From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future … [Archive]

giovonni

18th April 2010, 17:03

At times of great stress, when your relationship is changing, or your job is disappearing, or you are faced with a fateful choice, it can be extraordinarily helpful to get even a glimpse of what lies in your future.

From my favorite futurists~ Stephan A. Schwartz

Trends That Will Affect Your Future … Mr South Whidbey, Globalization, and the Worship of Profit

By the time we get there it is already a raucous party. The elderly Freeland Hall on Whidbey island, off the coast of Seattle, with its walls and ceiling made of short strips of ancient pine boards, vibrates with the noise. Two hundred fifty people have packed themselves in tonight to eat a simple box dinner on folding tables and watch six men make fools of themselves. One of them will be voted Mr South Whidbey. The voting is done by buying votes, in the form of business card–sized bits of paper, for $1 a card. There is much encouragement to buy as many cards as possible.

As I sit there eating my chicken salad, men in odd outfits—one wears a kind of apron upon which is airbrushed a nude female form with a fig leaf, another is got up as Abe Lincoln—circulate with cardboard beer six-pack carriers. Where the beer would be there are paper cups with the names of the contestants, who are also wearing improbable outfits and who range in age from one man in his early 30s wearing a kilt and sporting a chain saw—sort of like one of the Village People seen by someone on a bad drug trip—to an octogenarian dressed as a 1920s Parisian boulevardier. The evening is a parody of any beauty pageant. There are dumb questions for the contestant interview, a runway promenade, and a talent segment. It is all uniformly awful, and so self-consciously so that it calls forth from the audience cheers, hoots, and laughter. As the evening progresses, we vote by placing the little cards in the cup labeled with the name of our favorite.

I have just moved to Whidbey and am here at the party with my partner Ronlyn, and neither of us is very clear why; it is largely at the urging of my physician friend, Rick Ingrasci, the man wearing the nude apron. We know no one at our table, and to make conversation I introduce myself to a modest, plainly dressed, middle-aged woman across from me, asking her what it's all about. She explains the purpose of the evening is to raise money for Friends of Friends, a local philanthropy. When I ask her what Friends of Friends is, she tells me it is a community-supported fund offering financial help to our fellow south islanders with medically related bills they cannot afford to pay. The man next to her introduces himself and tells me that it all started in 1997 “and so far has helped about a thousand people with $400,000 in medical expenses.” The woman to my right joins the conversation by telling me she would probably be dead had it not been for Friends of Friends, since “I have no health insurance, and could not have obtained the treatments I desperately needed if they hadn't helped me.” The woman across from me nods in agreement and says, “I would have lost all my teeth except for Friends of Friends.”

As the octogenarian carries the day, an obvious favorite—how can you not vote for an 80-year-old man wearing a beret and smoking jacket willing to sing old Maurice Chevalier songs in public—I am moved by the community spirit the Mr South Whidbey Pageant represents and heartened by yet another example of the interlocking safety network my new community has created to help itself. And at the same time I am outraged that any of this should be necessary.

Whenever I confront the illness profit industry's impact on American society, I always imagine I am speaking with my sister, Susan, who has lived most of her life in Europe and is now in France. As I sit there while several men in trench coats and large black witches hats, blowing kazoos, march the hall's length, this particular imaginary conversation plays out with me explaining that little communities such as the villages of South Whidbey have to band together so that the weak, the poor, and the afflicted amongst them can have the basic healthcare that every other industrial nation in the world provides as a matter of course. I imagine my sister's face as she hears about the pleasant woman sitting across from me who almost became one of the 122 people who die daily in America—more than die monthly in the active war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan—because they have no health insurance.

Viewed from another perspective, I realize, Mr South Whidbey represents a powerful trend shaping our future—and not a happy one. It is the response of a caring small community to a massive failure on the part of the larger society. If we had national healthcare, the nice woman sitting to my right eating the last of her salad would never have faced the abyss of involuntary death because she lacked the insurance to open the door to a continued future. She wouldn't have needed $10,000 to pay for a procedure that in most countries would be considered a right. What must that be like to wake up each morning lying in your bed and knowing that without some drug or medical procedure you are doomed?

What if instead of giving $10,000 to the woman because she didn't have health insurance, this collective effort, and thousands of other efforts like it in other communities around the country, were focused on something else? How about local preparation for climate change, or to assist local businesses to navigate the “Green Transition” that is occurring as the world moves out of the “Age of Petroleum?” Not that such efforts do not exist, of course they do. But the many programs like Mr South Whidbey support not preparation for the future, but assuage an immediate unnecessary present day failure. Of necessity they compete for time, energy, and money, of which local communities like the villages of South Whidbey have only so much. Suppose Mr South Whidbey gave that $10,000 as a loan to local government to build charging stations for electric cars that local people drive, so they could recharge when they went shopping in the village? If you collected a modest fee like a parking meter, and the city paid the loans back over time, the whole business might even be self-financing. Everybody would benefit, if simply with cleaner air.

One of America's great defining characteristics is this capacity for coming together in volunteer local effort. “About 61.8 million people, or 26.4% of the population, volunteered through or for an organization at least once between September 2007 and September 2008,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported.1 If you have ever lived in another country you realize how rare this is.

Another of our strengths is the deep commitment of the American people to philanthropy. We commit 1.7% of our gross national product to this purpose—nearly $300 billion a year.2 The next most philanthropic nation is Great Britain at .73%—less than half as much—and it falls off precipitously from there.2

And the generosity of spirit that is such an American hallmark can be found at every level of the culture. About 65% of households with incomes less than $100,000 give to charity.1 Even the poor give. Their share of the nearly $300 billion offered up is just as green.3 In 2007, as individuals and families, we spent nearly $25 billion a month serving what we felt was good and life-affirming as we understood it.

This squandering of volunteer action, and philanthropic purpose because the failure to have universal healthcare requires local programs such as Friend of Friends, is a consequence of the “Illness Profit” model. Along with people working sick, or having simple inexpensive medical problems become complex and expensive because they were not treated, these social failures constitute a kind of friction, or a tax. One that in a global world makes us less competitive and less prepared for climate change. I suddenly have images from Katrina in my mind. Once again, like New Orleans and FEMA, are we going to ignore the warnings and be less prepared than we could be if other considerations were not draining off our time, passion, and resources?

Why is this happening? I think this is one of the great questions that our public conversation should focus on. Barbara Tuchman's 1984 best seller, March of Folly,4 Jared Diamond's 2005 book, Collapse,5 and Naomi Klein's 2007 book, Shock Doctrine,6 all spell out how powerful societies can, and have, destroyed themselves. Almost always it results from an obsessive commitment to something that proves again and again that it is destructive, yet that society continues to focus on it in spite of the evidence. The Easter Islanders kept cutting down their trees, even as they were punished by nature for the destruction of their ecosystem. I always wonder what the last man—cutting down the last tree—thought.

In our case, the culprit seems to be that profit has become our only bedrock value. Because this is our default consideration, we have chosen to develop a model of healthcare that reflects that value. As a result we have millions, literally millions, of people who cannot make their full contribution to our society's success, either because they cannot contribute at all or are contributing in varying degrees of diminished capacity. But this is just one manifestation of our obsession. Here are a few others.

When profit is the most important consideration, then social programs like prenatal care, having no immediate payoff, get severely cut even though we know that if a mother does not get a proper diet between the 19th and 23rd week of pregnancy, her fetus' brain will not develop properly and her child will become an unacknowledged handicapped person for their entire lives, in a way that can never be repaired. When short-term profit is the only consideration, then long-term education, particularly of the poor, never really becomes a social priority. And when privatized profit-making prisons become the rice bowl for communities left destitute because of earlier outsourcing, it becomes important to keep a steady flow of the poor into those institutions as the justification for their existence and the mechanism for tapping the public till.

People are beginning to gather up their coats and I am left with this: in a world that is globalizing, the future and national security of a nation are directly correlated with its ability to field as many brains—literally neurons—and as many fully committed hearts working on behalf of societal success as it can. When profit is the only priority governing the social infrastructure, our recent history shows it sabotages this success.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3096/2871675501_a87a5bdea2_o.jpg
Whidbey island, off the coast of Seattle

original article here;
http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307(09)00368-1/fulltext

The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
http://www.schwartzreport.net/

giovonni

19th April 2010, 15:30

Continuing to look into the ~ Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

Pot smoking legal for thousands at Cow Palace

DALY CITY -- People have been toking up in the Cow Palace parking lot for more than 50 years.

This was the first time it was legal.

The International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, the first trade show in the United States to allow on-site pot smoking, attracted an estimated 15,000 enthusiasts to Daly City over the weekend. They talked bud, sold products ranging from a $500 water bong to a $19,500 mobile grow house, and discussed how efforts to legalize marijuana would impact their livelihoods.

"We're exercising our rights as patients to peacefully gather," said Bob Katzman, chief operating officer of the expo, as he stood near the designated puffing area. "We're here to talk about changing some of the existing laws, but we're not here to break the law."

Katzman said it took organizers four years to negotiate a permit with a venue that would allow marijuana consumption. It wasn't possible, he said, until a "massive change in the political climate."

That climate is set to be tested in November, when an initiative that would legalize marijuana is to be decided by California voters. Now, marijuana is available only to those with a medicinal use card.

Such cards were easy to attain at the exposition.

For $99 - cash only - attendees such as Shawna Spencer of San Jose received a temporary "recommendation" from doctors that allowed her to smoke at the event. Spencer, who said she suffers from bipolar disorder, said she had waited for more than an hour.

"It's worth the wait because I need it," Spencer said.

Dr. Daniel Susott said he expected to sign off on 1,600 people by the end of the weekend. He said a portion of the fees would go to charity.

"We're making history today," he said as his visitors complained of chronic pain, depression and insomnia, among other ailments. "We're operating within the guidelines of Prop. 215 and helping people get the medical marijuana they need."

If marijuana becomes legal, Susott expects that his patients will self-prescribe.

"People will start growing their own medicine in their homes," he said. "And the big pharma companies aren't going to like it."

For those concerned with the conspicuous equipment needed to grow plants inside the home, Tim Ellis of Orange County had the solution: An 18-foot trailer that can yield up to 6 pounds of pot every two months. The Grow n' Mobile starts at $19,500.

Ellis, a father of two, said he had the family grower in mind - a person who desires to cultivate outside the house, but in a secure location.

Showing off every detail of his invention, Ellis said he rigged the trailer's hitch so thieves would need a blowtorch to hook the trailer to their own truck. Fumes are routed through a charcoal filter. And the roof has an infrared shield to thwart weed-hunting helicopters.

"Can't steal it, can't smell it, can't find it," Ellis said, offering his sales pitch. "Built by a grower for a grower. Grow mobile!"

The event hosted a panel discussion Saturday on how legalization would impact large California growers. A contingent from Humboldt County argued against the ballot initiative, complaining it could devastate a key local industry.

"Radical" Russ Belville, the outreach coordinator for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said that if California's initiative passed, he expected home-growers to enter the market and drive prices down.

But he was unsympathetic to the group from Humboldt County.

"To that end, I would say, 'Tough,' " Belville said. "We should have to put people in prison so you can continue to make a living?"
original story here;
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/19/BA2A1D0OB2.DTL

http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2010/03/30/highres_12258891.jpeg
more on this subject matter here;
http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2010/03/

note; i am neutral in regards to this subject matter, i believe each individual should be legally allowed to chose what's best in concerns to their own personal health care issues.
giovonni ;)

giovonni

20th April 2010, 18:01

bettye198

21st April 2010, 00:23

giovonni

21st April 2010, 17:20

This post, Giovanni merits a bump.
Are futurists only tapping in beyond reality? Maybe. We have such power, such imagination, such knowledge stored in our being and we live in such a lazy world that allows life to just swim by and we observe. Ok for the Zens but not ok for those primed to make a difference by waking up the sleepy heads.

Just a side note on your cannibus post. I just read from Fritz Springmeier's online book on Mind Control ( he has many ) that one type of drug is NOT used by handlers and programmers of Mind Control and that is Marijuana. I find that extraordinary since they use every other kind of drug, the list is so long and devastating. The reason for not using weed was because they could NOT control the victims. How is that possible? From my son's perspective on the experience years ago was that it made his brain Any comments?

Peace

Ciao amico mio bella italiana
i sense your :boink: probing old gio :haha:

well i'm sure some futurist possibly might have :drag: smoked some in the past ( maybe even a few practioners of zen), but usually from my experiences` its pretty much left me~ as your enlightened son says "sleepy and dull and fogged and useless" but usually quite Happy!

:secret: Between you and me~ i believe a lot of the past and present hemp issues have to do with (economics), pressure's from way back in the early years of U.S. history~ when cotton was King and hemp was not~ Old George Washington grew quite a bit of it for his own usage (cloths-ropes) etc...

The government (handlers) obviously are quite aware of that hemp (pot) is useless in terms of any kind of "Control" substance:haha: (giggle-giggle)

tanto amore per te<>gio

post-note; need to emphasis that smoking any substance whether it be tobacco pot etc.. is harmful to ones heart. unless directed by a qualified medical person (physician) for medical purposes~ its best not to use or abuse these substances.

giovonni

23rd April 2010, 16:38

The Lost Symbol Sparks Nationwide Interest in the Noetic Sciences

Bonnie J. Horrigan

Life can change rapidly; we all know that. But sometimes it changes in ways we aren't expecting, which is exactly what happened at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in October 2009. They did not know they were in the book.

Since the release of Dan Brown's newest novel, The Lost Symbol, visits to the IONS Web site have increased 10-fold; new members are signing up every day, calls are flooding in from across the country, and journalists from Dateline NBC, the Discovery Channel, NPR, and other media outlets are clamoring for interviews. Why? Because IONS and its research are prominently featured in the novel, and now people want to know more—a lot more—about the role of intention and consciousness in the world.

Brown's novel, which sold two million copies of the English language edition in its first two weeks of release, employs noetic science to untangle the web of clues that resolve a plot conflict between good and evil. It wasn't until the day of its release that IONS staff discovered they were featured. Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, PhD, CEO, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, received an email from Brown. It basically said that he was a big fan of IONS, and although he had hoped to give them a heads up, he wasn't able to do so because of the security around the book. But he hoped they were enjoying the attention.

They are. “We are immensely grateful to Mr. Brown for catapulting the little-known field of Noetic Sciences into mainstream conversation surrounding his book,” said Dr Schlitz, who shares similarities with the book's heroine, Katherine Solomon. Before becoming the CEO for IONS, Schiltz spent several decades pioneering clinical and field-based research in the area of human consciousness, transformation, and healing.

“Based on my research over three decades, I am convinced that consciousness matters,” said Schlitz. “Through our individual and collective explorations, through the bridging of objective science and ancient wisdom traditions, we can find creative new solutions to age-old problems besetting humanity—fostering personal and social healing and transformation.”

The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was founded in the early 70s by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, is a nonprofit membership organization that conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness—including perceptions, beliefs, attention, intention, and intuition. Sitting in the cramped cabin of the space capsule on his return trip from the moon, Mitchell saw planet Earth floating freely in the vastness of space and was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. In Mitchell's own words: “The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes.”

Researchers at IONS have been applying the lens of science to the multidisciplinary study of consciousness for nearly 40 years. The word noetic comes from the ancient Greek nous, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. It refers to “inner knowing,” a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.

EXPLORE Coeditor-in-Chief, Dean Radin, PhD, is the senior scientist at IONS. “My interest in consciousness was originally motivated out of an intuitive sense that the mind is far more mysterious and powerful than we know,” said Radin, who was brought on as an EXPLORE editor specifically because of his expertise in this field. “Through education and experience I've also come to appreciate that these experiences are also responsible for most of the greatest inventions, artistic and scientific achievements, creative insights, and religious epiphanies throughout history. Understanding this realm of human experience thus offers more than mere academic interest—it touches upon the very best that the human intellect and spirit have to offer.”

The Lost Symbol mentions studies on the effects of individual and collective intention, intuition, gut feelings, and presentiments—all areas that IONS has been studying intensively for years. For a list of IONS published studies, please go to: http://www.noetic.org/publications/journal_pubs.cfm.

To field the overwhelming number of requests by The Lost Symbol readers for information about noetic sciences, IONS launched a multipart teleseminar series on the subject in October 2009, which ran weekly through December 2009. The series was filmed on location in Washington, DC, where Brown's novel takes readers on a tour of the symbols and legends of ancient wisdoms and spiritual traditions hidden among the country's national monuments. Dr Schlitz guided listeners on a similar tour, offering a broader understanding of the noetic sciences and what science now knows about the mysteries of consciousness. “In January 2010 we will begin a new, live phone interview series in the form of a class that will take people deeper into the latest noetic research and implications,” explained Schlitz.

For more information about IONS, please visit http://www.noetic.org.

original article from explore journal here;
http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307(09)00371-1/fulltext#sec1

giovonni

25th April 2010, 23:01

I do not agree with many of Robert Bryce's conclusions, because the facts he uses to define these issues are highly selective, and very partial. That said, he raises a countervailing view about which one should be cognizant. Ignorant Greens are little different from Creationists. Both are willfully ignorant.
Stephen A. Schwartz

i concur~ giovonni ;)

Five myths about green energy
By Robert Bryce
Sunday, April 25, 2010

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His fourth book, "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future,"

Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we'll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, "green" energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes -- and subsidies -- in it, let's take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what "green" means.

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.

Unfortunately, solar and wind technologies require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, disrupting natural habitats. Even an aging natural gas well producing 60,000 cubic feet per day generates more than 20 times the watts per square meter of a wind turbine. A nuclear power plant cranks out about 56 watts per square meter, eight times as much as is derived from solar photovoltaic installations. The real estate that wind and solar energy demand led the Nature Conservancy to issue a report last year critical of "energy sprawl," including tens of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry electricity from wind and solar installations to distant cities.

Nor does wind energy substantially reduce CO2 emissions. Since the wind doesn't always blow, utilities must use gas- or coal-fired generators to offset wind's unreliability. The result is minimal -- or no -- carbon dioxide reduction.

Denmark, the poster child for wind energy boosters, more than doubled its production of wind energy between 1999 and 2007. Yet data from Energinet.dk, the operator of Denmark's natural gas and electricity grids, show that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2007 were at about the same level as they were back in 1990, before the country began its frenzied construction of turbines. Denmark has done a good job of keeping its overall carbon dioxide emissions flat, but that is in large part because of near-zero population growth and exorbitant energy taxes, not wind energy. And through 2017, the Danes foresee no decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation.

2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.

In the new green economy, batteries are not included. Neither are many of the "rare earth" elements that are essential ingredients in most alternative energy technologies. Instead of relying on the diversity of the global oil market -- about 20 countries each produce at least 1 million barrels of crude per day -- the United States will be increasingly reliant on just one supplier, China, for elements known as lanthanides. Lanthanum, neodymium, dysprosium and other rare earth elements are used in products from high-capacity batteries and hybrid-electric vehicles to wind turbines and oil refinery catalysts.

China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in these elements. And the Chinese government is reducing its exports of lanthanides to ensure an adequate supply for its domestic manufacturers. Politicians love to demonize oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, but adopting the technologies needed to drastically cut U.S. oil consumption will dramatically increase America's dependence on China.

3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.

In a global market, American wind turbine manufacturers face the same problem as American shoe manufacturers: high domestic labor costs. If U.S. companies want to make turbines, they will have to compete with China, which not only controls the market for neodymium, a critical ingredient in turbine magnets, but has access to very cheap employees.

The Chinese have also signaled their willingness to lose money on solar panels in order to gain market share. China's share of the world's solar module business has grown from about 7 percent in 2005 to about 25 percent in 2009.

Meanwhile, the very concept of a green job is not well defined. Is a job still green if it's created not by the market, but by subsidy or mandate? Consider the claims being made by the subsidy-dependent corn ethanol industry. Growth Energy, an industry lobby group, says increasing the percentage of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply would create 136,000 jobs. But an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that no more than 27,000 jobs would be created, and each one could cost taxpayers as much as $446,000 per year. Sure, the government can create more green jobs. But at what cost?

4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.

Nissan and Tesla are just two of the manufacturers that are increasing production of all-electric cars. But in the electric car's century-long history, failure tailgates failure. In 1911, the New York Times declared that the electric car "has long been recognized as the ideal" because it "is cleaner and quieter" and "much more economical" than its gasoline-fueled cousins. But the same unreliability of electric car batteries that flummoxed Thomas Edison persists today.

Those who believe that Detroit unplugged the electric car are mistaken. Electric cars haven't been sidelined by a cabal to sell internal combustion engines or a lack of political will, but by physics and math. Gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy, by weight, as the best lithium-ion battery. Sure, the electric motor is more efficient than the internal combustion engine, but can we depend on batteries that are notoriously finicky, short-lived and take hours to recharge? Speaking of recharging, last June, the Government Accountability Office reported that about 40 percent of consumers do not have access to an outlet near their vehicle at home. The electric car is the next big thing -- and it always will be.

5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Over the past three decades, the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, average per capita energy consumption in the United States fell by 2.5 percent from 1980 through 2006. That reduction was greater than in any other developed country except Switzerland and Denmark, and the United States achieved it without participating in the Kyoto Protocol or creating an emissions trading system like the one employed in Europe. EIA data also show that the United States has been among the best at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per $1 of GDP and the amount of energy consumed per $1 of GDP.

America's move toward a more service-based economy that is less dependent on heavy industry and manufacturing is driving this improvement. In addition, the proliferation of computer chips in everything from automobiles to programmable thermostats is wringing more useful work out of each unit of energy consumed. The United States will continue going green by simply allowing engineers and entrepreneurs to do what they do best: make products that are faster, cheaper and more efficient than the ones they made the year before.

original article here;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042302220.html

giovonni

28th April 2010, 23:20

Bad Economy Delays 'Adulthood'

By Jeanna Bryner

A 22-year-old today might have much more in common with his or her grandfather or even great-grandfather than his own parents, a new study suggests. The reason: Young Americans, like their counterparts in the early 1900s, are taking their time leaving home and becoming full-fledged adults.

The researchers say it comes down to economics, as young people today are more financially insecure and take home lower wages. The result: greater burden on parents, of course.

The result can be more than close quarters for burgeoning personalities and bodies. We're in the middle of a recession (though experts argue on whether we're truly in or out of the financial dive), which is already putting pressures on middle-class families, say the researchers, Richard Settersten, a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University, and Barbara Ray, president of Hired Pen, Inc.

The longer path to adulthood strains families as well as institutions that have traditionally supported young Americans in making that transition — residential colleges and universities, community colleges, the military, and national service programs.

"Only by continuing or increasing investments in young people after the age of 18 can policymakers implement the supports needed to make the road to adulthood less draining for families and less perilous for young people," Settersten said.

Possibly even more disconcerting is their finding that unlike 1910, today's young adults are being supported financially by their parents, instead of helping to support their parents as they might have in the early 20th century.

Their research, which includes decade-long work by Settersten as part of the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, is detailed in the journal Transition to Adulthood.

Generation basics

The mid-1900s, considered the baby boom, is often used as a comparison for judging young people today. But Settersten and Ray suggest that generation is an anomaly. Supporting this idea, past research has shown differences between the GenX-ers (born between 1965 and 1981) and baby boomers, such as differences in work attitude.

In the post-World War II baby boom, high-paying industrial jobs were plentiful, and a prosperous economy meant workers with little education could find secure employment with decent wages and benefits. The researchers found that since then, downward trends in wages and economic opportunities have been directly linked to young people staying at home longer, returning home later, and postponing or even forgoing marriage and children.

That same delay described young people in the early decades of the 1900s who were slow to leave their family homes and start families. Becoming an adult then, as now, was a gradual process characterized by "semi-autonomy," with young people waiting until they were self-sufficient to set up their own households, marry and have children.

"Having an income that's adequate to support oneself and a family — or at least the ability to earn one — has always been a precursor to living independently and taking on adult roles, such as marrying and settling down," Settersten said.

Highlights from the research

•In 2005, even before the current recession, roughly three in 10 white men (up to age 34) with a high school degree were not in school, in the military or at work. More than half of young black men were not in school, in the military or at work.
•Even those with an education weren't as likely as their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s to get a good-paying job. Young men (25-34 years old) with a high school degree or less earned about $4,000 less in 2002 than in 1975 (with earnings adjusted for inflation). Men with some college education earned about $3,500 a year less in 2002 than in 1975.
•Every age group, except those with graduate-level college education, had greater amounts of people earning below poverty level in 2002 than in 1975.
•In 1969, only about 10 percent of men in their early 30s had wages that were below poverty level. By 2004, that proportion had more than doubled.
Parents shoulder burden

Though the researchers found similarities between today's young adults and their grandparents, there were also differences. For instance, young people today don't contribute to the household as they once did. Instead, parents shoulder the burden of launching their children into adulthood.

"Parents are now being called on to provide financial and other kinds of assistance to their young adult children," Ray said. "A century ago, the opposite was true. Then, young adults often helped their parents when they went to work and especially if they still lived together."

They found parents spend some 10 percent of their annual income to help their adult children, regardless of their income level. "And that's a whole lot of money for some kids to get — and for many parents to give, or to afford," Settersten said.

Despite today's "adults" staying with mom and dad longer, they do venture out and spend years living independently from parents during early adulthood, Settersten noted. And the percentages of people who have never married and who are intentionally childless are also higher now than at any other time in American history.

"Today, the young adult years are filled up with many different kinds of living arrangements, some of which more often involve parents," he said. "But what is perhaps more significant is the fact that these arrangements don't as often involve spouses.

original article link;
http://www.livescience.com/culture/economy-delays-adulthood-americans-100427.html

giovonni

13th May 2010, 12:57

Limitless, Cheap Chips Made Out of DNA Could Replace Silicon

A Single Waffle Structure Nanotechnology never looked so delicious.
Chris Dwyer, Duke University

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Zc8ZK-H94B8/RskNf1dgVtI/AAAAAAAABzw/eQmNEwO9Wtw/s320/waffle.jpg

Silicon chips are on the way out, at least if Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer has his way. The professor of electrical and computer engineering says a single grad student using the unique properties of DNA to coax circuits into assembling themselves could produce more logic circuits in a single day than the entire global silicon chip industry could produce in a month.

Indeed, DNA is perfectly suited to such pre-programming and self-assembly. Dwyer's recent research has shown that by creating and mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he can create billions of identical, waffle-like structures that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.

The process works by adding light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to the structures. These chromophores absorb light, exciting the electrons within. That energy is passed to a different nearby chromophore, which uses the energy to emit light of a different wavelength. The difference in wavelength is easily differentiated from the original light; in computing terms, it's the difference between a one or a zero. Presto: a logic gate.

Rather than running computers and electrical circuits on electricity, light-sensitive DNA switches could be used to move signals through a device at much higher speeds. Furthermore, the waffle structures are cheap and can be made quickly in virtually limitless quantities, driving down the cost of computing power. Once you figure out how you wish to code the DNA snippets, you can synthesize them easily and repeatedly; from there you can create everything from a single logic gate to larger, more complex circuits.

A shift from silicon-based semiconductor chips would be a sea-change for sure, but semiconductors are reaching a technological ceiling and if the economics of DNA-based chips are really as attractive as they seem, change might be inevitable. DNA is already smart enough to be the foundation of life on Earth: why not the foundation of computing as well?

original article here;
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/limitless-cheap-dna-logic-chips-could-replace-silicon-processing-backbone

giovonni

14th May 2010, 00:25

China drought highlights future climate threats

http://www.dswei.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/yunnan-drought.jpg
The drought in Yunnan province has left millions without water.

Yunnan's worst drought for many years has been exacerbated by destruction of forest cover and a history of poor water management.

Jane Qi ~ Beijing

Born into a farming family in south Yunnan province, China, Zhu Youyong's life has always been tied to the soil. At the age of 54, however, Zhu — now president of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming — says he "has never seen such severe drought in Yunnan".

Since last September, the province has had 60% less rainfall than normal. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 8.1 million people — 18% of Yunnan's population — are short of drinking water, and US$2.5-billion worth of crops are expected to fail.

Scientists in China say that the crisis marks one of the strongest case studies so far of how climate change and poor environmental practice can combine to create a disaster. They are now scrambling to pin down exactly what caused the drought, and whether similar events are likely to hit the region more often in the future.

Meanwhile, with most of the province's winter crops ruined, local farmers need immediate help. Zhu has been going from county to county to persuade farmers to grow different crops together in the same field, rather than as a monoculture. Intercropping can boost yields by up to 30%, and could help to avoid food shortages in the region later this year1. This summer, 80% of the farmland in Yunnan — a staggering 2.9 million hectares — will use the technique. But success will depend on a break in the weather. "If it still doesn't rain in late May, the consequences will be unthinkable," says Zhu.
Dry spell

It is not news that China is seriously short of water, but its southwestern region — including the Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Sichuan provinces and Chongqing municipality — usually sees ample precipitation. This year, however, the rains did not come, and people there want to know why.

"Yunnan does experience droughts every few decades," says Xu Jianchu, an ecologist at the Kunming Institute of Botany, an institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). But the severity of this year's drought is unusual. Some say it is the worst in over a century. Xu is a contributor to a report on climate change in Yunnan and its myriad impacts2. Sponsored by CAS and the China Meteorological Administration, the report shows that Yunnan has got warmer and drier in the past half-century. Since 1960, the number of rainy days has decreased, whereas the number of extreme events, such as torrential rains and droughts, has increased.

Some suggest that this year's drought in Yunnan might be caused by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), an atmospheric circulation system that originates in the western Pacific Ocean and brings rainfall to Southeast Asia. During El Niño years the wind from the Pacific weakens, leading to droughts in the region.

"We've had a moderately strong El Niño event since October," says Dan Bebber, a climate researcher at the Earthwatch Institute in Oxford, UK, a non-profit environmental group. Although Yunnan is not directly under the influence of ENSO, "there is a statistical relationship between El Niño and the monsoon system in southwestern China through mechanisms that are unclear", he says.

Indeed, the CAS report suggests that in previous strong El Niño years, the rainy season in Yunnan, which spans May to October, was delayed, with less rain in the summer and more rain in the autumn. But climate models are divided on how climate change will affect ENSO, with some showing increasing intensity and others decreasing intensity, says Bebber.

Climate change is not the only factor affecting the drought. Deforestation in mountainous Yunnan is also being blamed. "Natural forests are a key regulator of climate and hydrological processes," says Xu, who is also China's representative at the World Agroforestry Centre, an international think tank headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya.

The forest's thick litter layer of organic materials can absorb up to seven times its own weight in water, says Liu Wenyao, an ecologist at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), a research institute of CAS in Menglun in southwestern Yunnan. Natural forests also have an extensive network of roots that keep the ground moist, and the canopy can trap water vapour, creating a dense fog that keeps the myriad plant species alive during dry seasons.

But in Xishuangbanna prefecture, renowned for the natural splendour of its tropical rainforests, forest clearance between 1976 and 2003 shrank the primary-forest cover to 3.6% of its 1976 value3. The rainforest has been replaced by rubber trees — known as 'water pumps' by locals because of their insatiable thirst — which now cover 20% of the prefecture's land.

In the Ailao mountains north of Xishuangbanna, where it is too cold to grow rubber trees, plantations of fast-growing but thirsty eucalyptus are replacing primary forest to feed the paper industry. In other parts of Yunnan, logging, mining, quarrying and increasing human settlement have cleared huge areas of forest. The results are an increase in soil erosion, landslides and flash floods.

"Such large-scale deforestation removes the valuable ecological services natural forests provide," says Liu. "The impact of deforestation on hydrological processes becomes particularly acute during prolonged droughts." The region could also be plagued by other natural hazards: with drought the risk of forest fire increases, whereas wetter monsoon seasons could see more floods wreaking havoc.

Many scientists are now worried that severe droughts, such as Yunnan's, will become more common across southeast Asia. In addition to the effect on humans, "the impact on biodiversity could be huge," says Jennifer Baltzer, an ecologist at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.

As existing plant species struggle to cope with the drought and die, they are replaced by hardier plants. Zhu Hua, an ecologist at XTBG, and his colleagues have already noted a 10% increase in the abundance of liana species over the past few decades in southwestern Yunnan's tropical forests4. Cao Kunfang, also an XTBG ecologist, says that lianas have a deep root system that allows them to absorb water deep in the soil5. They can also minimize evaporation by closing the minute stomatal pores in their leaves. But without a large trunk, lianas are poor at absorbing carbon dioxide — and even worse once their stomata close. "Having more lianas in tropical forests could compromise their function as a carbon sink," says Cao.
Last-minute scramble

As government officials scramble to deal with the emergency in Yunnan, the province's water management is being scrutinized. Most of its reservoirs were built more than 50 years ago, and half are either disused or do not function properly. Many of Yunnan's natural lakes are severely polluted and unusable, says Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a non-governmental organization in Beijing. Xu says that the region has not enough small-scale infrastructure — ponds, small reservoirs and canals — to distribute clean water to the hardest-hit areas. "There is an urgent need to develop an effective hydrological network in the province," he says.

In recent years the region has instead focused on building huge reservoirs and hydropower stations, Xu says, because of the economic and political capital that such projects offer. Overall, the central government has been reactive, tackling droughts when they come rather than preparing for the worst, adds Yu Chaoqing, a hydrologist at the Beijing-based China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, part of the government's Ministry of Water Resources.

Throughout southwestern China, where 2,000 drought-relief workers are drilling wells around the clock, the location of groundwater remains elusive because few geological surveys have been done. "It's a last-minute scramble because only 10% of the drought-ridden region has been surveyed," says Hao Aibing, a geologist at the China Geological Survey in Beijing, who is helping to locate groundwater in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces. "Even if we get live water wells, the water quality remains an issue," he says. "We just know so little about the groundwater in the region."

Researchers are adamant that lessons must be learned from this year's drought in Yunnan. "Extreme weather events are likely to happen more frequently in the future," says Xu, referring to the findings of the CAS report. "I hope we will be better prepared when the next natural disaster strikes."

original story here;
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100511/full/465142a.html

giovonni

15th May 2010, 16:53

Can an Aspirin a Day Do More Harm Than Good?
Experts are re-evaluating who should swallow a daily dose

http://healthrumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/aspirin_-300x187.jpg

Some 43 million Americans do it every day: take a tiny aspirin to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. In fact, doctors have been routinely recommending the practice to older adults for years. But recently, experts have been questioning the aspirin-a-day regimen, concerned that this everyday miracle drug can pose serious risks, including bleeding in the brain and stomach.

The aspirin-a-day controversy erupted publicly in March when a 10-year study of nearly 30,000 adults ages 50 to 75 without known heart disease found that a daily aspirin didn’t offer any discernible protection. The group taking aspirin had cardiovascular disease at the same rate as those taking a placebo. Moreover, the study—published in the Journal of the American Medical Association—reported that taking a daily aspirin (100 mg) almost doubled the risk of dangerous internal bleeding.

And last year the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—a panel of medical experts—issued new guidelines for patients, recommending only those at risk for heart attacks or strokes should take a daily aspirin. Risk factors include having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, as well as being overweight.

The panel also recommended that people over 80 not take aspirin at all because of bleeding risk.

For the first time, the panel also broke down its advice by gender, recommending against daily aspirin use in women under 55 and men under 45.

Is it right for you?

So, should you take a daily aspirin or not? The answer is not quite as simple as doctors previously thought. Aspirin, they say, can still be a lifesaving drug, but it’s not for everyone.

For reasons researchers don’t fully understand, aspirin seems to provide different benefits for men and women.

In men, aspirin can prevent heart attacks but seems to have no effect on strokes, says Michael LeFevre, M.D., a member of the task force that wrote the new guidelines and a professor of family medicine at the University of Missouri. Conversely, he says, aspirin appears to help women avoid strokes but not heart attacks.

The new recommendations suggest that aspirin will be most beneficial to:

* men between 45 and 79 who have a high risk for heart attacks;

* women between 55 and 79 who are at high risk for strokes.

Drawbacks

Aspirin, which has been around for more than 100 years, is a cheap, easy, effective way to control pain and inflammation. In 1989, when a major study revealed that a small dose could reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack by preventing blood clots, doctors began recommending that their older patients take a low dose of aspirin, 81 mg, every day.

“Aspirin is a lifesaving medicine in patients with established cardiovascular disease,” says Jeffrey Berger, M.D., a cardiologist at New York University who has studied the use of aspirin. But, he warns, it does come with some real drawbacks.

Aspirin has been linked with chronic ringing in the ears (tinnitus), and earlier this year scientists reported that people who took aspirin regularly were more likely to suffer from hearing loss.

Dangerous bleeding

The drug’s ability to prevent blood clots is also a double-edged sword. The body’s ability to stop bleeding is what prevents a small cut, for instance, from causing uncontrollable bleeding. While aspirin might keep clots from blocking blood flow to our hearts and brains, it also makes it more likely that we might develop serious internal bleeds, particularly in the stomach. “That’s not a trivial side effect,” says LeFevre. “We’re talking about people who get hospitalized” and may end up in the intensive care unit, he adds.

Some patients are more likely to suffer these complications than others; a recent review of the research reveals that men are twice as likely to experience bleeds as women, and the risk also increases with age. Researchers estimate the risk of internal bleeding for those who take aspirin is two to four times greater than for those who don’t take aspirin at all, depending on factors such as age and overall health.

Even though people are more likely to bleed as they get older, researchers don’t think aspirin causes the risk of bleeding to build up over time. “In fact, it’s likely that if one is to bleed, their risk of bleeding is seen early on,” Berger says.

Taking ibuprofen and naproxen—common pain relievers such as Advil and Aleve—also can make bleeding more likely. Unfortunately, this kind of severe bleeding doesn’t usually come with obvious warning signs, but sudden gastrointestinal pain can be a tip-off. The bleeding is often caused by inflammation of the stomach lining or an aspirin-induced ulcer and can result in vomiting blood or blood in the stool.

The traditional point of view, LeFevre says, was: “Aspirin is a pretty benign thing. Why doesn’t everybody take one? Aspirin, as it turns out, is not harmless.”

Strokes vs. heart attacks

Many of the risk factors for heart attacks and strokes—including age, diabetes and smoking—overlap, but there are slight differences. High total cholesterol and high levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol, for instance, are important predictors of heart attacks.

The most important risk factors for strokes include high blood pressure, certain kinds of irregular heartbeats (known as atrial fibrillation) and a condition known as left ventricular hypertrophy in which some of the heart muscle thickens.

Experts agree that women who have already had strokes and men who have already had heart attacks should absolutely be taking aspirin. “You have to make sure that people with a history of heart attack or stroke do not stop their aspirin, because it could be a deadly mistake,” says NYU’s Berger.

Clearly, the benefits of aspirin have to be weighed against the possibility of bleeding, and that’s a conversation that experts say every patient needs to have with his or her doctor.

“This decision has to be made one person at a time,” LeFevre says. “There is no one blanket recommendation for everybody.”

By: Emily Anthes | Source: AARP Bulletin
original link here;
http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/medications/articles/can_an_aspirin_a_day_do_more_harm_than_good_.html? cmp=NLC-WBLTR-CTRL-51410-F1-1

giovonni

19th May 2010, 00:50

Burger & Fries Worsen Asthma, Study Suggests :(

http://globalinternetmanagement.com/Concepts/Images/burger-and-fries.jpg
By Rachael Rettner, LiveScience Staff Writer

A burger and fries are not only bad for the waistline, they might also exacerbate asthma, a new study suggests.

Patients with asthma who ate a high-fat meal had increased inflammation in their airways soon afterward, and did not respond as well to treatment as those who ate a low-fat meal, the researchers found.

The results provide more evidence that environmental factors, such as diet, can influence the development of asthma, which has increased dramatically in recent years in westernized countries where high-fat diets are common. In 2007, about 34.1 million Americans had asthma, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. From 1980 through 1994, the prevalence of asthma increased 75 percent.

While the results are preliminary, they suggest cutting down on fat might be one way to help control asthma.

"If these results can be confirmed by further research, this suggests that strategies aimed at reducing dietary fat intake may be useful in managing asthma," study researcher Lisa Wood, of the University of Newcastle, told LiveScience in an e-mail.

The results will be presented at this year's American Thoracic Society's International Conference, held May 14-19 in New Orleans.

Asthma is a condition in which inflammation in the airways can lead to breathlessness, wheezing and coughing. Symptoms can be triggered by a variety of irritants, including air pollution, smoke and allergens, such as pollen and animal dander.

Previous studies have shown eating fatty foods can trigger the immune system, leading to an increase in cells in the blood that are responsible for inflammation. But no one had specifically looked at the effect of a fatty diet on asthma.

Wood and her colleagues had 40 asthmatic patients eat either a high-fat meal, consisting of burgers and hash browns, or a low-fat meal of yogurt. The high-fat meal was 1,000 calories (52 percent of calories from fat), and the low-fat meal was 200 calories (13 percent from fat).

Analysis of sputum samples revealed that those who had eaten the burger meal had an increased number of immune cells called neutrophils in their airways. Neutrophils play a role in triggering inflammation.

