Svalbard: "Polar bears on Norwegian islands fatter and healthier despite ice loss, scientists say"

Someone made a giant error, whether deliberately or not, by making the polar bear the apex charismatic megafauna to represent the perils of global warming.

Even before Knut the polar bear cub became famous in 2007 breeding populations in most of the Arctic had been growing for at least a decade. Compounding the falsity of the presentation were the pictures of polar bears seemingly trapped on small pieces of ice.

Ahem. The scientific name for the species is Ursus maritimus, the sea bear.

Anyhoo, the bears on Svalbard are fat and sassy which is a good thing as a fat bear is generally a healthy bear.

From the BBC, January 29: 

Scientists expected the opposite, but polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard have become fatter and healthier since the early 1990s, all while sea ice has steadily declined due to climate change.

Polar bears rely on sea ice as a platform from which to hunt the seals that they rely on for blubber-rich meals. The bears' fat reserves provide energy and insulation and allow mothers to produce rich milk for cubs.

Researchers weighed and measured 770 adults in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found that bears had become significantly fatter.

They think that Svalbard bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses.

The discovery, published in Scientific Reports, was particularly puzzling because of the impact of climate change in Svalbard.

During the same period that this research was carried out, global temperature rise has increased the number of ice-free days per year in the region by almost 100 - at a rate of about four days each year.

"The fatter a bear is the better it is," explained lead researcher Dr Jon Aars from the Norwegian Polar Institute.

"And I would have expected to see a decline in body condition when the loss of sea ice has been so profound."....

....MUCH MORE 

Additionally bears, like people, are omnivores and will eat just about anything. The ecosystems that run into trouble are those where the top predator will only eat one kind of prey and should the population of that food source decline the predator population will collapse.

In many areas of life it is good to be a generalist. 

Despite The Problems With The Ice Pack, Svalbard's Polar Bears Are Fat and Sassy

As we noted in May 19's "Arctic: Well, The Ice Has Begun Retreating Fom Its Winter Maximum....":

....And it was not a good year....

Here's the latest map from the Danish Meteorological Institute (I know. I should use the Norwegian's map, force of habit): 

If you travel north up the 20° east longitude line you run smack dab into the islands of the Svalbard archipelago and you see there is no ice to the west of Svalbard, and the area between Greenland and Svalbard does not have the "plug" we like to see to keep the ice from breaking off and flushing out into to open ocean and further diminishing the ice cap.

But this year the polar bears don't care. From Norway's MOSJ (Environmental Monitoring of Svalbard and Jan Mayen):

Polar bear
Last updated 30 April 2024

The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) in the Barents Sea lives on disappearing sea ice. Climate warming is the main threat to polar bears. The polar bear habitat is changing rapidly, and the Polar Basin could be ice-free in summer within a few years. To gain access to preferred denning areas and their favorite prey, ringed seals, polar bears depend on good sea ice conditions at the right time and place. The population probably increased considerably during the years after hunting was banned in 1973, and new knowledge indicates that the population has not been reduced the last 10-15 years, in spite of a large reduction in available sea ice in the same period.....

*****

Body condition index of adult male polar bears caught in spring (March-May) in the period 1993-2024. The lines in the middle of each box show the median value, and the box segments and lines above and below the median each cover ca 25 % of the data points. The changes in body condition over time is significant but does not follow a linear pattern. There was a decrease in body condition up to 2000, within a period where it was a decrease in available sea ice. After that, body condition increased over the next two decades despite a significant decrease in available sea ice. There was no fieldwork in 2020 due to the corona pandemic.
(Cite these data: Norwegian Polar Institute (2022). Condition in adult polar bear males. Environmental monitoring of Svalbard and Jan Mayen (MOSJ). URL: https://mosj.no/en/fauna/marine/polar-bear.html)

....MUCH MORE

Possibly also of interest:

"Svalbard Minute by Minute"
Can you feel the excitement?

News You Can Use: What To Do If You Meet A Polar Bear
The thing to remember is: polar bears are stone cold killers. It's what they do.
From the New York Post, August 29, 2020:
Get naked, and other advice to fend off a polar bear attack...

"The technological decoupling of geography from economic opportunity could make Gen Z filthy rich"

A major essay from Tablet Magazine, April 17:

The Rise of the Cyber City

Nature documentaries follow the annual Great Migration of roughly 2 million wildebeests from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back every year, and it is not hard to find footage of grimly determined wildebeests braving the waiting crocodiles who assemble in the Mara River for their regular feast. Likewise, every year the grizzly bears of Alaska wade into the rivers to feast on the returning salmon, as millions of fans watch the show on live cameras and vote in the “Fat Bear” contest for the most successful predator.

But the greatest migration on planet Earth is not in the wilderness. It is in and around the human cities of our world. Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts. The human commuters may not face crocodiles and grizzly bears on their treks, but they nevertheless provide vital nourishment for the denizens of the concrete jungles at the end of the commute. Building and maintaining the office towers in the dense urban cores toward which the swarms of migrants converge, feeding the hordes on their lunch breaks, building and operating the mass transit and road networks that ferry them to and from their homes, storing millions of cars in parking garages and lots throughout the city center and surrounding train and subway stops far out into the suburban ring: These activities employ tens of millions of people around the world and consume a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.

In America, the Great Migration is both the creator and the defining institution of the “car city,” the dominant form of urban life. The car city, with its mix of suburban and exurban sprawl and legacy central cities, shapes patterns of wealth accumulation, income distribution, and political division across the country. Mass commuting by car across a widely dispersed urban area made America’s post-World War II middle-class society possible. But the rise of the car city was a mixed blessing. The environmental, social, and financial costs of the daily commute are responsible for many of the most acute problems our society confronts.

It isn’t just urban geography and political economy that the Great Migration has transformed. The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families so profoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, most families spent the majority of their waking hours working together on tasks that were necessary to keep the family housed, clothed, and fed. Usually, the nuclear family was a small and not always very distinct element in a large pool of relatives with many generations with aunts, uncles, and cousins all part of the mix. The modern family, an isolated nuclear unit in which parents might work in very different jobs in very different parts of an urban megaplex, surrounded all day by people who their spouses rarely meet, and both the education and care of the children largely delegated to teachers and out of the home day care workers, is radically different from anything previous generations knew. It is almost certainly a factor in the weakening of institutions like marriage, the general loosening of family ties, and the rise of isolation and alienation endemic to modern life.

