in a one-third chance of a sovereign default. The shares of Russia's biggest lender, Sberbank, fell 18%.

Neil Shearing, from Capital Economics, said the spectacular failure of the rate shock may bring matters to a head. "If a rise of 650 basis points won't do the job, we are near the end. That means stringent capital controls," he said.

In Washington, the White House said it had no intention of easing pressure on Russia to halt the freefall. "It is President Putin's decision to make. The aim is to sharpen the choice that he faces," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest yesterday.

After years of bluster and suggestions by Mr. Putin that the US is a paper tiger, the Kremlin is now coming face to face with the cataclysmic consequences of what it has done by invading Ukraine and changing Europe's borders by force.

The gullible give in to the government's global-warming myth

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"Wasting Resources on a potential threat ignores problems at hand."

Much of the media treat those who are skeptics about man-made global warming with the pejorative term "global-warming deniers," as if they were Holocaust deniers. Yet many of those in the media who watched presidential spokesperson Jay Carney engage in what can only politely be called "reality denial" day after day were-all-too silent about his obvious misstatements.

Reality deniers get away with many of their fibs because...

Last week (2/28), JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a hit piece on antioxidant vitamins.  JAMA's Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E concluded that taking supplements of them increases one's chances of death by 5%.

The lamestream media gleefully ran stories on the study, with headlines like "Vitamins Can Kill You."

It's the whores of JAMA and their media shills who can kill you, not vitamins.

Note the "Meta" in the study's title.  That means it's an analysis of other studies, not research itself.  What these folks did is, out of the close to a thousand clinical antioxidant studies, they cherry picked 68 that showed what JAMA wanted.  

And they had to lie about many of those in order to force the data to fit their pre-ordained conclusion.

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith.

Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What's worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticize the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

This past week has seen three egregious examples of poor scientific practice. The most recent was the revelation last week that scientists appeared to scheme with environmental activists to get neonicotinoid pesticides banned, rather than open-mindedly assessing all the evidence.

Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 - with an error range of one tenth of a degree.

In any case, the year is not over with 16% of the 2014 data not yet recorded, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there's a political climate summit in Lima this week.

You may have noticed gasoline prices are rising. If the Middle East situation gets much worse, gasoline prices will rise even more. The good news is that we are likely to avoid long gas lines as we had in the late 1970s under President Carter, because fracking and other new technologies have lessened our dependence on foreign oil and gas. The bad news is that a major rise in oil prices could easily tilt Europe and other places back into a recession, which could kill the little growth the United States is now experiencing.

The tragedy is all of this was unnecessary, but brought about by the Obama administration, letting short-term political considerations and ideology override good economics and global security.