The high-fat diet patients also showed less improvement in their lung function in response to the asthma medication Ventolin (generically known as albuterol) three to four hours after the meal.

The researchers aren't sure why the drug didn't work as well after the high-fat meal and plan further studies to tease out an answer. It could be the fatty acids interfere with the drug in some way, the researchers say.

original story link here;
http://www.livescience.com/health/fatty-diet-worsens-asthma-100516.html

*Bonus link~ Top 7 Biggest Diet Myths
http://www.livescience.com/health/7-Biggest-Diet-Myths-100430.html

giovonni

19th May 2010, 18:46

Oceans’ fish could disappear in 40 years: UN

http://www.kenbryski.com/image-files/salmon-fishing.jpg

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, May 17th, 2010 -- 1:43 pm

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.

The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.

UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies.

However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said.

Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter.

One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN.

The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.

According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.

Fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev said.

"What is scarce here is fish," he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity."

Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.

Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks recover -- would be able to land bigger catches.

"We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required," Sukhdev said.

original story here;
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0517/oceans-fish-disappear-40-years/

giovonni

19th May 2010, 23:52

From The Explore Journal
Volume 6, Issue 3, Pages 135-142 (May 2010)

Trends That Will Affect Your Future … The Denier Movements Critique Evolution, Climate Change, and Nonlocal Consciousness

Stephan A. Schwartz

In our culture right now we have several “denier” movements actively engaged in trying to impede the free development of science: the creationists, the climate change deniers, and the consciousness deniers—those who cannot, or will not, consider consciousness as anything other than materialist processes. For all their lack of substance, these movements are powerful forces in the culture, with substantial detrimental effects.

Creationism, on its face, seems medieval and absurd, but The Pew Research organization, which has tracked the creationist question for many years, reports that 55% of Americans believe the world was created within the last 10,000 years, with all the species pretty much as they are today.1 As appalling as that is, I want to point out, in the context of this essay, that it is getting worse. Creationists are winning the hearts and minds of the American public.

Consider the 2005 poll by the Harris organization, shown in Table 1.2
Table 1.

Do Man and Apes Have Common Ancestry?

Do You Believe Apes and Man Have a Common Ancestry or Not?

Do You Believe Apes and Man Have a Common Ancestry or Not?

Yes, apes and man do have a common ancestry. July 1996- 51% ~ June 2005- 46%
No, apes and man do not have a common ancestry. July 1996- 43% ~ June 2005- 47%
Not sure/decline to answer. July 1996- 5% ~ June 2005- 7%

Taken from The Harris Poll.2 Base: all adults. Percentages may not add up exactly to 100% due to rounding.

Climate change deniers have seriously impeded the development of rational policies to deal with what the best science tells us is happening with our climate, a distortion that may prove to have fatal consequences.

Consciousness deniers are materialists who conceive of all aspects of consciousness as entirely a construct of physiological processes, in spite of hundreds of studies demonstrating this conclusion is not justified. This, just as creationists, in the face of hundreds of studies, demand that evolution be considered no more than an unproven theory, or climate deniers see extreme snow storms as proof climate change is a myth. As a result of these denier efforts, research in all three areas has been made more difficult, and this has had both unfortunate scientific and social implications.

The denier disruptions created in evolutionary and climate research are well known. The impact of consciousness deniers is less known or understood. But here is one consideration: progress in understanding the nature of consciousness, particularly that aspect—the nonlocal—that has not been explained by physiology but is addressed by nonlocality and quantum processes, has a very direct social consequence. The nonlocal aspect of consciousness may very well account for the insight of genius, for religious epiphany, as well as for the experiences known as psi. In an age when the acquisition and analysis of information as well as fostering of innovation that produces breakthroughs will be critical determinants of societal success, learning how individuals make intuitive leaps that change the game is no small matter. More profoundly, these studies, the collective product of multiple disciplines, are beginning to describe how consciousness and matter interact. Collectively they are defining a new paradigm.

The three denier movements—creationists, climate change, and consciousness—all share certain commonalities. Deniers from all these movements always make a point of defining themselves as skeptics, so we should begin by noting that skeptic comes from the Greek root skepsis, meaning inquiry and doubt. Yet any objective analysis of these movements makes it clear that their hallmarks are a lack of interest in further inquiry, and an absence of doubt concerning their own positions. So if deniers are not skeptics what are they?

I believe they represent examples of classic defense positions concerning a cherished paradigm, slowly moving into crisis, just as described by the physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.3 With creationists, it is the inerrancy of the Bible and the presentation in Genesis of the creation of the world. For climate deniers, it is the conviction that human intervention is not the source of massive climate change. For consciousness deniers, it is a materialist perspective.

In this essay, although I draw comparisons amongst the denier movements, I particularly focus on the consciousness deniers, because their attacks and the disruptive friction they produce have a particularly deleterious effect on many of the lines of research covered in these pages.

If one follows the threads of consciousness-denier criticism over the past century, it is notable that, although in the early years attacks mostly centered on methodology, after an exchange of comments between denier psychologist Ray Hyman and statistician Jessica Utts that line of criticism largely ceased. Why did this happen? In 1995, the United States Congress commissioned the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a Washington, DC–based not-for-profit think tank with a long history of work in human performance and close government ties, to assess the reality of remote viewing in research the US government had previously funded. Remote viewing is a protocol for obtaining objectively verifiable information that can only be obtained through accessing nonlocal awareness, the aspect of consciousness outside of space/time.

To make the assessment, AIR selected nationally recognized statistics professor Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis, and well-known skeptic, Professor Ray Hyman, a psychology professor on the faculty of the University of Oregon and a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). Both had previously written on this topic and were notably sophisticated in the issues involved. Utts had already addressed the question Congress was asking in a 1991 paper published in the journal Statistical Science.4

Hyman and Utts were each asked by AIR to produce an independent report by a fixed date. Utts complied and submitted her report by the deadline. Hyman did not. As a result, he was able to see her report before writing his own, and the approach he chose to take, when he did write, was largely a commentary on her analysis. To compensate for this inequity, AIR allowed Utts to write a response that was incorporated into the final document submitted to the Congress. It is in this unplanned form of exchange that the essence of the two positions is revealed. Utts' initial statement is remarkable for its clarity. She wrote:

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.

The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect. That means that it is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability.5

Hyman, responding to Utts' report, wrote:

I want to state that we agree on many … points. We both agree that the experiments (being assessed) were free of the methodological weaknesses that plagued the early…research. We also agree that the…experiments appear to be free of the more obvious and better known flaws that can invalidate the results of parapsychological investigations. We agree that the effect sizes reported…are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes.6

This is important because what Hyman is conceding is that the way in which the kinds of laboratory experiments described in this paper are conducted, and the way in which they are analyzed, is no longer a matter for dispute. Nonlocal perception cannot be explained away as some artifact resulting from how the data were collected or evaluated.

Nor is this research vulnerable to criticisms based on blindness and randomness. No other field of science is so obsessed with the gold standard issues of blindness and randomness.

English biologist Rupert Sheldrake conducted a survey of leading journals published between October 1996 and April 1998 (Table 2). The papers these journals had published were broken into three categories: “(1) not applicable: papers that did not involve experimental investigations, for example, theoretical or review articles; (2) blind or double-blind methodologies used; and (3) blind or double-blind methodologies not used.”7 The reader may find the results surprising. As can be seen in Table 2, parapsychology as a percentage of published papers overwhelmingly utilizes this protocol more than any other discipline.

Table 2.

Blind Methodologies Used By Various Disciplinesa

Area of Science

Number of Papers

Number with Blind Methodologies and as % of Total (0.00%)

Physical science disciplines 237 0
Biological science disciplines 914 7(0.8%)
Medical science disciplines 227 55(24.2%)
Psychological and animal behavior disciplines 143 7(4.9%)
Parapsychology 27 23(85.2%)

From Sheldrake. 7 Numbers of papers reviewed and the number involving blind or double-blind methodologies in a range of scientific journals. Only papers reporting experimental results were included in this survey; theoretical papers and review articles were excluded. All publications appeared in 1996-8 unless otherwise indicated.

Five years later, in 2004, Caroline Watt and Marleen Nagtegaal, working at Edinburgh University, restudied the use of the double-blind protocol in the various disciplines of science and reported that in the ensuing years little had changed.8

With the Utts/Hyman exchange, and the work by Sheldrake, and Watt and Nagtegaal on record, the deniers have been denied the line of attack that parapsychological methods are typically faulty. Their focus now is centered on replication rates—it works but not as well as we demand it should—and the fact that a single paradigm-achieving theory has not emerged. To anyone familiar with Kuhn, of course, consciousness research is evolving just as it should, and equally predictably, the deniers are mounting increasingly implausible paradigm defenses just as the Kuhn's model predicts.3

What the deniers do not acknowledge is that paradigms do change and that it is theories, and the experiments that test them, that create paradigms. Further, they do not recognize that no one discipline can create a new paradigm, only many disciplines reaching a consensus can do that. This is the process now going on and, in this context, consciousness researchers such as parapsychologists are simply early-adapters as science, in its many manifestations, finally grapples seriously with consciousness and nonlocality—a quest deniers refuse to join.

How ironic it is then that Kuhn, whose mind conceived the paradigm concept in science—and paradigm is the core of all denier arguments—fully, if somewhat uncomfortably, recognized the nonlocal. In his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he wrote:

No ordinary sense of the term ‘interpretation’ fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born. Though such intuitions depend upon the experience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the old paradigm, they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular items of that experience as an interpretation would be [emphasis added].3(pp122,123)

Comparing this with the statements made by people upon whom history confers the title genius, prophet, or seer reveals that Kuhn echoes their words almost exactly.

As Einstein explained it, “I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.”9 Einstein's assistant Banesh Hoffman, himself a major physicist, observed, “When excited discussions failed to break the deadlock [of a problem], Einstein would quietly say in his quaint English, ‘I will have a little tink.’”10 As Hoffman and Leopold Infeld, Einstein's other major assistant (also a major physicist) looked on in silence, Einstein would pace the room, coiling and uncoiling his signature hair around a finger as he walked, his sockless ankles winking into view as his pants flapped. “There was a dreamy faraway, yet inward look on his face,” Hoffman said, but, “No sign of stress. No outward indication of intense concentration.”10 Neither assistant felt he could say a word. After a few minutes, Einstein would suddenly come back to normal consciousness, “a smile on his face and an answer to the problem on his lips.” Hoffman said the ideas “seemed to come from left field, to be quite extraordinary.”10

Brahms described his moments of creative breakthroughs this way:

… in this exalted state I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above as Beethoven did…. Those vibrations assume the form of distinct mental images…. Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me…and not only do I see distinct themes in the mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare inspired moods…11

Mozart and Copland also seem to have had similar experiences.11 In Mozart's case, the connection was so clear and strong the pages of his compositions show few alterations; they look like finished transcriptions.

Remote viewers say of their experiences: “I kind of space out,” or “It's sort of like focusing my mind at some middle distance.” They describe the moment itself by saying, “It came in a flash,” or “It was like a hologram…. Images are all there…as if it were a hologram hanging in my mind.”12

Poincaré described his work on a mathematical problem in the same vein: “One day, as I was crossing the street, the solution of the difficulty which had brought me to a standstill came to me all at once.”13

Consider also one of history's most renowned psychics, Edgar Cayce, describing what he was doing. Speaking from his self-induced trance state in 1923, in response to a question about the process and source of his nonlocal ability:

The information as given or obtained from this body is gathered from the sources from which the suggestion may derive its information. In this state the conscious mind becomes subjugated to the subconscious, superconscious or soul mind; and may and does communicate with like minds, and the subconscious or soul force becomes universal. From any subconscious mind information may be obtained, either from this plane or from the impressions as left by the individuals that have gone on before, as we see a mirror reflecting direct that which is before it…Through the forces of the soul, through the mind of others as presented, or that have gone on before; through the subjugation of the physical forces in this manner, the body obtains the information.14

How is it that the great geniuses of history in both science and the arts, as well as ordinary remote viewers, and one of history's great clairvoyants have reported similar experiences in the process of attaining insight, and yet consciousness deniers feel this is not an appropriate area for scientific inquiry? Inasmuch as our history is largely defined by the breakthroughs resulting from such insights, surely understanding the processes involved should be of primary importance.

Because they are not data based, all three denier movements have a certain antique quality about them. Each speaks about the field it attempts to debunk from a position far behind the cutting edge of the science being attacked. This antiqueness is a sure sign that denier arguments are based on attitude, not data. Deniers all display what can only be called willful ignorance. In the case of the creationists, this is easy to see since, to maintain it, they basically have to discard geology, paleontology, anthropology, chemistry, astrophysics, astronomy (among other disciplines), and the rest of modern science—except perhaps for medicine—to hold their position.

Climate change deniers simply will not deal with the mass of data collected showing not only that climate change is real, but that human activity—not natural cycles—is the dynamic driving it. This creates severe political problems for the democracies where endless debate becomes a weapon. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman has described the denier's behavior in the debate leading up to the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill:

If you watched the debate…you didn't see people who've thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don't like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they've decided not to believe in it—and they'll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.15

Notably, corporations which live in the continuing glare of profit and loss, in its way a more stringent standard even than scientific protocol, have no time for such unworldly bias. As I write this essay in January 2010, at the United Nations Investor Summit on Climate Risk, 450 of the world's largest investors have issued a statement calling on the United States and other governments to “act now to catalyze development of a low-carbon economy and to attract the vast amount of private capital necessary for such transformation.”16

The US, European, and Australian investor groups, who together represent $13 trillion in assets, have called for “a price on carbon emissions” and “well-designed carbon markets” to provide “a cost-effective way of achieving emissions reductions.'”16

In consciousness deniers, willful ignorance can similarly be seen. They speak about a parapsychology that has not existed in decades, if it ever did, and even more revealingly they ignore all the other areas of research where work is going on that is essentially parapsychological under another name. Therapeutic intention research, such as immunologist Leonard Leibovici's study on remote retroactive intercessory prayer,17 or the near-death experience studies of cardiologist Pim Van Lommel et al,18, 19 are two examples. One wonders if they are even known to the denier community? This is not really a rhetorical question. At a conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, when asked directly in open session whether he was familiar with the remote viewing literature, I recall well-known psychologist and denier Richard Wiseman, recognizing he was about to be asked a specific question about this line of research, confessed he had not read it, and did not know where it was to be found.20

The denier commentaries do not seem to apprehend that some of the largest, most important, and best-funded research studying consciousness and nonlocality have been done in disciplines other than parapsychology—Leibovici and van Lommel being only two examples. Let me cite a few more lines of inquiry to give a sense of how far behind the times the consciousness denier community actually is. And let me point out that all of this could be discovered in half an hour by a college sophomore searching a freely available, recognized index such as PubMed.

First, this from a paper by three leading physicists who have explored the issue of consciousness, in the context of physics. Because of its unequivocal clarity, I quote the entire statement:

Neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior generally posits that brain mechanisms will ultimately suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience can therefore be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (eg, ‘feeling,’ ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’) are not included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century [emphasis added]. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena. The new principles contradict the older idea that local mechanical processes alone can account for the structure of all observed empirical data. Contemporary physical theory brings directly and irreducibly into the overall causal structure certain psychologically described choices made by human agents about how they will act. This key development in basic physical theory is applicable to neuroscience, and it provides neuroscientists and psychologists with an alternative conceptual framework for describing neural processes. Indeed, owing to certain structural features of ion channels critical to synaptic function, contemporary physical theory must in principle be used when analyzing human brain dynamics. The new framework, unlike its classic physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics. It is able to represent more adequately than classic concepts the neuroplastic mechanisms relevant to the growing number of empirical studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.21

Second, let me cite a report by Frecska and Luna of the National Institute for Psychiatry and Neurology in Budapest, in which they present a neuro-ontological interpretation of spiritual experiences:

The prevailing neuroscientific paradigm considers information processing within the central nervous system as occurring through hierarchically organized and interconnected neural networks. The hierarchy of neural networks doesn't end at the neuroaxonal level; it incorporates subcellular mechanisms as well. When the size of the hierarchical components reaches the nanometer range and the number of elements exceeds that of the neuroaxonal system, an interface emerges for a possible transition between neurochemical and quantum physical events. ‘Signal nonlocality,’ accessed by means of quantum entanglement is an essential feature of the quantum physical domain. The presented interface may imply that some manifestations of altered states of consciousness, unconscious/conscious shifts have quantum origin with significant psychosomatic implications.22

Nowhere in any of the denier commentaries is there any recognition of this work. Clearly there is a whole world beyond arguing whether nonlocality is real or a statistical artifact or a magic trick. But one would not know it from reading contemporary parapsychological criticism, just as one would know nothing of modern paleontology reading a creationist tract, or fully comprehend the acidification of the world ocean reading climate change denier literature.

Another hallmark of denier criticism is that nothing ever really changes and, depending on the audience, issues long settled will emerge from their crypts to distort and confuse once again. Remember the exchange between Hyman and Utts? Well here is an example of what I mean. Almost five years after his exchange with Jessica Utts, Professor Hyman, in July 2002, was interviewed by a reporter from the Austin American-Statesman.

Presumably on the assumption that a reporter in Texas was unlikely to know that a government white paper like the AIR report even existed, Hyman said, “The issue is, what kind of evidence do they have? I didn't see any science at all, any evidence they got anything right other than pure guesswork.”23

Even if remote viewing worked, Hyman stated, it would be too erratic to rely on. “People who believe it admit that only 15% of what Remote Viewers tell you is true, which means 85% is wrong,” he remarked, although he did not mention the origin of this statistic, and it directly contradicts the published research, about which since he participated in the AIR evaluation must be undoubted. He concluded, “You don't know which is which, so it's of no practical use.” If remote viewing could be demonstrated, “It would overturn almost everything we know in science.”23

How does one reconcile Hyman's words in 1995 with his interview in 2002? The answer, of course, is one cannot. It is worth noting that the “15% of what Remote Viewers tell you is true” is utterly fanciful, and could not produce the statistical outcomes that are part of the published AIR record. Moreover, it directly contradicts what has been reported in the peer-reviewed literature for almost four decades. I will cite here only one such report—not from one of my papers—showing what the most casual research in the peer-reviewed remote viewing literature will quickly yield.

In their initial 1976 paper on their research at SRI International, physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ reported, “Using Edington's method for combining the probabilities from independent experiments, the probability of observing these six experimental outcomes by chance alone is 7.8 × 10−9, one tailed.”24

When one sees comments such as Hyman's, it becomes clear that to deniers a preconceived conclusion is far more important than actual data. As George Orwell said in his novel 1984, “And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten.”25

This leads to a final point, a very sad one that only rarely turns up in the scholarly community, where a conscious and purposeful commitment to integrity is a basic part of science. There is a propensity in denier movements, all of whose members ostensibly ground their arguments in science, to behave in ways that are demonstrably unscientific and, even on occasion, of dubious ethicality.

In climate change, where there are vast sums at risk, the frauds are biggest and most complex, carefully filtered through a network of denier institutes and think tanks. One brief account will serve as representative. Mitchell Anderson, a Vancouver-based researcher and writer and former staff scientist at Sierra Legal Defense Fund, describes the backstory behind the climate denier Skeptic's Handbook created by the Heartland Institute, which was formed and funded by oil interests, including $676,000 from ExxonMobil.26 In a typical denier move to manipulate media and policy, they sent 150,000 copies of the Handbook across the United States, including to 850 journalists, 26,000 schools, and 19,000 “leaders and politicians.” The Handbook coaches “skeptics” to keep from being pinned down by the evidence demonstrating climate change.26

Anderson noted, “It is also interesting that this latest product of the denial machine is washing over the nation less than a month after the U.S. government released their Climate Change Literacy brochure—cosigned by 13 federal agencies and 24 educational and scientific partners.” Membership in the supposed climate change conspiracy now includes what deniers term “eco-freaks”—which includes such government agencies as the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service.26

Exactly these same techniques of widespread distribution of false or highly distorted information are employed by the other denier movements. Creationists, using the political power they wield, in 2006 pressured the Bush administration to direct the Grand Canyon National Park that it was not to provide an official estimate of the geologic age of the canyon. “In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” said Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment’ ”27

Consciousness deniers similarly maintain an active media-influencing program. Because it is both representative and reveals a state of mind, I want to draw attention to one particular example. To do that I rely on the published words of principal players in these events: a nationally prominent astronomer; highly regarded professors of psychology and sociology, and the professor of philosophy and founder of the organized American expression of the consciousness denier movement. This record exists because all but the philosopher became so appalled by what they saw that they not only resigned, they put their views quite deliberately on record in the public press.

Since this story is an integral part of the founding of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now morphed into the Committee for Scientific Inquiry (CSI), and still the principal consciousness-denier group in the United States, it is instructive to consider it. In my opinion it is probably the clearest story in the record illustrating the difference between deniers and genuine skeptics.

The story has an almost Greek tragedy mythopoetic quality, in which a group of scientists, some quite prominent in their fields, are presented with the most fundamental choice a scientist can face: do I go with the data, or with my prejudice? Some rose to the challenge, some did not. It is a cautionary tale that I will go into only to the point of illustrating the relevant denier-skeptic issues. However, I strongly encourage any reader interested in better understanding the psychology of denier movements to go to the Web sites listed in my references, where the original papers are located online, and to pursue what is to be found there.

In brief, here is the narrative. In the September-October 1975 issue of The Humanist, as well as a book by philosopher Paul Kurtz' private press, Prometheus, a statement, “Objections to Astrology” was published.28 The statement was signed by 186 scientists, a group which included 18 Nobel Laureates. One who lent his name was Astronomer Dennis Rawlins, already famous for debunking the claims of polar explorers Richard Byrd and Robert Peary while demonstrating that Ronald Amundsen was the first man to reach both poles.

Also published in the journal was a paper by science writer Lawrence Jerome that included an attack on French psychologist and statistician Michel Gauquelin and his then wife and research partner, Francoise.28 It was a curious attack; the Gauquelins had their own problems with astrology; indeed, they would go on to dismiss, on the basis of their research data, many claims of Western astrology—a position they would make explicit in Kurtz' journal The Humanist. But, exactly because they were being good scientists, the Gauquelins also reported identifying small but significant relationships between some planetary positions at the time of an individual’s birth and later performance excellence, most notably the position of Mars in a natal chart and later athletic prowess. It wasn't a big effect but, to the committee, it was intolerable. So, since in many ways they agreed, the committee—in the person of Jerome—chose as the grounds for their attack the Gauquelins' statistics.29, 30

It soon became clear that Michel Gauquelin was the better statistician and the denier case collapsed. Undeterred, the group went on for round two. What happened next Rawlins describes as a comedy of incompetence, bombast, and a commitment to denialism so powerful it overturned good sense and ethics, until the deniers were thoroughly tarred by their unscientific disdain for experimental evidence and integrity.29, 30

After furious public exchanges, Rawlins, a skeptic not a denier, publicly resigned or was expelled from the group, and shortly thereafter he put the entire sorry tale in the record via a paper entitled, “sTARBABY,” a play on Joel Chandler Harris' late 19th century Uncle Remus stories, where Br'er Rabbit, the Loki-like adventurer character around whom many of the stories are built, attacks a tar baby and, each time he hits him, he becomes more and more mired in the tar.29, 30 He would not be alone, and in the resignations of several others of the committee we have defined, for us, the difference between skeptics and deniers.

The person who saw this distinction most clearly was the sociologist Marcello Truzzi, who acted on his beliefs by first resigning from the committee and, then, publishing a new journal, The Zetetic Scholar (zetetic from the Greek zētētikos, from zētēo, to seek to proceed by inquiry), in which he decried what he called “pseudo-skeptisms.” Truzzi wrote:

The current evidence strongly indicates that (a) a Mars Correlation was validly found by the Gauquelins, (b) a correlation was found in several replications by the Gauquelins using different samples, (c) a similar correlation was found in replications conducted by Kurtz-Zelen-Abe11 (KZA) (Committee members—SAS) In regard to a) and b) the key question concerns the validity of the Gaugelin's data. It has repeatedly been incorrectly stated that there is no way to check this data. Not only have the Gauquelins published all their data (so computations can easily be checked), they have kept all original records from the birth registries, and these have been made available to any serious researchers. In fact, the Gauquelins have urged critics to check this data.31

Truzzi's reasons for resigning state clearly the problem with denier movements:

Originally I was invited to be a co-chairman of Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal by Paul Kurtz. I helped to write the bylaws and edited their journal. I found myself attacked by the Committee members and board, who considered me to be too soft on the paranormalists. My position was not to treat protoscientists as adversaries, but to look to the best of them and ask them for their best scientific evidence. I found that the Committee was much more interested in attacking the most publicly visible claimants such as the National Enquirer. The major interest of the Committee was not inquiry but to serve as an advocacy body, a public relations group for scientific orthodoxy. The Committee has made many mistakes. My main objection to the Committee, and the reason I chose to leave it, was that it was taking the public position that it represented the scientific community, serving as gatekeepers on maverick claims, whereas I felt they were simply unqualified to act as judge and jury when they were simply lawyers.32

New Zealand psychologist Richard Kammann, the third person to resign, would write in his exegetic essay of the whole Gaugelin affair, “When the whole record is examined over five years, there is almost no instance in which merit wins out over self-serving bias.”33 The one clear exception was providing Rawlins a carte blanche space in The Skeptical Inquirer, and even this was undermined by a flurry of simultaneous misstatements.28, 29 Kammann wrote:

The bottom line is that an apology is owed the Gauquelins for the mistreatment of their data, and the aspersions cast on their authenticity. I don't wish to convey that I'm a believer, because I also have skeptical reservations about the Mars effect. What makes this claim suspect is the scientific perversity of the proposition that the location of Mars in the sky at the time a person is born has some effect on that person's athletic performance 30 or 40 years later.33

More than a decade later, Suitbert Ertel,34 a German researcher of the next generation, uninvolved with the bitter fight that had gone before, meticulously went back through this entire chapter of denierism, including a subsequent denier round in Paris, and confirmed by a variety of independent statistical analyses both Kammann's and Truzzi's assessment. Perhaps even more important was the graceless acknowledgement of Paul Kurtz who had begun it all: “‘It is time, to submit, to move to other more productive topics. This controversy is not an isolated event. The “sTarbaby incident” has been followed by numerous subsequent incidents off alleged falsification and distortion amongst consciousness deniers.’”35

The Gauquelin controversy continues even as further confirmations come in. Fuzeau-Braesch reported data on twins that could be interpreted to support the Gaugelins' data.36 Rupert Sheldrake,37 Roger Nelson,38 and Jim Lippard,39 all of whom have been subjected to denier attacks, have created Web sites listing the relevant documents and transcripts of these and other such events. The reader is invited to go through these archives and reach their own conclusions. Because all three denier movements are essentially political-cultural special interests exercising common strategies they are exploring convergence. New York Times science writer Leslie Kauffman noted: “Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation's classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss ‘the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,’ including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”40

Environmental journalist, Bryan Nelson in a piece he entitled, Creationists Seek To Stop The Teaching Of Global Warming explained the rationale: “...linking the global warming debate with these other issues, (Creationism) strengthens their legal argument. Courts have ruled that singling out evolution for criticism violates the separation of church and state, so going after global warming gives them a broader agenda and thus opens a legal loophole. Second, by riding the coattails of rising public doubt about climate science, creationists hope to legitimize their stance against the scientific establishment in general.”41

Exactly where consciousness deniers will come down in this open alignment is not yet clear. In social terms it is the least important. Consciousness denial is the most parochial of these movements, because its field of argument is limited to a part of science. There is no monied constituency or theological infrastructure to back consciousness denial, and the robust sale of popular books on consciousness subjects makes it clear where the populace stands.

All of this matters more than might at first be apparent. Stop and think about this for a moment: the truth about our species and our planet, the processes of our planet's climate, and the nature of our consciousness are the essence of our search to understand who we are and what it means to be a human being. These three denier movements all, in one way or another, impede the quest for this knowledge. Like pranksters putting up false direction signs, they waste precious resources and time. Worse, they poison the atmosphere of the inquiries. They serve not truth but bias.

original journal article here;
http://www.explorejournal.com/article/PIIS155083071000039X/fulltext

giovonni

21st May 2010, 20:40

'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists

http://www.trt.net.tr/medya/resim/2009/08/22/5416d486-0cdf-4e30-9926-a7621c903101-444x333.jpg

Researchers in the US have developed the first synthetic living cell. Their work, which many scientists have called a landmark study, is a key step towards the design and creation of new living things. BBC News examines the issues raised by this controversial breakthrough.
Have these scientists created synthetic life?

They are calling this a synthetic living cell. But they did use an existing cell as a template and as a recipient for their home-made DNA. Strictly speaking, it is only the genome - the DNA in the cell - that is entirely synthetic.

This bacterial cell, the researchers say, is the first life form to be entirely controlled by synthetic DNA.

The researchers also employed "nature's tools" to build their new chromosome (the package of DNA that contains all of the genetic material the cell needs to live and function).

They chemically constructed blocks of DNA then inserted them into yeast cells, which assembled the blocks into a complete bacterial chromosome.
What will the scientists do with these synthetic bacteria?

These particular cells are just copies of existing or "wild type" bacteria. But they show that making a living cell with a synthetic chromosome is possible. Dr Craig Venter and his colleagues hope to use this technology to design new bacteria from scratch - cells that could carry out useful functions.

He and his colleagues are already collaborating with pharmaceutical and fuel companies to design and develop chromosomes for bacteria that would produce useful fuels or even new vaccines.

They say they hope eventually to "build" bacteria that absorb carbon dioxide and therefore help repair damage to the environment.
Could they use this same technique to make more complex synthetic organisms - like plants or animals?

Theoretically, yes. But the current aim is to design and build bacterial cells.

They are an ideal first candidate because they could potentially produce substances that we want. Dr Venter believes such tailor-made bacteria could "create a new industrial revolution".

And, in genetic terms, bacteria are very simple organisms.

They typically have a single, circular chromosome of DNA. On the other hand, every single cell in the human body contains 23 pairs of much larger, linear chromosomes. So bacteria have much less information in their genomes and it has been possible to sequence and copy all of this information.

Dr Venter says that extending the technique to higher organisms, such as plants, might be possible, but it will take scientists many years to work out how to build such large and complex genomes.
Are there ethical concerns about making new life?

Some critics have accused Dr Venter and his colleagues of "playing God" and believe that it should not be a role for humans to design new life.

There are also concerns about the safety of this new technology.

Professor Julian Savulescu, from the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford says the potential of this science is "in the far future, but real and significant: dealing with pollution, new energy sources, new forms of communication".

"But the risks are also unparalleled," he continues. "We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research and protections from military or terrorist misuse and abuse.

These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm."

Dr Venter stresses that he and his colleagues have been addressing these ethical and safety issues since they began their first experiments in the field of synthetic biology.

"We asked for an extensive ethical review of the approach," he explained.

"In 2003, when we made the first synthetic virus, it underwent extensive ethical review that went all the way up to the level of the White House.

"And there have been extensive reviews including from the National Academy of Sciences, which has done a comprehensive report on this new field.

"We think these are important issues and we urge continued discussion that we want to take part in."

note~ for more click below for BBC link page ~
illustrating graph how a synthetic cell was created ~
plus a short video by Craig Venter defending the synthetic living cell;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10134341.stm

giovonni

23rd May 2010, 00:48

Why Are American Doctors Mutilating Girls?

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A new proposal by the American Academy of Pediatrics would have doctors assisting families in the ritual of female circumcision, but activist and Nomad author Ayaan Hirsi Ali says they’d just be complicit in perpetuating a grave injustice.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently put forward a proposal on female genital mutilation. They would like that American doctors be given permission to perform a ceremonial pinprick or “nick” on girls born into communities that practice female genital mutilation.

Female circumcision is a custom in many African and Asian countries whereby the genitals of a girl child are cut. There are roughly four procedures. First there is the ritual pinprick. This is what Pediatrics refers to as the “nick” option. To give you an idea of what that means, visualize a preteen girl held down by adults. Her clitoris is tweaked so that the circumcizer can hold it between her forefinger and her thumb. Then she takes a needle and pierces it using enough force for it to go into the peak of the clitoris. As soon as it bleeds, the parents and others attending the ceremony cheer, the girl is comforted and the celebrations follow.

The majority of girls are subjected to FGM to ensure their virginity and to curb their libido to guarantee sexual fidelity after marriage. Think of it as a genital burqa, designed to control female sexuality.

There is a more sinister meaning to the word “nick” if you consider the fact that in some cases it means to cut off the peak of the clitoris. Proponents compare “nicking” to the ritual of boy circumcision. But in the case of the boys, it is the foreskin that is all or partly removed and not a part of the penis head. In the case of the girls, the clitoris is actually mutilated.

Then there is the second method whereby a substantial part of the clitoris is removed and the opening of the vagina is sewn together (infibulation). The third variation adds to this the removal of the inner labia.

Finally, there is a procedure whereby as much of the clitoris as possible is removed along with the inner and outer labia. Then the inner walls of the vagina are scraped until they bleed and are then bound with pins or thorns. The tissue on either side grows together, forming a thick scar. Two small openings roughly equal to the diameter of a matchstick are left for urination and menstruation respectively.

Often these operations are done without anesthesia and with tools such as sharp rocks, razor blades, knives or scissors depending on the location, family income, and education. It is thus more accurate—as does the World Health Organization—to speak of female genital mutilation (FGM) instead of the obscure and positive-sounding “circumcision.”

According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, more than 130 million women and girls worldwide have undergone some form of female genital cutting. Some immigrant parents from countries like Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and others in Europe and the United States, where FGM is common, continue this practice in the West even though they know that it is criminal. Some of them sneak their daughters out of the country during the long school summer vacation so that they can be subjected to any one of these forms of FGM.

Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) recently introduced a bill to toughen federal laws by making it a crime to take a girl overseas to be circumcised. He argued, rightly, that FGM serves no medical purpose and is rightfully banned in the U.S.

While the American Academy of Pediatrics agrees that FGM serves no medical purpose, it argues that the current federal law has had the unintended consequence of driving some families to take their daughters to other countries to undergo mutilation. The pediatricians say that “it might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.”

But is this plausible? I fear not.

I am familiar with this debate in two ways. First, I come from a culture where virtually every woman has undergone genital cutting. I was 5 years old when mine were cut and sewn. Second, while serving as a member of parliament in the Netherlands, I was assigned the portfolio for the emancipation and integration of immigrant women. One of my missions was to combat practices such as FGM.

To understand this problem, we need to begin with parental motives. The “nicking” option is regarded as a necessary cleansing ritual. The clitoris is considered to be an impure part of the girl-child and bleeding it is believed to make her pure and free of evil spirits.

But the majority of girls are subjected to FGM to ensure their virginity—hence the sewing up of the opening of the vagina—and to curb their libido to guarantee sexual fidelity after marriage—hence the effective removal of the clitoris and scraping of the labia. Think of it as a genital burqa, designed to control female sexuality.

When the motive for FGM is to ensure chastity before marriage and to curb female libido, then the nick option is not sufficient.

Moreover, the nick option does not address the main problem in Western liberal democracies where FGM is outlawed, which is that it can almost never be detected, so that few perpetrators are brought to justice. Even if we were to consider tolerating it in its most limited form, how could we tell that parents who want to ensure that their daughter will be a virgin on her wedding night will not have her (legally) nicked and then a few months later (illegally) infibulated? I applaud the compassion for children that inspires the pediatricians’ proposal, but they need to eliminate this risk for little girls.

Legislation is only a first step and even with that there is no uniformity. Some states have passed bills that define FGM in all its manifestations and punish it. Some states have none, but place FGM under existing laws of child abuse. So Rep. Crowley’s next move should be to push for uniform enforcement of his bill.

But even once the legislative flaws are fixed, there remains the really difficult question of detection.

For the law to have any meaningful effect in eradicating FGM in the U.S., we need to work out a way of knowing when a girl has been mutilated. As a legislator in the Netherlands, this was for me the thorniest issue. In the United States, where civil liberties are even more jealously guarded, the thorns are likely to be sharper still.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006 and is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her autobiography, Infidel, was a 2007 New York Times bestseller.

original story here;
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-20/ayaan-hirsi-ali-on-injustice-of-female-genital-mutilation/2/

giovonni

27th May 2010, 17:22

:gossip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk

The Plastic Panic

How worried should we be about everyday chemicals?
by Jerome Groopman

Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, may be among the world’s most vilified chemicals. The compound, used in manufacturing polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, is found in plastic goggles, face shields, and helmets; baby bottles; protective coatings inside metal food containers; and composites and sealants used in dentistry. As animal studies began to show links between the chemical and breast and prostate cancer, early-onset puberty, and polycystic ovary syndrome, consumer groups pressured manufacturers of reusable plastic containers, like Nalgene, to remove BPA from their products. Warnings went out to avoid microwaving plasticware or putting it in the dishwasher. On May 6th, the President’s Cancer Panel issued a report deploring the rising number of carcinogens released into the environment—including BPA—and calling for much more stringent regulation and wider awareness of their dangers. The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.” Dr. LaSalle Leffall, Jr., the chairman of the panel, said in a statement, “The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm.”

The narrative seems to follow a familiar path. In the nineteen-sixties, several animal studies suggested that cyclamates, a class of artificial sweetener, caused chromosomal abnormalities and cancer. Some three-quarters of Americans were estimated to consume the sweeteners. In 1969, cyclamates were banned. Later research found that there was little evidence that these substances caused cancer in humans. In the nineteen-eighties, studies suggesting a cancer risk from Alar, a chemical used to regulate the color and ripening of apples, caused a minor panic among parents and a media uproar. In that case, the cancer risk was shown to have been overstated, but still present, and the substance remains classified a “probable human carcinogen.” Lead, too, was for years thought to be safe in small doses, until further study demonstrated that, particularly for children, even slight exposure could result in intellectual delays, hearing loss, and hyperactivity.

There is an inherent uncertainty in determining which substances are safe and which are not, and when their risks outweigh their benefits. Toxicity studies are difficult, because BPA and other, similar chemicals can have multiple effects on the body. Moreover, we are exposed to scores of them in a lifetime, and their effects in combination or in sequence might be very different from what they would be in isolation. In traditional toxicology, a single chemical is tested in one cell or animal to assess its harmful effects. In studying environmental hazards, one needs to test mixtures of many chemicals, across ranges of doses, at different points in time, and at different ages, from conception to childhood to old age. Given so many variables, it is difficult to determine how harmful these chemicals might be, or if they are harmful at all, or what anyone can do to avoid their effects. In the case of BPA and other chemicals of its sort, though, their increasing prevalence and a number of human studies that associate them with developmental issues have become too worrisome to ignore. The challenge now is to decide a course of action before there is any certainty about what is truly dangerous and what is not.

In 1980, Frederica Perera, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and a highly regarded investigator of the effects of environmental hazards, was studying how certain chemicals in cigarette smoke might cause cancer. Dissatisfied with the research at the time, which measured toxic substances outside the body and then made inferences about their effects, she began using sophisticated molecular techniques to measure compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH—which are plentiful in tobacco smoke—in the body. Perera found that after entering the lungs the compounds pass into the bloodstream and damage blood cells, binding to their DNA. She hoped to compare the damaged blood cells from smokers with healthy cells, and decided to seek out those she imagined would be uncontaminated by foreign substances. “I thought that the most perfect pristine blood would come from the umbilical cord of a newborn,” Perera said.

But when she analyzed her samples Perera discovered PAH attached to some of the DNA in blood taken from umbilical cords, too. “I was pretty shocked,” she said. “I realized that we did not know very much about what was happening during this early stage of development.”

Perera’s finding that chemicals like PAH, which can also be a component of air pollution, are passed from mother to child during pregnancy has now been replicated for more than two hundred compounds. These include PCBs, chemical coolants that were banned in the United States in 1979 but have persisted in the food chain; BPA and phthalates, used to make plastics more pliable, which leach out of containers and mix with their contents; pesticides used on crops and on insects in the home; and some flame retardants, which are often applied to upholstery, curtains, and other household items.

Fetuses and newborns lack functional enzymes in the liver and other organs that break down such chemicals, and animal studies in the past several decades have shown that these chemicals can disrupt hormones and brain development. Some scientists believe that they may promote chronic diseases seen in adulthood such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, and cancer. There is some evidence that they may have what are called epigenetic effects as well, altering gene expression in cells, including those which give rise to eggs and sperm, and allowing toxic effects to be passed on to future generations.

In 1998, Perera initiated a program at Columbia to investigate short- and long-term effects of environmental chemicals on children, and she now oversees one of the largest and longest-standing studies of a cohort of mothers and newborns in the United States. More than seven hundred mother-child pairs have been recruited from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx; Perera is also studying pregnant women in Kraków, Poland, and two cities in China, and, since September 11, 2001, a group of three hundred and twenty-nine mothers and newborns from the downtown hospitals near the World Trade Center. In all, some two thousand mother-child pairs have been studied, many for at least a decade.