The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families so 

profoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are. 

After 100 years in which the rise of the car city and the gradual decline of the rail cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped American culture and politics, we are seeing the beginning of a radically different form of urban life. Think of it as the cyber city. The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome. Among other things, it promises to renew the economic machinery that made post-World War II America a paradise for the middle class and to provide Gen Z and its successors the kind of opportunity their predecessors enjoyed.

Until very recently, most people thought that the car city was the highest form of urban living and that the Great Migration would dominate our lives forever. Since the pandemic, doubts have been spreading. Work from home (WFH) opens the door to a new kind of urban living, and the shift from the car city to the cyber city looks like an upgrade. Cyber cities won’t be utopian paradises and they will have their slums and their dark alleys, but they offer more opportunity to more people at less social and environmental cost than car cities ever could.

The rewards of that upgrade are potentially so great that accelerating and facilitating the transition from the car city to the cyber city should ground the domestic policy program of any movement aiming to lead the United States in the next generation. Getting the transition right and making it quickly is not just the key to American prosperity and renewal at home. It is critical to maintaining America’s place in the world. The greater economic productivity, social cohesion, resilience, and environmental sustainability of the coming cyber city will enable a new era of American economic growth and help foster a sense of national unity and pride. Those forces in turn can underwrite a new era of American power globally, helping to maintain the peace in a rapidly developing and volatile world.

Although I think ultimately both parties will get with the program, Republicans are probably better placed to lead the transition than Democrats. This fact could, if Republicans play their cards well, make them the dominant political force for decades to come.

Especially in times like ours when rapidly cascading social and economic changes driven up the slope of the Adams curve by accelerating technological progress threaten to overwhelm us, it’s important to ground ourselves in past developments that can make the present more understandable. History matters most when the present is chaotic, and even a casual glance at the history of cities will clarify both the opportunities and the frustrations that we feel today.

Cities matter, never more than today when, unlike in past ages, a large and growing majority of people in the United States and around the world live in them. Cities, suburbs, and exurbs are where most of us grow up, build our social networks, find our spouses, educate our children, work, and accumulate our wealth. A change in the form of urban life will affect our lives in all these realms and will influence everything in politics from the distribution of votes in Congress and the Electoral College to the nature of political parties and the content of political debate.

Cities are where history is made. The word “civilization” comes to us from the Latin word for city. The Greek word for city, polis, gives us our word for politics. Since the dawn of civilization, cities have been the center of culture and politics. In Western culture, the three very different cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome produced what remain today the intellectual, political, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions shaping our common life. The Renaissance is unimaginable without the vibrant Italian city-states out of which it came. In modern history, great cities like Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin left their stamp on European history and culture during the Old World’s golden age.

Cities emerge from the interplay of geography and technology. Urban living brings people together, allowing for the specialization of labor and fostering the development of new products and new skills. But bringing people into close physical contact creates a set of problems, and the shape and size of cities is determined by how these are addressed.

Almost all the great cities of antiquity, and many down to contemporary times, sprang up based on their access to waterborne transport—still today the system by which most of the world’s long-distance trade is carried out. People in cities eat more food and their industry consumes more raw materials than can be produced in their immediate neighborhood. Iron for the blacksmiths, brick and marble for the builders, yarn for the spinners, and a thousand other goods must be brought to and then exported from the city.

Food is the worst of it. Even small cities require, literally, tons of food....

....MUCH MORE

Metropolitans forget the reality of that sentence at their peril. 

David Rosenberg: «Now Is a Good Time to Take Profits and Thank Your Lucky Stars»

We have some experience tracking Mr. R., more after the jump.

From Neue Zürcher Zeitung's The Market.ch, January 12:

David Rosenberg, head of Rosenberg Research, thinks the so-called soft landing is just the calm before the storm. The renowned contrarian explains why he expects a recession in 2024 and how to protect the portfolio from the looming turmoil.

Swimming against the tide is not easy. Herd mentality and the career risk of being wrong create a lot of pressure when it comes to navigating the financial markets. One of the rare exceptions who’s not afraid to go against the consensus is David Rosenberg.

The Toronto based top economist and investment strategist has been one of the most prominent contrarian thinkers in the investment industry for decades. «Breakfast with Dave», his daily market commentary, is a must-read for professional investors.

So what does he think about the current outlook? «We are probably still in a soft landing», he says of the surprisingly robust economy in the US. «But I would not forecast that this is somehow magically a perpetual state of affairs for the business cycle. It’s a prelude to a classic recession which no one should be too surprised about.»

In this in-depth interview with The Market/NZZ, which has been lightly edited for clarity, Mr. Rosenberg explains why he expects an economic downturn in 2024, why the current behavior of the stock markets reminds him strongly of the last stage of the bull markets in 2000 and 2007, and how to best protect your portfolio against the upcoming storm.

«This year’s primary theme is going to be capital preservation»: David Rosenberg.

The new year is off to a muted start. What awaits us in the coming weeks and months?
For 2024, the debate ultimately will be not whether interest rates come down. I think we can all agree on that. The question is going to be the magnitude. So you have to ask why interest rates are coming down: Is it only because inflation is in the rearview mirror, ratifying the recent decline in bond yields? Or will it be coupled with a deterioration in the economy that isn’t fully priced in? That’s going to be the main debate: Whether or not – from an economic standpoint – 2024 will be a repeat of 2023 where the economy surprised on the upside and yet inflation still came down.

Where do you stand in this debate about a soft landing for the economy?
That’s an easy one! In some sense, it’s a debate that is completely unnecessary because soft landings are a part of the economic cycle. Every cycle has a soft landing and the soft landings usually do come in the immediate aftermath of the Fed tightening cycle. Think of 1969, 1979, 1989, 2000 or 2007: These were all soft-landing years, but people can’t seem to see past the tip of their nose because the easiest thing is to always extrapolate the most current experience into the future. That’s where the mistake may be for 2024: All those years were soft landing years, followed unexpectedly by hard landings or recessions.

