Friday Morning News, Views, And Links; iPhones Sold Out -- Within 28 Minutes

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Thirteen companies announced increased dividends today, including Microsoft and McDonald's. The gap between investors and non-investors widens. 

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Bloomberg is reporting: Apple's New IPhone Poised for Record Debut as Sales Begin.

Apple Inc attracted long lines of shoppers at its retail stores today for the global debut of its latest iPhones, in the company’s biggest move this year to stoke new growth.

In Munich about 2,000 people lined up and at the Louvre in Paris about 300 people waited ahead of the 8 a.m. opening. At Tokyo’s Ginza area store there were about 800 people, including some dressed as Batman and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in a face mask, jeans and black turtleneck. A Beijing store attracted a crowd of only about 50 because buyers had to register online for an appointment to collect their devices.

From MacRumors:

Within four hours after Apple began taking orders for the iPhone 5s, Apple Store shipping estimates for new orders of the device slipped to 7-10 days in the U.S. and Canada, following a similar pattern to shipping estimates in other countries where the 5s went on sale earlier today. The original shipping estimate for all 5s models was 1-3 days.

Some 28 minutes after they went on sale, all gold iPhone 5s models saw their shipping estimates slip to October. 

Pandora fans flocking to Apple's iTunes Radio, and with that one headline, Pandora is history.

Pandora Media  is one of the hottest stocks of the year, about to triple in price, as listeners and advertisers have flocked to its online radio service. This week, the stock shot up further to an all-time high, as strong investor demand let Pandora increase a secondary stock offering by 30%.

But the positive momentum is at risk as Apple this week launched a copycat service, called, to hundreds of millions of iTunes users.

Early anecdotal signs indicate that iTunes Radio may be cutting into Pandora’s reported base of 72 million monthly active listeners.

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I could be wrong but the gang-related thirteen deaths last night in Chicago might even be a front page story in the Chicago Times. I didn't see the story at Debbie Downer but I went through the on-line edition quickly. If the Chicago gunfight was an argument over fracking it would have made front page news in the newspaper. Hey, on another note, the top story in Dickinson appears to be: "Famous Dave's eyeing Dickinson."

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It is funny how things worked out. Now the "global warmer" believers are the "new" flat earth society. Whatever. Fewer people than ever "believe" that the earth is getting warmer. The Express is reporting:

The report comes as climate change scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change are struggling to explain why global warming appears to have slowed down in the past 15 years even though greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. 

Dr. Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist and author of Climate Confusion, argues in his influential blog the UN report shows scientists are being forced to "recognise reality."

He said: "We are now at the point in the age of global warming hysteria where the IPCC global warming theory has crashed into the hard reality of observations." 

So, we are left with these leading the "global warming" charge: Barack O'Bama, Algore, and Nancy Pelosi.  Scientists are being forced to recognize reality. Yup.

We saw this same phenomenon back in the late 1800's with the rise of Romanticism, a Luddite reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, the Romantic Period provided some of the best art and literature ever and got me interested in fine art and reading literature. It will be interesting to see how social scientists and historians describe the lost decades (2000 - 2020) one hundred years from now.
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An enlightened reader sends me this: whatever happened to global warming?

While the UNIPCC, government bureaucracies, climate experts – that oxymoron again – suckered Guardianista-style journalists and various shades of ‘green-behind-the-ears’ would-be planet-savers are currently attempting to spin the latest IPCC admissions, front and center is the stone cold fact that global warming isn’t happening and hasn’t happened for nearly 17 years. Yet green elites continue to cling to the notion of a ‘warming trend.'

What warming trend? According to various reports the upcoming IPCC assessment in its ‘summary for policymakers’ is forced to admit that all four previous reports had over-estimated the rate of decadal warming since 1951. Most significant, however, is the admission that computer modelled forecasts failed to factor in the “natural variability” of the climate. And that’s precisely the main rolling criticism made by climate sceptics for the past two decades.

Wow, global warming. What a scam.