This March, I visited Columbia’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, where Perera is the director, and met with a woman I’ll call Renee Martin in an office overlooking the George Washington Bridge. Martin was born in Harlem, attended a community college in Queens, and then moved to 155th Street and Broadway, where she is raising her five children. She entered the study eleven years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child. “I was asthmatic growing up,” Martin said. “And I was concerned about triggers of asthma in the environment. So when they asked me to be in the study I thought it would be a good way to get information that might tell me something about my own health and the health of my child.” She showed me a small black backpack containing a metal box with a long plastic tube. During her pregnancy, Martin would drape the tube over her shoulder, close to her chin, and a vacuum inside the device would suck in a sample of air. A filter trapped particles and vapors of ambient chemicals, like pesticides, phthalates, and PAH. “I walked around pregnant with this hose next to my mouth, but, living in New York, people hardly notice,” she said with a laugh.

The Columbia team also developed a comprehensive profile of Martin’s potential proximity to chemicals, including an environmental map that charted her apartment’s distance from gas stations, dry cleaners, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and major roadways. They took urine samples and, at delivery, blood samples from her and from the umbilical cord, along with samples from the placenta. Nearly a hundred per cent of the mothers in the study were found to have BPA and phthalates in their urine. Urine and blood samples are taken as the babies grow older, as well as samples of their exhaled breath. “We have a treasure trove of biological material,” Perera said. The researchers track the children’s weight and sexual development, and assess I.Q., visual spatial ability, attention, memory, and behavior. Brain imaging, using an M.R.I., is performed on selected children.

Martin was still breast-feeding her two-year-old daughter. “I bottle-fed my first child,” she told me. “But when you learn what can come out of plastic bottles and all the benefits of breast-feeding—my other children were nursed.” The Columbia group regularly convenes the families to hear results and discuss ways to reduce their exposure to potential environmental hazards. At one meeting, Martin found out that some widely used pesticides could result in impaired learning and behavior. “I told the landlord to stop spraying in the apartment” to combat a roach infestation, she said. On the advice of the Columbia researchers, Martin asked him to seal the cracks in the walls that were allowing cockroaches to enter, and Martin’s family meticulously swept up crumbs. This approach has now become the New York City Department of Health’s official recommendation for pest control. “You don’t need to be out in the country and have compost,” Martin said. “This has made me into an urban environmentalist.”

In 2001, using data from animal studies, the E.P.A. banned the sale of the pesticide chlorpyrifos (sold under the name Dursban) for residential and indoor use. Many agricultural uses are still permitted, and farming communities continue to be exposed to the insecticide. Residues on food may affect those who live in urban areas as well. In 2004, the Columbia group published results in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives showing that significant exposure during the prenatal period to chlorpyrifos was associated with an average hundred-and-fifty-gram reduction in birth weight—about the same effect as if the mother had smoked all through pregnancy. Those most highly exposed to the insecticide were twice as likely to be born below the tenth percentile in size for gestational age. The researchers found that children born after 2001 had much lower exposure levels—indicating that the ban was largely effective.

For those children who were exposed to the pesticide in the womb, the effects have seemed to persist. The children with the greatest exposure were starting to fall off the developmental curve and displayed signs of attention-deficit problems by the time they were three. By seven, they showed significant deficits in working memory, which is strongly tied to problem-solving, I.Q., and reading comprehension. Another study, published this month in Pediatrics, using a random cross-section of American children, showed that an elevated level of a particular pesticide residue nearly doubled the likelihood that a child would have A.D.H.D.

“The size of this deficit is educationally meaningful in the early preschool years,” Virginia Rauh, the leader of Columbia’s research, said. “Such a decline can push whole groups of children into the developmentally delayed category.”

First used in Germany, in the nineteen-thirties, bisphenol A has a chemical structure similar to that of estrogen, but was considered too weak to be developed into a contraceptive pill. Recent animal studies have shown that, even at very low levels, BPA can cause changes that may lead to cancer in the prostate gland and in breast tissue. It is also linked to disruption in brain chemistry and, in female rodents, accelerated puberty. Japanese scientists found that high levels of BPA were associated with polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of impaired fertility.

Phthalates are also ubiquitous in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal-care products. They may have effects on older children and adults as well as on neonates. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found an association of high levels of certain phthalates with lower sperm concentrations and impaired sperm motility; young girls in Puerto Rico who had developed breasts prematurely were more likely to have high levels of phthalates in their blood. Immigrant children in Belgium who exhibited precocious puberty also showed greater exposure to the pesticide DDT, which has estrogenlike effects and has been banned in the U.S., but is still used in Africa to help control malaria.

Long-term studies have provided the most compelling evidence that chemicals once considered safe may cause health problems in communities with consistent exposure over many years. Researchers from SUNY Albany, including Lawrence Schell, a biomedical anthropologist, have worked over the past two decades with Native Americans on the Mohawk reservation that borders the St. Lawrence River, once a major shipping thoroughfare, just east of Massena, New York. General Motors built a foundry nearby that made automobile parts, Alcoa had two manufacturing plants for aluminum, and the area was contaminated with PCBs, which were used in the three plants. Several Mohawk girls experienced signs of early puberty, which coincided with higher levels of PCBs in their blood.

The Albany researchers also observed that increased levels of PCBs correlated with altered levels of thyroid hormone and lower long-term memory functioning. Similar results have been found in an area of Slovakia near heavy industry. “Folks have complained about reproductive problems,” Schell said, of the residents of the Mohawk reservation. “They talked a lot about rheumatoid arthritis, about lupus, about polycystic ovary syndrome. And, you know, you hear these things and you wonder how much of it is just a heightened sensitivity, but, when you see elevated antibodies that are often a sign of autoimmune disease of one kind or another, it could be the beginning of discovering a biological basis for their complaints about these diseases.”

Beginning in 2003, Antonia Calafat, a chemist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Russ Hauser, of the Harvard School of Public Health, set out to evaluate the exposure of premature infants to certain environmental contaminants. The researchers hypothesized that infants treated in the most intensive ways—intravenous feedings and delivery of oxygen by respirators—would receive the most exposure, since chemicals like phthalates and BPA can leach from plastic tubing. They studied forty-one infants from two Boston-area intensive-care units for BPA. Calafat told me, “We saw ten times the amounts of BPA in the neonates that we are seeing in the general population.” In several children, the levels of BPA were more than a hundred times as high as in healthy Americans.

Calafat, who came to the United States from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, developed highly accurate tests to detect BPA, phthalates, and other compounds in body fluids like blood and urine. This advance, she explained, “means that you are not simply doing an exposure assessment based on the concentration of the chemicals in the food or in the air or in the soil. You are actually measuring the concentrations in the body.” With this technology, she can study each individual as if he or she were a single ecosystem. Her studies at the Centers for Disease Control show that 92.6 per cent of Americans aged six and older have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies; the levels in children between six and eleven years of age are twice as high as those in older Americans.

Critics such as Elizabeth Whelan, of the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer-education group in New York (Whelan says that about a third of its two-million-dollar annual budget comes from industry), think that the case against BPA and phthalates has more in common with those against cyclamates and Alar than with the one against lead. “The fears are irrational,” she said. “People fear what they can’t see and don’t understand. Some environmental activists emotionally manipulate parents, making them feel that the ones they love the most, their children, are in danger.” Whelan argues that the public should focus on proven health issues, such as the dangers of cigarettes and obesity and the need for bicycle helmets and other protective equipment. As for chemicals in plastics, Whelan says, “What the country needs is a national psychiatrist.”

To illustrate what Whelan says is a misguided focus on manufactured chemicals, her organization has constructed a dinner menu “filled with natural foods, and you can find a carcinogen or an endocrine-disrupting chemical in every course”—for instance, tofu and soy products are filled with plant-based estrogens that could affect hormonal balance. “Just because you find something in the urine doesn’t mean that it’s a hazard,” Whelan says. “Our understanding of risks and benefits is distorted. BPA helps protect food products from spoiling and causing botulism. Flame retardants save lives, so we don’t burn up on our couch.”

Several studies also contradict the conclusion that these chemicals have deleterious effects. The journal Toxicological Sciences recently featured a study from the E.P.A. scientist Earl Gray, a widely respected researcher, which indicated that BPA had no effect on puberty in rats. A study of military conscripts in Sweden found no connection between phthalates and depressed sperm counts, and a recent survey of newborns in New York failed to turn up an increase in a male genital malformation which might be expected if the effects from BPA seen in rodents were comparable to effects in humans. Richard Sharpe, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and an internationally recognized pioneer on the effects of chemicals in the environment on endocrine disruption, recently wrote in Toxicological Sciences, “Fundamental, repetitive work on bisphenol A has sucked in tens, probably hundreds of millions of dollars from government bodies and industry, which, at a time when research money is thin on the ground, looks increasingly like an investment with a nil return.”

With epidemiological studies, like those at Columbia, in which scientists observe people as they live, without a control group, the real-life nature of the project can make it difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation. Unknown factors in the environment or unreported habits might escape the notice of the researchers. Moreover, even sophisticated statistical analysis can sometimes yield specious results.

Dr. John Ioannides, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina, in Greece, has noted that four of the six most frequently cited epidemiological studies published in leading medical journals between 1990 and 2003 were later refuted. Demonstrating the malleability of data, Peter Austin, a medical statistician at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, in Toronto, has retrospectively analyzed medical records of the more than ten million residents of Ontario. He showed that Sagittarians are thirty-eight per cent more likely to fracture an arm than people of other astrological signs, and Leos are fifteen per cent more likely to suffer a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. (Pisces were more prone to heart failure.)

To help strengthen epidemiological analysis, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, a British medical statistician, set out certain criteria in 1965 that indicate cause and effect. Researchers must be sure that exposure to the suspected cause precedes the development of a disease; that there is a high degree of correlation between the two; that findings are replicated in different studies in various settings; that a biological explanation exists that makes the association plausible; and that increased exposure makes development of the disease more likely.

When epidemiological studies fulfill most of these criteria, they can be convincing, as when studies demonstrated a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. But, in an evolving field, dealing with chemicals that are part of daily life, the lack of long-term clinical data has made firm conclusions elusive. John Vandenbergh, a biologist who found that exposure to certain chemicals like BPA could accelerate the onset of puberty in mice, served on an expert panel that advised the National Toxicology Program, a part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, on the risks of exposure to BPA. In 2007, the panel reviewed more than three hundred scientific publications and concluded that “there is some concern” about exposure of fetuses and young children to BPA, given the research from Vandenbergh’s laboratory and others.

Vandenbergh is cognizant of the difficulty of extrapolating data from rodents and lower animals to humans. “Why can’t we just figure this out?” he said. “Well, one of the problems is that we would have to take half of the kids in the kindergarten and give them BPA and the other half not. Or expose half of the pregnant women to BPA in the doctor’s office and the other half not. And then we have to wait thirty to fifty years to see what effects this has on their development, and whether they get more prostate cancer or breast cancer. You have to wait at least until puberty to see if there is an effect on sexual maturation. Ethically, you are not going to go and feed people something if you think it harmful, and, second, you have this incredible time span to deal with.”

The inadequacy of the current regulatory system contributes greatly to the atmosphere of uncertainty. The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, does not require manufacturers to show that chemicals used in their products are safe before they go on the market; rather, the responsibility is placed on federal agencies, as well as on researchers in universities outside the government. The burden of proof is so onerous that bans on toxic chemicals can take years to achieve, and the government is often constrained from sharing information on specific products with the public, because manufacturers claim that such information is confidential. Several agencies split responsibility for oversight, with little coördination: the Food and Drug Administration supervises cosmetics, food, and medications, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates pesticides, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees children’s toys and other merchandise. The European Union, in contrast, now requires manufacturers to prove that their compounds are safe before they are sold.

According to the E.P.A., some eighty-two thousand chemicals are registered for use in commerce in the United States, with about seven hundred new chemicals introduced each year. In 1998, the E.P.A. found that, among chemicals produced in quantities of more than a million pounds per year, only seven per cent had undergone the full slate of basic toxicity studies. There is no requirement to label most consumer products for their chemical contents, and no consistent regulation throughout the country. Although the F.D.A. initially concluded that BPA was safe, some states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, either have banned it or are considering a ban. (In January, the F.D.A. announced that it would conduct further testing.)

There has been some movement toward stricter controls: in July, 2008, Congress passed the Product Safety Improvement Act, which banned six phthalates from children’s toys. But so far removal from other products has been voluntary. The President’s Cancer Panel report advised people to reduce exposure with strategies that echo some of what the mothers in Frederica Perera’s study have learned: choose products made with minimal toxic substances, avoid using plastic containers to store liquids, and choose produce grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and meat free of antibiotics and hormones.

Mike Walls, the vice-president of regulatory affairs at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association that represents manufacturers of industrial chemicals, agrees that new laws are needed to regulate such chemicals. “Science has advanced since 1976, when the last legislation was enacted,” he said. But Walls notes that some eight hundred thousand people are employed in the companies that the A.C.C. represents, and that their products are found in ninety-six per cent of all American manufactured goods. “The United States is the clear leader in chemistry,” Walls said. “We have three times as many new applications for novel compounds as any other country in the world. We want to make good societal decisions but avoid regulations that will increase the burden on industry and stifle innovation.”

Academic researchers have found that the enormous financial stakes—the production of BPA is a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry—have prompted extra scrutiny of their results. In 2007, according to a recent article in Nature, a majority of non-industry-supported studies initially deemed sound by the National Toxicology Program on the safety of BPA were dismissed as unsuitable after a representative of the A.C.C. drafted a memo critiquing their methods; experimental protocols often differ from one university lab to another. Researchers are now attempting to create a single standard protocol, and a bill introduced by Representative Louise Slaughter, of New York, would fund a centralized research facility at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Other legislation aims to completely overhaul the 1976 law. “It’s clear that the current system doesn’t work at all,” Ben Dunham, a staffer in the office of Senator Frank Lautenberg, of New Jersey, who crafted the bill now before the Senate, told me. Henry Waxman, of California, and Bobby Rush, of Illinois, have released a companion discussion draft in the House. Lautenberg’s bill seeks to allow the E.P.A. to act quickly on chemicals that it considers dangerous; to give new power to the E.P.A. to establish safety criteria in chemical compounds; to create a database identifying chemicals in industrial products; and to set specific deadlines for approving or banning compounds. The bill also seeks to limit the number of animals used for research. (Millions of animals are estimated to be required to perform the testing mandated under the E.U. law.) How much data would be needed to either restrict use of a chemical or mandate an outright ban is still unclear. Lautenberg’s bill resisted the call of environmental groups to ban certain compounds like BPA immediately.

Dr. Gina Solomon, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Lautenberg bill is “an excellent first step,” but noted several “gaps” in the bill: “There is what people call lack of a hammer, meaning no meaningful penalty for missing a deadline in evaluating a chemical if E.P.A. gets bogged down, and we know from history that it can be easily bogged down.” The language setting a standard for safety is too vague, she added. “You could imagine industry driving a truck through this loophole.”

Linda Birnbaum, the director of the N.I.E.H.S. and its National Toxicology Program, helps assess chemicals for the federal government and, if Slaughter’s bill passes, could become responsible for much of the research surrounding these safety issues. Birnbaum’s branch of the National Institutes of Health is working with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the E.P.A. to test thousands of compounds, singly and in combination, to assess their potential toxicity. Part of the difficulty, she points out, is that “what is normal for me may not be normal for you. We all have our own balance of different hormones in our different systems.” When it comes to development and achievement, incremental differences—such as the drop of five to ten I.Q. points, or a lower birth weight—are significant. “We’re all past the point of looking for missing arms and legs,” Birnbaum said.

“I know of very little science where you will ever get hundred-per-cent certainty,” Birnbaum says. “Science is constantly evolving, constantly learning new things, and at times decisions have to be made in the presence of a lot of information, but maybe not certainty. The problem is we don’t always want to wait ten or twelve or twenty years to identify something that may be a problem.”

Perera, who is keenly aware of the potential pitfalls of epidemiological research, told me that her team employs rigorous statistical methods to avoid falsely suggesting that one chemical or another is responsible for any given result. And she objects to the characterization of her research as fear-mongering. “Our findings in children increasingly show real deleterious effects that can occur short-term and potentially for the rest of the child’s life,” Perera said. In January, the Columbia group published data from the mothers and infants it studied following September 11th. Cord-blood samples saved at the time of birth had been analyzed for the presence of flame retardants. Each year, the children were assessed for mental and motor development. As a point of reference, low-level lead poisoning results in an average loss of four to five I.Q. points. Those children in Columbia’s group with the highest levels of flame retardant in their blood at birth had, by the age of two, I.Q. scores nearly seven points lower than normal.

How do we go forward? Flame retardants surely serve a purpose, just as BPA and phthalates have made for better and stronger plastics. Still, while the evidence of these chemicals’ health consequences may be far from conclusive, safer alternatives need to be sought. More important, policymakers must create a better system for making decisions about when to ban these types of substances, and must invest in the research that will inform those decisions. There’s no guarantee that we’ll always be right, but protecting those at the greatest risk shouldn’t be deferred. ♦

From the New Yorker magazine
original story link here;
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/31/100531fa_fact_groopman

giovonni

28th May 2010, 08:37

I Feel Your Pain, Unless You're From a Different Race

By Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor

posted: 27 May 2010

http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Photos/020419/040219_scyimst_empathy_hlrg.jpg

Normally when you see or imagine someone else in pain, your brain experiences a twinge of pain as well. Not so when race and bias come into play, scientists now find.

Intriguingly, people respond with empathy when pain is inflicted on others who don't fit into any preconceived racial category, such as those who appear to have violet-colored skin.

"This is quite important because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play," said researcher Salvatore Maria Aglioti, a cognitive and social neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome in Italy.

Scientists asked volunteers in Italy of Italian and African descent to watch short films showing either needles penetrating a person's hand or a Q-tip gently touching the same spot. At the same time, they measured brain and nervous system activity.

When the volunteers saw the hands get poked, the brain and nervous system activity revealed the same spot on each volunteer's own hands reacted involuntarily when the person in the film was of the same race. Those of a different race did not provoke the same response.

However, when both white and black volunteers saw violet-colored hands get jabbed, they responded empathetically. This suggests that people normally automatically feel the pain of others, and the lack of empathy that volunteers showed for people of other races was learned and not innate.

"This default reactivity of human beings implies empathy with the pain of strangers," said researcher Alessio Avenanti of the University of Bologna in Italy. "However, racial bias may suppress this empathic reactivity, leading to a dehumanized perception of others' experience."

It could make evolutionary sense that we feel less empathy for people who are different than us. "In case of war or even a friendly competition like a football game, it could be adaptive to feel less empathy for people we consider our opponents," said social neuroscientist Joan Chiao at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who did not take part in this research.

Then again, "it also makes evolutionary sense for us to feel the pain of others, as it might cue that there is danger close by," Chiao noted. "Also, without feeling the pain of others, it could be harder to motivate altruistic behaviors, especially if such behaviors come at a cost."

Essentially, for the stranger in pain, in order to elicit help, he or she would need to actually get the stranger to feel empathy.

While the ability for culture to regulate empathy could be helpful, "when you feel prejudices that are not adaptive, that are not rooted in reality, that shows that there can be a darker side to empathy regulation," Chiao added.

These new findings could suggest one could help deal with racial prejudice with methods designed to restore empathy for others, the researchers said.

"One can reduce empathy, but one can also promote it, learning positive associations with another group," Chiao said.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 27 in the journal Current Biology.

original post site link;
http://www.livescience.com/culture/racial-bias-empathy-100527.html

giovonni

28th May 2010, 18:30

New Breed of Specialist Steps In for Family Doctor

PHILADELPHIA — By the time Djigui Keita left the hospital for home, his follow-up appointment had been scheduled. Emergency health insurance was arranged until he could apply for public assistance. He knew about changes in his medication — his doctor had found less expensive brands at local pharmacy chains. And Mr. Keita, 35, who had passed out from dehydration, was cautioned to carry spare water bottles in the taxi he drove for a living.

http://blog.mlive.com/citpat/2008/06/large_DW_Hospitalist2.jpg.jpg

The hourlong briefing the home-bound patient received here at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was orchestrated by a hospitalist, a member of America’s fastest-growing medical specialty. Over a decade, this breed of physician-administrator has increasingly taken over the care of the hospitalized patient from overburdened family doctors with less and less time to make hospital rounds — or, as in Mr. Keita’s case, when there is no family doctor at all.

Because hospitalists are on top of everything that happens to a patient — from entry through treatment and discharge — they are largely credited with reducing the length of hospital stays by anywhere from 17 to 30 percent, and reducing costs by 13 to 20 percent, according to studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association. As their numbers have grown, from 800 in the 1990s to 30,000 today, medical experts have come to see hospitalists as potential leaders in the transition to the Obama administration’s health care reforms, to be phased in by 2014.

Under the new legislation, hospitals will be penalized for readmissions, medical errors and inefficient operating systems. Avoidable readmissions are the costliest mistakes for the government and the taxpayer, and they now occur for one in five patients, gobbling $17.4 billion of Medicare’s current $102.6 billion budget.

Dr. Subha Airan-Javia, Mr. Keita’s hospitalist, splits her time between clinical care and designing computer programs to contain costs and manage staff workflow. The discharge process she walked Mr. Keita and his wife through can work well, or badly, with very different results. Do it safely and the patient gets better. Do it wrong, and he’s back on the hospital doorstep — with a second set of bills.

“Where we were headed was not a mystery to anyone immersed in health care,” said P. J. Brennan, the chief medical officer for the University of Pennsylvania’s hospitals. “We were getting paid to have people in the hospital and the part of that which was waste was under the gun. These young doctors, coming into a highly dysfunctional environment, had an affinity for working on processes and redesigning systems.”

But hospitalists are not a panacea. Some have made mistakes when they sent their short-term charges home, failing to pass along necessary information to the regular doctor and family. Another concern is that patients will balk at an unfamiliar doctor at the scariest of times.

Carol Levine, in charge of family caregiving at the United Hospital Fund of New York, remains skeptical that hospitalists will completely smooth the process. “The patient,” she said, “is still expecting a doctor-doctor, when ‘Wait a minute I don’t know you’ is going to take care of them.”

The hospitalist appeared in the early 1990s, before the primary care situation was the crisis it is now. Today’s private internist may carry a roster of more than 2,000 patients, older and sicker than ever before, and the workload is expected to increase 29 percent by 2025. To keep tabs on hospitalized patients, the doctor generally races in, white coat flying, at 7 a.m., when the patient is asleep and the family is not there. (Physicians also earn 40 percent less for time spent with a hospitalized patient than one in the office, according to a report in the journal Health Affairs. )

Mort Miller, 84, of Chicago, was hospitalized eight years ago for a broken hip. He already had congestive heart failure and diabetes and was on dialysis. He died after four weeks.

His son, Joseph, said that he did not once communicate with the family doctor. “He rounded in the morning when I wasn’t there and never returned my phone calls,” Mr. Miller said. “I guess he didn’t have time.”

Mr. Miller left his business to help run the hospitalists’ professional group, the Society of Hospital Medicine, a career change inspired by his father’s experience.

The most compelling argument in favor of hospitalists, who are now in 5,000 institutions, from academic giants like the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to small community hospitals to innovators like the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics — is that they are there all the time. Another is that they are more comfortable than their predecessors with technology and cost-cutting decision-making. One day in April, Dr. Airan-Javia was in and out of the rooms of a dozen patients, toggling between clinical work and designing a computer system for the safe handoff of patients between residents whose hours are now limited by law.

Bad discharges generally result from hurried instructions to patients and families and little thought to where they are headed. One such situation was the centerpiece of a class taught for doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. The patient, an elderly woman in the hospital for scoliosis, a spinal condition, was discharged by a hospitalist on a Friday night, with a prescription for a narcotic pain reliever that her pharmacy, as it turned out, did not stock. No one explained how her new medication differed from the old, or gave her a contact number for help. Without medication, by Tuesday, her ankles swollen and her breathing irregular, the woman was back in the hospital.

In 2008, the hospitalists’ organization decided to invent better discharge systems rather than respond defensively to criticism, not unlike the simple operating room checklist, made famous by the physician and author Atul Gawande, which reduced accidents and deaths.

In 65 participating hospitals around the country, the Society of Hospital Medicine identifies patients at high risk for readmission, provides staff mentoring, and designs user-friendly discharge forms listing follow-up appointments, potential signs of trouble and phone numbers for the hospital team. Peer-reviewed research on the reforms in the system is expected in a year or two.

Even experts who were initially skeptical agree that the hospitalists’ skill set is timely. They are young and thus not entrenched in the current order. They enjoy working in teams, when older doctors tend to be hierarchical. And, like Dr. Airan-Javia, who has a 16-month-old baby, they appreciate the regular hours and a paycheck of, say, $190,000 — higher by $30,000 than community-based peers.

Dr. Airan-Javia says she made an inspired career choice. Forty percent of her time is spent on the floor, treating diseases and helping patients and families though complex life events, like deciding when it is time to suspend medical care and let life end. Sixty percent of the time she is designing systems to improve workflow and advising the hospital’s chief medical officer. At meetings with her fellow hospitalists, phrases seldom spoken by most doctors, like “cost-effective delivery of care,” and “preventable adverse events,” flow off everyone’s tongue: The language of health care reform.

“The tools have never been better,” she said, “for finally getting all of this right."

more on this story;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/us/27hosp.html?src=me&ref=general

giovonni

30th May 2010, 18:18

mmmmm... :(

Artificial lifeforms
Genesis redux

A new form of life has been created in a laboratory, and the era of synthetic biology is dawning

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IN THE end there was no castle, no thunderstorm and definitely no hunchbacked cackling lab assistant. Nevertheless, Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and their colleagues have done for real what Mary Shelley merely imagined. On May 20th, in the pages of Science, they announced that they had created a living creature.

Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor. What it is, and how it lives, depends entirely on a design put together by scientists of the J. Craig Venter Institute and held on the institute’s computers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California. When the first of these artificial creatures showed that it could reproduce on its own, the age of artificial life began.

The announcement is momentous. It is not unexpected. Dr Venter’s ambition to create a living organism from close to scratch began 15 years ago, and it has been public knowledge for a decade. After so much time, there is a temptation for those in the field to say “show us something we didn’t know.” Synthetic DNA is, after all, routinely incorporated into living things by academics, by biotech companies, even by schoolchildren. Dr Venter—a consummate showman—and the self-effacing Dr Smith (uncharacteristically in the foreground in the picture of the two above) have merely done it on a grand scale.
Craig’s parts list

But if it is a stunt, it is a well conceived one. It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms. Hitherto, genetic modification has been the work of apprentices and journeymen. This new step is, in the true and original sense of the word, a masterpiece. It is the demonstration that the practitioner has mastered his art.

The journey to mastery has been a long one. Originally, not wishing to set himself a more difficult task than necessary, Dr Venter found the smallest living thing he could and set about making it smaller still. His chosen bug was Mycoplasma genitalium, a creature that lives in genital tracts. With just 485 genes, it is the tiniest known free-living bacterium. He then knocked out the bacterium’s genes one by one to see which it could live without, in the hope of making a yet smaller organism he could then use as a model for synthesis.

This was something of a dead-end. Though there turned out to be 100 genes M. genitalium can do without, at least in the cushy conditions of a laboratory, it could not do without all of them at once. And finding which smaller genomes worked best took a lot of time, because M. genitalium grows rather slowly.

On top of that, the reason for wanting a very small genome started to fade away. DNA synthesis techniques were getting better and better, a fact reflected in their ever decreasing price (see chart). So Dr Venter changed tack, and decided to go with a lightly modified version of the entire M. genitalium genome.

Around the same time, in 2003, he synthesised the genome of a virus, Phi-X174, which has a mere 11 genes. It was not the first artificial virus; a team at the State University of New York, in Stony Brook, had made a copy of the polio virus the previous year. But theirs was a feeble thing, only just capable of reproducing. Dr Venter’s was the real McCoy: when he put the viral DNA into host cells they started to spit out new viruses just as self-destructively as cells infected with the natural Phi-X174.

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The idea behind the efforts to make an artificial bacterium was, in essence, to treat a large synthetic genome as a giant version of Phi-X174 and use it to hijack a cell which had had all its DNA removed. The difference was that this time the result would not be a cell that produced more viruses, but a cell that produced more cells. By the time the hijacked cell had undergone a few divisions, all trace of its previous self would have been erased; its several-times-great-granddaughters would have transformed themselves into the new species.

Synthesising the genome proved reasonably easy. It was divided in “cassettes” about 1,000 base pairs long (a base pair being one of the genetic “letters” of which DNA is composed). These were put together by normal chemistry. The team then enlisted the help of yeast cells to link the cassettes in the correct order to produce the finished genomes.

At this point it was necessary to prepare the cadavers, which proved rather trickier. It wasn’t just a matter of taking a bacterium closely related to M. genitalium and scooping out its DNA. Bacteria have defences against viruses in the form of chemicals called restriction enzymes, which chop up foreign DNA. These enzymes (discovered in the 1970s by Dr Smith, in work that won him a Nobel prize) would lurk in the DNA-free cadaver and cut up the synthetic genome before it was able to do its stuff. So the last step on the winding road was the creation of a bacterial strain without any restriction-enzyme genes, and thus without restriction enzymes, so that the team could have a purified reaction vessel in which the new genome could do its thing.

Or almost the last step. M. genitalium still had a slow-growth problem, so the team swapped bugs, lighting on its cousin, Mycoplasma mycoides. This has twice as much DNA, but that no longer mattered. To make the new bacterium recognisably different Dr Venter and his colleagues deleted 14 genes they thought unnecessary from M. mycoides, and added some DNA designed from scratch in a process Dr Venter refers to as “watermarking”.

This was an opportunity for some fun. The watermark, Dr Venter says, includes a cipher which contains the URL of a website and three quotations, if you can work out how to decode it. The plaintext part of the watermark brands the bug as Dr Venter’s own, encoding its serial number as JCVI-syn1.0. (A plan to refer to the result as Mycoplasma laboratorium and have it recognised as a completely new species seems to have been abandoned for the moment.)

The watermarking is not just a fancy signature. It means that if, despite precautions, the Frankenbug does get out, its entirely harmless presence would be detectible in any given sample by straightforward DNA amplification technology of the sort used in genetic fingerprinting. It might also trap thieves. Dr Venter has offered his invention for patenting—an action that is sure to be controversial—and the watermark will thus stake out what he hopes will become the property of his firm, Synthetic Genomics.

Once the finished genome was inserted into the genome-free bacteria, the work regressed to the sort of microbiology that would have been familiar to the science’s 19th-century pioneers. The fluid with the bacteria in it was dotted on to agar plates. Spots showed up on the agar as individual bacteria grew and multiplied. As a check, the researchers sequenced the DNA from some of the flourishing spots (a Mycoplasma genome is the sort of thing a modern sequencing set-up can knock off before its morning coffee). The colonies did, indeed, have the synthetic genomes. The masterpiece was alive.
Radicalism and ribosomes

Other journeymen, though, are hot on Dr Venter’s heels. And some have different ideas on how to go about the problem of making life, concentrating on things which Dr Venter’s hack-a-cadaver approach allows him to gloss over.

A minimal genome is one thing. At Harvard Medical School, Jack Szostak is working on a minimal cell, the components of which might be quite unlike those of any modern life form. Dr Szostak is interested in the origin of life, and wants to develop something analogous to what he imagines life’s earliest days were like: a reaction vessel in which a self-sustaining cycle of chemical reactions can reproduce itself.

In a modern cell, such as a bacterium, instructions from the DNA are transcribed into a related molecule called RNA. The RNA messenger molecules relay them to structures known as ribosomes that read them and make proteins accordingly. The whole process also involves a lot of proteins called enzymes to act as catalysts to the reactions.

Many biologists—and Dr Szostak is one of them—think that life had a simpler early stage in which the varied tasks now carried out by DNA, RNA and proteins were all achieved by RNA alone. Even today, RNA molecules are not only messengers; they are also fetchers and carriers of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And they can catalyse reactions, as proteins do, too. In principle, then, RNA could act as both a cell’s genetic material and its self-assembly mechanism.

If this idea is true, it should be possible to make a cell using just a membrane to hold things in place, some RNA, ingredients for more RNA, and an energy source. This comes in the form of an energy-rich molecule, ATP, which is what modern cells use to move energy from where it is generated to where it is used. Dr Szostak has already made a range of “ribozymes”, as catalytic pieces of RNA are known in the trade, and some of them are ATP-powered. He does not, yet, have a system that is capable of replicating itself. But that is his goal.

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Meet the new bug: JCVI-syn1.0

If this idea is true, it should be possible to make a cell using just a membrane to hold things in place, some RNA, ingredients for more RNA, and an energy source. This comes in the form of an energy-rich molecule, ATP, which is what modern cells use to move energy from where it is generated to where it is used. Dr Szostak has already made a range of “ribozymes”, as catalytic pieces of RNA are known in the trade, and some of them are ATP-powered. He does not, yet, have a system that is capable of replicating itself. But that is his goal.

Dr Szostak’s cell, if it does come to pass, will be quite different from the protein- and DNA-based life familiar to biologists. It would in some ways be a greater achievement than Dr Venter’s, in that it would create something truly from scratch; but it would be of less practical importance, since that something would be very primitive compared even with a bacterium.

George Church, a colleague of Dr Szostak’s at Harvard, dreams instead of making something intensely practical that Dr Venter has left out: a ribosome. The Venter shortcut—booting up a bacterial cadaver—means that the new-minted bug has to rely on ribosomes from its dead host to make the proteins its genome describes. It has the genes with which to make its own ribosomes, though, and as time goes by it will do so, diluting out the legacy that got it started. Dr Venter calculates that once JCVI-syn1.0 has undergone 30 divisions, all trace of the original cell will have disappeared. But that does not address the point that the new cells have relied on the output of genes from the old one to get going in the first place.

Dr Church is working on making ribosomes—complex contraptions with dozens of protein and RNA components—from scratch. He has managed to synthesise all the RNA components in such a way that, when they are mixed with natural ribosome proteins, they form working ribosomes. Making the proteins from scratch is more difficult, because their shape is crucial to their function, so it is not clear whether he will bother to do so.

Although he is interested in chalking up firsts, Dr Church focuses mainly on making tools. Artificial ribosomes, he thinks, could be specially crafted to add new capabilities to biotechnology—higher-than-natural protein productivity, for example. And that, for all the brouhaha which rightly accompanies the passage from journeyman to master, is the ultimate point: practical control over what life can be made to do.

Another avowedly practical approach is that taken by Drew Endy, a researcher at Stanford University. Dr Endy wants to make the way that cells process genetic information more like the way that familiar computers do. Just as computers are built from electronic components that (at least in the days before integrated circuits and silicon chips) could be ordered from a catalogue by engineers and enthusiasts alike, so Dr Endy is trying to build up a catalogue of components he calls biobricks that, when linked together, will form useful biological “circuits”. Synthetic biologists will be able to order stretches of DNA that encode biobricks and link them together to do their bidding.

Dr Endy’s approach is intriguing. His plan to “reimplement” life shows an engineer’s desire to replace biology’s unruly heritage—kludge built on kludge for billions of years—with something designed to be fit for a physicist’s practical purpose. Whether it will work remains to be seen. But a less thoroughgoing approach to modular design underlies the next stage of Dr Venter’s plans, too.
The constant gardener

Biotechnology can sometimes resemble that rather older interaction with nature, gardening. It relies quite heavily on pruning and grafting. Gene-by-gene biotechnology constantly comes up against the problem that living organisms like to plough their own furrow, regardless of what their human “masters” might desire. The pruning part of biotechnology involves eliminating proclivities that might be useful to a wild organism, but drain its energy and metabolic effort away from the task at hand. The grafting part is adding new characteristics from elsewhere to the well-trained root stock.

Dr Venter wants to get back to his original idea of creating a minimal genome in a peculiarly complete and rational act of pruning in order to be able to do a much more thorough job than has been previously possible of grafting in new stock. It is this ambition that makes his work something more than just a breathtaking novelty, positioning it as a milestone on the road from the craft of biotechnology, which manipulates genes one at a time, to the industry of synthetic biology, which aims to make wholesale changes to living things.

In this, Dr Venter seems to be going with the grain of nature, as wise gardeners do. Over the past decade it has become clear that bacteria are already well disposed to the idea of interchangeable parts. Each member of a bacterial species, or group of species, has a subset of genes (numbering hundreds, or a few thousand) drawn from a pool containing many thousands. Comparing lots of different but related bacteria can thus reveal a “core competence” similar in concept to a minimal genome. In seeking to build useful bacteria (ones that can, say, produce particular drugs in quantity) Dr Venter’s thoroughgoing root-and-graft approach may be tidying up a strategy that has been used for 4 billion years, perhaps even returning it to its basics.

He does not plan to stick to bacteria, though. The other challenge, besides the minimal genome, is to repeat the trick with single-celled algae.

The step from single-celled bacteria to single-celled algae may sound like a short one. But algae are on the other side of the great dividing line of life, that between creatures with a simple, single genome which is just a big loop of DNA sitting in the cell and those with genomes that are for the most part sequestered in a nucleus set aside for them, and cut up into multiple chromosomes. This second group includes animals, plants, fungi and algae. With no disrespect towards bacteria, which are remarkably innovative and spectacularly durable, the creatures that have taken the nuclear route are much more interesting—not least because Homo sapiens is himself one of them.

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Bring on the empty algae

Algae, though, are interesting for other reasons. Many people—including Dr Venter—want to use them to produce biofuels. They would turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (or, better, from power-station exhaust) into petrol or diesel by photosynthesis. At the moment, the microbes which make biofuels almost all do so through fermentation. The photosynthesis is done by plants such as sugar cane and the sugar is transformed into fuel by engineered bugs of one sort or another. Using algae would cut out the middleman.
The life to come

All of this activity, however, relies on one thing: that the price of synthesising DNA continues to fall. In a way analogous to Gordon Moore’s famous law about the improvement of computers, both the price of sequencing DNA and the price of making it have plummeted over the past decade. The former means that the world’s databases are filling up with genes from every part of the tree of life. The latter means those genes can be cut and pasted together with greater and greater ease.

If synthetic biology is to take off as a technology, that is not merely good, it is essential. There will be a lot of trial and error in the process of creating new, useful organisms. Evolution by artificial selection is likely to prove almost as wasteful as the kind by natural selection. But there are those that worry about the proliferation of gene synthesis. Noting the propensity of computer-hackers to turn out what have been dubbed, by analogy, software viruses, they worry that hackers of the future may turn to synthetic biology and turn out real viruses.

It is a risk, no doubt. But almost all technologies can be used for ill as well as good. Approaches that can create pathogens to order can create vaccines, too—and it is not too rose-tinted to think that the will to do good, often harnessed to the desire to make money, will attract many more people than the dark side will. They could create new crops, new fuels, new ways of investigating diseases and new drugs to treat them. They might do other, wilder things as well.

A more recent piece of science fiction than Shelley’s, Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, conceived of the resurrection of dinosaurs. No DNA survives that would allow that to be done directly. But the ability to make genomes, coupled to a far greater understanding of how they lead to the structures of complex organisms, could one day allow simulacra of such creatures to be made by synthetic biology.

In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more recently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, allying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of comparing this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of finding the essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead, to create a Neanderthal and ask him.

And if that seems too morally fraught, may we interest you in a mammoth?

The Economist ~story link here;http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16163006

giovonni

31st May 2010, 20:51

Acupuncture May Trigger Natural Painkiller

Needle insertion stimulates production of chemical known to reduce discomfort, scientists say

Posted: May 30, 2010
http://www.elements4health.com/images/stories/therapies/acupuncture-3.jpg

SUNDAY, May 30 (HealthDay News) -- The needle pricks involved in acupuncture may help relieve pain by triggering a natural painkilling chemical called adenosine, a new study has found.

The researchers also believe they can enhance acupuncture's effectiveness by coupling the process with a well-known cancer drug -- deoxycoformycin -- that maintains adenosine levels longer than usual.
Click here to find out more!

"Acupuncture has been a mainstay of medical treatment in certain parts of the world for 4,000 years, but because it has not been understood completely, many people have remained skeptical," lead author Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said in a news release. "In this work, we provide information about one physical mechanism through which acupuncture reduces pain in the body."

Nedergaard and her team report their findings online May 30 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. They are also scheduled to present the results this week at the Purines 2010 scientific meeting in Barcelona.

Working exclusively with mice, Nedergaard and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group with paw discomfort.

The investigators found adenosine levels in tissue near the needle insertion points was 24 times greater after treatment, and those mice with normal adenosine function experienced a two-thirds drop in paw pain. By contrast, mice that were genetically engineered to have no adenosine function gained no benefit from the treatment.

The team also found that if they activated adenosine in the same tissue areas without applying acupuncture, the animals' discomfort was similarly reduced, strongly suggesting that adenosine is the magic behind the method.

Adenosine, better known for regulating sleep, inhibits nerve signals and inflammation, the authors explained.

In their experiments with deoxycoformycin, which is known to impede adenosine removal from the body, the researchers said the drug almost tripled the amount of adenosine in the targeted muscles and more than tripled the amount of time that the mice experienced pain relief.