That said, the consensus does not see any major problems on the horizon....

....MUCH MORE

One thing to keep in mind, a point made by others but hammered on by ZeroHedge: except for the early eighties when rates were coming down from Paul Volker's inflation cure, the only times we've seen six or more consecutive rate cuts was when the economy was in recession. At last look the market was pricing in seven cuts.

And on Mr. Rosenberg, coming out of the Great Financial Crisis Bob Janjuah, Albert Edwards, Russel Napier and David Rosenberg seemed to be in a race to see who could forecast the lowest target for the S&P. We named the race The Gloomster Stakes, July 2011:

Coming into the Far Turn Russell Napier and Albert Edwards Lead the Gloomster Stakes But Felix Zulauf is Making a Move With an S&P at 500 Prediction

Napier is at 400
Albert says 450
Bob Janjuah trails at 550.

Although not mentioned in that piece here's our thinking on Mr. Rosenberg while he was in his permabear stage, March and December 2010:
December 2010
....It is the same situation that Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg ran into with the U.S. economy, he may or may not have been right about our economic quagmire but he seriously underestimated the effects of the government's reaction in delaying the worst-case realization:

I usually don't have much time for Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg. His pig-headed refusal to listen to the market as the averages advanced more than 70% was not only arrogant but expensive for his firm's clients.

I can handle arrogant as long as you're right, hell I can tolerate a fat guy in a grass skirt and spike heel Manolo Blahniks if he's right.
It would be fun to watch him tottering around.
But Mr. Rosenberg hasn't been right for a while and he's not funny.

-Climateer Line of the Day: Damn Arrogant Economist With Faint Praise Edition

The thing is, you have to be correct about both the doom and the timing. If you are predicting the end of the world it is usually best to make the occurance far enough into the future that your audience is either dead or demented on the appointed date.

If you insist on a call that even your clients with alzheimers can remember you have to do serious analysis and consider the millions of moving parts that go into a dynamic system.
In the case of China the government can delay the day of reckoning long enough to really hurt the time adjusted returns of the shorts.

If you have a situation that will fall 30% and it happens in a year you've put up some professional level numbers.
If it takes two years, your annualized gain is down to 14.5% and your 2 and 20 are at risk.

Funny is important if you're doing the Angel of Death schtick. Here's our thinking:

Unlike his fellow gloomster David Rosenberg, Société Générale's Albert Edwards amuses* as he forecasts gloom, doom and despair. They both bow to the master, the Telegraph's international business editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard whose writing I once described as a "continuum that ranges from morose to suicidal.
Here he is at his despondent best...

Back in October we posted "Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg has finally lost it":

We haven't posted much, if anything, from Mr. Rosenberg. His adamant refusal to acknowledge the rising market is at odds with our approach, playing the cards you're dealt.
Unlike our gloomy pal Ambrose Evans-Pritchard who can be downright funny in the depths of his despair, Mr. Rosenberg is a strategist. He'll be right one of these days, we hope we are too.
Oh well, here's the story from FT Alphaville:

November 2014
"The Theory Of Reflexivity: A Primer For Today’s Market"

This is where hard core bears, exemplified by David Rosenberg, got it wrong. Although they were probably right on where the markets would have gone absent fiscal stimulus and monetary machinations, when the stimulus came and the central banks acted they could not change their advice.
Crazy.

It's a dynamic system.

Rosenberg did finally, after four or so years, get bullish but there are guys like Bob Janjuah who still haven't.
Really crazy.

December 2013
Rosie Scenario: Replacing Aged Plant, Property and Equipment To Boost Main Street
Changing his mind was better than not changing his mind but boy it feels odd to read Rosenberg these days.

Mr. Rosenberg seems much more flexible these days.

"The quest to understand obesity"

There is so much money to be made here. Oh, and there's the human dimension too. 

From Delancey Place:

Today's encore selection -- from The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman. 

The quest to understand obesity:
 
"Putting the evidence together, the key point is that excessive weight gain relative to height during childhood is a strong risk fac­tor for future diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. A major reason that overweight children have a propensity to become over­weight or obese adults is that they develop and then retain for life more fat cells than average-weight children. Crucially, these extra fat cells are often inside the abdomen, packed around organs such as the liver, kidneys, and intestines. 

These visceral (belly) fat cells behave differently than fat elsewhere in the body in two important ways. First, they are several times more sensitive to hormones and thus tend to be more metabolically active, which means they are capable of storing and releasing fat more rapidly than fat cells in other parts of the body. Second, when visceral cells release fatty acids (something fat cells do all the time), they dump the molecules almost straight into the liver, where the fat accumulates and even­tually impairs the liver's ability to regulate the release of glucose into the blood. An excess of belly fat (a paunch) is therefore a much greater risk factor for metabolic disease than a high BMI.

"Although we still don't understand why some people store fat more readily than others, it is uncontroversial to state that all humans are adept at storing extra energy as fat and that all of us inherited trade-offs in the ways we use energy to grow and repro­duce that did not adapt us to thrive in conditions of too much energy. However, if you look at any graph of obesity rates over the last few decades, it is evident that the percentage of overweight people has remained constant while the percentage of obese people started rising rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. What changed?

"The most widespread, partly true, yet overly simplistic explana­tion for why more people than ever are getting fatter is that more people than ever are eating more and being less active. As chapter 9 described, there is plenty of evidence that food industrialization over the last few decades has increased portion sizes and made food denser in calories. Other industrial 'advances,' such as the prolif­eration of cars and labor-saving devices, as well as more sitting, cause people to be less active. If you add up how many extra calo­ries people consume and how many fewer they expend, then you get larger energy surpluses, which translate into more fat.

"The 'calories in versus calories out' explanation for the obesity epidemic is not entirely wrong, but the situation is more compli­cated because we have also changed what we are eating. Remember that energy balance is regulated by hormones, especially insulin. Insulin's chief function is to shuttle energy from the food you have digested into your body's cells. It bears repeating that insulin rises when blood glucose levels rise, causing muscle and fat cells to take up and store some fraction of that sugar as fat. Insulin also causes fat (triglycerides) in the bloodstream to enter fat cells and simultaneously inhibits fat cells from releasing triglycerides back into the bloodstream. 