The study was funded by the New York State Spinal Cord Injury Program and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

article link;
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/pain/articles/2010/05/30/acupuncture-may-trigger-natural-painkiller_print.html

More information

For more on acupuncture, visit the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine here;
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/

giovonni

2nd June 2010, 16:03

Increasingly I have come to think of individual depression, such as is described here, as a manifestation of the dysfunctionality of our society. Why is it we live in a culture in which large numbers of people have no one with whom they can speak?

Survey: Talk Therapy as Good as Antidepressants

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Consumer Reports Survey Shows Both Treatments Are Effective for Depression and Anxiety

By Kathleen Doheny
WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD

June 1, 2010 -- Antidepressants are commonly prescribed for treating both anxiety and depression, but talk therapy appears to work just as well as the medications, according to a new survey. People who both take medicine and get therapy fare even better.

Nearly 80% of survey respondents with depression or anxiety reported antidepressant use, says Nancy Metcalf, senior program editor at Consumer Reports Health, which will publish the results of its third mental health survey of its readers in the July issue.

While medication produced good results, so did talk therapy. ''What we found is, if you can get yourself to talk therapy, and if you stick with it for at least seven weeks, you are going to get results as good as you would if you just popped a pill," Metcalf tells WebMD.

The survey, conducted in 2009, includes data from more than 1,500 survey respondents who had sought professional help for depression, anxiety, or another mental health problem between January 2006 and April 2009. They reported the treatments they sought and how well they helped, including specifics on types of drugs and side effects and the types of therapists they went to.

About 16% of U.S. adults have had depression at some point in their lives, according to a 2006 CDC survey, and about 11% are told by a health care professional they have anxiety.

Tracking Depression and Anxiety

Of the 1,544 respondents in the Consumer Reports survey with depression or anxiety, 30% reported depression only, 18% anxiety only, and 52% both at the same time. Most drugs now used for depression treatment also work for anxiety. The average age of the survey respondents was 58.

In the survey, those who took medications found that some drugs produced fewer side effects than other types.

Those who took the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) such as Celexa, Prozac, Zoloft, and their generic equivalents had lower rates of side effects than those taking SNRIs.

SNRIs, or serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are a newer antidepressant class, often more expensive. Among them: Effexor, Cymbalta, and Pristiq.

The respondents who took SSRIs found them about as helpful as those taking SNRIs, with 53% of those on SSRIs saying they helped a lot and 49% of those on SNRIs saying that.

The side effects, Metcalf's team found, were higher than what is typically reported in drug company studies; 31% of those on SSRIs and 36% of those on SNRIs reported sexual side effects.

The first drug tried didn't always work, the readers reported; they took a median (half more, half fewer) of three.

Of the 45% of respondents who turned to talk therapy, either alone or with medication, 46% said the therapy sessions had made their condition "a lot better," while 45% termed things ''somewhat better."

Overall, a psychiatrist got a somewhat higher helpfulness score from the readers. But in general, the advantages of talk therapy were consistent whether the therapist was a psychologist, social worker, or licensed counselor.

Those who stuck with the talk therapy for seven sessions or more had better results than those who completed fewer.

When single vs. combined treatment was considered, taking into account how helpful readers found their therapist or doctor, how much change they reported in emotional health, and other factors, those who used drugs and engaged in talk therapy for at least seven visits fared the best, according to Metcalf.

Second Opinion

In response to the survey results (including the finding of fewer side effects with Prozac than with Cymbalta), Charles McAtee, a spokesman for Eli Lilly and Company, which makes both of the drugs, says in a statement: "Depression is a highly individualized illness. Treatment decisions, including what type of treatment is appropriate for a given patient, are best determined by the health care professional and patient working together and based on the individual patient's needs."

''As with any medication," McAtee states, "Prozac and Cymbalta can include side effects, so patients should speak with their doctor about the risks and benefits of any antidepressant medication before starting treatment."

The report offers some good information, but there's a caveat, says Harold Pincus, MD, vice chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University, New York, who has researched and published on trends in depression treatment.

''A lot of the information is pretty sound," says Pincus, who reviewed the report for WebMD. But, he adds, it has flaws inherent in any survey.

"We have no idea who the respondent pool is, whether they are representative of the general population," he says. (The Consumer Reports authors note that they are not necessarily representative of the general U.S. population). Those who are depressed or anxious who answered the survey may also not be typical of those in the general population with the conditions, he says.

''The bottom line is, it's not something I would rely on for decision making," Pincus says.

Deciding which treatments to recommend for mental health issues, he says, is complicated, with many factors needing to be taken into account. Among them are the degree of symptoms, the patient's medical and family history, and past experiences with medications and other therapies.

If the depression is very mild, he says, "watchful waiting" for a couple of weeks may be best, as the depression may lift on its own.

If the depression is mild, he says, psychotherapy or medications can be used with equal benefit. ''For those with moderate to severe major depression, medication is more effective than psychotherapy alone, but the two together may be synergistic because they may attack different components of the illness."

article link;
http://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20100601/survey-talk-therapy-as-good-as-antidepressants

SOURCES:

Nancy Metcalf, senior program editor, Consumer Reports Health.

Harold Pincus, MD, vice chairman of psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York.

Consumer Reports Health, July 2010: "Depression and Anxiety."

Charles McAtee, spokesman, Eli Lilly and Company.

CDC: "Anxiety and Depression."
© 2010 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.

giovonni

3rd June 2010, 10:57

A cultural divide~
To the women who read The Schwartz Report: Imagine living like this. Then imagine a society of women who want to live this way. That is how far apart our cultures are.

The Female Factor
Talk of Women's Rights Divides Saudi Arabia

May 31, 2010
By KATHERINE ZOEPF

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Rowdha Yousef started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me,” which opposes calls for a more liberal approach to women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.

JIDDA — Roughly two years ago, Rowdha Yousef began to notice a disturbing trend: Saudi women like herself were beginning to organize campaigns for greater personal freedoms. Suddenly, there were women asking for the right to drive, to choose whether to wear a veil, and to take a job without a male relative’s permission, all using the Internet to collect signatures and organize meetings and all becoming, she felt, more voluble by the month.

The final straw came last summer, when she read reports that a female activist in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Wajeha al-Huwaider, had been to the border with Bahrain, demanding to cross using only her passport, without a male chaperon or a male guardian’s written permission.

Ms. Huwaider was not allowed to leave the country unaccompanied and, like other Saudi women campaigning for new rights, has failed — so far — to change any existing laws or customs.

But Ms. Yousef is still outraged, and since August has taken on activists at their own game. With 15 other women, she started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.” Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.”

Ms. Yousef’s fight against the would-be liberalizers symbolizes a larger tussle in Saudi society over women’s rights that has suddenly made the female factor a major issue for reformers and conservatives striving to shape Saudi Arabia’s future.

Public separation of the sexes is a strongly distinctive feature of Saudi Arabia, making it perhaps a logical area for fierce debate. Since women have such a limited role in Saudi public life, however, it is somewhat surprising that it is their rights that have become a matter of open contention in a society that keeps most debate hidden.

Surprising, too, are the complexities turned up by the debate, which go far beyond what some Saudis see as the simplistic Western argument that women are simply entitled to more rights.

Take Ms. Yousef. She is a 39-year-old divorced mother of three (aged 13, 12 and 9) who volunteers as a mediator in domestic abuse cases. A tall, confident woman with a warm, effusive manner and sparkling stiletto-heeled sandals, her conversation, over Starbucks lattes, ranges from racism in the kingdom (Ms. Yousef has Somali heritage and calls herself a black Saudi) to her admiration for Hillary Rodham Clinton to the abuse she says she has suffered at the hands of Saudi liberals.

She believes firmly that most Saudis share her conservative values but insists that adherence to Shariah law and family custom need not restrict a woman seeking a say. Female campaigners in the reform camp, she says, are influenced by Westerners who do not understand the needs and beliefs of Saudi women.

“These human rights groups come, and they only listen to one side, those who are demanding liberty for women,” she said.

Every Saudi woman, regardless of age or status, must have a male relative who acts as her guardian and has responsibility for and authority over her in a host of legal and personal matters.

Ms. Yousef, whose guardian is her elder brother, said that she enjoyed a great deal of freedom while respecting the rules of her society. Guardian rules are such that she could start her campaign, for instance, without seeking her guardian’s permission.

She did not wish to speak in detail about her divorce but noted that, unusually, she had retained custody of her children through their 18th birthdays. She said she had founded her guardianship campaign unassisted, without any special connections, enlisting women in her circle of contacts as fellow founding members.

Activists like Ms. Huwaider, Ms. Yousef believes, are susceptible to foreign influences because of personal problems with men. “If she is suffering because of her guardian, she can go to a Shariah court that could remove the responsibility for her from that man and transfer it to someone who is more trustworthy.”

To an outsider, Ms. Yousef’s effort — petitioning King Abdullah to disregard calls for gender equality — might seem superfluous. After all, Saudi women still may not drive or vote and are obliged by custom to wear the floor-length cloaks known as abayas, and headscarves, outside their own homes.

Women may not appear in court, and though they may be divorced via brief verbal declarations from their husbands, they frequently find it very difficult to obtain divorce themselves. Fathers may marry off 10-year-old daughters, a practice defended by the highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh.

The separation of genders in Saudi public life is difficult to overstate — there are women-only stores, women-only lines in fast food restaurants, and women-only offices in private companies. Members of the hai’a, the governmental Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, patrol to ensure that ikhtilat, or “mixing” of the sexes, does not occur.

There are a few places where men and women do work together — medical colleges, some hospitals, a handful of banks and private companies. But the percentage of Saudis in such environments is minuscule.

Jidda and Riyadh host stand-up comedy shows where young people do mix — albeit summoned with only hours’ notice via cellphone in an attempt to dodge policing. At the popular Janadriyah cultural festival in Riyadh, families were allowed to visit together for the first time last year, instead of on separate men’s and women’s days.

Where conservatives like Ms. Yousef attribute the recent volubility of rights campaigners to Western meddling, liberals say that Saudi society itself is changing, and that increasing freedoms for Saudi women appear to be cautiously supported by King Abdullah himself.

Both sides of the debate tend to claim the king’s backing. Recent history suggests that the sympathies of the 85-year-old monarch — whose feelings are never explicitly outlined in public — lie with the reformers. If so, he seems out in front of most of his youthful subjects (an estimated two-thirds of the 29 million Saudis are under 25).

The king has appeared in newspaper photographs alongside Saudi women with uncovered faces, a situation that was unimaginable until very recently. Last year, he appointed a woman to deputy minister rank, a first for Saudi Arabia. Schools and colleges remain rigidly segregated by gender, but the opening last September of a coeducational post-graduate research university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, was hotly debated, even if only about 15 percent of the nearly 400 students at Kaust, as it is known, are Saudi.

A senior cleric was fired last October after criticizing gender mixing at Kaust on a television call-in show. Two months later, Sheikh Ahmad al-Ghamdi, the head of Mecca’s branch of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, caused a sensation when he told The Okaz, a newspaper, that gender mixing was “part of normal life.” In February, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Barrak, another prominent cleric, issued a fatwa that proponents of gender mixing should be killed.

Whether it is the king’s support, or simply the ever greater availability of digital social networks, campaigning is mushrooming on both sides of the women’s rights divide, although Ms. Yousef’s is so far thought to be the only conservative effort led by a woman.

Hatoon al-Fassi, an assistant professor of women’s history at King Saud University in Riyadh, called 2009 “the year of the campaigns” for women in Saudi Arabia. Female Saudi activists embraced causes as diverse as an effort to ban child marriage and the right to set up businesses without male sponsors.

Reem Asaad lectures in the finance department at Dar al-Hekma College in Jidda. She organized a nationwide boycott of lingerie shops that employ only men, choosing lingerie because even Saudi conservatives can agree that it may be humiliating for a woman to buy underwear from a male clerk.

Her ultimate aim is to broaden women’s job opportunities. Outside her university office, where her all-female students wait for meetings with their teacher, hangs a photocopy of the country page for Saudi Arabia from the Global Gender Gap Report for 2009 by the World Economic Forum. In “economic participation and opportunity” for women, the kingdom ranks 133 out of 134 listed countries, above only Yemen. “Many Saudis would rather see a woman in poverty than have her work,” Ms. Asaad said. “This is about opening doors for women in different sectors of the economy.”

Ms. Huwaider, who so incensed Ms. Yousef with her attempts to cross into Bahrain, is a veteran campaigner, famously seen driving illegally in a YouTube clip in 2008. Now she distributes small lengths of black elastic to Saudi women, asking them to wear the ribbons until Saudi laws treat them as adults.

Soon, she said in an interview, she plans a campaign for the Saudi government to put in place a law requiring men who wish to take a second wife to obtain permission from the first wife. Morocco has such a law, which Ms. Huwaider believes could serve as a useful model.

Ms. Huwaider emphatically rejects Ms. Yousef’s characterization that she attacks the guardianship system because of personal problems. Her male guardian, she said, is her ex-husband, and they have excellent relations.

She did agree, notionally, with Ms. Yousef’s claim that many if not most Saudi men try to be fair and caring guardians. “Saudi men pride themselves on their chivalry,” Ms. Huwaider said, “but it’s the same kind of feeling they have for handicapped people or for animals. The kindness comes from pity, from lack of respect.”

Ms. Huwaider lives at what she said was considerable expense — the equivalent of $16,000 a year — in the guarded compound of the Saudi Aramco oil company. She is an employee of Aramco, working in a department that runs further education and employee development, and took the rare step, for a Saudi, of moving into the compound in 2007, after her campaign for the right to drive provoked several death threats. Sometimes, she conceded, it is frightening. But she has grown so accustomed to it that “sometimes I think to myself, ‘Oh, I didn’t get any threats today.”’

Over tea and curried snack mix at her home in Riyadh, Ms. Fassi pronounced herself “very optimistic” about the women’s campaigns for more freedom. They break the censure on expression, and the list of topics that Saudi writers may address without being censored has also expanded very rapidly, Ms. Fassi said.

“The media is not that free, still, but it is much better than it was a few years ago. Nowadays we talk openly about minors’ marriages, about rape and incest, about cases brought against the religious police.”

And, of course, the activism produces backlash. “This campaign of Rowdha Yousef’s is a reaction,” she said — unaware that Ms. Yousef, when contacted by this reporter, expressed surprise that a journalist had come from New York to meet her. Ms. Yousef said more than 30 articles discussing her campaign had appeared in the Saudi press, but no Saudi reporter was willing to meet her, and coverage was mainly what she called mocking opinion columns.

Ahmad al-Omran, a pharmacist who blogs under the name Saudi Jeans, points out that, in the absence of opinion polling or free elections, it is hard to measure the popularity or representative nature of women’s campaigns. None have produced even an official response from the Saudi leadership.

“What do they achieve?” Mr. Omran asked. “Changing laws comes from higher up, not lower down.”

Even the most optimistic say that change will be slow. Ms. Fassi explained that even the hint of breaking the taboo on gender mixing had been traumatic for many Saudis. “People had lived their whole lives doing one thing and believing one thing, and suddenly the king and the major clerics were saying that mixing was O.K.,” Ms. Fassi said.

The extent of this trauma may be difficult for outsiders to understand, Ms. Fassi said. “You can’t begin to imagine the impact that the ban on mixing has on our lives and what lifting this ban would mean.”

Noura Abdulrahman, an Education Ministry employee who recently founded an after-school Islamic studies program aimed at teenage girls in Riyadh, said she tries to be generous toward the “liberaliyeen” — Saudi conservatives give the English word an Arabic plural and frequently employ it as a term of disparagement.

“The liberals’ motives might be good — they might want to make Saudi Arabia competitive with Western societies — but they’re failing to understand the uniqueness of Saudi society,” Ms. Abdulrahman said. “In Saudi culture, women have their integrity and a special life that is separate from men. As a Saudi woman, I demand to have a guardian. My work requires me to go to different regions of Saudi Arabia, and during my business trips I always bring my husband or my brother. They ask nothing in return — they only want to be with me.”

While Ms. Abdulrahman was discussing guardianship with a visitor, a neighbor, Umm Muhammad, dropped in for a morning tea. She proudly volunteered that her own guardian, her husband, was out of town but they were in constant touch by phone. In fact, she had just called him for permission to visit Ms. Abdulrahman.

“The image in the West is that we are dominated by men, but they always forget the aspect of love,” she said. “People who aren’t familiar with Shariah often have the wrong idea. If you want stability and safety in your life, if you want a husband who takes care of you, you won’t find it except in Islam.”

Eman Fahad is a 31-year-old linguistics graduate student and mother of three. In her blog, she called Ms. Yousef’s campaign an effort to “stand against women who are demanding to be treated as adults.”

Even if most Saudi men are caring guardians, Ms. Fahad said, until women have full adult rights under the law, there will be abuses. She said she resented conservatives’ portrayal of Saudi women’s rights activists as spoiled and frivolous. She spoke of women she had met who had been forced to quit work they loved because their guardianship had been transferred to a new, less understanding man, and of women with no legal recourse when estranged husbands snatched their children away.

“These are the women they are fighting for,” Ms. Fahad said of the campaigners. “They’re not campaigning because they really want to be allowed to go crazy in some nightclub.”

Yet Ms. Fahad conceded that most Saudi women cleave to tradition. “If you actually talk to ordinary people,” including in her circle, she said, “you’ll find that most people want things to stay the same.”

From The NYTimes.com-Middle East
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01iht-saudi.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=all

giovonni

4th July 2010, 04:23

Working with nature is healthier. What a concept ! :shocked:

http://www.a-healthy-balance.com/images/mother_nature.jpg

Carmen my friend~ you were (quite) right~ all along~ ;)

Science News

'Balanced' Ecosystems Seen in Organic Agriculture Better at Controlling Pests, Research Finds

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2010) — There really is a balance of nature, but as accepted as that thought is, it has rarely been studied. Now Washington State University researchers writing in the journal Nature have found that more balanced animal and plant communities typical of organic farms work better at fighting pests and growing a better plant.

The researchers looked at insect pests and their natural enemies in potatoes and found organic crops had more balanced insect populations in which no one species of insect has a chance to dominate. And in test plots, the crops with the more balanced insect populations grew better.

"I think 'balance' is a good term," says David Crowder, a post-doctorate research associate in entomology at Washington State University. "When the species are balanced, at least in our experiments, they're able to fulfill their roles in a more harmonious fashion."

Crowder and colleagues here and at the University of Georgia use the term "evenness" to describe the relatively equal abundance of different species in an ecosystem. Conservation efforts more typically concentrate on species richness -- the number of individual species -- or the loss of individual species. Crowder's paper is one of only a few to address the issue. It is the first the first to look at animal and fungal communities and at multiple points in the food chain.

The researchers say their results strengthen the argument that both richness and evenness need to be considered in restoring an ecosystem. The paper also highlights insect predator and prey relationships at a time when the potato industry and large French fry customers like McDonald's and Wendy's are being pushed to consider the ecological sustainability of different pest-control practices.

Conventional pest-management on farms often leads to biological communities dominated by a few species. Looking at conventional and organic potato farms in central Washington State's Columbia Basin, Crowder found that the evenness of natural pests differed drastically between the two types of farms. In the conventional fields, one species might account for four out of five insects. In the organic fields, the most abundant species accounted for as little as 38 percent of a field's insect predators and enemies.

Using field enclosures on Washington State University's Pullman campus, Crowder recreated those conditions using potato plants, Colorado potato beetles, four insect species and three soil pathogens that attack the beetles. When the predators and pathogens had similar numbers, says Crowder, "we would get significantly less potato beetles at the end of the experiment."

"In turn," he adds, "we'd get bigger plants."

Crowder says he is unsure why species evenness was lower in conventional crops. It could be from different types of fertilization or from insecticides killing some natural enemies more than others.

Journal Reference: David W. Crowder, Tobin D. Northfield, Michael R. Strand, William E. Snyder. Organic agriculture promotes evenness and natural pest control. Nature, 2010; 466 (7302): 109 DOI: 10.1038/nature09183

original story link;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100630132752.htm

SkepticSoul

4th July 2010, 09:53

This post, Giovanni merits a bump.
Are futurists only tapping in beyond reality? Maybe. We have such power, such imagination, such knowledge stored in our being and we live in such a lazy world that allows life to just swim by and we observe. Ok for the Zens but not ok for those primed to make a difference by waking up the sleepy heads.

Just a side note on your cannibus post. I just read from Fritz Springmeier's online book on Mind Control ( he has many ) that one type of drug is NOT used by handlers and programmers of Mind Control and that is Marijuana. I find that extraordinary since they use every other kind of drug, the list is so long and devastating. The reason for not using weed was because they could NOT control the victims. How is that possible? From my son's perspective on the experience years ago was that it made his brain sleepy and dull and fogged and useless. Any comments?

Peace

Cannabis isn't for anyone, there are people that just can't stand the feeling of being stoned or high much like people don't like to be drunk from alcohol.
marihuana in my case just makes me feel calm, relaxed, stress-free, i just forget all worries.
it also makes me think in different ways, from angles you didn't think possible, it also makes you gratefull xD in a happy state, more social - like not affraid to talk to someone you don't know... you can connect easier with a person.
If you have smoked for years this will be the result of smoking cannabis

If it isn't then it's just not for you...
I smoke cannabis 24% THC (basicly the highest quality) and smoke around 2 or 3 joints a day.
I never get sick... I wake up easily in the morning (i have to wake up for work at 3.30 am) and I am feeling good all day long xD

Here's what i want to say... I don't see a downside to marihuana...

Peace

mod edit to add this section of the forum guidelines regarding talk of illegal substances
Section B - Posting

1. SUBVERSIVE TOPICS
1.
Discussions that involve drugs and other intoxicating substances, pornography, foul language, racial / sexual / national intolerance, hate speech, politically subversive acts or planning, will not be tolerated. See "Trolling" in the Infractions/Suspensions section below. http://projectavalon.net/forum4/faq.php?faq=avalonguidelines#faq_membershipguideli nes

giovonni

5th July 2010, 05:56

MIT Researchers Promise an Internet That's 100x Faster and Cheaper
A team of MIT researchers has developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but could also make high-speed...
Sharon Gaudin

http://images.pcworld.com/shared/graphics/cms/broadbandFiber_180.jpg

MIT researchers have developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but also could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within routers that direct traffic on the Internet, according to Vincent Chan , an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team. Chan told Computerworld that replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100, if not 1,000 times faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

What would the Internet be like if it ran that much faster?

Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, with the Internet running 100 times faster, according to Chan.

"We're looking to the future when computer processors are much more powerful and we have much bigger downloads and applications," Chan said. "When we get more powerful processors, people will be clamoring for more speed. The question is, can these new processors and their powerful applications be supported over the Internet? Everyone will be using more high-rate applications, like 3D, interactive games, high-speed financial trading."

And when that happens, Chan said users of those large applications will run into choke points on the Internet. And that could happen as soon as 16-core processors hit the market, if not sooner. "I think the Internet will not be fast enough within three to five years," he added.

The answer, he said, is optical fibers, which carry light pulses.

Optical fibers are used widely on the Internet, spanning great distances and even continents. While they transmit information more efficiently than electrical signals, optical signals are complicated to deal with. A router, for instance, has problems handling optical signals coming from different directions at the same time. To get around that problem, routers on the Internet generally take in optical signals and convert them to electrical signals so they can be stored in memory until they can be processed, said MIT's report. After that, the electrical signals are converted back to optical signals so they can be sent back out.

That process eats up chunks of time and energy. Chan and his team have developed technology that would eliminate the need for such conversions.

Chan's architecture, which is called "flow switching," establishes a dedicated path across the network between locations that exchange large volumes of data -- from Silicon Valley to Boston, for instance. MIT explained that routers along that path would only accept signals coming from one direction and send them off in only one direction. Since the optical signals aren't coming from different directions, there's no need to convert them to electrical signals for storage in memory.

"If this can truly jack up Internet data speeds by 100 times, that would have a huge impact on the usability of the Net," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. "We'd see the era of 3D computing and fully immersive Internet experiences come much sooner.... If this turns out to be practical, it could be a very big step forward."

Dealing with network bottlenecks would be a huge accomplishment, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

"Right now, the network is the bottleneck for hosted computing. This change could transform the industry as we know it," said Enderle. "We are going to need a faster Internet. We need it now. Currently, we only have about 20% [of available bandwidth] in many places."

Olds noted that there's no way to get around the fact that a faster Internet infrastructure will be needed to continue to push forward with better devices and applications.

"The Internet is going to have to become faster," he said. "We still have millions and millions of people added every year. But, just as importantly, consider the millions and millions of devices that are now vying for Net access -- all of the smartphones, sensors and other devices that need connectivity. All of these new users are generating new Web traffic and content at a furious pace, and the Internet needs to get faster to keep up."

Chan was quick to note that switching to optical fibers won't just mean better performance. It also will mean cheaper high-speed access.

"With bigger applications and more bottlenecks, you could buy extra bandwidth if you pay through the nose, but that's not something every user could do," Chan said. "Sure, you can increase the data rate, but it's expensive. With this new architecture, we can speed up the Internet but make high-speed access cheaper."

The MIT research team is testing the transport part of its architecture at Bell Labs in New Jersey, Chan said, and they're making sure the switch to all optical fibers won't cause any long-term effects on the Internet.

Chan, who is planning to start a company that will deploy and sell the technology, added that the next step will be to piggyback the new system onto some traditional networks in the U.S. in a limited trial.

"I think we have enough tests to know that the transport is ready and the architecture would work," he added.

Chan said he's been in talks with router companies about the new architecture. The router companies, along with major Internet service providers, would have to buy into his plan.

"Assuming the technology works as advertised, the main drawback will be the cost of rolling out the new gear and optimizing the Net so that it takes best advantage of the new stuff," Olds said. "New cutting-edge technology isn't cheap, and while prices will drop over time, they will only fall if the volume for the equipment is there."

Olds also noted that it might take a little doing for major ISPs and user organizations to swallow that expense.

"There will be considerable expense in adopting this new technology, not just in the new hardware, but in testing and optimizing the Internet so it can take advantage of the higher speeds," he added. "Given that the new equipment will be more expensive, it isn't going to be easy to convince the providers to adopt it right away. Just because the speed of light is the fastest thing we know, it doesn't mean they'll pay big bucks harnessing it so I can get my e-mail faster. They're going to need to be convinced that the higher transmission speeds and lower power requirements will help their bottom line."

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin , or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com .

Read more about internet in Computerworld's Internet Topic Center.

original link here;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/200262/MIT_Researchers_Promise_an_Internet_That_100x_Fast er_and_Cheaper.html?tk=rss_news

giovonni

10th July 2010, 18:18

Quantum Entanglement Holds DNA Together, Say Physicists
A new theoretical model suggests that quantum entanglement helps prevent the molecules of life from breaking apart.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/files/43208/Entangled-DNA.jpg

There was a time, not so long ago, when biologists swore black and blue that quantum mechanics could play no role in the hot, wet systems of life.

Since then, the discipline of quantum biology has emerged as one of the most exciting new fields in science. It's beginning to look as if quantum effects are crucial in a number of biological processes, such as photosynthesis and avian navigation which we've looked at here and here.

Now a group of physicists say that the weird laws of quantum mechanics may be more important for life than biologists could ever have imagined. Their new idea is that DNA is held together by quantum entanglement.

That's worth picking apart in more detail. Entanglement is the weird quantum process in which a single wavefunction describes two separate objects. When this happens, these objects effectively share the same existence, no matter how far apart they might be.

The question that Elisabeth Rieper at the National University of Singapore and a couple of buddies have asked is what role might entanglement play in DNA. To find out, they've constructed a simplified theoretical model of DNA in which each nucleotide consists of a cloud of electrons around a central positive nucleus. This negative cloud can move relative to the nucleus, creating a dipole. And the movement of the cloud back and forth is a harmonic oscillator.

When the nucleotides bond to form a base, these clouds must oscillate in opposite directions to ensure the stability of the structure.

Rieper and co ask what happens to these oscillations, or phonons as physicists call them, when the base pairs are stacked in a double helix.

Phonons are quantum objects, meaning they can exist in a superposition of states and become entangled, just like other quantum objects.

To start with, Rieper and co imagine the helix without any effect from outside heat. "Clearly the chain of coupled harmonic oscillators is entangled at zero temperature," they say. They then go on to show that the entanglement can also exist at room temperature.

That's possible because phonons have a wavelength which is similar in size to a DNA helix and this allows standing waves to form, a phenomenon known as phonon trapping. When this happens, the phonons cannot easily escape. A similar kind of phonon trapping is known to cause problems in silicon structures of the same size.

That would be of little significance if it had no overall effect on the helix. But the model developed by Rieper and co suggests that the effect is profound.

Although each nucleotide in a base pair is oscillating in opposite directions, this occurs as a superposition of states, so that the overall movement of the helix is zero. In a purely classical model, however, this cannot happen, in which case the helix would vibrate and shake itself apart.

So in this sense, these quantum effects are responsible for holding DNA together.

The question of course is how to prove this. They say that one line of evidence is that a purely classical analysis of the energy required to hold DNA together does not add up. However, their quantum model plugs the gap. That's interesting but they'll need to come up with something experimentally convincing to persuade biologists of these ideas.

One tantalising suggestion at the end of their paper is that the entanglement may have an influence on the way that information is read off a strand of DNA and that it may be possible to exploit this experimentally. Just how, they don't say.

Speculative but potentially explosive work.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1006.4053: The Relevance Of Continuous Variable Entanglement In DNA

for original story and comments~go here;
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25375/

giovonni

23rd July 2010, 22:00

Frankly, I don't hold out much hope that we will do anything until it is too late. If you look at history you see clearly that great empires destroy themselves from within, usually as a result of willful ignorance. It is themselves not their enemies that cause their collapse, and I think the same is happening with us. :(

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/1/15/1232029987131/Polar-Bears-on-Ice-Pack-a-001.jpg

You can't explain away climate change
Some hold that global warming stopped in 1998, but scientists know better.

July 22, 2010

You probably won't hear it from columnist George F. Will, Fox News commentators or the plethora of conservative blogs that have claimed global warming essentially stopped in 1998, but recent figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that global land and ocean surface temperatures in June were the highest since record-keeping began in 1880. What's more, the first half of 2010 was the hottest such period ever recorded, and Arctic sea ice melted at a record-setting pace in June.

The heat can probably be attributed at least in part to periodic and entirely natural changes in ocean temperatures and surface air pressure — the El Niño/La Niña phenomena most likely played a role. But the fact that peak years are getting hotter while even relatively "cool" years now tend to remain above historical averages (the 10 warmest years on record all occurred within the last 15 years, according to the NOAA) shows that something else is at work. A consensus of climate scientists worldwide, including not only the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but the national scientific academies of the United States and the rest of the developed world, have identified that "something else" as anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, which reflect the sun's heat back onto the Earth rather than letting it escape into space.

Climate skeptics such as Will et al either deny that this warming is happening — an increasingly untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is — or insist that it doesn't matter. They argue that it would be more expensive to try to solve the problem than to adapt to it, and that in any case, the effects of higher temperatures won't be all that damaging. Climate modelers, who have accurately forecast the currently observed climate oscillations, sea-level rise and ice melting, do not agree. They predict catastrophic destruction in coastal cities, droughts, crop failure, forest loss, insect infestations and other woes.

For us, it's not a difficult decision which side to believe: scientists who directly observe and measure climate changes and whose accuracy is rigorously tested by their peers, or pundits with little knowledge of climate science whose views are informed by a long-held resentment of environmentalists and government regulation. Yet the latter group, working hand in hand with big energy companies that profit from the filthy status quo, have injected enough doubt into the national debate to paralyze Congress — which seems little closer to imposing greenhouse-gas limits or placing a market price on emissions than it was during the laissez-faire George W. Bush administration — and confuse the public, who in recent polls are increasingly inclined to believe that the threat of climate change has been exaggerated.

Granted, scientists themselves deserve some blame for the shift in attitudes. Climatology, even more than other fields, is undergoing changes that are unsettling for those in the trenches. A relatively obscure line of work until policymakers started seriously considering carbon curbs in recent years, climate science is suddenly at the center of a raging international debate. Meanwhile, a sedate culture of publication and private peer review has been roiled by a new media environment; today, critics of a scientist's work don't have to publish a carefully reviewed study in a major journal, they just have to fire off an indignant blog post.

When scientists at the prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia responded to such critics by sending catty e-mails to their colleagues, and when those e-mails were made public by hackers last November, it did more to impede action on climate change than Big Oil could have achieved with an army of lobbyists. Yet investigations have shown that the e-mails amounted to little more than fits of pique. The most recent review, conducted by an independent team funded by the University of East Anglia, found no evidence that the researchers had undermined scientific findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or any other group, and that they neither withheld access to data nor tampered with it.

We'd love to hear climate skeptics explain away the results of such investigations and address the latest report from the NOAA. But we suspect they'll do what they usually do when confronted with facts that contradict their worldview: ignore them.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
original story link;
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-climate-20100722,0,1056514.story

giovonni

1st August 2010, 14:15

FDA approves Geron's groundbreaking study of embryonic cells
By Steve Johnson
Posted: 07/30/2010 06:37:40 PM PDTUpdated: 07/31/2010 03:50:48 AM PDT

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site568/2010/0730/20100730__ssjm0731geron~1_GALLERY.JPG

A Menlo Park biotech firm said Friday that federal regulators will let it proceed with the world's first human test of a treatment made from embryonic stem cells, a much-anticipated but controversial study of patients with spinal cord injuries that had been placed on hold for nearly a year because of safety concerns.

If the treatment from Geron works, it "would be revolutionary," said Dr. Richard Fessler, a neurological surgeon at Northwestern University, who will lead the study of a stem-cell treatment designed to be injected into patients with spinal injuries to restore their motor function. "The therapy would provide a viable treatment option for thousands of patients who suffer severe spinal cord injuries each year."

Geron has spent 15 years and more than $150 million to develop the treatment, and "getting it into a clinical trial, just by itself, is a big deal," added Fessler, who has no financial ties to the company.

Many people hope that human embryonic stem cells, which can turn into any type of tissue in the body, could prove useful for everything from generating organs for transplants to helping test drugs on numerous diseases. But because the cells are derived from discarded 3- to-5-day-old embryos, their use by researchers has sparked ethical concerns and a highly contentious national debate.

The Food and Drug Administration had put the study on hold last year after a few animals the company was testing with its treatment developed small cysts. Although similar cysts had appeared in earlier animal studies, they appeared with "a higher frequency" in more recent animal tests, the company said at the time.

FDA officials declined to comment on why they decided to lift their hold on the study. However, Geron said Friday that it determined the cysts "did not lead to any adverse consequences to the animals" and that the company changed some of its procedures "to minimize the likelihood of cyst formation."

After Geron's announcement, its stock price rose 83 cents, or about 17 percent, to $5.63 at the close of trading.

In studies several years ago, Geron reported that its spinal treatment had helped paralyzed rats walk. The company's treatment involves turning embryonic cells into another type of cell, which helps nerve fibers replace myelin, a fatty insulating substance that often gets stripped away when spines are injured, inhibiting the body's ability to transmit sensory signals.

However, no people have ever been tested using human embryonic stem cells, That's partly because critics — many of them involved in religious and anti-abortion groups — argue that research with the cells is unethical because the embryos the cells come from are life-forms.

In addition, some scientists have feared that if the cells are injected into people they might form teratomas, which are growths of unwanted cells. Supporters of human embryonic stem-cell studies argue that the cells' potential benefits outweigh any ethical concerns about where they come from and Geron has said it has found no teratomas among the vast numbers of animals it has tested with its treatment.

Having Geron's study given the go-ahead, "is an important milestone for the whole field," said Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a state agency that promotes research with human embryonic stem cells. "We are looking with hope and expectation that the transplant will be safe and effective."

Adult stem cells, which appear in the body about 12 weeks after conception and typically produce a limited variety of tissue types, have been tested on people in various ways.

To be selected for the study, patients must have mid-back spinal cord injuries that leave them paralyzed below the site of their injuries, which must be one to two weeks old.

Geron has identified seven U.S. medical centers that may participate in the study, which is primarily intended to gauge how safe the treatment is. The tests are expected to involve only a small number of patients. Geron did not disclose when the treatments would begin, though Fessler said it might take a couple of months to get the medical center personnel prepared for the study.

Geron isn't the only company seeking FDA permission to test a human embryonic stem cell treatment on people. Santa Monica-based Advanced Cell Technology hopes to win approval soon to study a treatment it has developed for patients suffering from an eye disease called Stargardt's macular dystrophy.

"We're also hoping we can begin our clinical trials in the next few months," said Dr. Robert Lanza, the company's chief scientific officer. "Of course, it's not important who does the first clinical trial," he added, "but, rather, whether your therapy helps patients."

WHY GERON"S PROPOSED STUDY IS UNIQUE

The company plans to conduct the world"s first test on people of a treatment made from human embryonic stem cells, which are controversial in large part because they are derived from discarded embryos.
PATIENTS TARGETED FOR THE STUDY:
People with severe mid-back spinal cord injuries that leave them paralyzed below the injury, which must be one to two weeks old.
The treatment is to help patients regrow a spinal insulating material, called myelin, which often gets stripped away during injuries, disrupting the body"s ability to transmit sensory signals and resulting in paralysis.
WHAT THE STUDY IS DESIGNED TO LEARN:
Primarily if the treatment is safe for humans. Geron also hopes the study indicates whether the treatment improves neuromuscular control and sensation. Later studies in people would be needed to fully assess the treatment"s effectiveness in alleviating spinal damage.
WHERE TO LEARN ABOUT THE STUDY:
Information about the tests can be found at Geron"s website, www.geron.com.

WHY GERON"S PROPOSED STUDY IS UNIQUE

The company plans to conduct the world"s first test on people of a treatment made from human embryonic stem cells.

HOW IT COULD HELP: The treatment is to help patients
regrow a spinal insulating material, called myelin, that often gets stripped away during injuries, disrupting the body"s ability to transmit sensory signals and resulting in paralysis.
WHAT THE STUDY DETERMINES: The study will primarily determine if the treatment is safe for humans, and whether it
improves neuromuscular control and sensation. Later studies in people would be needed to assess the treatment"s effectiveness.

article link here;
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_15641176?nclick_check=1

giovonni

8th August 2010, 19:19

(CNN) -- A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/WORLD/americas/08/07/greenland.ice.island/t1larg.ice.jpg

http://i.livescience.com/images/greenalnd-petermann-glacier-satellite-100806-ls-02.jpg

Satellite image from Aug. 5, 2010, shows the huge ice island calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. Credit: Andreas Muenchow, University of Delaware.
The 260 square-kilometer (100 square miles) ice island separated from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland early on Thursday, researchers based at the University of Delaware said.

The ice island, which is about half the height of the Empire State Building, is the biggest piece of ice to break away from the Arctic icecap since 1962 and amounts to a quarter of the Petermann 70-kilometer floating ice shelf, according to research leader Andreas Muenchow.

"The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days," Muenchow said.

Muenchow's team is studying ice in the Nares Strait separating Greenland from Canada, about 1,000 kilometers south of the North Pole.

Satellite data from NASA's MODIS-Aqua satellite revealed the initial rupture which was confirmed within hours by Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service, according to the University of Delaware website.

Muenchow said the island could block the Nares Strait as it drifts south, or break into smaller islands and continue towards the open waters of the Atlantic.

"In Nares Strait, the ice island will encounter real islands that are all much smaller in size," he said.

"The newly born ice island may become land-fast, block the channel, or it may break into smaller pieces as it is propelled south by the prevailing ocean currents. From there, it will likely follow along the coasts of Baffin Island and Labrador, to reach the Atlantic within the next two years."

Environmentalists say ice melt is being caused by global warming with Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reaching their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, according to a study published in 2009.

Current trends could see the Arctic Ocean become ice free in summer months within decades, researchers predict.

click here to view slide show of glacier;
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Massive-ice-island-breaks-off-Greenland-glacier/ss/events/sc/080710greenlandice#photoViewer=/100807/photos_ca_afp/e0912da2472641c8d88b34d591e208bf

original story link;
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/08/07/greenland.ice.island/index.html?iref=NS1

giovonni

10th August 2010, 20:10

Unpaving our roads. :confused:
Can anything be more symbolic of what has gone wrong with America? We are closing our schools, closing libraries, shutting down our street lighting. But nothing, for me, is quite as symbolic as unpaving the roads. Have you ever before heard of an advanced nation tearing up the pavement of its roads?

This is the natural progression and inevitable consequence of 30 years of conservatives pounding away that government is bad. It began with Ronald Reagan and his statement that that "government is not the solution, government is part of the problem." We are now reaping the fruits of that worldview and, if the midterm elections go as many believe they will, and Republicans gain seats, it will only get worse. Unpaving the roads. It is the sign of who we have become, and the road we have chosen.

Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement
Asphalt Is Replaced By Cheaper Gravel; 'Back to Stone Age'

By LAUREN ETTER

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW297_GRAVEL_G_20100716182815.jpg
Dan Koeck for The Wall Street Journal

A road crew in Jamestown, N.D., where road repair means reclaiming the original asphalt and processing it to resemble gravel.

SPIRITWOOD, N.D.—A hulking yellow machine inched along Old Highway 10 here recently in a summer scene that seemed as normal as the nearby corn swaying in the breeze. But instead of laying a blanket of steaming blacktop, the machine was grinding the asphalt road into bits.

"When [counties] had lots of money, they paved a lot of the roads and tried to make life easier for the people who lived out here," said Stutsman County Highway Superintendant Mike Zimmerman, sifting the dusty black rubble through his fingers. "Now, it's catching up to them."

Outside this speck of a town, pop. 78, a 10-mile stretch of road had deteriorated to the point that residents reported seeing ducks floating in potholes, Mr. Zimmerman said. As the road wore out, the cost of repaving became too great. Last year, the county spent $400,000 on an RM300 Caterpillar rotary mixer to grind the road up, making it look more like the old homesteader trail it once was.

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-JG857_gravel_D_20100716141541.jpg
Project supervisor Jerry Brickner checked a county road recently converted to gravel in Jamestown, N.D.

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

The moves have angered some residents because of the choking dust and windshield-cracking stones that gravel roads can kick up, not to mention the jarring "washboard" effect of driving on rutted gravel.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-JG859_gravel_D_20100716141904.jpg
The heavy machines at work in Jamestown, N.D., are grinding the asphalt off road beds, grading the bed and packing the material back down to create a new road surface.

But higher taxes for road maintenance are equally unpopular. In June, Stutsman County residents rejected a measure that would have generated more money for roads by increasing property and sales taxes.

"I'd rather my kids drive on a gravel road than stick them with a big tax bill," said Bob Baumann, as he sipped a bottle of Coors Light at the Sportsman's Bar Café and Gas in Spiritwood.

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.

"A lot of these roads have just deteriorated to the point that they have no other choice than to turn them back to gravel," says Larry Galehouse, director of the National Center for Pavement Preservation at Michigan State University. Still, "we're leaving an awful legacy for future generations."

Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."

Paving grew in popularity in the early 20th century as more cars hit streets and spread when the federal government built the Interstate Highway System.

Over the years, many of the two-lane arteries that connect country roads with metro areas have deteriorated under rising traffic and the growing weight of farm combines, logging trucks and other heavy equipment.

Frederick Wachtel, county engineer in Coshocton County, Ohio, says his budget, largely driven by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, was off 5% last year, the first decline in nearly 20 years. He is now letting some of his roads return to nature.

In Spiritwood one day recently, a soft breeze carried the scents of cow manure and hot asphalt over the tall broom grass. The giant Caterpillar chugged along at a speed of 2.4 feet per minute and pulverized Old Highway 10 into a black dust with chunks of rock and pavement. A piece of equipment following behind rolled the surface flat.

The machines rumbled along a path carved by homesteaders' covered wagons in the 1800s. Over time, grain elevators and railroad depots sprung up along the route, which became known as the Old Red Trail. Later, the road was paved and renamed Highway 10.

After Interstate 94 was built alongside the road in the 1950s, it became Old Highway 10. Traffic volumes gradually dropped until Old 10 became a lazy backcountry road dotted with abandoned farmsteads. In the 1960s the state gave Old 10 to the counties it ran through, leaving them to pay for upkeep. North Dakota's Stutsman County got a 30-mile stretch.

The gift became a burden. The Stutsman highway department, which gets the bulk of its funds from local property taxes, state fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, let the road fall into disrepair as it juggled other projects. Every year without major maintenance, the road became more expensive to fix.

Judy Graves of Ypsilanti, N.D., voted against the measure to raise taxes for roads. But she says she and others nonetheless wrote to Gov. John Hoeven and asked him to stop Old 10 from being ground up because it still carries traffic to a Cargill Inc. malting plant. She says the county has mismanaged its finances and badly neglected roads.

"Our expenses outweigh the income," says Mr. Zimmerman, who has been with the county highway department for nearly 30 years. He says the county will pay about $2,600 per mile annually for the newly ground-up road, as against about $75,000 per mile to reconstruct it.

Gayne Gasal, who lives along the redone stretch of road, says it has turned out "better than we all thought." But Sportsman's Bar owner Hilda Kuntz worries that the classic cars and bikers that roll through town in the summer will stay away.

"It's going to kill my business," she said.

Write to Lauren Etter at lauren.etter@wsj.com

original article link;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704913304575370950363737746.html

giovonni

11th August 2010, 21:33

The alarm bells go off one by one, but is anyone in power listening? The only way climate change is going to be addressed is if citizens create a voting mass that overcomes special interests. whether religious, political, or corporate. :eek:

Greenland ice sheet faces 'tipping point in 10 years'

Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level.

* Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 August 2010 19.29 BST

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Environment/Pix/columnists/2010/8/10/1281456269937/Ice-Island-calves-off-Pet-006.jpg

An enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles in size, has broken off the Petermann Glacier along the northwest coast of Greenland. Photograph: Aqua/Modis/Nasa

The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University

"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

"What is going on in the Arctic now is the biggest and fastest thing that nature has ever done," he said.

Speaking by phone, Alley was addressing a briefing held by the House of Representatives committee on energy independence and global warming.

Greenland is losing ice mass at an increasing rate, dumping more icebergs into the ocean because of warming temperatures, he said.

The stark warning was underlined by the momentous break-up of one of Greenland's largest glaciers last week, which set a 100 sq mile chunk of ice drifting into the North Strait between Greenland and Canada.

The briefing also noted that the last six months had set new temperature records.

Robert Bindschadler, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, told the briefing: "While we don't believe it is possible to lose an ice sheet within a decade, we do believe it is possible to reach a tipping point in a few decades in which we would lose the ice sheet in a century."

The ice loss from the Petermann Glacier was the largest such event in nearly 50 years, although there have been regular and smaller "calvings".

Petermann spawned two smaller breakaways: one of 34 sq miles in 2001 and another of 10 sq miles in 2008.

Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science at the University of Delaware, who has been studying the Petermann glacier for several years, said he had been expecting such a break, although he did not anticipate its size.

He also argued that much remains unknown about the interaction between Arctic sea ice, sea level, and temperature rise.

Muenchow told the briefing that over the last seven years he had only received funding to measure ocean temperatures near the Petermann Glacier for a total of three days.

He was also reduced, because of a lack of funding, to paying his own airfare and that of his students to they could join up with a Canadian icebreaker on a joint research project in the Arctic.

original article here;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/10/greenland-ice-sheet-tipping-point

giovonni

12th August 2010, 21:30

It can be done. It is possible to make the Green Transition. So why are we dragging our feet in the U.S.? Because our government has been captured by the corporate virtual states whose rice bowl is enslaved to petroleum? That's what it looks like.

Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/solar-panel-sam.jpg

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

LISBON — Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.

Today, Lisbon’s trendy bars, Porto’s factories and the Algarve’s glamorous resorts are powered substantially by clean energy. Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

Land-based wind power — this year deemed “potentially competitive” with fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency in Paris — has expanded sevenfold in that time. And Portugal expects in 2011 to become the first country to inaugurate a national network of charging stations for electric cars.

“I’ve seen all the smiles — you know: It’s a good dream. It can’t compete. It’s too expensive,” said Prime Minister José Sócrates, recalling the way Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, mockingly offered to build him an electric Ferrari. Mr. Sócrates added, “The experience of Portugal shows that it is possible to make these changes in a very short time.”

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has renewed questions about the risks and unpredictable costs of America’s unremitting dependence on fossil fuels. President Obama has seized on the opportunity to promote his goal of having 20 to 25 percent of America’s electricity produced from renewable sources by 2025.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

Indeed, complaints about rising electricity rates are a mainstay of pensioners’ gossip here. Mr. Sócrates, who after a landslide victory in 2005 pushed through the major elements of the energy makeover over the objections of the country’s fossil fuel industry, survived last year’s election only as the leader of a weak coalition.

“You cannot imagine the pressure we suffered that first year,” said Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s minister of economy and innovation from 2005 until last year, who largely masterminded the transition, adding, “Politicians must take tough decisions.”

Still, aggressive national policies to accelerate renewable energy use are succeeding in Portugal and some other countries, according to a recent report by IHS Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., a leading energy consulting firm. By 2025, the report projected, Ireland, Denmark and Britain will also get 40 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources; if power from large-scale hydroelectric dams, an older type of renewable energy, is included, countries like Canada and Brazil join the list.

The United States, which last year generated less than 5 percent of its power from newer forms of renewable energy, will lag behind at 16 percent (or just over 20 percent, including hydroelectric power), according to IHS.

To force Portugal’s energy transition, Mr. Sócrates’s government restructured and privatized former state energy utilities to create a grid better suited to renewable power sources. To lure private companies into Portugal’s new market, the government gave them contracts locking in a stable price for 15 years — a subsidy that varied by technology and was initially high but decreased with each new contract round.

Compared with the United States, European countries have powerful incentives to pursue renewable energy. Many, like Portugal, have little fossil fuel of their own, and the European Union’s emissions trading system discourages fossil fuel use by requiring industry to essentially pay for excessive carbon dioxide emissions.

Portugal was well poised to be a guinea pig because it has large untapped resources of wind and river power, the two most cost-effective renewable sources. Government officials say the energy transformation required no increase in taxes or public debt, precisely because the new sources of electricity, which require no fuel and produce no emissions, replaced electricity previously produced by buying and burning imported natural gas, coal and oil. By 2014 the renewable energy program will allow Portugal to fully close at least two conventional power plants and reduce the operation of others.

“So far the program has placed no stress on the national budget” and has not created government debt, said Shinji Fujino, head of the International Energy Agency’s country study division.

If the United States is to catch up to countries like Portugal, energy experts say, it must overcome obstacles like a fragmented, outdated energy grid poorly suited to renewable energy; a historic reliance on plentiful and cheap supplies of fossil fuels, especially coal; powerful oil and coal industries that often oppose incentives for renewable development; and energy policy that is heavily influenced by individual states.

The relative costs of an energy transition would inevitably be higher in the United States than in Portugal. But as the expense of renewable power drops, an increasing number of countries see such a shift as worthwhile, said Alex Klein, research director, clean and renewable power generation, at IHS.

“The cost gap will close in the next decade, but what you get right away is an energy supply that is domestically controlled and safer,” Mr. Klein said.

Necessity Drives Change

Portugal’s venture was driven by necessity. With a rising standard of living and no fossil fuel of its own, the cost of energy imports — principally oil and gas — doubled in the last decade, accounting for 50 percent of the country’s trade deficit, and was highly volatile. The oil went to fuel cars, the gas mainly to electricity. Unlike the United States, Portugal never depended heavily on coal for electricity generation because close and reliable sources of natural gas were available in North Africa, and Europe’s carbon trading system could make coal costly.

Portugal is now on track to reach its goal of using domestically produced renewable energy, including large-scale hydropower, for 60 percent of its electricity and 31 percent of its total energy needs by 2020. (Total energy needs include purposes other than generating electricity, like heating homes and powering cars.)

In making the shift, Portugal has overcome longstanding concerns about reliability and high cost. The lights go on in Lisbon even when the wind dies down at the vast two-year-old Alto Minho wind farm. The country’s electricity production costs and consumer electricity rates — including the premium prices paid for power from renewable sources — are about average for Europe, but still higher than those in China or the United States, countries that rely on cheap coal.

Portugal says it has kept costs down by focusing heavily on the cheapest forms of renewable energy — wind and hydropower — and ratcheting down the premium prices it pays to lure companies to build new plants.

While the government estimates that the total investment in revamping Portugal’s energy structure will be about 16.3 billion euros, or $22 billion, that cost is borne by the private companies that operate the grid and the renewable plants and is reflected in consumers’ electricity rates. The companies’ payback comes from the 15 years of guaranteed wholesale electricity rates promised by the government. Once the new infrastructure is completed, Mr. Pinho said, the system will cost about 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) a year less to run than it formerly did, primarily by avoiding natural gas imports.

A smaller savings will come from carbon credits Portugal can sell under the European Union’s carbon trading system: countries and industries that produce fewer emissions than allotted can sell permits to those that exceed their limits.

Mr. Fujino of the International Energy Agency said Portugal’s calculations might be optimistic. But he noted that the country’s transition had also created a valuable new industry: Last year, for the first time, it became a net power exporter, sending a small amount of electricity to Spain. Tens of thousands of Portuguese work in the field. Energias de Portugal, the country’s largest energy company, owns wind farms in Iowa and Texas, through its American subsidiary, Horizon Wind Energy.

Redesigning the System

A nationwide supply of renewable power requires a grid that can move electricity from windy, sunny places to the cities.

But a decade ago in Portugal, as in many places in the United States today, power companies owned not only power generating plants, but also transmission lines. Those companies have little incentive to welcome new sources of renewable energy, which compete with their investment in fossil fuels. So in 2000, Portugal’s first step was to separate making electricity from transporting it, through a mandatory purchase by the government of all transmission lines for electricity and gas at what were deemed fair market prices.

Those lines were then used to create the skeleton of what since 2007 has been a regulated and publicly traded company that operates the national electricity and natural gas networks.

Next, the government auctioned off contracts to private companies to build and operate wind and hydropower plants. Bidders were granted rights based on the government-guaranteed price they would accept for the energy they produced, as well as on their willingness to invest in Portugal’s renewable economy, including jobs and other venture capital funds. Some of the winners were foreign companies. In the latest round of bidding, the price guaranteed for wind energy was in the range of the price paid for electricity generated by natural gas.

Such a drastic reorganization might be extremely difficult in the United States, where power companies have strong political sway and states decide whether to promote renewable energy. Colorado recently legislated that 30 percent of its energy must come from renewable sources by 2020, but neighboring Utah has only weak voluntary goals. Coal states, like Kentucky and West Virginia, have relatively few policies to encourage alternative energies.

In Portugal, said Mr. Pinho, the former economy minister, who will join Columbia University’s faculty, “the prime minister had an absolute majority.”

“He was very strong, and everyone knew we would not step back,” Mr. Pinho said.

A Flexible Network

Running a country using electricity derived from nature’s highly unpredictable forces requires new technology and the juggling skills of a plate spinner. A wind farm that produces 200 megawatts one hour may produce only 5 megawatts a few hours later; the sun shines intermittently in many places; hydropower is plentiful in the rainy winter, but may be limited in summer.

Portugal’s national energy transmission company, Redes Energéticas Nacionais or R.E.N., uses sophisticated modeling to predict weather, especially wind patterns, and computer programs to calculate energy from the various renewable-energy plants. Since the country’s energy transition, the network has doubled the number of dispatchers who route energy to where it is needed.

“You need a lot of new skills. It’s a real-time operation, and there are far more decisions to be made — every hour, every second,” said Victor Baptista, director general of R.E.N. “The objective is to keep the system alive and avoid blackouts.”

Like some American states, Portugal has for decades generated electricity from hydropower plants on its raging rivers. But new programs combine wind and water: Wind-driven turbines pump water uphill at night, the most blustery period; then the water flows downhill by day, generating electricity, when consumer demand is highest.

Denmark, another country that relies heavily on wind power, frequently imports electricity from its energy-rich neighbor Norway when the wind dies down; by comparison, Portugal’s grid is relatively isolated, although R.E.N. has greatly increased its connection with Spain to allow for energy sharing.

Portugal’s distribution system is also now a two-way street. Instead of just delivering electricity, it draws electricity from even the smallest generators, like rooftop solar panels. The government aggressively encourages such contributions by setting a premium price for those who buy rooftop-generated solar electricity. “To make this kind of system work, you have to make a lot of different kinds of deals at the same time,” said Carlos Zorrinho, the secretary of state for energy and innovation.

To ensure a stable power base when the forces of nature shut down, the system needs to maintain a base of fossil fuel that can be fired up at will. Although Portugal’s traditional power plants now operate many fewer hours than before, the country is also building some highly efficient natural gas plants.

To accommodate all this, Portugal needed new transmission lines from remote windy regions to urban centers. Portugal began modernizing its grid a decade ago. Accommodating a greater share of renewable power cost an additional 480 million euros, or about $637 million, an expense folded into electricity rates, according to R.E.N.

Last year, President Obama offered billions of dollars in grants to modernize the grid in the United States, but it is not clear that such a piecemeal effort will be adequate for renewable power. Widely diverse permitting procedures in different states and the fact that many private companies control local fragments of the grid make it hard to move power over long distances, for example, from windy Iowa to users in Atlanta. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States’ grid a “D+,” commenting that it is “in urgent need of modernization.”

“A real smart national grid would radically change our technology profile,” said John Juech, vice president for policy analysis at Garten Rothkopf, a Washington consulting firm that focuses on energy. “But it will be very costly, and the political will may not be there.”

A 2009 report commissioned by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change estimated that the United States would have to spend $3 billion to $4 billion a year for the next two decades to create a grid that could accommodate deriving 20 percent of electricity from wind power by 2030 — a 40 percent to 50 percent increase over current spending.

The Drawbacks

Energy experts consider Portugal’s experiment a success. But there have been losers. Many environmentalists object to the government plans to double the amount of wind energy, saying lights and noise from turbines will interfere with birds’ behavior. Conservation groups worry that new dams will destroy Portugal’s cork-oak habitats.

Local companies complain that the government allowed large multinationals to displace them.

Until it became the site of the largest wind farm south of Lisbon, Barão de São João was a sleepy village on the blustery Alentejo Coast, home to farmers who tilled its roller coaster hills and holiday homeowners drawn to cheap land and idyllic views. Renewable energy has brought conflict.

“I know it’s good for the country because it’s clean energy and it’s good for the landowners who got money, but it hasn’t brought me any good,” said José Cristino, 48, a burly farmer harvesting grain with a wind turbine’s thrap-thrap-thrap in the background. “I look at these things day and night.” He said 90 percent of the town’s population had been opposed.

In Portugal, as in the United States, politicians have sold green energy programs to communities with promises of job creation. Locally, the effect has often proved limited. For example, more than five years ago, the isolated city of Moura became the site of Portugal’s largest solar plant because it “gets the most sun of anywhere in Europe and has lots of useless space,” said José Maria Prazeres Pós-de-Mina, the mayor.

But while 400 people built the Moura plant, only 20 to 25 work there now, since gathering sunlight requires little human labor. Unemployment remains at 15 percent, the mayor said — though researchers, engineers and foreign delegations frequently visit the town’s new solar research center.

Indeed, Portugal’s engineers and companies are now global players. Portugal’s EDP Renováveis, first listed on stock exchanges in 2008, is the third largest company in the world in wind-generated electricity output. This year, its Portuguese chief executive, Ana Maria Fernandes, signed contracts to sell electricity from its wind farm in Iowa to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

“Broadly, Europe has had great success in this area,” said Mr. Juech, the analyst at Garten Rothkopf. “But that is the result of huge government support and intervention, and that raises questions about what happens when you have an economic crisis or political change; will these technologies still be sustainable?”

original story here;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/earth/10portugal.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=me

giovonni

20th August 2010, 04:16

Please excuse me for diverting from the usual future trends format~ for a momentary> regressive interlude~
while the next story takes us back and examines ~ a provocative hypothesis:

No Copyright Law
The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

By Frank Thadeusz

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-117294-galleryV9-vord.jpg
Interior of the Krupp steelworks in Essen in the 19th century. Historian Eckhard Höffner argues that Germany's rapid expansion was partly due to the huge amount of books, many dealing with science, that were printed in the 19th century.

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans "a people of poets and thinkers."

"That famous phrase is completely misconstrued," declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. "It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller," he explains, "but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany."

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain," Höffner states.

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-117291-galleryV9-qbgn.jpg
A printing press in the 17th century. Germany, unlike England at the time, did not have strict copyright laws. Many books were plagarized and printers made money by selling cheap mass-market books, as well as luxury volumes for wealthier buyers.

Equally Developed Industrial Nation

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

Höffner's diligent research is the first academic work to examine the effects of the copyright over a comparatively long period of time and based on a direct comparison between two countries, and his findings have caused a stir among academics. Until now, copyright was seen as a great achievement and a guarantee for a flourishing book market. Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected.

Yet a historical comparison, at least, reaches a different conclusion. Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.

London's most prominent publishers made very good money with this system, some driving around the city in gilt carriages. Their customers were the wealthy and the nobility, and their books regarded as pure luxury goods. In the few libraries that did exist, the valuable volumes were chained to the shelves to protect them from potential thieves.

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-117293-galleryV9-cglt.jpg
Mary Shelley's Gothic horror novel "Frankenstein" may still be read today. But Berlin professor, Sigismund Hermbstädt, earned far more royalties for his book "Principles of Leather Tanning."

A Multitude of Treatises

This created a book market very different from the one found in England. Bestsellers and academic works were introduced to the German public in large numbers and at extremely low prices. "So many thousands of people in the most hidden corners of Germany, who could not have thought of buying books due to the expensive prices, have put together, little by little, a small library of reprints," the historian Heinrich Bensen wrote enthusiastically at the time.

The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself."

Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country.

The "Literature Newspaper" reported in 1826 that "the majority of works concern natural objects of all types and especially the practical application of nature studies in medicine, industry, agriculture, etc." Scholars in Germany churned out tracts and handbooks on topics such as chemistry, mechanics, engineering, optics and the production of steel.

In England during the same period, an elite circle indulged in a classical educational canon centered more on literature, philosophy, theology, languages and historiography. Practical instruction manuals of the type being mass-produced in Germany, on topics from constructing dikes to planting grain, were for the most part lacking in England. "In Great Britain, people were dependent on the medieval method of hearsay for the dissemination of this useful, modern knowledge," Höffner explains.

The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.

'Lively Scholarly Discourse'

The trade in technical literature was so strong that publishers constantly worried about having a large enough supply, and this situation gave even the less talented scientific authors a good bargaining position in relation to publishers. Many professors supplemented their salaries with substantial additional income from the publication of handbooks and informational brochures.

Höffner explains that this "lively scholarly discourse" laid the basis for the Gründerzeit, or foundation period, the term used to describe the rapid industrial expansion in Germany in the late 19th century. The period produced later industrial magnates such as Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens.

The market for scientific literature didn't collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s. German publishers did, however, react to the new situation in a restrictive way reminiscent of their British colleagues, cranking up prices and doing away with the low-price market.

Authors, now guaranteed the rights to their own works, were often annoyed by this development. Heinrich Heine, for example, wrote to his publisher Julius Campe on October 24, 1854, in a rather acerbic mood: "Due to the tremendously high prices you have established, I will hardly see a second edition of the book anytime soon. But you must set lower prices, dear Campe, for otherwise I really don't see why I was so lenient with my material interests."

original story link here;
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html#

giovonni

20th August 2010, 22:47

As you can see in this German article, I am not alone in seeing the destruction of the American middle class as a powerful trend in the U.S. It can be reversed, consider what Germany looked like 60 years ago, but not if the current trends continue. This is yet another screaming alarm bell telling us how important the November election is going to be.If the Republicans take power and attempt to reassert their policies, a full bore depression would not surprise me.

The End of the American dream?
http://www.spiegel.de/images/image-121639-panoV9-utks.jpg
view photo gallery here> http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-58334.html

While America's super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing.

Ventura is a small city on the Pacific coast, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles. Luxury homes with a view of the ocean dot the hillsides, and the beaches are popular with surfers. Ventura is storybook California. "It's a well-off place," says Captain William Finley. "But about 20 percent of the city is what we call at risk of homelessness." Finley heads the local branch of the Salvation Army.

Last summer Ventura launched a pilot program, managed by Finley, that allows people to sleep in their cars within city limits. This is normally illegal, both in Ventura and in the rest of the country, where local officials and residents are worried about seeing run-down vans full of Mexican migrant workers parked on residential streets.

But sometime at the beginning of last year, people in Ventura realized that the cars parked in front of their driveways at night weren't old wrecks, but well-tended station wagons and hatchbacks. And the people sleeping in them weren't fruit pickers or the homeless, but their former neighbors.

Finley also noticed a change. Suddenly twice as many people were taking advantage of his social service organization's free meals program, and some were even driving up in BMWs -- apparently reluctant to give up the expensive cars that reminded them of better times.

Finley calls them "the new poor." "That is a different category of people that I think we're seeing," he says. "They are people who never in their wildest imaginations thought they would be homeless." They're people who had enough money -- a lot of money, in some cases -- until recently.

"The image of what is a poor person in today's day and age doesn't fly. When I was growing up a poor person, and we grew up fairly poor, you drove a 10-year-old car that probably had some dents in it. You know, there was one car for the family and you lived out of the food bank," says Finley. "In the past, you got yourself out of poverty and were on your way up."

American Way Heads in Opposite Direction

It was the American way, a path taken by millions. "Today the image is you're getting newer late model cars that at one point cost somebody 40, 50 grand, and they're at wits end, now they're living out of the food banks. And for many of them it takes a lot to swallow their pride," says Finley.

Today the American way is often headed in the opposite direction: downward.

For a while, America seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the worst economic crisis in decades -- with renewed vigor and energy -- just as it had done in the wake of past crises.

The government was announcing new economic growth figures by as early as last fall, much earlier than expected. The banks, moribund until recently, were back to earning billions. Companies nationwide are reporting strong growth, and the stock market has almost returned to it pre-crisis levels. Even the number of billionaires grew by a healthy 17 percent in 2009.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and 40 other billionaires pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropy, either while still alive or after death. Is America a country so blessed with affluence that it can afford to give away billions, just like that?

Growing Resentment

Gates' move could also be interpreted as a PR campaign, in a country where the super-rich sense that although they are profiting from the crisis, as was to be expected, the number of people adversely affected has grown enormously. They also sense that there is growing resentment in American society against those at the top.

For people in the lower income brackets, the recovery already seems to be falling apart. Experts fear that the US economy could remain weak for many years to come. And despite the many government assistance programs, the small amount of hope they engender has yet to be felt by the general public. On the contrary, for many people things are still headed dramatically downward.

According to a recent opinion poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that the recession is still in full swing. And this time it isn't just the poor who are especially hard-hit, as they usually are during recessions.

This time the recession is also affecting well-educated people who had been earning a good living until now. These people, who see themselves as solidly middle-class, now feel more threatened than ever before in the country's history. Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

Unemployment Persists

In a recent cover story titled "So long, middle class," the New York Post presented its readers with "25 statistics that prove that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America." Last week, the leading online columnist Arianna Huffington issued the almost apocalyptic warning that "America is in danger of becoming a Third World country."

In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn't overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.

The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.

More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and are using up their savings, the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are.

Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse.

Where Did All the Money Go?

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Where did all the money go? All the enormous market gains and corporate earnings, the profits from the boom in the financial markets and the 110-percent increase in the gross national product in the last 30 years? It went to those who had always had more than enough already.

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s, except that hardly anyone has minded until now.

Little Chance of the American Dream

In America, the free market is king, and people with low incomes are seen as having only themselves to blame. Those who make a lot of money are applauded -- and emulated. The only problem is that Americans have long overlooked the fact that the American Dream was becoming a reality for fewer and fewer people.

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4-percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation.

So far, politicians have failed to come up with solutions for the growing social crisis. Washington is still waiting for jobs that aren't coming. President Barack Obama and his administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the notion that Americans will eventually pull themselves up by their bootstraps -- preferably by doing the same thing they've always done: spending money. Domestic consumer spending is responsible for two-thirds of American economic output.

But even though Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to pump money into the market, and even though the government deficit has now reached the dizzying level of $1.4 trillion, such efforts have remained unsuccessful.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last week, and described communities that couldn't even afford to maintain their streets anymore.

The problem is that many Americans can no longer spend money on consumer products, because they have no savings. In some cases, their houses have lost half of their value. They no longer qualify for low-interest loans. They are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.

Turning Out the Lights

As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, for example, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services. Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, has shut off a third of its streetlights to save electricity.

There are many discrepancies in America in the wake of the financial crisis. On the one hand, the Fed is constantly printing fresh money, and the government spent $182 billion to bail out a single company, the insurance giant AIG. On the other hand, the lights are in fact going out in some areas, because Washington, citing the need to reduce spending, is unwilling to provide local governments with financial assistance. "America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere," economist Krugman warns.

Chanelle Sabedra is already on that road. She and her husband have been sleeping in their car for almost three weeks now. "We never saw this coming, never ever," says Sabedra. She starts to cry. "I'm an adult, I can take care of myself one way or another, and same with my husband, but (my kids are) too little to go through these things." She has three children; they are nine, five and three years old.

"We had a house further south, in San Bernardino," says Sabedra. Her husband lost his job building prefab houses in July 2009. The utility company turned off the gas. "We were boiling water on the barbeque to bathe our kids," she says. No longer able to pay the rent, the Sabedras were evicted from their house in August.

Friends and relatives had few resources to help them. Now they live in a room at the Salvation Army homeless shelter in downtown Ventura, which is run by Captain Finley.

The sudden plunge into homelessness is a reality that's difficult to understand, given the images of America we are accustomed to seeing in television series and films. They always depict homes with well-kept yards and two-car garages with basketball hoops attached to them. This America still exists, but it's shrinking. And often those who are managing to keep the illusion alive can hardly afford to do so.

Americans have been struggling with a rising cost of living for the past 20 years. At the beginning of the decade, families were already paying twice as much for health insurance and their mortgages than the previous generation did.

"To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce," says Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who President Obama appointed to chair the congressional panel to oversee the government's bank bailout program. According to Warren, the average family has spent all of its income and used up its savings "just to stay afloat a little while longer."

Spiraling Debt

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.

Chanelle Sabedra's husband has found another job, this time as a warehouse worker for a company that makes aircraft turbines. But he doesn't earn enough to get the family out of the homeless shelter. "I haven't got a new job yet," says Sabedra. Her husband's job doesn't pay enough, and the couple has now joined the growing ranks of the working poor, for whom even two low-wage jobs are insufficient to feed their families. "We need the second income," says Sabedra. "Just the baby alone is $600 a month for half-day care."

In pre-recession America, she and her husband would have had two jobs each to make ends meet. They would have worked at the cash register at Wal-Mart during the day, flipped burgers at McDonald's in the early evening and perhaps spent half the night working as a security guard or cleaning buildings. These are all low-paying jobs, hardly careers, but the combined income is usually enough to keep a family afloat. In pre-recession America, life wasn't luxurious for Chanelle Sabedra, but it was doable if they were willing to work hard enough and sacrifice enough of their lives to stay afloat.

What kind of a job is she looking for now? "Anything right now. Mostly I'm looking for retail, or just anything to get me started, but there's just nothing out there," says Sabedra.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
original
URL: below
* http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,712496,00.html

giovonni

22nd August 2010, 17:10

This is a pretty good overview of what those of us who are studying the nature of consciousness -- what your faithful editor does when not doing SR -- are exploring. This is all part of an important emerging trend, which is pushing the old reductionist materialist paradigm into crisis.

from~ The Huffington PostAugust 22, 2010

Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone

by
Robert Lanza, M.D

http://www.robertlanza.com/images/huff_post/does_death_exist.jpg

Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.

More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.

Of course, we live in the same world. Particles have a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on properties. So until the present is determined, how can there be a past? According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word "black hole"), "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past." Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the "probability waves collapse." But there's still uncertainty, for instance, as to what's underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there's a probability you'll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment.

But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.

Like the light from Wheeler's quasar, historical events such as who killed JFK, might also depend on events that haven't occurred yet. There's enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality. According to biocentrism, space and time are relative to the individual observer - we each carry them around like turtles with shells.

History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

original story here;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-the-past-exist-yet-e_b_683103.html

giovonni

30th August 2010, 21:03

The Coming Food Crisis

Global food security is stretched to the breaking point, and Russia's fires and Pakistan's floods are only making a bad situation worse.

BY JOHN D. PODESTA, JAKE CALDWELL | AUGUST 26, 2010

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/hunger.jpg

There was already little margin for error in a world where, for the first time in history, 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But the fragility of world food markets has been underscored by the tragic events of this summer.

The brutal wildfires and crippling drought in Russia are decimating wheat crops and prompting shortsighted export bans. The ongoing floods and widespread crop destruction in Pakistan are creating a massive humanitarian crisis that has left more than 1,600 dead and some 16 million homeless and hungry in a region vital to U.S. national security. These and other climate crises trigger widespread food-price volatility, disproportionately and relentlessly devastating the world's poor.

Less noticed has been the spiking price of wheat -- up 50 percent since early June. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recently cut its 2010 global wheat forecast by 4 percent amid fears of a scramble among national governments to secure supplies. As wheat prices climb, demand for other essential food crops such as rice will increase as part of a knock-on effect on world food markets, driving up costs for consumers. In particular, Egypt and other countries that depend heavily on Russian wheat might see dramatic price increases and unrest in the streets.

Fortunately, there are signs we will likely avoid a repeat of the 2007-2008 food crisis, when prices jumped as much as 100 percent and led to deadly riots in Port-au-Prince and Mogadishu. This year, bumper crops in the United States, alongside replenished wheat stocks globally, may be adequate to offset shortages due to the fires in Russia. But these short-term measures should not lull us into complacency or a false sense of confidence. We still have neither a strategy nor a solution to ending global hunger.

Note;
John D. Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. Jake Caldwell is the director of policy for agriculture, trade, and energy at CAP.

In the short term, the United States must implement U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to commit $3.5 billion to food security assistance. Since he made the pledge in 2009, only $812 million has been allocated. Surely the United States can do better, and at a faster pace. Emergency food aid is needed now to prevent famine and needless deaths in Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria. Congress should increase U.S. contributions to the World Food Program and insist on accountability and reform in the distribution of more than $2 billion in annual U.S. food aid. And the Emergency Food Security Program, which allows greater flexibility in international food assistance by allowing purchases from local producers, cash transfers, and food vouchers, is a step in the right direction and deserves congressional support.

Looking beyond the immediate crisis, the United States and other developed countries must renew long-neglected investments in agriculture assistance across the developing world, targeting small farmers as the fundamental drivers of economic growth. In Africa, for example, agriculture employs more than 60 percent of the labor force and accounts for 25 percent of the continent's economic output. And yet, Africa continues to struggle: Nearly 10 million people in the northern Sahel region are suffering from extreme hunger, and most countries still lack adequate investment in agricultural and road infrastructure to facilitate the development of value-added products and new markets.

While the United States provides more than half of the world's food aid, agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979. Not surprisingly, agricultural productivity growth in developing countries is now less than 1 percent annually.

We must also improve how this assistance is targeted. We can reap lasting results by focusing on soil and water conservation and improved crop varieties rather than carbon-intensive fertilizers. Scientific research and appropriate biotechnology can deliver significant crop yield gains and water savings if conducted in a safe and transparent manner. We also must invest in women, who represent up to 80 percent of the food producers in many developing countries, but frequently lack the support and services that will allow them to reinvest hard-earned agricultural gains into health and education for their families.

Internationally, the United States must lead efforts to ensure open and well-regulated agricultural markets. Farm subsidies and tariffs in rich countries must be reduced and commodity markets made more transparent. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicates subsidies for agriculture in the world's richest countries rose to $252.5 billion, or 22 percent of farmers' total receipts in 2009. And impediments to free trade between developing countries must be eliminated.

The Group of Twenty leading developed and developing nations must uphold their pledges of $22 billion to enhance global food security by sending real money out the door. The multilateral Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a new global partnership funded by commitments from the United States, Canada, South Korea, Spain, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is to be commended for issuing $224 million in initial grants to help increase food security and reduce poverty in five developing countries.

But lasting gains in agricultural productivity will require something more -- action to confront climate change. Food shortages resulting from severe crop losses will occur more frequently and take longer to recover from as more people become vulnerable to extreme weather events like the droughts and flooding we see today in Russia and Pakistan. The World Bank predicts that developing countries will require $75 billion to $100 billion a year for the next 40 years to adapt to the effects of climate change on agricultural productivity, infrastructure, and disease.

This year, we may be able to limit the damage to a single supply shock in Russia and Eastern Europe. But even in the best of times, our global food system is stretched to the breaking point by the ever-present challenges of population growth, increased demand from changing diets, higher energy costs, and more extreme weather. Experts at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimate global agricultural productivity must double by 2050 to keep pace with increased demand. Unless we take immediate action, we are destined to race from food crisis to food crisis for generations to come, with grim consequences for the world's poor and our own national security.

John D. Podesta is the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress (CAP) and was White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. Jake Caldwell is the director of policy for agriculture, trade, and energy at CAP.

source;
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/26/the_coming_food_crisis

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For More
A Food Program That's Not About Food:

India's starving children don't need more blind handouts. They need real social change.

By Purnima Menon

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Last year, the New York Times splashed stark images of child malnutrition in India's hinterland across its front page. More recently, another front-page article in the Times reminded the world that India's hunger problem hasn't gone anywhere and told the story of how various social-safety-net programs have failed to help. As the article explains, India still faces endemic problems with chronic malnutrition and hunger -- rates of child nutrition here compare unfavorably with many countries in sub-Saharan Africa -- that government initiatives have failed to address.

The story of why hunger persists in India is long, sometimes depressing, and full of paradoxes, the central one of course being the fact that the country actually has a booming economy and robust food stocks. But really it's a story of poor planning, social exclusion, gender inequality, and above all, a government that's failing to translate new capital into broad prosperity for its people. Because of this, the various schemes for food distribution debated in the recent Times article, which are part of the conversation as India's long-delayed National Food Security Bill wends its way slowly through the political system, will likely do little to create a long-lasting solution to hunger in India. Any real effort will have to start with the country's social and governance problems, and include nutrition programs that pick their targets better.

India's nutrition programs have failed to provide what the most vulnerable members of its population need -- and the new bill under development isn't likely to do enough to address them either. We've known for a long time that the period beginning before a woman gives birth and ending around the second year of her child's life are the crucial years for addressing nutrition. Miss this window, and the battle is largely lost. India's programs are only now just starting to take this "window of opportunity" paradigm into account. But to actually translate a policy into action, reaching all children under 2 with everything that they need (breast-feeding, high-quality foods, immunizations and preventive health care, hygiene and sanitation, and above all, mothers who are healthy themselves), an approach is required that goes far beyond food distribution.

Taking social exclusion, the evidence has consistently shown that marginalized social groups -- particularly lower castes, certain tribes, and some religious minorities -- have poorer access to social-safety-net services and are also more likely to be excluded from India's rapid economic growth. The stories from Madhya Pradesh portrayed in the Times this year and last year exemplify this social exclusion (as does Foreign Policy's recent story on the resource wars in the nearby provinces of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand), as they describe the precarious conditions that exist for India's tribal populations, migrant laborers, and extreme poor.

In 2006, the Supreme Court of India asked the government to universalize projects such as the Integrated Child Development Services, the world's largest health, immunization, and nutrition program for young children. This has certainly helped expand services to excluded geographic areas and groups, but ensuring quality of service and reaching the more vulnerable children is still a challenge.

Gender is a problem as well. Research has shown that empowering women is one of the most effective ways to improve nutrition, especially for children. Studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where I work, have demonstrated that the low status of women contributes to hunger and malnutrition -- not just among the women themselves, but among their children too.

It's easy to see this process at work in India. South Asia, including India, is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, especially a poor woman. Sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, low rates of female education, early marriage, domestic violence, and social exclusion of widows create misery across the life cycle. These gender imbalances lead directly to poor nutrition among women, as well as compromising their children's nutrition. Our research in Bangladesh, for example, shows that women who condone domestic violence have children who are more undernourished than those who do not condone violence.

When it comes to children, malnourished women are much more likely to give birth to a low-weight baby -- birth weight being an important predictor of child survival. Not surprisingly, one-third of babies born in India are born with low birth weight, compared with one-sixth in sub-Saharan Africa.

The extent to which women are allowed to control household spending also affects childhood nutrition. Numerous studies, including those by IFPRI, have shown that income or assets controlled by women are more likely to be spent on items that benefit children and themselves, such as food, clothing, and health care, than assets controlled by men.

As with social exclusion, gender inequality has been the target of a number of government and civil society programs. Sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, early marriage, and domestic violence are illegal -- though they still persist. Some states, including Madhya Pradesh, have conditional cash transfer programs aimed at families with girl children. These programs provide financial incentives to families to keep girls in school and delay marriage. Unfortunately, though, little is known about their impact. This is another problem: Well-intentioned investments are made, but without research into outcomes, little is known about how well they work and how they can be made to work better.

Under the best of circumstances, though, reshaping social norms around gender and class could take a long time. Part of the impetus must come from the Indian media, which to their credit have taken an interest in pushing Indians to question the basic assumptions they grew up with. A long-running TV serial, Balika Vadhu (Child Bride), tackles issues of child marriage and ostracism of widows by showing the daily struggles and stories of a girl married as a child and another married early and widowed at age 16. The show is among the top 10 most-watched soap operas in India. In October 2009, Life Gulmohar Style, a 156-episode radio drama by the BBC World Service Trust aired on FM channels of All India Radio and Dhamaal Radio and took on issues of women's rights, including the question of dowry, in the modern world by portraying the lives of five young people, men and women; the BBC World Service Trust will conduct research on the social impact of the show later this year.