Insulin thus makes you fatter, regardless of whether the fat comes from eating carbohydrates or fat. According to some estimates, twenty-first-century adolescents in the United States secrete far more insulin than their parents produced when they were the same age in 1975.  It's no wonder more of them are overweight. Since insulin rises only after you eat foods that con­tain glucose, one obvious culprit for higher levels of insulin and more fat must be eating more glucose-rich foods, such as soda and cake. There are, however, many other factors that promote obe­sity, including two additional factors related to sugar. One is the rate at which you break foods down into glucose, which determines how quickly your body produces insulin. The other factor, which is more indirect, is how much fructose you eat, and how fast it hits your liver.

"To explore these effects of sugar on obesity let's compare how your body responds to eating a raw apple that weighs 100 grams (3.5 ounces) and a 56 gram (2 ounce) pack of fruit rolls that once upon a time were apples but then were industrially processed with sugar added for sweetness and any fiber removed (along with the apple's nutrients) to improve the product's shelf life. If we focus only on the sugar, one major difference evident between these two foods is that the apple has about 13 grams (a bit less than half an ounce) of sugar, whereas the fruit rolls have been packed with 21 grams (three quarters of an ounce) of sugar, hence nearly twice the calories. 

A second difference is the percentage of sugar types. The apple is about 30 percent glucose: the fruit roll is about 50 percent glucose. So eating the fruit rolls yields about the same amount of fructose and more than twice the glucose. Finally, the apple comes with a skin, and the apple's sugar resides within cells, both of which contain fiber. Fiber, also known as roughage, is the portion of the apple you cannot digest, but it plays a crucial role in how you digest the apple's sugars. Fiber makes up the walls of the cells that encase the sugars in the apple, slowing the rate at which you break down carbohydrates into sugars. Fiber also coats the food and the walls inside your gut, functioning as a barrier to slow the rate at which your intestine transports all those calories, especially the sugar, from your gut to your bloodstream and organs. Finally, fiber speeds the rate at which food passes through your gut, and it makes you feel full. As a result, when we compare the two apple products, the real apple not only supplies less sugar, but it makes you feel more sated and causes you to digest those sugars at a much more gradual rate. In contrast, the fruit rolls are termed high glycemic because they rapidly and markedly elevate blood sugar levels (a condition known as hyperglycemia).

"It is possible to get fat by eating too many apples, but you now have enough information to appreciate why the fruit roll is so much more likely to cause weight gain....

....MUCH MORE

However fructose, in any form, even from fruit, messes with your liver when taken into your body at speed and in volume.

The so-called "high-fructose corn syrup" is high-fructose only in comparison with corn syrup, which is 100% glucose. The HFCS's are usually 50% glucose and 50% fructose, the same proportions as sucrose, table sugar. But it's that 50% fructose that'll get you.

"Return of Svalbard sea ice in time for seal births and the polar bear feeding bonanza"

 From Polar Bear Science, March 16:

It seems that every fall and winter for the last decade at least, there has been hand-wringing about the lack of Svalbard sea ice and what a tragedy this is for polar bears. And like clockwork, before the end of winter (30 March) every year, the pack ice returns in time for spring: for ringed and bearded seals to give birth–and for the polar bears to gorge themselves on the fat newborns.

This year there is even ice as far south as Bear Island (Bjørnøya) and it’s only 15 March. This has happened several times now in the last 10 year. So much for the catastrophe! And soon Norwegian biologists will be out checking on the health of these bears, which they do every year and report their results online for everyone to see....

....MUCH MORE 

Although she has ice maps in the article we prefer the maps from the Danish Meteorological Institute, in particular the "Sea ice thickness and volume" maps—for our more general purposes, because of the way ice melts volume matters more than extent.

Follow the 20°E longitude line until you hit the archipelago:

DMI

The  ice will continue growing through April and into May.

How to navigate through ice sheet without breaking it - ditto for life 😊 Life lesson from a Polar bear #FridayFeeling pic.twitter.com/kBmaD9GLr3

— Supriya Sahu IAS (@supriyasahuias) October 14, 2022

And no, the polar bear isn't doing this because he doesn't want to get wet. Its Latin name is Ursus maritimus for Chrissakes. Bears have been known to swim 300 to 400 miles and regularly swim from Greenland to Iceland across the Denmark Strait (180 - 200 miles), although the lazier ones will raft across on an ice floe.*
*Iceland on High Alert

From Planet Gore:
...MARAUDING polar bears could cause terror on Iceland after experts claimed global warming could bring the killer beasts across the sea....

...Climate expert Thor Jakobsson said: "Since two have reached the shore, more could be on the way."

Thor is calling for aerial surveillance of the ice, as well, to protect the Icelandic population:

“Since two bears have already reached the shore, more could be on the way, but there’s no telling whether this trend will continue in the coming years.

“Surveillance of the drifting ice must be improved. It has obviously not been taken good care of.

"Thin and filmy ice can easily reach over the canal between Greenland and Iceland, but cannot be spotted from satellite, so planes must fly over the area regularly to locate the ice and identify the polar bears.

"It is better to know if they are on the way,” Mr Jakobson concluded.

Still Shaken By The Voter Fraud In Fat Bear Week

It seems that any place some people think they can cheat—and get away with cheating—they will. 

And be cheered on by their fellow travelers or acquiesced to by the meek.

From The Independent via Yahoo Finance, October 11:

One of America’s most beloved elections has been the victim of a voter fraud scandal.

That’s right — Fat Bear Week. The annual March Madness-style tournament where people vote for their favourite rotund grizzly bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park has reported an apparent attempt at election rigging.

Katmai National Park said on Twitter that the race between the bears 435 Holly and 747 was hit by a spam attack, apparently to tip the scales in favour of 435 Holly.

“Like bears stuff their face with fish, our ballot box, too, has been stuffed,” the park tweeted.

Amber Kraft with the National Parks Service told Rolling Stone that while 747 was in the lead all day on Sunday, 435 Holly seemed to get a sudden boost of thousands of votes, drawing suspicion from election officials.

The votes all seemed to come from fake email addresses connected to a few IP addresses, she added, so the team was able to filter out all the fake votes.

In the end, 747, a favourite to win the tournament this year, came out victorious against 435 Holly, the 2019 champion.

The National Parks Service reviewed previous rounds of voting and did not find any additional evidence of fraud, Rolling Stone reports....

....MUCH MORE

Bear 747, also known among the cognoscenti as Bear Force One is a fine specimen but this victory will always have the taint of corruption associated with it 

From Popular Science, a head-on view of the winner:

  

And from Smithsonian Magazine, a three-quarter pose:

He is a chonky boy. 

Our posts on the 2022 competition: 

It's Fat Bear Week At Katmai National Park (and on Wall Street) 

North to Alaska: The Fat Bear Junior competition, AKA Chubby Cubbies, has ended with an horrendous decision by the crowd....

Heads-Up: "Get Ready, Fat Bear Week 2022 is Coming From Katmai National Park"

It's Fat Bear Week At Katmai National Park (and on Wall Street)

CORRECTION: I see that despite the Thursday - Friday carnage the equity markets closed up (a bit) for the week.

North to Alaska: The Fat Bear Junior competition, AKA Chubby Cubbies, has ended with an horrendous decision by the crowd. Completely ignoring the cuteness factor, the voters went with a yearling (how can that be fair?) instead of the Spring-born triplets:

There was an unfortunate incident where one of the quadruplets was attacked by an adult.

(Yet another reason to vote for the survivors.)

 

Here is the current state of play in the competition.

 

And here is the state of play in the current:

And the rest of the cameras. Highlights, live action, blooper reels...Follow them all. 

Stop back tomorrow for breakfast! Sunrise at Katmai 8:38 am Alaska Daylight Time, UTC -8. 

Bring the kids. Currencies accepted: United States Dollar (USD); Salmon

Forget the bulls, the bears are in charge.

Large and in charge.

Heads-Up: "Get Ready, Fat Bear Week 2022 is Coming From Katmai National Park"

From Outsider, September 23:

We’ve got the full schedule ahead of September’s Chubby Cubby bracket, followed by October’s full-on Fat Bear Week bracket in Katmai National Park.

It’s that time of year, Outsiders, and this bruin enthusiast couldn’t be happier to tell you that the Fat Bear Week 2022 festivities are set to begin this coming Monday, September 26! View the schedule below, then delve deep into the glory of the tournament’s 2022 return with us.

Fat Bear Week 2022 Schedule

As years prior, voting will take place on explore.org’s Fat Bear Week website where you can:

• Browse previous winners in the Hall of Fame, learn all about FBW and follow fat bears in the news, beginning now!
• September 26: Brace for adorable overload as the Fat Bear Junior bracket is revealed 
• September 29 – 30: Chubby cubbies square off for your votes in Fat Bear Junior, trying to make it into the full FBW competition
• October 3: Host your own bracket party as the official FBW Bracket hits!
• October 5 – 10/11: Vote in each bear-vs-bear FBW matchup and don’t let your favorite get sidelined
• October 10/11: See which bear hit it out of the park this year to become FBW Champion!

‘The entire season has come down to this!’

....MUCH MORE

And from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service:

Fat Bear Diet Plan

Alaska bruins share their secrets for packing on the pounds

"Islamic State Turns to NFTs to Spread Terror Message"

Related: Rating Agencies Put Islamic State on CreditWatch: Negative*

From the Wall Street Journal, September 4:

National-security analysts see potentially dangerous platform for recruiting and funding

A simple digital card praising Islamist militants for an attack on a Taliban position in Afghanistan last month is the first known nonfungible token created and disseminated by a terrorist sympathizer, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials.

It is a sign that Islamic State and other terror groups may be preparing to use the emerging financial technology to sidestep Western efforts to eradicate their online fundraising and messaging, they said.

The NFT, visible on at least one NFT trading website and titled “IS-NEWS #01,” bears Islamic State’s emblem. It was created by a supporter of the group, likely as an experiment to test a new outreach and funding strategy for ISIS, the former officials said. Regulators and national-security officials have expressed concern about the potential for terrorists to exploit new financial technologies and markets, including NFTs.

“It was only a matter of time,” said Yaya Fanusie, a former economic and counterterrorism analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

An NFT is a unit of data stored on a blockchain—a database of transactions organized without the need for a central trusted authority. The technology first emerged as a means of tracking, valuing and trading digital assets, but developers say that it has much broader applications, such as digital concert tickets and branded collectibles like digital trading cards.

IS-NEWS #01 doesn’t appear to have been traded, but its existence on the blockchain—distributed across countless systems connected to the internet—makes it nearly impossible for the Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies to take it off the internet, unlike, say, a news release that lives on a conventional website serviced by a host.

“It’s as censorship-proof as you can get,” said Mario Cosby, a former federal intelligence analyst specializing in blockchain currencies. “There’s not really anything anyone can do to actually take this NFT down,” said Mr. Cosby, who is now at blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs.

Since many social-media platforms take down links to offensive NFTs, the technology doesn’t lend itself to the explosive replication across the internet that makes tweets or videos go viral.....

....MUCH MORE
*Our related headline is "fāke™" or, in the words of Sheldon Cooper, "A big fat whopper".

Most of the agencies remain neutral in their forecasts.

That's another big fat whopper.

S&P, which I thought owned the mark on CreditWatch when written in CamelCase (no spaces, individual words capitalized) but may not, doesn't cover the Islamic State as either a corp. or a sovereign.
Ditto for Moody's and Fitch. 
Instead they do stuff like this, from 2008: "'Like A Gang of Clowns in a Pie Shop': S&P Puts Moody's on CreditWatch (Negative)"

Russia's ACRA--see post-2016-sanctions post: Vladimir Putin Starts His Own Credit Ratings Firm--has had IS at junk for quite a while while China's Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., best known for 2010's "UPDATED: Chinese Credit Rating Agency Downgrades the Entire United States" is mum on the issue.
Now where was I?
Right.

Combined with yesterday's post on the directive from the Fed it appears there is a big push against crypto being unleashed:  

UhOh: The Fed Letter To Member Banks On Crypto

Some Of The Fat Bears Of Alaska's Katmai National Park Are Going Vegetarian

Actually they're lacto-ovo-icthy-carnivores. They are omnivores, that will eat pretty much anything.