Finally, there's the role of good governance in addressing the crisis. As the recent Times story pointed out, vast resources are being lost to bad planning and corruption. The proposed National Food Security Bill aims to guarantee food security for all people in India, using means such as provision of subsidized food grains. However, it is currently caught up in acrimonious back-and-forth between the group of ministers who drafted its early version and critics who would like to see a more encompassing bill. In either case, it doesn't address any of the broader social problems that are really at the heart of the hunger problem in India.

That's a huge niche for government to fill, as a major report last year from the Institute of Development Studies pointed out, suggesting solutions to governance problems such as poor local-area service delivery, poor outreach to excluded groups, and the overall political economy of nutrition in India. There are ongoing experiments with some approaches to increase transparency and accountability: for example, leaning on local-level government or civil society groups to audit programs. Programs like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which guarantees 100 days of hard-labor employment to poor rural families and sets a minimum wage rate for such labor, has offered ways to inform communities about their rights and address grievances. Such mechanisms should be tried out in nutrition programs as well.

All these efforts notwithstanding, government has a ways to go, both on the national and local levels -- and outside pressure can help. India's media has been, again, a key player in the fight. The Tracking Hunger campaign by the Hindustan Times has continued to portray different dimensions of the hunger and nutrition problem in India, while other papers have covered discussions surrounding the National Food Security Bill as it continues to be developed. But NGOs and research organizations need to continue to offer material to the media and civil society that puts pressure on Indian policymakers (such as IFPRI's India State Hunger Index), while also asking tough questions about how the current programs are functioning.

International donors and NGOs must work on investing in programs and research with a positive effect on women and marginalized classes and minorities. Nutrition, health, and anti-poverty programs must be designed so that they help women control family resources. Leaders at the G-8 and G-20 must force India to confront the role of social exclusion, gender inequality, and poor governance in malnutrition. Research institutions must make the effort to document the effectiveness and impact of ongoing efforts to address food security and nutrition, to report on people who are left out of such programs, and to tell the positive stories of those who implement successful programs in the face of these hurdles.

India's hunger problem is not necessarily fatal. If the country can take some decisive action, reaching out to women and the poor and excluded and scaling up the social safety net in effective ways, it could make radical changes in a comparatively short time. Countries such Brazil, China, and Thailand have made huge leaps in nutrition in their countries, all in a short period of time. India can hardly afford to be left behind.

source:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/26/a_food_program_thats_not_about_food

giovonni

2nd September 2010, 18:50

This is another emerging trend in the redesign of cities. First, they are being broken down into internally coherent segments, such as is happening in Detroit; second, this movement for healtful cities; third, the Green Transition.

Healing Cities Comes to Gaining Ground Conferences

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For immediate release

September 1, 2010

Vancouver, BC - At the turn of the 19th Century no one would have considered planning, designing or building urban spaces without consulting health professionals. Somewhere between then and now until today, where it's a rare occurance, that drop off the agenda. But if you've been paying attention, it's starting to change.

In inviting the Healing Cities Working Group to co-host its community development and social innovation day, Gaining Ground it treading in a new way onto old territory. They bring perspectives on all aspects of health - emotional, social, mental, physical and spiritual - to the conversation and activities of the day.

"The notion of Healthy Cities has been coming into it's own for the past 30 years and you will find that urban planners and developers are starting to take many health considerations into account in their thinking and implementation," says Mark Holland, Urban Planner, a part of the Working Group and this year's moderator. Holland continues, "What is different for us is switching from "health" as an absolute, to "healing" as a whole health process that is ongoing. It's not something that's done and then finished. Healing takes place over time and covers very broad territory including addressing people's spiritual needs. That's new. And while we are developing a framework to use to implement healing aspects in concrete, practical ways into urban planning work, we understand that the process is organic, and unique in each situation."

Holland adds, "We cannot afford to continue to build cities that erode our health, fill our air, water and earth with toxins, add stress to our children's lives, and make our souls feel exhausted. We need to think of cities as places that can make us healthier simply by living in them - and use that vision to drive our planning and design. Creating healthy cities may become a key part of keeping our future health care costs in check - a critical piece in the plan for shaping the determinants of population health. This conference is going to be a rare opportunity to look ahead to a leading edge of planning cities and health initiatives to explore the direct links between urban design and our health and wellbeing."

The full title of 2010's Gaining Ground being held in Vancouver in October, is EcoLogical: The Power of Green Cities to Shape the Future. A green city is a healthy city and we will explore the question, Can we think of a city or other build space as an organism that can be treated and healed? And then, can that built space be one that in turn heals us by simply being in it and engaging in our lives there? On October 7 you will hear the perspectives of not only urban planners, but also transportation expert-s and physicians; not only architects, but also ? and ?.

EcoLogical: The Power of Green Cities to Shape the Future
October 4 - 7, 2010

Healing Cities Day - October 7th www.gaininggroundsummit.com

Vancouver, BC, Downtown

http://www.gaininggroundsummit.com/calendar_Oct7.jpg

Email Marketing by
Center for Urban Innovation | 8-900 Park Blvd. | Victoria | BC | V8V 2T3 | Canada
source:
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=xem94jcab&v=001b3MRj4D6bdofpos7TVDfUfZXes6tsywBR6V55kGCsAFMk 5c2trYvjS3GrN32jlo3S_Vk7pf_Sa9EMoMxHV5nJlWWAIZh3Va J0K-69KWfo2CqxTL3PPmV8TDAWzM7sVpyVOgQ8ILKACjranHbIymi-zn_VFFccKJMKVPt4Uy0MhntgYcnNVeFkg%3D%3D

giovonni

5th September 2010, 19:00

I am trying to buy the Virgin G3 MiFi 2200. I forgot to do it day before yesterday, and David Pogue wrote this glowing piece about it in the NYT, so when I called tonight they were sold out. Coming back from a week teaching at Omega in upstate New York I stayed at a decent New York hotel -- whose name I will mercifully leave unmentioned, because they didn't mean for it to happen -- whose internet collapsed, forcing me out into the night to do SR. Think about it: $40 a month for unlimited usage, paid only when you need it, nothing when you don't, and it costs $149.95. Near Broadband speed. How cool is that?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/02/business/JP-POGUE/JP-POGUE-articleInline.jpg

September 1, 2010
Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap
By DAVID POGUE

Someday, they’ll build wireless Internet into every building, just the way they build in running water, heat and electricity today. Someday, we won’t have to drive around town looking for a coffee shop when we need to check our e-mail.

If you want ubiquitous Internet today, though, you have several choices. They’re all compromised and all expensive.

You could get online using only a smartphone, but you’ll pay at least $80 a month and you’ll have to view the Internet through a shrunken keyhole of a screen. You could equip your laptop with one of those cellular air cards or U.S.B. sticks, which cost $60 a month, but you’d be limited to 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month (and how are you supposed to gauge that?). You could use tethering, in which your laptop uses your cellphone as a glorified Internet antenna — but that adds $20 or $30 to your phone bill, has a fixed data limit and eats through your phone’s battery charge in an hour.

Last year, you could hear minds blowing coast to coast when Novatel introduced a new option: the MiFi. It creates a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot that, because it’s the size of a porky credit card, can go with you everywhere. The MiFi gets its Internet signal from a 3G cellphone network and converts it into a Wi-Fi signal that up to five people can share.

You can just leave the thing in your pocket, your laptop bag or your purse to pump out a fresh Internet signal to everyone within 30 feet, for four hours on a charge of the removable battery. You’re instantly online whenever you fire up your laptop, netbook, Wi-Fi camera, game gadget, iPhone or iPod Touch.

The MiFi released by Virgin Mobile this week ($150) is almost exactly the same thing as the one offered by Verizon and, until recently, Sprint — but there’s a twist that makes it revolutionary all over again.

The Virgin MiFi, like its rivals, is still an amazing gizmo to have on long car rides for the family, on woodsy corporate offsite meetings, at disaster sites, at trade show booths or anywhere you can’t get Wi-Fi. If you live alone, the MiFi could even be your regular home Internet service, too — one that you can take with you when you head out the door. And it’s still insanely useful when you’re stuck on a plane on a runway.

But three things about the Virgin MiFi are very, very different. First, Virgin’s plan is unlimited. You don’t have to sweat through the month, hoping you don’t exceed the standard 5-gigabyte data limit, as you do with the cellular-modem products from Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. (If you exceed 5 gigabytes, you pay steep per-megabyte overage charges, or in T-Mobile’s case, you get your Internet speed slowed down for the rest of the month.)

If you hadn’t noticed, unlimited-data plans are fast disappearing — but here’s Virgin, offering up an unlimited Internet plan as if it never got the memo.

Second, Virgin requires no contract. You can sign up for service only when you need it. In other words, it’s totally O.K. with Virgin if you leave the thing in your drawer all year, and activate it only for, say, the two summer months when you’ll be away. That’s a huge, huge deal in this era when every flavor of Internet service, portable or not, requires a two-year commitment.

Third, the service price for this no-commitment, unlimited, portable hot spot is — are you sitting down? — $40 a month.

That’s no typo. It’s $40 a month. Compare that with the cheapest cellular modems from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint: $60 a month. T-Mobile also charges $40 a month for its cellular modems. But all four of those big companies require a two-year contract, and come with those scary 5-gigabyte monthly data limits.

(There’s actually another Virgin plan available, too: you can pay $10 for a 100-megabyte chunk of Internet use that expires in 10 days. It’s intended for people who are heading out for the weekend and just want to keep in touch with e-mail without having to fork over a whole month’s worth of money — and without paying $15 or $25 for each night of overpriced hotel Wi-Fi. And speaking of options, Virgin also offers a standard U.S.B. plug-in cellular modem with exactly the same pricing details.)

I’ve pounded my head against the fine print, grilled the product managers and researched the heck out of this, and I simply cannot find the catch.

Is it the speed? No. You’re getting exactly the same 3G speed you’d get on rival cellular modems and MiFi’s. That is, about as fast as a DSL modem. A cell modem doesn’t give you cable-modem speed, but you’ll have no problem watching online videos and, where you have a decent Sprint signal, even doing video chats.

Is it the coverage? Not really; Virgin uses Sprint’s 3G cellular Internet network, which is excellent. You’re getting exactly the same battery life and convenience of Verizon’s MiFi — for two-thirds the monthly price.

(Why would Sprint allow Virgin to use its data network but undercut its own pricing in such a brazen way? Because Sprint is focused on promoting its 4G phones and portable hot spots — even faster Internet, available so far only in a few cities. For example, its Overdrive portable hot spot is $100 after rebate, with a two-year commitment. The service is $60 a month for 5 gigabytes of 3G data and unlimited 4G data.)

That’s not to say that there’s no fine print whatsoever.

First, the Virgin plan doesn’t include roaming off Sprint’s network; the old Sprint MiFi plans did. According to Virgin, that’s not a big deal — the regular Sprint network covers 262 million people, whereas roaming would cover 12 million more — but it means that you might be out of luck in smaller towns.

Second, the Virgin MiFi can’t plug directly into your computer’s U.S.B. port to act as a wired cellular modem, like other carriers’ MiFi units. You can connect to it only wirelessly, if you care. (You can still charge it from your computer’s U.S.B. jack, but very slowly. A wall outlet or car adapter is a much better bet.)

Finally, remember that the Virgin MiFi is still a MiFi, so it’s a bit uncommunicative. It has only a single, illuminated button that serves as the on-off switch and an indicator light that blinks cryptically in different colors. You have to press that button and wait about 20 seconds before you can get online.

But come on: $40 a month? With no commitment or contract?

I did a little survey of broadband Internet prices among my Twitter followers. Turns out $40 a month is not only a great price for cellular (portable) Internet service — it’s among the lowest broadband prices in America, period. In some areas you can pay $35 a month for DSL service. But most people pay $50 to $60 for high-speed Internet, which makes the Virgin deal seem even more incredible.

And unlike those plans, Virgin lets you turn on service only when you want it. You can buy service — as with a prepaid phone —either by calling an 800 number or visiting a Web site. Handily enough, you can get onto the Virgin Web site to re-activate your MiFi, even if you’d previously stopped paying for service.

The MiFi’s portability has always made it an exceptionally flexible and useful little gadget — and Virgin’s prepaid model, unlimited data plan and dirt-cheap pricing just multiply that flexibility. And if Virgin can make money with a plan like this, the mind boggles at just how overpriced the similar offerings from its rivals must really be.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/personaltech/02pogue.html?_r=1

giovonni

6th September 2010, 16:56

This is the second major piece in a popular magazine in less than a week addressing quantum mechanics and consciousness. When a subject like this begins appearing frequently in the popular press it is because it is reaching consensus in the scientific community.

Back From the Future
08.26.2010
A series of quantum experiments shows that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. Does that mean the universe has a destiny—and the laws of physics pull us inexorably toward our prewritten fate?
by Zeeya Merali; photography by Adam Magyar

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future/future1.jpg

Jeff Tollaksen may well believe he was destined to be here at this point in time. We’re on a boat in the Atlantic, and it’s not a pleasant trip. The torrential rain obscures the otherwise majestic backdrop of the volcanic Azorean islands, and the choppy waters are causing the boat to lurch. The rough sea has little effect on Tollaksen, barely bringing color to his Nordic complexion. This is second nature to him; he grew up around boats. Everyone would agree that events in his past have prepared him for today’s excursion. But Tollaksen and his colleagues are investigating a far stranger possibility: It may be not only his past that has led him here today, but his future as well.

Tollaksen’s group is looking into the notion that time might flow backward, allowing the future to influence the past. By extension, the universe might have a destiny that reaches back and conspires with the past to bring the present into view. On a cosmic scale, this idea could help explain how life arose in the universe against tremendous odds. On a personal scale, it may make us question whether fate is pulling us forward and whether we have free will.

The boat trip has been organized as part of a conference sponsored by the Foundational Questions Institute to highlight some of the most controversial areas in physics. Tollaksen’s idea certainly meets that criterion. And yet, as crazy as it sounds, this notion of reverse causality is gaining ground. A succession of quantum experiments confirm its predictions—showing, bafflingly, that measurements performed in the future can influence results that happened before those measurements were ever made.

As the waves pound, it’s tough to decide what is more unsettling: the boat’s incessant rocking or the mounting evidence that the arrow of time—the flow that defines the essential narrative of our lives—may be not just an illusion but a lie.

Tollaksen, currently at Chapman University in Orange County, California, developed an early taste for quantum mechanics, the theory that governs the motion of particles in the subatomic world. He skipped his final year of high school, instead attending physics lectures by the charismatic Nobel laureate Richard Feynman at Caltech in Pasadena and learning of the paradoxes that still fascinate and frustrate physicists today.

Primary among those oddities was the famous uncertainty principle, which states that you can never know all the properties of a particle at the same time. For instance, it is impossible to measure both where the particle is and how fast it is moving; the more accurately you determine one aspect, the less precisely you can measure the other. At the quantum scale, particles also have curiously split personalities that allow them to exist in more than one place at the same time—until you take a look and check up on them. This fragile state, in which the particle can possess multiple contradictory attributes, is called a superposition. According to the standard view of quantum mechanics, measuring a particle’s properties is a violent process that instantly snaps the particle out of superposition and collapses it into a single identity. Why and how this happens is one of the central mysteries of quantum mechanics.

“The textbook view of measurements in quantum mechanics is inspired by biology,” Tollaksen tells me on the boat. “It’s similar to the idea that you can’t observe a system of animals without affecting them.” The rain is clearing, and the captain receives radio notification that some dolphins have been spotted a few minutes away; soon we’re heading toward them. Our attempts to spy on these animals serve as the zoological equivalent of what Tollaksen terms “strong measurements”—the standard type in quantum mechanics —because they are anything but unobtrusive. The boat is loud; it churns up water as it speeds to the location. When the dolphins finally show themselves, they swim close to the boat, arcing through the air and playing to their audience. According to conventional quantum mechanics, it is similarly impossible to observe a quantum system without interacting with the particles and destroying the fragile quantum behavior that existed before you looked.

Most physicists accept these peculiar restrictions as part and parcel of the theory. Tollaksen was not so easily appeased. “I was smitten, and I knew there was no chance I was ever going to do anything else with my life,” he recalls. On Feynman’s advice, the teenager moved to Boston to study physics at MIT. But he missed the ocean. “For the first time in my life, I lost the background sound of surf,” he says. “That was actually traumatic.”

Mindful that a job in esoteric physics might not be the best way to put food on his family’s table, Tollaksen worked on a computing start-up company while pursuing his Ph.D. But if the young man wasn’t sure of his calling, fate quickly gave him a nudge when a physicist named Yakir Aharonov visited the neighboring Boston University. Aharonov, now at Chapman with Tollaksen, was renowned for having codiscovered a bizarre quantum mechanical effect in which particles can be affected by electric and magnetic fields, even in regions where those fields should have no reach. But Tollaksen was most taken by another area of Aharonov’s research: a time-twisting interpretation of quantum mechanics.

“Aharonov was one of the first to take seriously the idea that if you want to understand what is happening at any point in time, it’s not just the past that is relevant. It’s also the future,” Tollaksen says. In particular, Aharonov reanalyzed the indeterminism that forms the backbone of quantum mechanics. Before quantum mechanics arrived on the scene, physicists believed that the laws of physics could be used to determine the future of the universe and every object within it. By this thinking, if we knew the properties of every particle on the planet we could, in principle, calculate any person’s fate; we could even calculate all the thoughts in his or her head.
+++

That belief crumbled when experiments began to reveal the indeterministic effects of quantum mechanics—for instance, in the radioactive decay of atoms. The problem goes like this, Tollaksen says: Take two radioactive atoms, so identical that “even God couldn’t see the difference between them.” Then wait. The first atom might decay a minute later, but the second might go another hour before decaying. This is not just a thought experiment; it can really be seen in the laboratory. There is nothing to explain the different behaviors of the two atoms, no way to predict when they will decay by looking at their history, and—seemingly—no definitive cause that produces these effects. This indeterminism, along with the ambiguity inherent in the uncertainty principle, famously rankled Einstein, who fumed that God doesn’t play dice with the universe.

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It bothered Aharonov as well. “I asked, what does God gain by playing dice?” he says. Aharonov accepted that a particle’s past does not contain enough information to fully predict its fate, but he wondered, if the information is not in its past, where could it be? After all, something must regulate the particle’s behavior. His answer—which seems inspired and insane in equal measure—was that we cannot perceive the information that controls the particle’s present behavior because it does not yet exist.

“Nature is trying to tell us that there is a difference between two seemingly identical particles with different fates, but that difference can only be found in the future,” he says. If we’re willing to unshackle our minds from our preconceived view that time moves in only one direction, he argues, then it is entirely possible to set up a deterministic theory of quantum mechanics.

In 1964 Aharonov and his colleagues Peter Bergmann and Joel Lebowitz, all then at Yeshiva University in New York, proposed a new framework called time-symmetric quantum mechanics. It could produce all the same treats as the standard form of quantum mechanics that everyone knew and loved, with the added benefit of explaining how information from the future could fill in the indeterministic gaps in the present. But while many of Aharonov’s colleagues conceded that the idea was built on elegant mathematics, its philosophical implications were hard to swallow. “Each time I came up with a new idea about time, people thought that something must be wrong,” he says.

Perhaps because of the cognitive dissonance the idea engendered, time-symmetric quantum mechanics did not catch on. “For a long time, it was nothing more than a curiosity for a few philosophers to discuss,” says Sandu Popescu at the University of Bristol, in England, who works on the time-symmetric approach with Aharonov. Clearly Aharonov needed concrete experiments to demonstrate that actions carried out in the future could have repercussions in the here and now.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Tollaksen teamed up with Aharonov to design such upside-down experiments, in which outcome was determined by events occurring after the experiment was done. Generally the protocol included three steps: a “preselection” measurement carried out on a group of particles; an intermediate measurement; and a final, “postselection” step in which researchers picked out a subset of those particles on which to perform a third, related measurement. To find evidence of backward causality—information flowing from the future to the past—the experiment would have to demonstrate that the effects measured at the intermediate step were linked to actions carried out on the subset of particles at a later time.

Tollaksen and Aharonov proposed analyzing changes in a quantum property called spin, roughly analogous to the spin of a ball but with some important differences. In the quantum world, a particle can spin only two ways, up or down, with each direction assigned a fixed value (for instance, 1 or –1). First the physicists would measure spin in a set of particles at 2 p.m. and again at 2:30 p.m. Then on another day they would repeat the two tests, but also measure a subset of the particles a third time, at 3 p.m. If the predictions of backward causality were correct, then for this last subset, the spin measurement conducted at 2:30 p.m. (the intermediate time) would be dramatically amplified. In other words, the spin measurements carried out at 2 p.m. and those carried out at 3 p.m. together would appear to cause an unexpected increase in the intensity of spins measured in between, at 2:30 p.m. The predictions seemed absurd, as ridiculous as claiming that you could measure the position of a dolphin off the Atlantic coast at 2 p.m. and again at 3 p.m., but that if you checked on its position at 2:30 p.m., you would find it in the middle of the Mediterranean.

And the amplification would not be restricted to spin; other quantum properties would be dramatically increased to bizarrely high levels too. The idea was that ripples of the measurements carried out in the future could beat back to the present and combine with effects from the past, like waves combining and peaking below a boat, setting it rocking on the rough sea. The smaller the subsample chosen for the last measurement, the more dramatic the effects at intermediate times should be, according to Aharonov’s math. It would be hard to account for such huge amplifications in conventional physics.

For years this prediction was more philosophical than physical because it did not seem possible to perform the suggested experiments. All the team’s proposed tests hinged on being able to make measurements of the quantum system at some intermediate time; but the physics books said that doing so would destroy the quantum properties of the system before the final, postselection step could be carried out. Any attempt to measure the system would collapse its delicate quantum state, just as chasing dolphins in a boat would affect their behavior. Use this kind of invasive, or strong, measurement to check on your system at an intermediate time, and you might as well take a hammer to your apparatus.

By the late 1980s, Aharonov had seen a way out: He could study the system using so-called weak measurements. (Weak measurements involve the same equipment and techniques as traditional ones, but the “knob” controlling the power of the observer’s apparatus is turned way down so as not to disturb the quantum properties in play.) In quantum physics, the weaker the measurement, the less precise it can be. Perform just one weak measurement on one particle and your results are next to useless. You may think that you have seen the required amplification, but you could just as easily dismiss it as noise or an error in your apparatus.

The way to get credible results, Tollaksen realized, was with persistence, not intensity. By 2002 physicists attuned to the potential of weak measurements were repeating their experiments thousands of times, hoping to build up a bank of data persuasively showing evidence of backward causality through the amplification effect.

Just last year, physicist John Howell and his team from the University of Rochester reported success. In the Rochester setup, laser light was measured and then shunted through a beam splitter. Part of the beam passed right through the mechanism, and part bounced off a mirror that moved ever so slightly, due to a motor to which it was attached. The team used weak measurements to detect the deflection of the reflected laser light and thus to determine how much the motorized mirror had moved.

That is the straightforward part. Searching for backward causality required looking at the impact of the final measurement and adding the time twist. In the Rochester experiment, after the laser beams left the mirrors, they passed through one of two gates, where they could be measured again—or not. If the experimenters chose not to carry out that final measurement, then the deflected angles measured in the intermediate phase were boringly tiny. But if they performed the final, postselection step, the results were dramatically different. When the physicists chose to record the laser light emerging from one of the gates, then the light traversing that route, alone, ended up with deflection angles amplified by a factor of more than 100 in the intermediate measurement step. Somehow the later decision appeared to affect the outcome of the weak, intermediate measurements, even though they were made at an earlier time.

This amazing result confirmed a similar finding reported a year earlier by physicists Onur Hosten and Paul Kwiat at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They had achieved an even larger laser amplification, by a factor of 10,000, when using weak measurements to detect a shift in a beam of polarized light moving between air and glass.

For Aharonov, who has been pushing the idea of backward causality for four decades, the experimental vindication might seem like a time to pop champagne corks, but that is not his style. “I wasn’t surprised; it was what I expected,” he says.
+++

Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, admires the fact that Aharonov’s team has always striven to verify its claims experimentally. “This isn’t airy-fairy philosophy—these are real experiments,” he says. Davies has now joined forces with the group to investigate the framework’s implications for the origin of the cosmos (See “Does the Universe Have a Destiny?” below).

Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, agrees that the experiments confirm the existence and power of weak measurements. But while the mathematics of the team’s framework offers a valid explanation for the experimental results, Vedral believes these results alone will not be enough to persuade most physicists to buy into the full time-twisting logic behind it.

For Tollaksen, though, the results are awe-inspiring and a bit scary. “It is upsetting philosophically,” he concedes. “All these experiments change the way that I relate to time, the way I experience myself.” The results have led him to wrestle with the idea that the future is set. If the universe has a destiny that is already written, do we really have a free choice in our actions? Or are all our choices predetermined to fit the universe’s script, giving us only the illusion of free will?

Tollaksen ponders the philosophical dilemma. Was he always destined to become a physicist? If so, are his scientific achievements less impressive because he never had any choice other than to succeed in this career? If I time-traveled back from the 21st century to the shores of Lake Michigan where Tollaksen’s 13-year-old self was reading the works of Feynman and told him that in the future I met him in the Azores and his fate was set, could his teenage self—just to spite me—choose to run off and join the circus or become a sailor instead?

The free will issue is something that Tollaksen has been tackling mathematically with Popescu. The framework does not actually suggest that people could time-travel to the past, but it does allow a concrete test of whether it is possible to rewrite history. The Rochester experiments seem to demonstrate that actions carried out in the future—in the final, postselection step—ripple back in time to influence and amplify the results measured in the earlier, intermediate step. Does this mean that when the intermediate step is carried out, the future is set and the experimenter has no choice but to perform the later, postselection measurement? It seems not. Even in instances where the final step is abandoned, Tollaksen has found, the intermediate weak measurement remains amplified, though now with no future cause to explain its magnitude at all.

I put it to Tollaksen straight: This finding seems to make a mockery of everything we have discussed so far.

Tollaksen is smiling; this is clearly an argument he has been through many times. The result of that single experiment may be the same, he explains, but remember, the power of weak measurements lies in their repetition. No single measurement can ever be taken alone to convey any meaning about the state of reality. Their inherent error is too large. “Your pointer will still read an amplified result, but now you cannot interpret it as having been caused by anything other than noise or a blip in the apparatus,” he says.

In other words, you can see the effects of the future on the past only after carrying out millions of repeat experiments and tallying up the results to produce a meaningful pattern. Focus on any single one of them and try to cheat it, and you are left with a very strange-looking result—an amplification with no cause—but its meaning vanishes. You simply have to put it down to a random error in your apparatus. You win back your free will in the sense that if you actually attempt to defy the future, you will find that it can never force you to carry out postselection experiments against your wishes. The math, Tollaksen says, backs him on this interpretation: The error range in single intermediate weak measurements that are not followed up by the required post*selection will always be just enough to dismiss the bizarre result as a mistake.

physics mainstream isdestined to finally notice his time-twisting ideas, then so it will be.

Tollaksen sums up this confounding argument with one of his favorite quotes, from the ancient Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva: “All is foreseen; but freedom of choice is given.” Or as Tollaksen puts it, “I can have my cake and eat it too.” He laughs.

Here, finally, is the answer to Aharonov’s opening question: What does God gain by playing dice with the universe? Why must the quantum world always retain a degree of fuzziness when we try to look at it through the time slice of the present? That loophole is needed so that the future can exert an overall pull on the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular instance.

“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake,” Aharonov says.

Whether this realization is a masterstroke of genius that explains the mechanism for backward causality or an admission that the future’s influence on the past can never fully be proven is open to debate. Andrew Jordan, who designed the Rochester laser amplification experiment with Howell, notes that there is even fundamental controversy over whether his results support Aharonov’s version of backward causality. No one disputes his team’s straightforward experimental results, but “there is much philosophical thought about what weak values really mean, what they physically correspond to—if they even really physically correspond to anything at all,” Jordan says. “My view is that we don’t have to interpret them as a consequence of the future’s influencing the present, but rather they show us that there is a lot about quantum mechanics that we still have to understand.” Nonetheless, he is open to being convinced otherwise: “A year from now, I may well change my mind.”

Popescu argues that the Rochester findings are hugely important because they open the door to a completely new range of laboratory explorations based on weak measurements. In starting from the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, physicists had not realized such measurements were possible. “With his work on weak measurements, Aharonov began to pose questions about what is possible in quantum mechanics that nobody had ever even thought could be articulated,” Popescu says.

Aharonov remains circumspect. He has spent most of his adult life waiting for recognition of the merit of his theory. If it is destined that mainstream physics should finally take serious notice of his time-twisting ideas, then so it will be.

And Tollaksen? He too is at one with his destiny. A few months ago he moved to Laguna Beach, California. “I’m in a house where I can hear the surf again—what a relief,” he says. He feels that he is finally back to where he was always meant to be.

DOES THE UNIVERSE HAVE A DESTINY?

Is feedback from the future guiding the development of life, the universe, and, well, everything? Paul Davies at Arizona State University in Tempe and his colleagues are investigating whether the universe has a destiny—and if so, whether there is a way to detect its eerie influence.

Cosmologists have long been puzzled about why the conditions of our universe—for example, its rate of expansion—provide the ideal breeding ground for galaxies, stars, and planets. If you rolled the dice to create a universe, odds are that you would not get one as handily conducive to life as ours is. Even if you could take life for granted, it’s not clear that 14 billion years is enough time for it to evolve by chance. But if the final state of the universe is set and is reaching back in time to influence the early universe, it could amplify the chances of life’s emergence.

With Alonso Botero at the University of the Andes in Colombia, Davies has used mathematical modeling to show that bookending the universe with particular initial and final states affects the types of particles created in between. “We’ve done this for a simplified, one-dimensional universe, and now we plan to move up to three dimensions,” Davies says. He and Botero are also searching for signatures that the final state of the universe could retroactively leave on the relic radiation of the Big Bang, which could be picked up by the Planck satellite launched last year.

Ideally, Davies and Botero hope to find a single cosmic destiny that can explain three major cosmological enigmas. The first mystery is why the expansion of the universe is currently speeding up; the second is why some cosmic rays appear to have energies higher than the bounds of normal physics allow; and the third is how galaxies acquired their magnetic fields. “The goal is to find out whether Mother Nature has been doing her own postselections, causing these unexpected effects to appear,” Davies says.

Bill Unruh of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, a leading physicist, is intrigued by Davies’s idea. “This could have real implications for whatever the universe was like in its early history,” he says.

Also see the other articles in this issue's special Beyond Einstein section: Is the Search for Immutable Laws of Nature a Wild-Goose Chase and The Mystery of the Rocketing Particles That Shouldn't Exist.
here;
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-is-search-for-immutable-laws-of-nature-wild-goose-chase

and here;
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/26-mystery-of-particles-that-shouldn.t-exist

original story source;
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future/#

giovonni

22nd September 2010, 20:14

Solar Doubling, Gas Glut Drive Down German Power Prices: Energy Markets

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iiXojRDmW0zU
Rows of solar panels are seen at the Solarworld AG plant in Freiberg, Germany.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iWr39HyOiDEk
Germany is installing 10 times as much solar power capacity this year as the U.S.

By Lars Paulsson - Sep 22, 2010

Solar power may almost double in Germany this year just as a natural gas glut sends electricity prices to near five-month lows.

Capacity at plants converting sunlight to electricity in Europe’s biggest energy market will rise to 18,000 megawatts from 9,786 megawatts, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts. No other power source will grow as fast, increasing the glut that emerged after last year’s recession, UBS AG said.

“What’s new and special in Germany this year is the devilish growth in solar,” Sigurd Lie, a senior analyst at Imarex ASA’s Nena unit, an Oslo-based energy markets research company, said in a Sept. 16 phone interview. “This has kept a lid on prices even as you’ve seen an increase in demand.”

German prices probably won’t gain this year even with power consumption forecast to rise 4 percent, according to Lie, 44, who has tracked electricity markets for 12 years at Nena. Per Lekander, UBS’s head of global utilities research, said in a Sept. 16 e-mail that profits at coal-fired plants, such as those run by E.ON AG and RWE AG, the country’s two biggest utilities, may drop by more than 50 percent to as low as 2 euros ($2.66) a megawatt hour in the next 12 months.

German power for next year, the European benchmark contract, fell to its lowest since July 27 today, trading at 49.25 euros a megawatt hour, according to broker prices on Bloomberg, down 11 percent from this year’s peak of 55.10 euros on June 21. E.ON spokesman Georg Oppermann declined to comment on the UBS forecast while RWE spokeswoman Annett Urbaczka declined to comment on trading matters.

Gas Glut

The contract exceeded 90 euros in July 2008, as a six-year rally in energy prices was coming to an end. Now, natural gas, used to produce about 15 percent of Germany’s electricity, is also damping gains, said Sebastien Terryn, a risk manager at Summit Energy Inc. in Waregem, Belgium.

“German power won’t rise to anywhere near the record levels of 2008 for at least another two years because of the price link with natural gas, which remains a market with ample supplies,” Terryn said by e-mail on Sept. 17. Summit manages about $20 billion of energy purchases annually for clients including Healthcare Trust of America Inc.

U.K. natural gas for this winter is down 18 percent since July 5 to 47.50 pence a therm today. A therm is 100,000 British thermal units. The U.K. gas market, Europe’s biggest, influences prices elsewhere in the region.

Solar Surge

Producers will bring 7,000 to 9,000 megawatts of new solar capacity online in Germany this year, said Francesco d’Avack, a London-based analyst at New Energy Finance. That’s in addition to the 9,786 megawatts in use at the end of last year, which is equivalent to the capacity of about 11 new coal-fired plants.

Germany is installing 10 times as much solar power capacity this year as the U.S. Investors are racing to lock in above- market rates for 20 years while they can. Germany’s parliament decided July 8 on a 16 percent reduction in solar subsidies, and another reduction in the so-called feed-in tariffs is scheduled for January.

Mikio Katayama, president of Sharp Corp., Japan’s biggest solar-panel maker, said last week the Osaka-based company may boost sales by 50 percent this year, faster than it earlier forecast, on increased demand in Europe. Sharp today agreed to buy California’s Recurrent Energy for as much as $305 million. The all-cash deal will be completed by the end of the year, the companies said.

Solar Sales

Global 2010 sales for photovoltaic panels may more than double to as much as 18,000 megawatts and then flatten next year as countries including Germany, Italy and France cut solar energy subsidies, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated.

Germany meets as much as 10 percent of its power demand from the sun on some days, Andreas Haenel, chief executive officer of German solar-plant developer Phoenix Solar AG, said in an interview last month. In the southernmost state of Bavaria, solar power contributes as much as 25 percent of total electricity when the sun shines and demand is low, he said.

Solar power’s share may rise to as much as 7.5 percent of Germany’s total power generation by 2013, according to Deutsche Energy Agentur GmbH, from about 1 percent last year, as measured by industry group Bundesverband Solarwitschaft.

As solar capacity jumps, traders will increasingly depend on data for projecting availability and prices. The European Energy Exchange AG in Leipzig started publishing daily data on expected solar capacity on July 19, in addition to estimates on other German power sources. Solar output was expected to peak today at as much as 7,963 megawatts at 1 p.m. Berlin time, according to a forecast published yesterday.

Surplus Power

The German government also plans to extend the lifespan of aging nuclear power plants. On Sept. 28, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet is set to approve a plan to allow reactors to operate for an average of 12 years beyond a legally mandated closure of 2022, to help the nation of 82 million people transition to renewable power.

Germany’s surplus power is weighing on coal-fired generators. The so-called clean-dark spread, a calculation of forward prices for fuel, power and carbon allowances, was at 5.36 euros a megawatt hour yesterday, according to Bloomberg calculations. That’s down from 11.93 euros at the start of this year and almost 18 euros in December 2008.

Lekander at UBS expects as much as 10,000 megawatts of solar capacity and 2,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity plants to be added in Germany this year. Neither renewable power source is available 24 hours a day, unlike coal or nuclear. Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are collectively adding about 7,000 megawatts of gas-fired capacity a year.

“The spreads have collapsed and won’t recover in a long time because there will be even more overcapacity next year,” Lekander, 48, said.

Source;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-21/solar-doubling-gas-glut-drive-down-german-power-prices-energy-markets.html#

giovonni

23rd September 2010, 17:42

Out of the hysteria of 9/11 has grown a whole movement designed to compromise civil liberties. It had been my hope -- obviously a vain one -- that the Democrats would stop this erosion of privacy. Clearly both parties find fear too politically useful to honor the Constitution.

Feds: Privacy Does Not Exist in ‘Public Places’

by David Kravets

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/09/Picture-8-660x526.png

The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.

The administration, in urging the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse a three-judge panel’s August ruling from the same court, said Monday that Americans should expect no privacy while in public.

“The panel’s conclusion that Jones had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the public movements of his Jeep rested on the premise that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his or her movements in public places, ” Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Smith wrote the court in a petition for rehearing.

The case is an important test of privacy rights as GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting, and can be affixed to moving vehicles by an officer shooting a dart. Three other circuit courts have already said the authorities do not need a warrant for GPS vehicle tracking, Smith pointed out.

The circuit’s ruling means that, in the District of Columbia area, the authorities need a warrant to install a GPS-tracking device on a vehicle. But in much of the United States, including the West, a warrant is not required. Unless the circuit changes it mind, only the Supreme Court can mandate a uniform rule.

The government said the appellate panel’s August decision is “vague and unworkable” and undermines a law enforcement practice used “with great frequency.”

The legal dispute centers on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning a tracking beacon affixed to a container, without a court warrant, to follow a motorist to a secluded cabin. The appeals court said that decision did not apply to today’s GPS monitoring of a suspect, which lasted a month.

The beacon tracked a person, “from one place to another,” whereas the GPS device monitored Jones’ “movements 24 hours a day for 28 days.”

The government argued Monday that the appellate court’s decision “offers no guidance as to when monitoring becomes so efficient or ‘prolonged’ as to constitute a search triggering the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

The appeals court ruled the case “illustrates how the sequence of a person’s movements may reveal more than the individual movements of which it is composed.”

The court said that a person “who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

Source:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/public-privacy/#ixzz10GwocAiu

giovonni

27th September 2010, 17:29

There is a very significant trend taking place in the world: more and more women are entering politics and attaining real power (see the bottom of this report). As in the case of Dilma Rousseff, a number of them have experienced pain and persecution from earlier American backed authoritarian regimes, and we must anticipate reaping the bitter fruit arising from those experiences, as they formulate their policies. The same will be true in the Islamic nations where young politicians bear significant grudges against the U.S. for its ill-conceived wars and policies.

The former guerrilla set to be the world's most powerful woman

Brazil looks likely to elect an extraordinary leader next weekend

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/dynamic/00461/brazil_461080t.jpg
Dilma Rousseff in her 1970 police mugshot, when she led a revolutionary group

then and now

http://mycatbirdseat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/dilma-rousseff.jpg

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Sunday, 26 September 2010

The world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend. Stocky and forceful at 63, this former leader of the resistance to a Western-backed military dictatorship (which tortured her) is preparing to take her place as President of Brazil.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton
, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil's growth rate, rivalling China's, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy.

Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday's presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the "national security state", an arrangement that conservative governments in the US and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favouring their rich friends.

Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead – of more than 50 per cent compared with less than 30 per cent – over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the centre called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January.

Like President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Brazil's neighbour, Ms Rousseff is unashamed of a past as an urban guerrilla which included battling the generals and spending time in jail as a political prisoner. As a little girl growing up in the provincial city of Belo Horizonte, she says she dreamed successively of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter and a trapeze artist. The nuns at her school took her class to the city's poor area to show them the vast gaps between the middle-class minority and the vast majority of the poor. She remembers that when a young beggar with sad eyes came to her family's door she tore a currency note in half to share with him, not knowing that half a banknote had no value.

Her father, Pedro, died when she was 14, but by then he had introduced her to the novels of Zola and Dostoevski. After that, she and her siblings had to work hard with their mother to make ends meet. By 16 she was in POLOP (Workers' Politics), a group outside the traditional Brazilian Communist Party that sought to bring socialism to those who knew little about it.

The generals seized power in 1964 and decreed a reign of terror to defend what they called "national security". She joined secretive radical groups that saw nothing wrong with taking up arms against an illegitimate military regime. Besides cosseting the rich and crushing trade unions and the underclass, the generals censored the press, forbidding editors from leaving gaps in newspapers to show where news had been suppressed.

Ms Rousseff ended up in the clandestine VAR-Palmares (Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). In the 1960s and 1970s, members of such organisations seized foreign diplomats for ransom: a US ambassador was swapped for a dozen political prisoners; a German ambassador was exchanged for 40 militants; a Swiss envoy swapped for 70. They also shot foreign torture experts sent to train the generals' death squads. Though she says she never used weapons, she was eventually rounded up and tortured by the secret police in Brazil's equivalent to Abu Ghraib, the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was given a 25-month sentence for "subversion" and freed after three years. Today she openly confesses to having "wanted to change the world".