I blame Klaus Schwab for the trend toward more vegetables and leafy greens.

From Hakai Magazine:

Bears in Alaska’s Hallo Bay Are Changing What They Eat

It’s out with fish and in with berries and leafy greens—but scientists aren’t entirely sure why.

The brown bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve are huge, so much so that they are the subject of a popular tournament called Fat Bear Week. Each year, an online audience votes on which bear—gorged on salmon from the Brooks River—is the chonkiest. Last summer, the 450-kilogram giant Otis was crowned the year’s fattest bear. But new research conducted on a lonely stretch of the park’s coast, far from the gaze of Fat Bear Week’s cameras, shows that some of Alaska’s bears have shifted their diets away from salmon, one of their richest foods, with unknown consequences for their future.

Working with National Park Service biologists, Joy Erlenbach led the research, which began in 2015 while she was a graduate student at the University of Washington. The work shows that the proportion of salmon in female brown bears’ diets in Hallo Bay has decreased more than 50 percent over the past three decades, possibly in response to declining salmon runs. Salmon made up 62 percent of the bears’ diets in 1989, but by 2017 it was just 28 percent, says Erlenbach.

The bears replaced salmon with increased consumption of berries, sedges, and leafy vegetation—despite the availability of clams and other fish. The finding shows that bears can get by on a largely herbivorous diet, suggesting plants are a buffer resource when favored foods like salmon decline.

The work highlights the famous dietary adaptability of bears. But it also raises questions about how leaner diets could affect them in the future....

....MUCH MORE

 If interested see also: 

UPDATED—It's Fat Bear Week And A Media Frenzy!

Update: Unbeknownst to me there had been a single-elimination Fat Bear Junior competition to select one cub to compete against the adults.

The winner was (drumroll please): 

 132's Spring Cub

 With tough competition from 909’s Spring Cub and the other contenders

Fat Bear Week home

Regret the omission. 

Original post:....MUCH MORE 

That chubby cubby is not the result of dining on 'leafy greens.'

Follow-up—"Fat Bear Week: 480 Otis Takes Title for 4th Time"

Following up on September 29's "UPDATED—It's Fat Bear Week And A Media Frenzy!".

From the New York Times. October 6:

The brown bear was named the winner of the annual contest in which people vote for their favorite chunky bear at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

Move over Bear 747. In the battle of the bulkiest bear in Alaska, there’s a new heavyweight champion at Katmai National Park and Preserve.

On Tuesday night, 480 Otis was declared the winner of Fat Bear Week, an online competition that celebrates the bears’ pre-hibernation weight gain from late June to October, drawing hundreds of thousands of votes from bear buffs.

At more than 25 years old, Otis is one of the older bears at the park, which encompasses about 4.1 million acres in southwest Alaska and is home to about 2,200 brown bears.

Otis is now a four-time champion, having won the inaugural contest, in 2014, as well as in 2016 and 2017. This year, Otis earned 51,230 votes in the final round to beat bear 151 Walker’s 44,834 votes. Nearly 800,000 votes were cast in the weeklong contest, which featured 12 bears.

“Bears are fascinating animals and lead challenging lives, and I think people are happy to celebrate their success each season,” said Amber Kraft, a spokeswoman for the park....

....MUCH MORE

The people have spoken! The portly patriarch of paunch persevered to pulverize the Baron of Beardonkadonk in the final match of #FatBearWeek 2021. 480 Otis can now boast a bevy of bests w/ this fourth 1st place finish. As we celebrate, like a true champ 480 is still chowing down. pic.twitter.com/rLvm7pvGJW

— Katmai National Park (@KatmaiNPS) October 6, 2021

"Fascinating animals"; "Lead challenging lives." C'mon Amber you know, and I know, they're charismatic megafauna. (as am I) 

 

Okay that's two posts in a row where I tried to make it about me. It might be time to descend from the donjon and socialize a bit. Back shortly.

UPDATED—It's Fat Bear Week And A Media Frenzy!

Update: Unbeknownst to me there had been a single-elimination Fat Bear Junior competition to select one cub to compete against the adults.

The winner was (drumroll please): 

 132's Spring Cub

 With tough competition from 909’s Spring Cub and the other contenders

Fat Bear Week home

Regret the omission. 

Original post:

What had started (for us) with a casual tip from an FT Alphaville commenter last year is now being reported by Newsweek, USA Today, CNN, the Seattle Times, the Wall Street Journal (chubby cubbies), Reuters and any number of other outlets.

We will go direct to the source.

Dateline: King Salmon Alaska, September 29, 2021

News Release

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s …. a very fat bear! Bracket for 2020 Fat Bear Week (9/30-10/6) Now Available

NPS
Katmai National Park and Preserve

Contact: Amber Kraft

King Salmon, AK – Katmai National Park and Preserve, – No capes are needed for these furry superheroes. They may not be faster than a speeding bullet, but despite the weight they are carrying, these burly beasts can still run faster than most humans. These brown bears’ power of packing on the pounds gets them through the winter and able to live to compete another year. With or without the lasso of truth around us, our story remains the same: fat bears = healthy bears.

While the plumpest of the plump work to gain even more, Katmai’s bears of Brooks River will compete in head-to-head matchups in Fat Bear Week’s single elimination tournament. Your votes decide who will wear the mantle of 2020’s Fattest Bear. We are moving this voting from Katmai National Park’s Facebook page to explore.org/fat-bear-week hosted by explore.org. Experience the excitement of survival of the fattest when Fat Bear Week 2020 begins Wednesday, September 30th! Matchups will be open for voting from 12 - 10 p.m. Eastern (8 a.m. - 6 p.m. Alaska).

Does Bear 747 have a chance to get his first championship by dethroning last year’s reigning champion, 435 Holly? Will a new bear come from the outside and topple the competition for the ultimate win? Can multi time champ 480 Otis reclaim his spot on top for one more year? While we can’t foresee the future champion, we do know the paunchy bear will only achieve their win with all of you casting your votes.

This competition is brought to you through the partnership of Katmai National Park and Preserve, explore.org and the Katmai Conservancy. If you want to check out the live bear cams, you can find them here.

Ready to check out the competition for this year’s crown? Here is the 2020 Fat Bear Week Bracket for you to fill out! Then remember to come back to explore.org/fat-bear-week daily from Wednesday, September 30th through Championship Tuesday, October 6th. Remember, with great Fat Bears comes a great responsibility to vote!

That's from the National Park Service website.

This release has more more detail:

Competitor lineup with slider comparison photos:

Bears are presented in numerical order with their slider photos, a brief summary of how to identify the bear and the bears biography....

....MUCH MORE

It's morning in Alaska and the bears are just now making their way to the breakfast buffet:

Recently:

September 2

Meanwhile In Alaska.....

....the beta bears are trying to put on weight:

*****

During June and July the alpha bears hang out at the falls upstream, feasting on salmon and getting enormous while the smaller bears are pushed down to less favorable fishing spots.

The big ones usually come back sometime between now and mid-September before waddling off for the winter.

Here's the suite of all the cameras.

And here are the "Bears of Brooks River, 2021"

From Last October's "Where The Bears Are":

Really, really fat bears, up to 1400 pounds (635 kg)*

Do click through.

Here's 747 doing his bear thing:

He is very, very big.

Meanwhile In Alaska.....

 ....the beta bears are trying to put on weight:

 

During June and July the alpha bears hang out at the falls upstream, feasting on salmon and getting enormous while the smaller bears are pushed down to less favorable fishing spots.

The big ones usually come back sometime between now and mid-September before waddling off for the winter.

Here's the suite of all the cameras.

And here are the "Bears of Brooks River, 2021"

From Last October's "Where The Bears Are":

Really, really fat bears, up to 1400 pounds (635 kg)*

Do click through.

*These are the bears of Fat Bear Week 2020. We will be updating for 2021 soon! 

Some Possibly Good News For The Arctic Icecap

With the circumpolar vortex having retreated back to circling the pole, the cold air is staying up top and helping to expand both the extent and more importantly the thickness of the ice cap.

quick note: the thickness is more important because of the way ice melts. As any good bartender knows, it's all about the ratio of surface area to volume, a block of ice will melt slower than shavings.

The latest ice map from the Danish Meteorological Institute has three points of interest, two positive, one negative. First up the Bering Straits, top center in this view, have the thickest ice they've seen in at least three years:

Second, the volume (thickness x extent) which had been running at the lowest level in the last five years is now at the fourth-lowest level of the last five years, giving more ice a chance to get through the summer and become second-year ice.

The negative can be seen in this map from the same date in 2019. Although the overall current situation is better than it was two years ago, the ice between Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago at 20° east longitude has not filled in:

This is negative because the prevailing ice drift is from the Bering Strait and out the Fram Strait into the North Atlantic. It is best for the ice cap if there is a fat plug to bottle-up the ice above the 80th parallel.

The best case scenario would of course be a solid sheet of ice so the polar bears can walk over from Greenland to visit their cousins and maybe harass some Norwegians.

Two other negatives for this summer and maybe next are that the Central European heatwave expected in May and June will again extend north to Scandinavia, see: 

A Couple Reasons To Look For A Hot Summer, Maybe Even Drought In Central Europe This Year

And: 

Higher Temperatures Expected Through 2022

Where The Bears Are

A commenter at the Financial Times' premier online property, FT Alphaville, mentioned Fat Bear Week and I wanted to know more.
So, with no further ado, here is one of the cameras pointed at Brooks River in Katmai National Park.
note, these are live cams so you may want to click through to the site for different views:

And here is why the bears gather:

Fat salmon, fat bears.
If the bears have moved out of range of the top camera there are five more:

Really, really fat bears, up to 1400 pounds (635 kg)*

Do click through.

*
*

Investment Banks As Marxist Paradise

I think I could learn to like this young Matthew Klein fellow.
As I mentioned in 2009's "In Downturn, Americans Flock to the Movies (But Don't Bet on It)":

...A quick look at the Cowles Theaters and Motion Pictures sub-index* (price series P-55, page 152) shows the index bottoming at 46.0 in October of the 1921 bear market, a Roaring 20's high of 150.6 in January 1929 and a depression low of 5.1 in March, 1933.

Although the business held up fairly well in the first year of the depression, they ended up a bit worse than the general market. Between th '29 high and the '33 low they lost 96% vs. the DJIA's 89% fall....

...There are two problems with the business as an investment.
First, similar to the investment banks, when times are good the profits belong to the employees. When times are bad the losses belong to the shareholders....

That bit about the investment banks is an often overlooked feature of the 1970 NYSE rule change that allowed members to be joint stock companies rather than individuals or partnerships.

Starting with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette's 1970 IPO and the flotations of Merrill, Reynolds & Bache in '71 the floodgates were open and the business was changed forever.

The culmination was the Goldman Sachs IPO, May 3, 1999 during the market madness that top-ticked early the next year. (Prospectus)

So yeah, the fact that Klein has internalized the business model gives me warm fuzzies.

From FT Alphaville:
Beneficiary of rent extraction says rents explain inequality

Peter Orszag has a new column arguing that insufficient attention is being paid to “profits at some companies well in excess of what’s necessary to keep them in the market” as a source of inequality. This is far from being an original idea, although we appreciate Orszag’s citation of data on factory-level productivity.

However, we were struck by an odd omission. While Orszag is quick to note the importance of patents and land values, he leaves out any mention of the large subsidies enjoyed by the financial sector. (Orszag is paid several million dollars a year as a vice chairman at Citi.) That obscures a lot.


The International Monetary Fund has estimated that the big US banks received possibly more than all of their profits from the implicit subsidies associated with being “too important to fail”, as opposed to actually producing anything of value.

That supports Andy Haldane’s hypothesis that the supposed post-1980 productivity miracle in finance, which was calculated by blindly trusting the big banks’ reported profits, was simply the result of greater risk-taking — and therefore larger hidden transfers from the rest of society — rather than any genuine value creation.

For perspective, the financial sector contributes about a fifth of total US corporate profits. That share has grown tremendously since the late 1970s, and is a big reason why overall US corporate margins are so much higher now.