In 1973 she moved to the prosperous southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where her second husband, Carlos Araujo, a lawyer, was finishing a four-year term as a political prisoner (her first marriage with a young left-winger, Claudio Galeno, had not survived the strains of two people being on the run in different cities). She went back to university, started working for the state government in 1975, and had a daughter, Paula.

In 1986, she was named finance chief of Porto Alegre, the state capital, where her political talents began to blossom. Yet the 1990s were bitter-sweet years for her. In 1993 she was named secretary of energy for the state, and pulled off the coup of vastly increasing power production, ensuring the state was spared the power cuts that plagued the rest of the country.

She had 1,000km of new electric power lines, new dams and thermal power stations built while persuading citizens to switch off the lights whenever they could. Her political star started shining brightly. But in 1994, after 24 years together, she separated from Mr Araujo, though apparently on good terms. At the same time she was torn between academic life and politics, but her attempt to gain a doctorate in social sciences failed in 1998.

In 2000 she threw her lot in with Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers' Party which set its sights successfully on combining economic growth with an attack on poverty. The two immediately hit it off and she became his first energy minister in 2003. Two years later he made her his chief of staff and has since backed her as his successor. She has been by his side as Brazil has found vast new offshore oil deposits, aiding a leader whom many in the European and US media were denouncing a decade ago as a extreme left-wing wrecker to pull 24 million Brazilians out of poverty. Lula stood by her in April last year as she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a condition that was declared under control a year ago. Recent reports of financial irregularities among her staff do not seem to have damaged her popularity.

Ms Rousseff is likely to invite President Mujica of Uruguay to her inauguration in the New Year. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay – other successful South American leaders who have, like her, weathered merciless campaigns of denigration in the Western media – are also sure to be there. It will be a celebration of political decency – and feminism.

Female representation: A woman's place... is in the government

In recent years, female political representation has undergone significant growth, with dramatic changes occurring in unexpected corners of the globe. In some countries women are dominating cabinets and even parliamentary chambers. By comparison, the UK falls far behind, with only 22 per cent of seats in the Commons currently held by women.

Bolivia In the Bolivian cabinet, 10 men are now matched by 10 women. In 2009, women won 25 per cent of seats in the lower chamber, and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Costa Rica In 2010, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Argentina In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Cuba In 2009, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Rwanda In 2009, women won 56 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 35 per cent in the upper chamber.

Mozambique In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Angola In 2009, women won 38 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Switzerland Has a female-dominated cabinet for the first time. In 2007, women won 29 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Germany In 2009, the cabinet had six women and 10 men. That year, women won 33 per cent of lower chamber seats.

Spain Nine women compared with eight men in cabinet. In 2008, women won 37 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Norway Equal numbers of men and women in the cabinet. Women won 40 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Denmark Nine women and 10 men in cabinet. In 2007, women won 23 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Netherlands Three women and nine men in cabinet. In 2010, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Source;
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-former-guerrilla-set-to-be-the-worlds-most-powerful-woman-2089916.html

giovonni

29th September 2010, 23:19

Longtime SR readers know of my view that water is destiny (See the archives for two of my essays on this subject, or go to explorejournal.com/content/schwartz. Here is further evidence of this trend. It isn't hard to understand the implications of this story on life in Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Tucson.

Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/28/us/mead-1/mead-1-articleLarge.jpg
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is tunneling under Lake Mead to install an intake valve that could continue operating until water levels dropped below 1,000 feet.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/28/us/28mead-graphic/28mead-graphic-popup.jpg

Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning
By FELICITY BARRINGER

LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Nev. — A once-unthinkable day is looming on the Colorado River.

Barring a sudden end to the Southwest’s 11-year drought, the distribution of the river’s dwindling bounty is likely to be reordered as early as next year because the flow of water cannot keep pace with the region’s demands.

For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet.

If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced.

This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected.

But the operating plan also lays out a proposal to prevent Lake Mead from dropping below the trigger point. It allows water managers to send 40 percent more water than usual downstream to Lake Mead from Lake Powell in Utah, the river’s other big reservoir, which now contains about 50 percent more water than Lake Mead.

In that case, the shortage declaration would be avoided and Lake Mead’s levels restored to 1,100 feet or so.

Lake Powell, fed by rain and snowmelt that create the Colorado and tributaries, has risen more than 60 feet from a 2004 low because the upper basin states, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, do not use their full allocations. The upper basin provides a minimum annual flow of 8.23 million acre feet to Arizona, Nevada and California. (An acre-foot of water is generally considered the amount two families of four use annually.)

In its August report the Bureau of Reclamation said the extra replenishment from Lake Powell was the likeliest outcome. Nonetheless, said Terry Fulp, the bureau’s deputy regional director for the Lower Colorado Region, it is the first time ever that the bureau has judged a critical shortage to be remotely possible in the near future.

“We’re approaching the magical line that would trigger shortage,” Mr. Fulp said. “We have the lowest 11-year average in the 100-year-plus recorded history of flows on the basin.”

The reservoir is now less than 15 inches above the all-time low of 1,083.2 feet set in 1956.

But back then, while the demand from California farmland was similar, if not greater, the population was far smaller. Perhaps 9.5 million people in the three states in the lower Colorado River basin depended on the supply in the late 1950s; today more than 28 million people do.

The impact of the declining water level is visible in the alkaline bathtub rings on the reservoir’s walls and the warning lights for mariners high on its rocky outcroppings. National Park Service employees have repeatedly moved marinas, chasing the receding waterline.

Adding to water managers’ unease, scientists predict that prolonged droughts will be more frequent in decades to come as the Southwest’s climate warms. As Lake Mead’s level drops, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity, which, like the Colorado River water, is sent around the Southwest, diminishes with it. If Lake Mead levels fall to 1,050 feet, it may be impossible to use the dam’s turbines, and the flow of electricity could cease.

The fretting that dominates today’s discussions about the river contrasts with the old-style optimism about the Colorado’s plenitude that has usually prevailed since Hoover Dam — then called Boulder Dam — was completed 75 years ago, impounding the water from Lake Mead.

The worries have provoked action: cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have undertaken extensive conservation programs. Between 2000 and 2009, Phoenix’s average per-capita daily household use has dropped almost 20 percent; Las Vegas’s has dropped 21.3 percent.

Nonetheless, “if the river flow continues downward and we can’t build back up supply, Las Vegas is in big trouble,” Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said in an interview.

While Las Vegas is one of the Colorado River’s smaller clients — it consumes 2 percent of the river’s allocated deliveries— the city relies on Lake Mead for 90 percent of its water supply. From 2002 to 2009, the metropolitan area’s population mushroomed by nearly 40 percent, to 1.9 million from 1.37 million.

In response to the population boom and the drought, which began in 1999, the authority began an aggressive effort to encourage water conservation in 2002.

Now it is expanding its options: it is tunneling under the bottom of Lake Mead to install a third intake valve that could continue operating until lake levels dropped below 1,000 feet.

Saddle Island, the construction staging site on the reservoir, looks like an abstract painting, its dusty russet ground covered with interlacing segments of the 2,500 concrete rings that will make up the three-mile-long pipe.

Ms. Mulroy has also pushed aggressively for pipelines to carry distant groundwater to the Las Vegas area; most contentious is a planned 285-mile pipeline that would cross the state diagonally and take groundwater from the Snake Valley, on the Nevada-Utah border, to Las Vegas.

The authority has also spent about $147 million on a program to encourage homeowners and businesses to eliminate their lawns in favor of the rock, grass and cactus landscaping known as xeriscaping. More than 70 percent of household water usage is attributed to outdoor use, Ms. Mulroy said.

Residents can now water their yards only three days a week, before 11 a.m. and after 7 p.m., and the restrictions are to tighten this winter.

Dolores Cormier, 82, who lives on Monterrey Avenue on the southern side of Las Vegas, reconfigured her front and side lawns, installing a rocky cover and drip irrigation. Under a water authority program known as Water Smart Landscapes (colloquially, Cash for Grass), she has received $2,689 in utility subsidies that will offset the $5,600 or so she said the xeriscaping cost her.

She is pleased with the new look but said her average monthly water bill of $45 or so has yet to decline, perhaps because she still tends grass in her small backyard. “I need some lawn,” she confessed.

If the 1,075 level is broken at Lake Mead next year, more drastic conservation measures will be needed, officials warn.

“We have a very finite resource and demand which increases and enlarges every day,” said John A. Zebre, a Wyoming lawyer and the president of the Colorado River Water Users Association.

“The problem is always going to be there,” he said. “Everything is driven by that problem.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28mead.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1285801201-qKFJ5jMJhdNy2ILBdgbLlw#

giovonni

30th September 2010, 20:10

For over a decade I have been writing about the growth of the American Gulag, and its toxic effects on society (See SR archives). Here is the latest on this national self-mutilation trend. Certainly we need prisons, all societies do. But when matters rise to this level, where the warehousing of human beings is a major industry it is a sign of deep social dysfunction.

from
DANIEL TENCER - The Raw Story
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 -- 9:26 pm http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/prison.jpg

One in 28 US kids has a parent in prison: study

The US's exceptionally high rate of incarceration is causing economic damage not only to the people behind bars but to their children and taxpayers as a whole, a new study finds.

The study (PDF) from the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project, released Tuesday, reports that the US prison population has more than quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, making the US's incarceration rate the highest in the world, beating former champions like Russia and South Africa.

This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and the cost of prisons to states now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every 15 state dollars spent -- a figure the study describes as "staggering."

According to the authors, one in every 28 children in the US has a parent behind bars -- up from one in 125 just 25 years ago. This is significant, the study argues, because children of incarcerated parents are much likelier to struggle in life.

A family with an incarcerated parent on average earns 22 percent less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before, the study finds. And children with parents in prison are significantly likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23 percent of students with jailed parents are expelled, compared to 4 percent for the general population.

Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children’s future economic mobility," the survey notes. "With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children."

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and "two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses," the study notes.

Not surprisingly, the statistics show large disparities when broken down by race. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4 percent, have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for white children it's one in 57.

The study also finds that the US now has a prison population larger than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate in the US is five times that of Great Britain -- 753 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 151 inmates in the UK. Even the British incarceration rate is high compared to some countries: 96 in France and 88 in Germany, for example.

The cost of such a high incarceration rate hasn't been lost on lawmakers in this era of budget deficits. Over the past few years, numerous states have released prisoners early to reduce incarceration costs. California granted early release to some 1,500 inmates this year, and the state hopes to reduce its prison population by a total of 6,500.

But those early releases have proven controversial, both for political and public safety reasons. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

In February, lawmakers in Oregon temporarily suspended a program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) after an anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in alarming tones. “A woman’s asleep in her own apartment,” a narrator said. “Suddenly, she’s attacked by a registered sex offender and convicted burglar.”

In Illinois, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat, described as “a big mistake” an early release program that sent some convicts who had committed violent crimes home from prison in a matter of weeks. Of more than 1,700 prisoners released over three months, more than 50 were soon accused of new violations.

An early release program in Colorado meant to save $19 million has scaled back its ambitions by $14 million after officials found far fewer prisoners than anticipated to be wise release risks. In more than five months, only 264 prisoners were released, though the program was designed to shrink the prison population by 2,600 over two years.

With concern growing about the cost -- both economic and social -- of incarceration, lawmakers have turned an eye to sentencing reform. But prospects for wholesale changes to sentencing in the US are dim, primarily because of the difficulty of selling "weaker" criminal punishments to a skeptical public.

This year, the Obama administration backed sentencing reform for crack cocaine, reducing the disparity between crack sentences and powder cocaine sentences on the basis that they discriminated along racial lines. But, as law professor Andrea Lyon noted at the Huffington Post, even that reform allowed for large disparities in sentences. "What was a 100 to 1 disparity is now 'only' an 18 to 1 disparity," she writes.

In Missouri, an innovative new law gives judges access to information about incarceration costs before they decide on punishment, as well as access to information on recidivism rates for various crimes. Lawmakers hope it will result in a more consistent application of the law.

Marijuana law reform could also have an impact, by simply reducing the number of crimes for which people can be jailed. Last year alone, there were more than 858,000 arrests in the United States for marijuana. That's down from a peak of 872,000 in 2007, but still near record highs. More than half of all drug arrests involved marijuana.

Source:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/one-28-kids-parent-jail-study/

giovonni

2nd October 2010, 20:03

While we are squandering our wealth on self-crippling wars, the Chinese are using theirs to gain control over the raw materials that will define the century. The shortsightedness of American politicians of both parties is breathtaking.

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The Great Haul of China:
Fears of Chinese land grab as Beijing's billions buy up resources

By Sarah Arnott

Saturday, 2 October 2010

China is pouring another $7bn (£4.4bn) into Brazil's oil industry, reigniting fears of a global "land grab" of natural resources.

State-owned Sinopec clinched the deal with Spain's Repsol yesterday to buy 40 per cent of its Brazilian business, giving China's largest oil company access to Repsol Brasil's estimated reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil and gas. The whopping price tag for Repsol Brasil – which values the company at nearly twice previous estimates – is a sign of China's willingness to pay whatever it takes to lock in its future energy supplies and avoid social unrest. It will give the company enough cash to develop all its current oil projects, including two fields in the Santos Basin.

The Repsol deal is not China's first in Brazil. In February last year, Sinopec stumped up a $10bn loan to Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, in return for guaranteed supplies of 10,000 barrels of oil every day for the next 10 years.

It also follows a slew of similar deals across the world. While much of the developed world is baulking at its debts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, China has continued a global spending spree of unprecedented proportions, snapping up everything from oil and gas reserves to mining concessions to agricultural land, with vast reserves of US dollars.

This year alone, Chinese companies have laid out billions of dollars buying up stakes in Canada's oil sands, a Guinean iron ore mine, oil fields in Angola and Uganda, an Argentinian oil company and a major Australian coal-bed methane gas company.

"China is rich in people but short of resources, and it wants to have stable supplies of its own rather than having to buy on the open market," Jonathan Fenby, China expert and director of research group Trusted Resources, said.

But it is a strategy causing anxiety elsewhere in the world. Rumours in recent weeks that China's Sinochem may make a bid for Canada's Potash Corporation raised fears that the Middle Kingdom would corner the global market for fertiliser.

Similarly, when BP's share price plummeted after Barack Obama's criticisms in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there was concern that the company would be driven into the hands of the Chinese.

More explicitly still, when the aluminium giant Chinalco was trying to buy Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto last year, television ads protesting against the scheme from no less than the Senate opposition leader bellowed "Keep Australia Australian".

"Chinese acquisitions are increasingly on the political radar," said Robin Geffen, the chief executive of Neptune Investment Management, which runs a leading China investment fund. "The pinch points come when people feel that supplies affecting national security could be threatened by China buying them all up."

Contrary to the conspiracy theories, China is not looking for world domination. It has seen economic growth averaging a massive 10 per cent for the best part of three decades, and although it is expected to drop into the high single-digits in the coming years – in response to a dip in export demand – the natural resources required to support even slightly moderated growth are an overwhelming priority.

China is already the second-largest oil consumer in the world and far outstrips its domestic supplies. Neptune estimates that it will need to buy two companies the size of BP each year for the next 12 years to meet its growing domestic energy demand. Demand for electricity alone is growing each year equivalent to Britain's entire output.

"These are massive, massive numbers," Mr Geffen said. "The deal with Repsol today, and all the others we have seen in recent years, are wholly strategic, to nail down what they estimate future demand will be."

But, despite the concerns that China is cornering the market and will push up prices, the developed world also has a vested interest in China pursuing a successful strategy.

Notwithstanding qualms about a change in the global balance of power, China's continued economic growth has been vital to hauling the world out of recession – and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The threat from political instability if Chinese growth stalls has similarly global implications. "The whole world needs China to have these resources to help pull us out of recession and avoid local unrest," said Ian Sperling-Tyler, a partner and oil and gas expert at the consultancy Deloitte.

But concerns remain about China's involvement in politically difficult countries, particularly in Africa. China is not squeamish about the politics of its business partners. It follows a simple formula, offering premium prices and massive infrastructure investments in return for long-term concessions for key resources. There are several well-documented deals on the continent – including a recent $2.5bn tie-up with Britain's Tullow Oil in Uganda and off-shore production in Angola and Nigeria. And the positive impact is evident in spanking new infrastructure including hospitals, ports, and road and rail links being built with the influx of Chinese money.

But China is also involved in some of Africa's more controversial countries. It came in for widespread criticism in 2008 for arms sales to war-torn Sudan, a major trade partner, and its alleged refusal to help resolve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. It has also been accused of paying multimillion-dollar backhanders in return for African leaders repudiating Taiwan at the UN, although nothing has ever been proved. And because the majority of the deals are done on a government-to-government basis, there is no way to be clear on the extent of the relationships.

Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fears-of-chinese-land-grab-as-beijings-billions-buy-up-resources-2095451.html

Related ~ Bonus - Story Article- below

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China's Wen offers to buy Greek debt

China says has bought and will buy new Greek bonds

By Ingrid Melander and Harry Papachristou

ATHENS, Oct 2 (Reuters) - China offered on Saturday to buy Greek government bonds when Athens resumes issuing, in a show of support for the country whose debt burden pushed the euro zone into crisis and required an international bailout.

Premier Wen Jiabao made the offer at the start of a two-day visit to Greece, his first stop on a tour of Europe, and also said he wanted to boost shipping and trade ties with Athens, underscoring Beijing's use of economic strength to win friends.

"With its foreign exchange reserve, China has already bought and is holding Greek bonds and will keep a positive stance in participating and buying bonds that Greece will issue," Wen said, speaking through an interpreter.

"China will undertake a great effort to support euro zone countries and Greece to overcome the crisis."

Wen and his Greek counterpart George Papandreou said in a statement the world's nations need to coordinate their economic policies for global recovery to find a sure footing. [ID:nATH005710]

"The global economy shows signs of gradual recovery but many uncertainties remain," the two leaders said in the statement, issued on Saturday by Papandreou's office after the two men met in Athens.

In addition to seeing economic opportunities in Greece, China may calculate its support of a struggling European country will help deflect international criticism of its trade policies and its refusal to let its yuan currency appreciate sharply.

Wen did not specify how much Greek debt China would be willing to buy or which Chinese entities would buy the bonds.

Chinese state entities have been generally conservative about investing in foreign financial markets and the Chinese government faces domestic political criticism over losses incurred by these entities during the global financial crisis.

HIGH BORROWING COSTS

A senior Greek government official said Wen made clear his offer concerned buying bonds only when the country returned to markets. [ID:nATH005706]

Greece, which is currently funded through a 110 billion euro ($150 billion) EU/IMF bailout, is only issuing short-term T-bills for the time being.

Since the true scale of its debt burden emerged late last year, investors have shunned its bonds. The yield they demand to hold 10-year Greek debt has shot up to 10 percent, compared with just 2.3 percent for similar bonds from the euro zone's biggest economy Germany, making it too expensive for Greece to seek long-term funding in international markets. GR10YT=RR

It has said it wants to return to markets some time next year to sell longer-term debt.

China, at loggerheads with the United States over the yuan and likely to face similar complaints during this European tour, emphasised its willingness to cooperate with the 27-nation EU on financial issues.CNY=CFXS

"China is prepared, hand in hand with the EU, as passengers in the same boat, to strengthen cooperation ... to confront the financial crisis," Wen said. "I believe that we can undertake a genuine effort to promote the reform of the international financial system and strengthen its supervision," he said.

Neither Wen nor Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou mentioned the Chinese currency at the news conference.

SHIPPING FUND, TRADE, EXPORTS

Wen said China wanted to boost cooperation with Greece -- which faces its worst recession in decades as it struggles with its debt -- on all fronts, including by setting up a shipping fund and doubling bilateral trade to $8 billion by 2015.

"China will set up a special Greek-Chinese shipping development fund for Greek shipowners on which it will invest, in an initial phase, $5 billion," Wen told the news conference. "The aim is to offer Greek shipowners a basket of financial support to buy Chinese-made vessels."

Greece and China pledged to stimulate investment in a memorandum of understanding and private companies signed a dozen deals in areas like shipping, construction and tourism. [ID:nATH005705] [ID:nATH005704]

With the global economic crisis and competition with other Balkan countries increasing, foreign direct investment in Greece fell from 6.9 billion euros in 2006 to 4.5 billion in 2009, according to Investment Ministry figures.

Chinese investment represents a very minor proportion of this, excluding a 35-year concession deal China's Cosco signed in 2008 to turn the port of Piraeus into a regional hub for a guaranteed amount of 3.4 billion euros, according to port authority figures.

The investment memorandum does not target specific investment volumes, an official close to Investment Minister Harris Pamboukis said ahead of Wen's visit.

"We want to build this strategic partnership with China," the investment ministry official said. "The purpose is not a signature on something big."

Wen will address the Greek parliament on Sunday and leave early on Monday for Brussels, where he will attend an EU-China summit before going on to Germany, Italy and Turkey.

Clinching business deals with countries such as China and Qatar would help boost confidence among Greek consumers and businesses, economic analysts said.

(Additional reporting by Deborah Kyvrikosaios and George Georgiopoulos; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Charles Dick/Ruth Pitchford) ($1=.7322 Euro)

Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

Source;
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE69100N20101002

giovonni

7th October 2010, 19:33

Once again we see how the middle class is being destroyed. Endless dollars for war while 12.67 per cent of our people are on food assistance teetering on the brink of hunger.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphics/2009/04/foodstamps.jpg

Food Stamp Recipients at Record 41.8 Million Americans in July, U.S. Says

By Alan Bjerga - Oct 5, 2010

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 41.8 million in July as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government said.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 18 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.4 percent from June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 20 straight months.

Unemployment in September may have reached 9.7 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the release of last month’s rate on Oct. 8. Unemployment was 9.6 percent in July, near levels last seen in 1983.

An average of 43.3 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

Source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-05/food-stamp-recipients-at-record-41-8-million-americans-in-july-u-s-says.html

giovonni

9th October 2010, 18:28

Animals said to have spiritual experiences
Ever have an out-of-body experience? Your dog may have too

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery Channel
http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/dog-sunset-zoom.grid-6x2.jpg

Animals (not just people) likely have spiritual experiences, according to a prominent neurologist who has analyzed the processes of spiritual sensation for over three decades.

Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain — areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals' experiences.

"Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences," Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.

"Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences," added Nelson, author of the book "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain," which will be published in January 2011.

The finding is an extension of his research on humans, which has been published in many peer-reviewed journals. A Neurology journal study, for example, determined that out-of-body experiences in humans are likely caused by the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness.

"In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth's gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch," he said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain."

Other mammals also probably have near-death experiences comparable to those reported by certain humans, he believes. Such people often say they saw a light and felt as though they were moving down a tunnel.

The tunnel phenomenon "is caused by the eye's susceptibility to the low blood flow that occurs with fainting or cardiac arrest," he said. "As blood flow diminishes, vision fails peripherally first. There is no reason to believe that other animals are any different from us."

Nelson added, "What they make of the tunnel is another matter."

The light aspect of near-death experiences can be explained by how the visual system defines REM (rapid eye movement) consciousness, he believes.

"In fact," he said, "the link between REM and the physiological crises causing near-death experience are most strongly linked in animals, like cats and rats, which we can study in the laboratory."

Mystical experiences — moments that inspire a sense of mystery and wonderment — arise within the limbic system, he said. When specific parts of this system are removed from animal brains, mind-altering drugs like LSD have no effect.

Since other animals, such as non-human primates, horses, cats and dogs, also possess similar brain structures, it is possible that they too experience mystical moments, and may even have a sense of spiritual oneness, according to Nelson.

Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, also believes animals have spiritual experiences, which he defines as experiences that are nonmaterial, intangible, introspective and comparable to what humans have.

Both he and primatologist Jane Goodall have observed chimpanzees dancing with total abandon at waterfalls that emerge after heavy rains. Some of the chimps even appear to dance themselves into a trance-like state, as some humans do during religious and cultural rituals.

Goodall wondered, "Is it not possible that these (chimpanzee) performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe? After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. What is it, this water?"

"Perhaps numerous animals engage in these rituals, but we haven't been lucky enough to see them," Bekoff wrote in a Psychology Today report.

"For now, let's keep the door open to the idea that animals can be spiritual beings and let's consider the evidence for such a claim," he added.

"Meager as it is, available evidence says, 'Yes, animals can have spiritual experiences,' and we need to conduct further research and engage in interdisciplinary discussions before we say that animals cannot and do not experience spirituality."

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39574733/from/toolbar#

giovonni

10th October 2010, 18:20

Poverty Grows in Suburbs, but Social Services Don’t Keep Up http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/host.madison.com/content/tncms/assets/editorial/e/78/831/e788311e-2701-11df-9cfe-001cc4c03286.preview-300.jpg

Released: 10/4/2010 4:00 PM EDT
Embargo expired: 10/7/2010 12:15 AM EDT
Source: University of Chicago

Newswise — Poverty has grown in America’s suburbs during the recent economic downturn, but poor people in many suburban communities are finding it hard to get the help they need, a report by University of Chicago researchers shows.

“Many suburbs have seen significant expansion in the number of poor persons over the last several years, yet few of the suburban communities have a social services infrastructure in place to address the challenges this increased poverty poses,” said Scott Allard, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University.

Allard and Benjamin Roth, a graduate student at SSA, are the authors of a report, “Suburbs in Need: Rising Suburban Poverty and Challenges for Suburban Safety Nets,” prepared for the Brookings Institution, to be released Thursday, Oct. 7. For the study, the researchers examined census data, records from the Internal Revenue Service and interviewed representatives of social service agencies in suburban Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

The authors focused on these specific metropolitan areas because they provide a diverse set of suburban communities with different levels of poverty and social service support. Focusing on three metro areas also allowed the authors to follow a large set of nonprofit service providers over the course of a year. The experiences of low-income people in the suburbs of these three metro areas are quite similar to the experiences of low-income people in other suburban areas across the country, Allard said.

The study is one of the first comprehensive looks at suburban safety nets and poverty during the recession. The majority of poverty research focuses on concentrated urban poverty.

Poverty rates remain higher in urban areas than suburban areas (18.2 percent versus 9.5 percent), but the number of poor in the suburbs has grown considerably as the overall population of the suburbs grows. Poverty rates also grew quickly in the suburbs of the largest metropolitan areas during the 2000s, and by 2008, the number of suburban poor exceeded the number of city poor in the largest metro areas by 1.5 million. The report found that several suburban counties outside Chicago experienced more than 30 percent increases in the number of poor residents from 2000 to 2008, as did portions of counties in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia.

As in the city, poverty also is concentrated in certain areas of the suburbs, with some communities having high concentrations of poverty while nearby communities are more affluent. Suburbs also vary greatly in their number of immigrants and minority populations. For example, while several suburban Los Angeles municipalities are predominantly Hispanic and a handful of Chicago suburbs have sizeable Hispanic populations, many Washington, D.C. suburbs have substantial black and Asian populations as well.

Although the collapse of the housing market and high unemployment are driving demand for help, many of the people seeking assistance have jobs. They are among the working poor who have seen their hours and earnings cut in the last few years. “Forty-five percent of providers report substantial increases in the number of clients coming from households where one or both adults are working but cannot earn enough to make ends meet,” Allard said.

The researchers also found that a major impact of the ¬Great Recession has been an increase in the number of people coming, for the first time, to seek help from social service agencies. “Almost three-quarters of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs,” Allard said.

The social service agencies, which provide emergency food and housing relief, job training, help with health care and other assistance to low-income populations, were often not well-positioned to respond to the increase in poverty, the report showed.

“Suburban safety nets rely on relatively few social service organizations, and those few organizations tend to stretch operations across much larger service delivery areas than their urban counterparts,” Allard said. The study found that 60 percent of the agencies administered programs in more than one community, which led to fragmentation in the services that agencies could provide because they had to deal with different sets of municipal leaders.

The study also found great variation in the number of social service agencies for given populations of poor people. In suburban Chicago, Evanston had one social service agency per 344 poor residents in the community, while nearby Skokie had one social service agency per 1,299 poor residents.

A major problem for social service providers has been low funding, and that will continue as the economy slowly recovers. Both California and Illinois have massive deficits that limit the prospect for state support of social service agencies. Additionally, philanthropic support has declined, Allard said.

“Almost half of suburban nonprofits surveyed reported a loss in a key revenue source last year, with more funding cuts anticipated in the year to come. Nearly 30 percent nonprofits have laid off full-time and part-time staff,” Allard said. As a result, the poor are put on waiting lists for the help they need.

Despite such challenges, the work of nonprofits serving the poor in the suburbs is needed now more than before, and deserves support, Allard said.

“As is true for cities and rural places, the nonprofit social service sector in suburbs can help these communities alleviate the worst economic and social impacts of the current downturn and future increases in poverty,” Allard said. “Promoting stronger region-wide providers and better engaging charitable foundations in metropolitan safety net planning represent important strategies for strengthening suburban social services infrastructure.”

Source;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/poverty-grows-in-suburbs-but-social-services-don-t-keep-up2?ret=/articles/list&category=latest&page=9&search

giovonni

11th October 2010, 17:05

Further evidence of the destruction of the middle class.

http://www.truecrimereport.com/assets_c/2010/07/debtors-prisons-thumb-400x300.jpg
Debtors prisons have been outlawed in the U.S. for more than 100 years -- but that hasn't stopped collections agencies

The Return of Debtor’s Prison
Collection agencies use the criminal justice system to pocket credit card debts

Greg Beato from the November 2010 issue

According to Michael Klozotsky, managing editor of the trade publication insideARM.com, debt collectors contact consumers approximately four billion times a year. With so many contacts, there are bound to be complaints. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 88,190 consumer complaints about third-party debt collectors. More than 2,500 of these involved collectors who used threats of violence, or actual violence, while plying their trade. Another 11,505 involved false threats of arrest or property seizure. Approximately zero involved one of the more egregious aspects of debt collection: the way the industry outsources collection efforts to the civil court system, using taxpayer money and government force to strong-arm nickels from low-level deadbeats.

“In 2007, third party collection agencies returned over $40 billion to original creditors via collection efforts,” Klozotsky tells me. He’s making a case for the virtues of debt collection, and this is his most persuasive talking point: Those recovered billions increase the availability of credit to all consumers and help keep interest rates in check.

But the persistent phone calls and dunning letters that collection agencies deploy on debtors only pack so much punch. More and more, creditors are retaining the services of attorneys to file lawsuits on their behalf in civil court. At an FTC roundtable in 2009, Ira Leibsker, a Chicago collection attorney, estimated that there were “probably tens of millions of lawsuits” underway at that time. That same year, a single company, Encore Capital Group, filed 375,000 suits in the United States. According to “Debt Deception,” a report published by the Legal Aid Society and several other advocacy organizations in May 2010, the 26 largest debt buyers in New York City filed 457,322 lawsuits from January 2006 through July 2008.

This huge infusion of cases exposes thousands of individuals to a process that overwhelmingly favors plaintiffs. Indeed, in debt collection cases, you’re basically guilty until proven innocent.

Part of the problem stems from the way the debt buying industry has evolved over the last 20 years. As recently as the early 1990s, many credit card issuers made little effort to collect on their past-due accounts. If a cardholder missed a payment or two, in-house collection efforts would generally follow. But when a cardholder hadn’t made a payment in 180 days, issuers tended to “charge off” the delinquent account against earnings, settle for the tax break, and pursue collection efforts no further.

Now there are companies that purchase portfolios of delinquent debt for pennies on the dollar, then attempt to collect. According to “Debt Machine,” a report produced by the National Consumer Law Center, debt buyers bought receivables worth $6 billion in face value in 1993. By 2005, that number had grown to $110 billion. Debts migrate from seller to buyer, often with very little information attached to them. “What they’re buying is a spreadsheet full of data: names, addresses, account numbers, and balances,” says Fred W. Schwinn, an attorney at Consumer Law Center, Inc. in San Jose, California. Applications, original contracts, transaction histories—plaintiffs don’t need any of these documents to file a lawsuit. “You don’t have to attach assignment documents of any kind,” says Schwinn. “You just say, ‘I bought an account [with a balance of] $10,000. This person owes me the money.’ You file the complaint, you get service on the defendant, and the courts will grant a judgement on that.”

In the bulk of these cases, defendants don’t show up and the judge simply issues default judgments against them. In many instances, they fail to show because they’re hoping haplessly to avoid paying debts they owe. In others, they simply don’t know they’re being sued. “I get people in our office every week who say, ‘My paycheck just got garnished and I’ve never been served for anything,’” says Schwinn. “Come to find out, they were substitute-served at an address they haven’t lived at in three or four years. The processor knocks on the door and asks for So-and-So, and the person says, ‘I never heard of that person.’ And the processor just drops the paperwork on the porch and walks away.”

In the early years of America, “debt was an inescapable fact of life,” the historian Bruce H. Mann writes in Republic of Debtors, his 2002 account of how the new nation reconciled its ideals of “republican independence” with the pervasive indebtedness that plagued its citizens. Over time, he shows, insolvency shifted in meaning “from sin to risk, from moral failure to economic failure,” and bankruptcy laws and the eventual abolition of debtor’s prisons offered the insolvent a chance to free themselves from past failures and misfortunes.

While this shift in meaning applied more to commercial debts than personal ones, we see its echo in today’s statutes of limitations on credit card debts. Simply put, America doesn’t want you to stay in debt forever. While statutes of limitations differ from state to state, more than half give creditors just three to five years to sue debtors for non-payment. If they miss that window, a debtor is under no legal obligation to repay
his debt.

If a creditor sues and obtains a judgment, however, any ideals of republican independence, fresh starts, and forgiveness quickly go out the window. In California, for example, judgments are enforceable for 10 years, then renewable for another 10 years, then renewable after that under certain conditions. Interest accrues at 10 percent per annum, wages can be garnished, bank accounts frozen, property seized. A debt originally incurred by someone whose name is similar to yours can become a lifelong commitment, simply because you ignored a few letters from a company whose name you didn’t recognize that said you owed it money. That’s a worst-case scenario, but as cases get rubber-stamped by judges and clerks auto-piloting their way through the daily deluge of lawsuits, it happens.

Then there’s an unfortunate fellow in Kenney, Illinois. In January, a judge sentenced him to “indefinite incarceration” until he paid $300 toward a debt he owed to a lumber yard. Originally reported in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the case is an extreme example of a practice that, while rare, is apparently happening more frequently—the Star Tribune reports that the “use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009.”

When a judge issues a judgment against a debtor, the debtor is supposed to complete a financial disclosure form that will provide the information a creditor needs to collect his debt. If the debtor fails to do this, the creditor can obtain a court order compelling the debtor to show up in court to explain why he hasn’t. If the debtor fails to show up for this hearing, a judge can issue a contempt of court order and a warrant for the person’s arrest.

It’s the same process the court system uses to imprison individuals who fall behind on child support. In the mid-1990s, a hospital in Illinois started employing the tactic as well. Over the last decade, at least four people around the country have actually been arrested and at least briefly detained for their failure to pay library fines. Debtors have also been arrested and jailed in Arkansas, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, and New Jersey.

While the official charge is contempt of court, judges sometimes set the bail to the exact amount the debtor owes. When he pays it, it can go straight to the creditor’s coffers. At a time when the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out big business, it’s a travesty that state and local governments are using the full force of their power to shake down private citizens on behalf of debt collectors—especially when many of those debts have been acquired for less than it costs to incarcerate a small-time deadbeat for a long afternoon, much less indefinitely.

Source;
http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/07/the-return-of-debtors-prison
Reason Magazine

*********************************
Here's a very real example of this articles report :(

[I]Robert Vee Discovers that Collections Agencies Have Created a New Debtors Prison -- with Government Help

By Cory Zurowski in Douchebags,
Tuesday, Jul. 13 2010

http://www.truecrimereport.com/robert-vee_opt.jpg

Robert Vee, a highway construction worker from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, got boned not once but twice. If it wasn't bad enough that late last winter he was tossed into a local county clink -- the result of missing a court hearing over an unpaid credit card...

The truly below-the-belt shot came when he found out his bail was the exact amount he owed the creditor: $1,875.06. It was not coincidence.

In various parts of the country, collections agencies -- fueled by a sideways economy and a growing industry that buys bad debt -- are hijacking law enforcement and the legal system to arrest and imprison people who have walked on unpaid bills, ranging from auto loans to credit cards to outstanding medical tolls.

In a multiplying number of cases, judges set the debtor's at exactly what they owe the creditors. And more often than not, if friends or family do come up with the bail money, they'll likely never see it again.

It will end up with the creditor who initiated the collection process and will ask the court for the bail amount.

Debt collectors having law enforcement officials haul people off to jail is a disagreeable if obnoxious way of doing business. But a private company using government employees as its own collections arm feels like the stuff of Lucifer.

Still, it is happening as more and more in an industry that believes any means available to collect is fair game.

Being in debt hasn't been illegal in the United States for more than 100 years when debtor's prisons were scrapped. However, in modern day America, missing a court hearing over an unpaid bill allows collections agencies to bring the hammer down.

Private firms such as Portfolio Recovery Associates and Encore Capital Group buy old debt from other companies that have thus far been stiffed: a mortgage firm, a cell phone provider, a credit card lender. They purchase them for pennies on the dollar.

If harassing phone calls don't work, these debt buyers enlist the help of the courts. Of course, fees and interest are usually tacked on as well. The profit goal for these agencies is to reap more than 200 percent of what they originally shelled out for the tardy debt.

When the debtor doesn't show up for a hearing called by the likes of Encore Capital, that's when law enforcement and the courts "unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors," says a Spokane lawyer who has represented people against private debt collectors.

Those who fail to appear in court can be held in contempt. An arrest warrant is issued if a collector so desires and the court goes along with it.

If a debtor who's bagged on or just blatantly ignored their hearing is unfortunate enough to live in a jurisdiction that has extra law enforcement resources, they soon might find themselves in cuffs.

"The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, " adds the Spokane attorney, "and law enforcement is going along with it."

Oddly enough, arrested debtors aren't officially charged with a crime.

Robert Vee eventually was released from the Hennepin County jail in downtown Minneapolis after he made a collect call to his landlord, who posted his bail for the amount he owed on his unpaid credit card.

Despite satisfying the old tab, he is not without fret. He still has unpaid junk debt. Vee also owes $40,000 on a second mortgage.

"The question always crosses my mind: 'Are the cops going to arrest me again?' So long as I've got unpaid bills, the threat is there."

Source;
http://www.truecrimereport.com/2010/07/debtor_robert_vee_bagged_on_he.php

giovonni

15th October 2010, 01:57

Here is a leverage point for change, speeding on the Green Transition.

http://img.alibaba.com/photo/11078244/Plastic_Solar_Cell.jpg

New discovery paves way for pollution-free electricity production
2010-10-15 05:30:00

Scientists have identified new properties in a material that could result in efficient and inexpensive plastic solar cells for pollution-free electricity production.

The discovery by physicists at Rutgers University reveals that energy-carrying particles generated by packets of light can travel on the order of a thousand times farther in organic (carbon-based) semiconductors than scientists previously observed.

This boosts scientists' hopes that solar cells based on this budding technology may one day overtake silicon solar cells in cost and performance, thereby increasing the practicality of solar-generated electricity as an alternate energy source to fossil fuels.

"Organic semiconductors are promising for solar cells and other uses, such as video displays, because they can be fabricated in large plastic sheets," said Vitaly Podzorov, assistant professor of Physics at Rutgers.

Podzorov and his colleagues observed that excitons - particles that form when semiconducting materials absorb photons, or light particles - can travel a thousand times farther in an extremely pure crystal organic semiconductor called rubrene. Until now, excitons were typically observed to travel less than 20 nanometers - billionths of a meter - in organic semiconductors.

"This is the first time we observed excitons migrating a few microns," said Podzorov, noting that they measured diffusion lengths from two to eight microns, or millionths of a meter. This is similar to exciton diffusion in inorganic solar cell materials such as silicon and gallium arsenide.

"Once the exciton diffusion distance becomes comparable to the light absorption length, you can collect most of the sunlight for energy conversion," he said.

Excitons are particle-like entities consisting of an electron and an electron hole (a positive charge attributed to the absence of an electron). They can generate a photo-voltage when they hit a semiconductor boundary or junction, and the electrons move to one side and the holes move to the other side of the junction. If excitons diffuse only tens of nanometers, only those closest to the junctions or boundaries generate photo-voltage. This accounts for the low electrical conversion efficiencies in today's organic solar cells.

While the extremely pure rubrene crystals fabricated by the Rutgers physicists are suitable only for laboratory research at this time, the research shows that the exciton diffusion bottleneck is not an intrinsic limitation of organic semiconductors. Continuing development could result in more efficient and manufacturable materials.

The scientists discovered that excitons in their rubrene crystals behaved more like the excitons observed in inorganic crystals - a delocalized form known as Wannier-Mott, or WM, excitons. Scientists previously believed that only the more localized form of excitons, called Frenkel excitons, were present in organic semiconductors. WM excitons move more rapidly through crystal lattices, resulting in better opto-electronic properties.