But profits are only one piece of the puzzle. Unlike, say, Apple, which depends on ill-treated Chinese labourers for its fat margins, workers in the financial sector are paid very well. It bears repeating that investment banks are Marxist paradises where an overwhelming share of the surplus is captured by the people who produce it, rather than outside shareholders. This also has had a big impact on the inequality statistics....MORE

That Marxist link goes to a piece Mssr. Klein penned while working at Bloomberg:

Proletarian Bankers Feeling the Capitalist Yoke

Nov 3, 2013 6:01 PM EST

By Matthew C. Klein

Banks have long been oddities -- fiercely capitalist in their treatment of others, yet run like Marxist bastions where labor, rather than capital, captured much of the value created. (Just look at the share of revenues that went to employee compensation before the crisis, or the bizarre fact that, in essence, banks only adjust their balance sheets by borrowing more or less rather than issuing or retiring equity.)

This seems to be changing, thanks in part to tighter leverage limits. According to Bloomberg News, the workers' paradises are finally under assault from newly class-conscious capitalists. The rest of us should be pleased.

Leverage rules are meant to shield taxpayers from bearing the costs of bank failures and, by extension, take away the subsidies that enrich bankers and bank shareholders during the good years. Society as a whole benefits because crises become less likely and less costly, but those forced off their taxpayer-funded gravy train are stuck figuring out how to split the cost between workers and owners. So far, capital has borne the brunt of the new regulations with lower returns on equity....MORE

This is almost enough to make one want to go visit Marx, Sraffa, Ricardo and the boys.
More to come.

Getting Technical: "Fat Lady Is About to Sing, According to the Charts"

The Helga-horns imagery is from Barron's, not me.
From Barron's Getting Technical column, Oct. 8, 1014:

Today’s rally doesn’t erase the bearish signals from recent market action, including small stock weakness.

“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” applies to technical analysis just as well as it applies to basketball and opera. No matter how bad we think market conditions are, until it actually breaks down all we have is a warning. As the story goes, when the fat lady’s song is over, the curtain falls and the show, or bull market, is over.

With the events over the past few days, the fat lady seems to be on the stage starting her aria. 

Last week, I wrote here that one of the most important technical features in the market broke to the downside (see Getting Technical, “Will Stocks Suffer Death By a Thousand Cuts?,” Oct. 1). The Standard & Poor’s 500 index moved below the bull market trendline drawn from the key November 2012 low.

It was a bearish event, but in the age of the Federal Reserve’s bond buying and low interest-rate programs, breakdowns over the past few years were immediately erased. Last Friday’s September jobs report and ensuing rally once again looked to trap the bears and send the market back up.

Despite today’s Fed-induced rally, this time the reality was different. Action this week reversed that rally, and sent the market to fresh closing lows. The breakdown was confirmed (see Chart 1).

Chart 1

Standard & Poor’s 500

Chart watchers noted other factors, including resistance at the 50-day average keeping a lid on Friday’s rally. And even as the market gained last week on economic news, the number of stocks hitting new 52-week lows remained quite high. The rally, though impressive on the charts, was far from inclusive. The rising tide did not raise all boats.

The Nasdaq did not fare much better, although it has not broken its major trendline. But it, too, turned lower at its 50-day average, and Wednesday it set a lower intraday low for the current decline. 

Bulls rightly question whether this is a full-market breakdown because the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are both above their 200-day averages. Whereas the 50-day average is the proxy for the short-term trend, the 200-day is the proxy for the long-term trend. Big stocks indexes, therefore, still have an argument that they have not broken down....MORE

 Fat Lady Is About to Sing, According to the Charts - Barron's 

9 of the World's Most Ridiculously Secure Safes and Vaults

From Mental Floss:

1. Fort Knox

Plan on breaking into Fort Knox? First, climb the four surrounding fences—two of which are electric—and then sneak past the armed sentinels lining the perimeter. Be sure to avoid the video cameras. Don’t waste time trying to blast through the granite walls—they are four feet thick and held together by 750 tons of reinforcing steel. If you get past the armed guards inside, plus the maze of locked doors, you’ll probably be stopped by the 22-ton vault door. Don’t despair. The vault can be opened, but only if you find all the staff members who know a small slice of the combination (you’ll need all of them, since nobody knows the whole thing.) Once you get inside the vault, you’ll have to break into the smaller vaults tucked inside, then you can start taking the 5000 tons of gold bullion stored in there. And do be careful when you leave: 30,000 soldiers from Fort Knox’s military camp will be anxiously awaiting you outside.

2. Svalbard Global Seed Vault

If Armageddon happens soon, any hope of bringing the world’s crops back is buried 390 feet under a Nordic mountain. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the island of Spitsbergen currently houses over 500,000 of the world’s plant species. The vault is 620 miles south of the North Pole and safeguarded by hundreds of miles of ocean, plus a couple thousand polar bears. It’s so deep, it’s resistant to a nuclear holocaust, not to mention severe earthquakes. It also sits 430 feet above sea level, safe from any possible sea-level rise. The three seed vaults lay behind four heavy steel doors. As long as the keys aren’t hidden under a doormat, our seeds should be safe from Doomsday.

3. Cheyenne Mountain

Cheyenne Mountain redefines the phrase “job security.” Employees work behind two 25-ton doors, which can withstand a 30-megaton blast. To put that into perspective, Fat Man—the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—would have to explode 1429 times to crack the entrance. The offices there are buried 2000 feet into the mountain’s granite, so far that air has to be pumped inside. That air, however, is the cleanest in the world. It is processed by a state-of-the-art system of chemical, biological, and nuclear filters. It’s no wonder why Cheyenne hosted the US Missile Warning Center and NORAD during the Cold War.

4. Iron Mountain

What do the charred remains of Flight 93, the original photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue, and Edison’s patent for the light bulb have in common? They’re all stowed under Iron Mountain. 200 feet below the ground, this retired limestone mine houses 1.7 million square feet worth of vaults. The US government is the biggest tenant, and the identities of 95% of vault owners are confidential. We do know that Warner Brothers, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corbis all have vaults there. Thousands of historic master recordings, photo negatives, and original film reels live here. Iron Mountain is also home to Room 48, a data center backing up some of America’s biggest companies. Two waves of armed guards protect the entrance, and it’s said they inspect guests so thoroughly that even the TSA would be embarrassed....MORE