Podzorov noted that the research also produced a new methodology of measuring excitons based on optical spectroscopy. Since excitons are not charged, they are hard to measure using conventional methods. The researchers developed a technique called polarization resolved photocurrent spectroscopy, which dissociates excitons at the crystal's surface and reveals a large photocurrent. The technique should be applicable to other materials, Podzorov claims.

The discovery has been posted online and slated for publication in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature Materials. (ANI)

Source;
http://sify.com/news/new-discovery-paves-way-for-pollution-free-electricity-production-news-international-kkln4ebeigj.html

giovonni

15th October 2010, 17:43

If depression is a problem for you, you might consider discussing this treatment with your physicians.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20081020/med-healthbeat-depression-magnet/images/6e70f6dc-efa9-4944-a102-8f8426914b5e.jpg

Magnets Used To Treat Patients With Severe Depression

Released: 10/14/2010 3:45 PM EDT
Source: Loyola University Health System

Newswise — John O’Sullivan had struggled with bipolar depression since he was a teen. He has tried numerous types of psychotherapy and medication but nothing seemed to help for long.

A salesman whose profession required the constant projection of a positive, upbeat image to be successful, O’Sullivan found that his condition frequently left him feeling listless and restless. He switched jobs often and had difficulties in his family life.

“When you’re in a maniacal state with bipolar, it’s not like you’re often happy. You’re irritable and hard to live with,” said O’Sullivan, a husband and father of five. “That’s been tough on the family.”

At age 50 and desperate, O’Sullivan was cautiously intrigued when his Loyola University Medical Center psychiatrist, Dr. Murali S. Rao, told him about a new high-tech, non-invasive therapy that uses magnetic waves to treat his condition.

“My first thought was, ‘What is this?’” said O’Sullivan, a resident of Downers Grove, Ill. “But, really, I was open-minded to it because I was desperate for anything that would work quicker and more effectively.”

Known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the treatment delivers a series of electrical pulses to the part of the brain associated with depression and other mood disorders. The pulses generate an electric current in the brain that stimulates neurons to increase the release of more mood-enhancing chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

“The electrical pulses target the nerve cells in the region of the brain called the left prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that regulates our moods,” said Rao, chairman of Loyola’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience Services.

A study involving 301 patients that was recently published in the journal Brain Stimulation found TMS to be “an effective, long-term treatment for major depression.”

O’Sullivan’s treatment took place over a span of about three weeks. It involved a series of sessions lasting about a half hour each, five days a week. He remained awake and alert throughout each session and no anesthesia or sedation was required.

“The results have been what I would call surprisingly good,” O’Sullivan said. “From my experience going back to my teenage years, I’ve never been as optimistic about life as I am now after TMS. I feel like a million bucks. I feel great. It’s a pretty big change.”

There is nothing new about the use of electricity to treat depression. For years, a treatment called electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – also known as “electric shock treatment” – has been used to induce seizures in anesthetized patients for therapeutic results.

“But since TMS uses an electrical field, not electricity like ECT, there is very little risk of a seizure from the procedure,” Rao said. “The pulses are mild and painless and patients are able to immediately return to normal activities.”

The short-term side effects of TMS are usually minor. Some patients experience tingling in the scalp or twitching of facial muscles. Others experience a headache, which can be relieved by any over-the-counter pain-relief medication.

“It’s not all unpleasant,” O’Sullivan said. “During treatment, I could feel a pulsing around my left eye but it wasn’t painful.”

TMS is FDA approved and is performed on an outpatient basis in a psychiatrist’s office. Patients sit in a device that resembles a comfortable dentist chair. The chair reclines and has a padded headrest. It also has a touch-screen control panel and an electrical magnetic coil that is positioned on a precise spot on the patient’s head.

“I’ve had tremendous results in the three weeks I was undergoing it,” O’Sullivan said. “Medication would take six to eight weeks before I knew it was working or not. The TMS results were pretty quick and pretty dramatic.”

Source;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/magnets-used-to-treat-patients-with-severe-depression?ret=/articles/list&category=latest&page=1&search[status]=3&search[sort]=date+desc&search[has_multimedia]=

giovonni

17th October 2010, 18:23

This is wonderful news. As readers know my view is water is destiny, and the lack of potable water constitutes an almost insurmountable obstacle stopping poor indigenous cultures from rising to a higher quality of life. Please click through and look at the MIT created video.

Researchers demonstrate portable, solar-powered water desalination system

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, October 16th, 2010

About one in eight humans do not have access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. That's approximately 884 million people.

The repercussion of this reality are a daily reality in developing nations: an estimated 1.4 million children perish each year due to diarrhea brought on by waterborne bacteria. In spite of breathtaking advances in human technology, over 97 percent of the world's water is still undrinkable.

http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/mitwaterdesalinationsystemmockup.jpg
This full-scale rendering may represent the future of clean water for those who have none.

And while salty or impure water can be cleaned through existing water desalination technologies, the facilities needed are massive and consume vast amounts of energy. It's costly, too: purifying sea water can cost "over $1,000 per acre-foot," according to the US Geological Survey. Even worse, of the roughly 12,500 desalination plants operating as of 2002, their combined total output was equal to less than 1 percent of humanity's daily water consumption.

All of these factors combine to effectively place clean water out of reach for most of the world's poor.

Enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Field and Space Robotics Laboratory, which has developed and successfully tested a portable, solar-powered water desalination system that has the potential to save millions of lives the world over.

Under the guidance of Profs. Steven Dubowsky and Richard Wiesman, the group created a small, reverse-osmosis system that's capable of producing up to 80 gallons of clean water per day. A scaled-up version of the system could produce up to 1,000 gallons per day, according to David Gabriel, writing for the Environmental News Network.

One of the military's C-130 cargo planes could theoretically carry up to 24 of these systems, Gabriel noted. With 24,000 gallons of clean water per day, that's enough to sustain a population of approximately 10,000.

"The system is designed to be cost effective," he explained. "It is made from standard parts such as PVC pipe and basic electronic components. It can be assembled and operated by local people who do not need advanced technical training. The units can also operate efficiently in a wide range of weather conditions. They have built in computers with sensors that can change certain variables if it gets cloudy. For example, the computer can adjust power going to the pump or the position of the valves to ensure the system will always produce water."

This video of the portable water desalination prototype in action was released by the MIT News Office on Oct. 14, 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2bVJxuFP4I&feature=player_embedded

(Courtesy photo: MIT.)

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/researchers-create-portable-solarpowered-water-desalination-system/

giovonni

19th October 2010, 03:04

This is extraordinary news. It would provide replacement employment for miners, so that the general financial health of West Virginia would actually improve, and the devastation of coal, and coal mining, would end. It will be interesting to see whether old energy attempts to take this over, or blocks it.

EDITORIAL:
Bonanza: Geothermal Heat in West Virginia

By The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.

Oct. 17--Apparently, West Virginia sits atop a potential industrial gold mine, a source of boundless free energy even greater than the state's rich coal deposits.

It's geothermal heat -- 400-degree power seething 3 miles underground in semi-magma rock layers -- that might be tapped by deep wells for steam-turbine electricity generating plants.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory studied temperature readings from 1,400 West Virginia oil, gas and water wells. They found indications that the East Coast's strongest "hot spots" lie beneath Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Randolph and Tucker counties.

"It appears to be hotter than other areas on the East Coast," SMU researcher Zachary Frone said. SMU estimated West Virginia's geothermal power-generation potential at 18,890 megawatts -- exceeding the 16,350 megawatts currently derived from coal, river dams and other sources.

West Virginia University engineer Brian Anderson commented: "I actually do think it is something to be excited about. ... It's a reserve, or resource, of energy that West Virginia has that other places don't."

Geothermal heat is the molten "hell" inside the planet that can be seen when volcanoes spill rivers of fiery lava. Part of it stems from the original formation of Earth, and part comes from radioactive decay of minerals. If this power could be utilized more fully, it would meet all human needs worldwide forever.

"The amount of heat available from the Earth under the United States alone is enough to power the current U.S. energy demand for 10,000 years," WVU's Anderson said. "You can consider the geothermal energy source an infinite energy source."

Reaching this free power requires drilling extra-deep wells -- costing around $10 million each -- then pouring in water to make steam. Such operations already exist in Italy, New Zealand, California, Nevada, Germany and elsewhere. A recent attempt in Switzerland triggered local earthquakes and had to be canceled.

State Geologist Michael Hohn says the sedimentary rock of the Appalachians presumably wouldn't cause quakes of the sort suffered in Switzerland.

Geothermal wells release some polluting gases trapped deep underground -- but only about 4 percent of the pollution freed by burning fossil fuels. Thus geothermal is considered clean "green energy." It's more reliable than wind and solar, which generate electricity only when the wind blows or the sun shines during daylight hours.

The promise of an important new geothermal power industry in West Virginia is a bright prospect. State leaders and the Legislature should launch studies to evaluate this enticing possibility.

Source;
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4587892

http://www.gov.mb.ca/stem/energy/geothermal/images/energy_under_our_feet.jpg

giovonni

19th October 2010, 18:21

The Rule of Law

I urge each of you to go to the World Justice Project website and download and read this report:

http://cgi.wn.com/templates/worldjusticereport/justice1.gif http://www.worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/

STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Editor - Schwartzreport

It has always been my safe port that no matter what else happened in America I always saw the justice system as fair; perhaps you feel the same way. I mean America is the shining city on the hill, to use President Reagan's image, when it comes to Justice and the Rule of Law ... right? That's what I thought, and if you feel the same, you will be as appalled as I was when I read the just released World of Justice Project report: Rule of Law Index 2010.

When compared to our peer group of high affluence industrialized nations -- with 1 being best and 7 being worst -- the US ranks 7th in limited government powers; 7th in Absence of corruption; 6th in clear, publicized and stable laws; 6th in order and security; 7th in fundamental rights; 3rd open government; 5th in regulatory enforcement; 7th in access to civil justice; 5th in effective criminal justice.

To understand why I think this report is such a big deal, and not just another ideological think tank agitprop report perhaps it will help to say who funded it: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Neukom Family Foundation, the GE Foundation, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Lexis Nexis. I list them to make the point that this is the pinnacle of non-partisan philanthropy, not some political think tank with an agenda. We can trust the data.

The project, involving 900 researchers from 35 countries, who have polled 35,000 individuals, in addition to searching each nation's records, presents itself in this way:

'Establishing the rule of law is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity and equity-communities that offer sustainable economic development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights…. The rule of law is the cornerstone to improving public health, safeguarding participation, ensuring security, and fighting poverty.”

When the World Justice Project talks about the rule of law they spell out very carefully what they mean. They refer to 'a rules-based system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:

• The government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law;
• The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and fair, and protect fundamental rights,
including the security of persons and property;
• The process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient;
• Access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives, and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

With this as the basis for its analysis the Rule of Law Index then lists what it calls the 10 'factors” which break down further into 49 'subfactors.” These descriptors are the basis upon which the Rule of Law Index evaluates a nation's justice under the rule of law. The outcome of this exercise is a quite extraordinary assessment 'of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law-- not in theory but in practice. (emphasis added).” Here are the 10 factors; they all sound very 'American.”

• Factor One - Limited government powers
• Factor Two - Absence of corruption
• Factor Three - Clear, publicized and stable laws
• Factor Four - Order and security
• Factor Five - Fundamental rights
• Factor Six " Open government
• Factor Seven - Regulatory enforcement
• Factor Eight - Access to civil justice
• Factor Nine - Effective criminal justice
• Factor Ten - Informal justice”

As I started reading the report I assumed that whatever other self inflicted wounds we have brought to ourselves as a nation, our justice system was still solid, and that the U.S. would rank at the top of the world's list. Surprise. The WJP groups countries by regions as well as such considerations as income level. Then evaluates them, dropping Factor 10 - Informal Justice - because it is does not involve law. Not surprisingly the U.S. is grouped with North America and Western Europe, and there are seven nations in our bloc: Austria, Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and USA. These are the nations where the survey was carried out for the 2010 report, with other countries to follow in later reports.

It is a death's head portrait of the reality that lies beneath the smug rhetoric we use to hector others about justice and the rule of law. I am embarrassed. We all should be. This has haunted me since I read the report. If America is not a leader in justice, what are we? Who are we? What have we become?

giovonni

22nd October 2010, 01:30

:doh:

Water on the Moon: a Billion Gallons !

Scientists Say LCROSS Moon Mission Found Enough Ice in Crater to Fill 1,500 Olympic Pools

Water on the moon? Scientists used to think it was as dry as, well, lunar dust.

But after a year of analysis NASA today announced that its LCROSS lunar-impact probe mission found up to a billion gallons of water ice in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater near the moon's south pole.

That's enough, said researchers, to fill 1,500 Olympic-size swimming pools, all from one crater.

If there is ice there, it probably exists in other places on the moon as well. They also found silver, mercury, carbon monoxide and ammonia.

LCROSS was an empty rocket stage that was deliberately crashed into the moon last year, while a small satellite trailing it took chemical measurements of what it kicked up. Its target, a crater called Cabeus, was chosen because it is so deep that sunlight never reaches the bottom -- and any ice there, mixed in the soil, would never have a chance to vaporize. The ice might have remained frozen there for billions of years.

"To our surprise, some of the permanently shadowed regions had no water, but some of the areas that receive sunlight occasionally did have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team.

The LCROSS researchers had already announced preliminary findings last November -- about a third less water than they reported today -- and refined their numbers in the months since. Their conclusions appear today in the journal Science.

Finding large amounts of water on the moon could be important, not just for science, but for future exploration by astronauts. Water, essential for human survival, would be heavy and expensive for spacecraft to bring from earth. But if astronauts land near ice deposits, as NASA has long hoped, they could, in effect, live off the land.

The ice could be melted and purified for drinking and cooling of spacecraft systems -- and beyond that, it could also be broken down into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen could be used as rocket fuel; oxygen could be used for breathing.

"This place looks like it's a treasure chest of elements, of compounds that have been released all over the moon and they've been put in this bucket in the permanent shadows," said planetary geologist Peter Schultz of Brown University in Rhode Island in a statement.

How much water did they actually find? The researchers said the satellite measured about 41 gallons in the debris from the 60-foot crater gouged out by the crashing rocket. Since the ice was mixed in with rock and dust, its chemical signature -- H2O -- was mixed in with the myriad minerals to be found in lunar soil.

Some of those other minerals were less than welcome to the researchers. Mercury, in particular, is toxic, so the idea of astronauts simply melting the ice for personal use becomes more complicated. And the scientists said not to get excited about the silver they found; it's hardly enough to be worth mining.

There is no saying whether astronauts will get to use that ice any time soon. The Obama administration early this year canceled the Constellation project, which had been proposed by President George W. Bush, to return astronauts to the moon and eventually send them on to Mars. They will still go to Mars, someday, but the moon plans, when given another look, appeared unaffordable.

But scientists' image of the moon has changed since the Apollo astronauts came home. Anthony Colaprete, the chief mission scientist, said Cabeus crater was like an "oasis in a lunar desert."

video-clip
and
source page here;
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/water-moon-nasa-impact-probe/story?id=11939079&page=1

giovonni

22nd October 2010, 21:58

In very short order it will soon be accurate to say Americans are minority owners of America.

From the Rolling Stone Magazine's
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's 'Griftopia'

http://www.rollingstone.com/files/content/mounts/sambamount/images/POLITICS/TAIBBI/2010/griftopia_sq.jpg

Our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters, finding eager buyers in the Middle East.

By Matt Taibbi
Oct 18, 2010 1:30 PM EDT

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that "great vampire squid", played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book,

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.

Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

My buddy was a young guy who'd come up working on the derivatives desk of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.

Aside from the hot weather, it wasn't such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.

"I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."

I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?"

As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.

There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

note > to continue reading excerpt from page 2-5
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206?RS_show_page=1#

Source;
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206?RS_show_page=0#

giovonni

24th October 2010, 20:42

The richest country in the world, spending hundreds of billions on wars, and one out of eight Americans are on food assistance. Can the craziness of our priorities get any starker?

Food Stamp Usage Soars Among Working Families

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/211693/thumbs/s-FOOD-STAMPS-large.jpg

MARK NIESSE | 10/22/10 04:45 PM | AP

HONOLULU — Lillie Gonzales does whatever it takes to provide for three ravenous sons who live under her roof. She grows her own vegetables at home on Kauai, runs her own small business and like a record 42 million other Americans, she relies on food stamps.

Gonzales and her husband consistently qualify for food stamps now that Hawaii and other states are quietly expanding eligibility and offering the benefit to more working, moderate income families.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviewed by The Associated Press shows that 30 states have adopted rules making it easier to qualify for food stamps since 2007. In all, 38 states have loosened eligibility standards.

Hawaii has gone farther than most, allowing a family like Gonzales' to earn up to $59,328 and still get food stamps.

Prior to an Oct. 1 increase, the income eligibility limit for a Hawaii family of five was $38,568 a year.

"If I didn't have food stamps, I would be buying white rice and Spam every day," said Gonzales, whose Island Angels business makes Hawaiian-style fabric angel ornaments, quilts, aprons and purses.

Eligibility for food stamps varies from state to state, with the 11 most generous states allowing families to apply if their gross income is less than double the federal poverty line of $22,050 for a family of four on the U.S. mainland. The threshold is higher in Alaska and Hawaii.

With more than 1 in 8 Americans now on food stamps, participation in the program has jumped about 70 percent from 26 million in May 2007, while the nation's unemployment rate rose from 4.3 percent to 9.2 percent through September of this year.

"We've seen a huge increase in participation due to the economic downturn," said Jean Daniel, a spokeswoman for the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. "That's the way this program was designed."

In addition to helping alleviate economic pressures, many states embrace the popularity of food stamps because their cost – $50 billion last year – is paid entirely by the federal government. States are only responsible for paying half of their programs' administrative costs.

Food stamps have been blasted by some Republicans in this midterm election season as just another federal entitlement program, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich framing the vote as a choice between "the party of food stamps" and Republican policies that create jobs.

Participants in the food stamp program, technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, receive a per person average of $133 per month to buy staples including milk, bread and vegetables.

Shortly after Hawaii announced it was raising its eligibility limits starting this month, three carloads of 10 seniors drove to the Kauai Independent Food Bank to ask if they qualified. Nine of them did, said Judy Lenthall, executive director for the food bank, which helps people apply for food stamps.

"We saw an immediate and overwhelmingly wonderful response," Lenthall said. "It surprised us how fast it's spreading."

States that have relaxed food stamp eligibility did so by moving to a system where applicants could qualify based on their income, and their other assets such as real estate, vehicles and savings accounts could be ignored.

Basing food stamps on income alone allows the newly unemployed and the elderly to seek government food aid without having to first sell their property or exhaust every dollar they've earned, said Sue McGinn, director of the food stamp program in Colorado, which will expand eligibility beginning in March.

"They won't have to wipe out their savings to apply for benefits," McGinn said.

Many of these states also raised income limits, although applicants still have to show they're essentially living at the poverty line after accounting for allowable deductions, including elder medical expenses and child support.

"It helps moderate and low-income people who are struggling," said Stacy Dean of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "They're doing everything we want: they're working, paying all their bills, taking care of their kids, and they still don't have enough money at the end of the month to put food on the table."

Since 2000, the only states that haven't enacted the lower food stamp eligibility requirements are Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.

In Hawaii, where everything from milk to gasoline is typically the highest in the nation, the changes are welcomed by Gonzales and others.

"As long as my kids have good food, that's all I care about," Gonzales said. "It makes a tremendous difference."

Source;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/22/food-stamp-usage-soars-am_n_772287.html

If you, or someone you know needs help with food: Food and Nutrition Service: http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/

giovonni

29th October 2010, 02:41

When I wrote my first book in 1976, I lived in Arizona in Flagstaff, where I co-directed a remote viewing archaeological site, and in Tucson. Through an encounter on a mountain I was given access into the Hopi culture, and through another connection, the Navajo. I learned many things but what particularly impacted me was the realization that when the Green Transition occurred Native Americans would become genuine nations within the United States, sanctioned by ancient treaties. And that this will happen because the resources within their territories, and the territories themselves make them affluent. It started with casinos, which have always seemed to me a voluntary reparations tax. But this will be dwarfed by the income from wind and sun and the rising value of their lands.

This story, I believe is the next step of this evolving process.

Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: October 25, 2010

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/10/26/us/navajo-1/navajo-1-articleLarge.jpg
Supporters of Earl Tulley and Lynda Lovejoy at a campaign rally last month in Blue Gap, Ariz.

BLUE GAP, Ariz. — For decades, coal has been an economic lifeline for the Navajos, even as mining and power plant emissions dulled the blue skies and sullied the waters of their sprawling reservation.

But today there are stirrings of rebellion. Seeking to reverse years of environmental degradation and return to their traditional values, many Navajos are calling for a future built instead on solar farms, ecotourism and microbusinesses.

“At some point we have to wean ourselves,” Earl Tulley, a Navajo housing official, said of coal as he sat on the dirt floor of his family’s hogan, a traditional circular dwelling.

Mr. Tulley, who is running for vice president of the Navajo Nation in the Nov. 2 election, represents a growing movement among Navajos that embraces environmental healing and greater reliance on the sun and wind, abundant resources on a 17 million-acre reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“We need to look at the bigger picture of sustainable development,” said Mr. Tulley, the first environmentalist to run on a Navajo presidential ticket.

With nearly 300,000 members, the Navajo Nation is the country’s largest tribe, according to Census Bureau estimates, and it has the biggest reservation. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants on the reservation and on lands shared with the Hopi provide about 1,500 jobs and more than a third of the tribe’s annual operating budget, the largest source of revenue after government grants and taxes.

At the grass-roots level, the internal movement advocating a retreat from coal is both a reaction to the environmental damage and the health consequences of mining — water loss and contamination, smog and soot pollution — and a reconsideration of centuries-old tenets.

In Navajo culture, some spiritual guides say, digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium (which the reservation also produced until health issues led to a ban in 2005) is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.

“As medicine people, we don’t extract resources,” said Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about 100 healers known as medicine men and women.

But the shift is also prompted by economic realities. Tribal leaders say the Navajo Nation’s income from coal has dwindled 15 percent to 20 percent in recent years as federal and state pollution regulations have imposed costly restrictions and lessened the demand for mining.

Two coal mines on the reservation have shut down in the last five years. One of them, the Black Mesa mine, ceased operations because the owners of the power plant it fed in Laughlin, Nev., chose to close the plant in 2005 rather than spend $1.2 billion on retrofitting it to meet pollution controls required by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Early this month, the E.P.A. signaled that it would require an Arizona utility to install $717 million in emission controls at another site on the reservation, the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, describing it as the highest emitter of nitrous oxide of any power plant in the nation. It is also weighing costly new rules for the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona.

And states that rely on Navajo coal, like California, are increasingly imposing greenhouse gas emissions standards and requiring renewable energy purchases, banning or restricting the use of coal for electricity.

So even as they seek higher royalties and new markets for their vast coal reserves, tribal officials say they are working to draft the tribe’s first comprehensive energy policy and are gradually turning to casinos, renewable energy projects and other sources for income.

This year the tribal government approved a wind farm to be built west of Flagstaff, Ariz., to power up to 20,000 homes in the region. Last year, the tribal legislative council also created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to promote environmentally friendly jobs and businesses.

“We need to create our own businesses and control our destiny,” said Ben Shelly, the Navajo Nation vice president, who is now running for president against Lynda Lovejoy, a state senator in New Mexico and Mr. Tulley’s running mate.

That message is gaining traction among Navajos who have reaped few benefits from coal or who feel that their health has suffered because of it.

Curtis Yazzie, 43, for example, lives in northeastern Arizona without running water or electricity in a log cabin just a stone’s throw from the Kayenta mine.

Tribal officials, who say some families live so remotely that it would cost too much to run power lines to their homes, have begun bringing hybrid solar and wind power to some of the estimated 18,000 homes on the reservation without electricity. But Mr. Yazzie says that air and water pollution, not electricity, are his first concerns.

“Quite a few of my relatives have made a good living working for the coal mine, but a lot of them are beginning to have health problems,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me.”

One of those relatives is Daniel Benally, 73, who says he lives with shortness of breath after working for the Black Mesa mine in the same area for 35 years as a heavy equipment operator. Coal provided for his family, including 15 children from two marriages, but he said he now believed that the job was not worth the health and environmental problems.

“There’s no equity between benefit and damage,” he said in Navajo through a translator.

About 600 mine, pipeline and power plant jobs were affected when the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada and Peabody’s Black Mesa mine shut down.

But that also meant that Peabody stopped drawing water from the local aquifer for the coal slurry carried by an underground pipeline to the power plant — a victory for Navajo and national environmental groups active in the area, like the Sierra Club.

Studies have shown serious declines in the water levels of the Navajo aquifer after decades of massive pumping for coal slurry operations. And the E.P.A. has singled out the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Generating Station as two of the largest air polluters in the country, affecting visibility in 27 of the area’s “most pristine and precious natural areas,” including the Grand Canyon.

The regional E.P.A. director, Jared Blumenfeld, said the plants were the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 emitters of nitrogen oxides, which form fine particulates resulting in cases of asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks and premature deaths.

Environmentalists are now advocating for a more diversified Navajo economy and trying to push power plants to invest in wind and solar projects.

“It’s a new day for the Navajo people,” said Lori Goodman, an official with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a group founded 22 years ago by Mr. Tulley. “We can’t be trashing the land anymore.”

Both presidential candidates in the Navajo election have made the pursuit of cleaner energy a campaign theme, but significant hurdles remain, including that Indian tribes, as sovereign entities, are not eligible for tax credits that help finance renewable energy projects elsewhere.

And replacing coal revenue would not be easy. The mining jobs that remain, which pay union wages, are still precious on a reservation where unemployment is estimated at 50 percent to 60 percent.

“Mining on Black Mesa,” Peabody officials said in a statement, “has generated $12 billion in direct and implied economic benefits over the past 40 years, created thousands of jobs, sent thousands of students to college and restored lands to a condition that is as much as 20 times more productive than native range.”

They added, “Renewables won’t come close to matching the scale of these benefits.”

But many Navajos see the waning of coal as inevitable and are already looking ahead. Some residents and communities are joining together or pairing with outside companies to pursue small-scale renewable energy projects on their own.

Wahleah Johns, a member of the new Navajo Green Economy Commission, is studying the feasibility of a small solar project on reclaimed mining lands with two associates. In the meantime, she uses solar panels as a consciousness-raising tool.

“How can we utilize reclamation lands?” she said to Mr. Yazzie during a recent visit as they held their young daughters in his living room. “Maybe we can use them for solar panels to generate electricity for Los Angeles, to transform something that’s been devastating for our land and water into something that can generate revenue for your family, for your kids.”

Mr. Yazzie, who lives with his wife, three children and two brothers, said he liked the idea. “Once Peabody takes all the coal out, it’ll be gone,” he said. “Solar would be long-term. Solar and wind, we don’t have a problem with. It’s pretty windy out here.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/science/earth/26navajo.html?_r=3&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

giovonni

1st November 2010, 23:07

The obscenity of this makes me have to get up and walk around. :pout:
A small group of contractors are making so much money it seems like a novel. And they are doing so under conditions of drunken looseness. It is so over the top that they don't even know where it went. Or who ended up with it. Billions. Meanwhile one in eight Americans are on some kind of food assistance.

US not tracking spending on Afghan projects, audit says

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49689000/jpg/_49689844_010502531-1.jpg
Billions have been spent on contractors in Afghanistan, but US records are poor

The US government has spent about $55bn on rebuilding in Afghanistan since 2001 but cannot easily show how the money was spent, a government watchdog says.

The special inspector general's office for Afghanistan reconstruction talked of a "confusing labyrinth" of spending.

It said some 7,000 contractors received $17.7bn from 2007-09 but data prior to 2007 was too poor to be analysed.

It is the first comprehensive audit of US spending in Afghanistan since US-led troops ousted the Taliban in 2001.

According to the report, US government agencies are not tracking Afghan contracts in a shared database and cannot easily show where the money went.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says record-keeping has been so poor that most of the money has not been properly recorded.

The Pentagon, state department and USAID "are unable to readily report on how much money they spend on contracting for reconstruction activities in Afghanistan", said the report from the special inspector general's office, which was set up by Congress.

It was also not clear who had received money disbursed by the three agencies, which are the biggest US spenders on Afghan reconstruction.

'Oversight impossible'

Pentagon contracts worth $11.5bn for construction, supplies and logistics in Afghanistan went to more than 6,615 contractors between 2007 and 2009, the audit found. Half of that money went to just 41 contractors.

USAID spent $3.8bn during that time and the state department $2.4bn.

"The audit shows that navigating the confusing labyrinth of government contracting is difficult, at best," according to the watchdog.

It said there had been little co-ordination within and between US government agencies. The three agencies mentioned above, for example, do not separate their spending in Afghanistan from other US-funded projects around the world.

"If we don't even know who we're giving money to, it is nearly impossible to conduct systemwide oversight," the inspector general, Arnold Fields, said.

US special envoy Richard Holbrooke has voiced similar concerns in the past, talking of an "ununified" effort by the US, the UN and hundreds of other countries and aid agencies in Afghanistan.

According to the inspector general's audit, the largest contract between 2007 and 2009 was with US company DynCorp. It received about $1.8bn for police training and counter-narcotics work in Afghanistan.

A Kabul construction company received nearly $700m to build offices and barracks.

In a separate report, the inspector general found that six buildings constructed for the Afghan national police - which cost the US taxpayer $5.5m - were unusable.

The quality of construction was so bad that the sites in Helmand and Kandahar could collapse in an earthquake, it reported.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49686000/jpg/_49686622_009318562-1.jpg
Much of Afghanistan remains to be rebuilt after years of war

Source;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11641964

giovonni

2nd November 2010, 19:46

Is the American Dream Over?
i tend to believe (we) Americans are at a crossroads~ Yes~ the United States, is deservedly taking its hits right now, but i truly believe a new day and beginning is unfolding <> with new and wonderful opportunities for (us and) the entire world to share equally in creating.
giovonni

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_AcOhvwec3IE/SfPZbv931LI/AAAAAAAAABA/-DrK-e3fCTQ/s320/american-dream-over.jpg

the following article is long, but worth the read for any serious lightworker too ponder upon.

from Stephan A. Schwartz
"Here is a good first approximation at history beyond immediate journalism, by rational analysts who are not American, and not caught up in our passions. I agree with a great deal of this. We have to radically restructure our society to recreate a healthy middle class."

*********************************

A Superpower in Decline
Is the American Dream Over?

Der Spiegel (Germany)

11/01/2010 05:12 PM

America has long been a country of limitless possibility. But the dream has now become a nightmare for many. The US is now realizing just how fragile its success has become -- and how bitter its reality. Should the superpower not find a way out of crisis, it could spell trouble ahead for the global economy. By SPIEGEL Staff

It was to be the kind of place where dozens of American dreams would be fulfilled -- here on Apple Blossom Drive, a cul-de-sac under the azure-blue skies of southwest Florida, where the climate is mild and therapeutic for people with arthritis and rheumatism. Everything is ready. The driveways lined with cast-iron lanterns are finished, the artificial streams and ponds are filled with water, and all the underground cables have been installed. This street in Florida was to be just one small part of America's greater identity -- a place where individual dreams were to become part of the great American story.

But a few things are missing. People, for one. And houses, too. The drawings are all ready, but the foundations for the houses haven't even been poured yet.

Apple Blossom Drive, on the outskirts of Fort Myers, Florida, is a road to nowhere. The retirees, all the dreamers who wanted to claim their slice of the American dream in return for all the years they had worked in a Michigan factory or a New York City office, won't be coming. Not to Apple Blossom Drive and not to any of the other deserted streets which, with their pretty names and neat landscaping, were supposed to herald freedom and prosperity as the ultimate destination of the American journey, and now exude the same feeling of sadness as the industrial ruins of Detroit.

Florida was the finale of the American dream, a promise, a symbol, an American heaven on earth, because Florida held out the prospect of spending 10, perhaps 20 and hopefully 30 years living in one's own house. For decades, anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people moved to the state each year. The population grew and grew -- and so too did real estate prices and the assets of those who were already there and wanted bigger houses and even bigger dreams. Florida was a seemingly never-ending boom machine.

Could the Dream Be Over?

Until it all ended. Now people are leaving the state. Florida's population decreased by 58,000 in 2009. Some members of the same American middle class who had once planned to spend their golden years lying under palm trees are now lined up in front of soup kitchens. In Lee County on Florida's southwest coast, 80,000 people need government food stamps to make ends meet -- four times as many as in 2006. Unemployment figures are sharply on the rise in the state, which has now come to symbolize the decline of the America Dream, or perhaps even its total failure, its naïveté. Could the dream, in fact, be over?

Americans have lived beyond their means for decades. It was a culture long defined by a mantra of entitlement, one that promised opportunities for all while ignoring the risks. Relentless and seemingly unstoppable upward mobility was the secular religion of the United States. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, established the so-called ownership society, while Congress and the White House helped free it of the constraints of laws and regulations.

The dream was the country's driving force. It made Florida, Hollywood and the riches of Goldman Sachs possible, and it attracted millions of immigrants. Now, however, Americans are discovering that there are many directions that life can take, and at least one of them points downward. The conviction that stocks have always made everyone richer has become as much of a chimera in the United States as the belief that everyone has the right to own his own home, and then a bigger home, a second car and maybe even a yacht. But at some point, everything comes to an end.

The United States is a confused and fearful country in 2010. American companies are still world-class, but today Apple and Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are investing in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing, and hardly at all in the United States. Some 47 percent of Americans don't believe that the America Dream is still realistic.

Loud and Distressed

The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it's also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country's capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don't believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.

And if America is indeed on the downward slope, it will have consequences for the global economy and the political world order.

The fall of America doesn't have to be a complete collapse -- it is, after all, a country that has managed to reinvent itself many times before. But today it's no longer certain -- or even likely -- that everything will turn out fine in the end. The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.

The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance -- it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.

But will the US wake up? Or is it already much too late?

YESTERDAY: AMERICA'S FALL

The sociologist Robert Putnam hems and haws, not wanting to be the kind of professor who drops names to make himself seem more important. But the issue is much too important for him to resist. "I have had the chance to discuss income inequality with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and I can assure you both were worried about the trend," he says. "It was possible to have an adult conversation with them on this topic."

Putnam, a Harvard professor who sports an enormous beard, sounds pleased, as if this were an exception. He is a surveyor of the American psyche. A few years ago, he caused a stir with his book "Bowling Alone," in which he argued that more and more Americans are bowling alone -- and not in a bowling club -- because the average American hardly even speaks to other Americans anymore, and certainly not with those who hold views different from his own.

Now Putnam is worried about economic imbalances and new disparities within society. Today an American CEO earns about 300 times as much as an ordinary worker. In 1950, that number was only 30. The consequence is "social segregation," says Putnam, by which he means that people go to different schools and parties and live in different neighborhoods, and that there is no longer any overlap between groups.

"The fundamental bargain, the core of America, has always been that we can live with big gaps between rich and poor as long as there is also equality of opportunity," Putnam says. "If that is no longer true, then the core bargain is being violated."

The Ownership Fetish
Nothing symbolizes America's dream more than ownership, that fetish that politicians, culture and the media have glorified and inflated since the beginning of the 20th century. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that a country of homeowners would be "invincible." "Owning a home lies at the heart of the American dream," former President George W. Bush said. And former President Bill Clinton said that one of the most important goals of his presidency was to create 8 million new homeowners.

In the 1960s, two-thirds of Americans already owned a home. The goal was to increase that percentage. The industry and banks played along, because the government encouraged home buying with subsidies and tax benefits worth about $100 billion (€72 billion) a year. Developers dreamed up entire neighborhoods in places with mild climates, like California and, most of all, Florida. There used to be 15,000 houses in Lehigh Acres, the Fort Myers suburb. By 2007, that number had jumped to 28,000.

"It was crazy," says Axel Jakobeit, a German by birth and American by choice, a real estate agent and investor in southwest Florida. Everyone was speculating in real estate, including secretaries, office workers and people who, as Jakobeit says, made $50,000 a year and were periodically up to $1 million in debt, because they were buying and selling multiple houses at the same time. When things were going well, that is. But, as always, things went well until they didn't.

Since prices have dropped, 11 million homeowners in the United States owe the banks more than their properties are worth. Houses are on the market for $80,000 that were built for $120,000 two years ago and have never been occupied. The unemployment rate is at 12 percent in Florida. Many people are leaving, running away and leaving everything behind, not just their dreams, but also their furniture, their keys and, most of all, their debt. Others are taking everything with them, from toilets to copper cable.

Americans Are Not Careful

"I had hoped that the Americans would change their way of thinking, that they would take responsibility and only spend as much as they made," says Jakobeit. But Americans aren't like that. Americans are not careful.

The political leadership, says Raghuram Rajan, deliberately made sure that people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale were provided with low-interest mortgage loans, so that they would forget that their incomes were stagnating. "It was easy for people to get credit, and when home prices went up they felt rich, borrowed more money and spent it," says Rajan, who teaches at the University of Chicago. It's the old concept of bread and circuses. According to Rajan, this approach was easier for the people in power, on both the right and the left, than investing in education or health care.

But there are pain thresholds in every country, including one for debt. According to economists, that threshold is at 90 percent in the United States. When government debt reaches 90 percent of the gross domestic product, the country begins to feel sick. People lost confidence in a better future, investors stop investing, consumers stop buying and the economy stops growing. America reached its pain threshold in the second quarter of this year. Alan Greenspan, once the cheerleader of a society that lived beyond its means, is now urging the US to cut back on borrowing.

Greenspan was the first pop star of the economy, the face of what was then a new era, one in which the economy was shaking off government regulation and corporations no longer saw the state as a partner, but as an adversary. It was the phase of constant tax cuts, the stock market boom and the New Economy, a time economic liberals saw as an era of liberation. While Greenspan was in office, from 1987 to 2006, America experienced the biggest boom in its history and, at the same time, the economic, political and social triumph over the socialist model. US GDP doubled during that time. The only problem was that it wasn't real or robust, and that it was fueled by too much pretense and naïve hope of never-ending growth.

Weaknesses of the Old Order

When Greenspan came to Washington in 1967, as a campaign advisor to Richard Nixon, the old order of the New Deal was still in place. The unions were powerful. Big corporations like General Motors, General Electric and ITT controlled the market. But Greenspan felt that the old order was too sedate. He placed great stock in the experiences of his friend, the Russian immigrant and philosopher Ayn Rand, who wrote about the evils of collectivist systems. "What she did...was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," Greenspan said. "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Ronald Reagan was a rising regional politician in California at the time. He believed that the government was not the solution to all problems; rather that government was, in fact, the problem itself. In his biography, Reagan wrote: "People are tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers, and they're angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who think all of mankind's problems can be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them."

The beginning of the 1980s offered conservatives the opportunity to reshape the country as they saw fit. Unions were suffering from a decline in membership. Technical advances enabled companies to produce smaller quantities cost-effectively and thus gain access to markets previously dominated by major corporations. Reagan took advantage of the weaknesses of the old order to deregulate the economy.

When air traffic controllers went on strike for higher pay, Reagan fired them and banned them from federal service for life. He also deregulated the telecommunications industry, the shipping industry, banks and commercial aviation, and he lowered the maximum tax rate from 70 to 28 percent.

The Need for Lower Interest Rates

The United States became a different country, a radical, free, forward-looking and bold country -- a triumphant country, or so it appeared.

Exporters from other countries surged into the American market, first from Japan and later from China and India. The Internet became popular. The deregulation of the financial markets awakened interest in stocks as a financial investment. The retailer Wal-Mart displaced automaker General Motors as the world's largest company. In this new order, the consumer was among the winners. The investment fund was the modern advocacy group. Banks became more important, and the banking industry had managed to double its profits since the 1970s. Shortly before the crisis, almost 40 percent of American corporate profits were made in the financial sector.

But was it healthy and sustainable?

Fast money was too sexy. In those days, before the crisis, 40 percent of Harvard graduates were taking jobs in the financial and business sectors, earning three times as much as their fellow graduates working in other fields. Trading in financial products had become more lucrative than producing goods.

But because this remnant of the economy still needed to be kept happy, consumers had to keep on consuming, buying bigger cars and bigger houses. Consumer spending made up more than 70 percent of total economic output. But consumers were also spending more than they made, and the savings rate was shrinking. Americans made up for their stagnating or declining earnings by borrowing money. This created a need for lower interest rates.

America's 'Perfect Storm'
Reagan appointed Greenspan to the position of Fed chairman, and a new era began. The digital world was designed in America, and the United States under Reagan and later under Bill Clinton saw itself as the home of fantasy and boldness. Near the end of his era, between November 2001 and November 2004, Greenspan kept interest rates below 2 percent, even though the economy was growing at a rate of 2.8 percent. As the low interest rates boosted the stock market, more people bought stocks. Their expectations of new profits drove up stock prices and consumers had more disposable income -- seemingly.

Robert Reich has dissected the causes of the crash in his book "Aftershock," in which he analyzes an American character trait that seems oddly simplistic: If my neighbor has more, than I want more too. And I get what I want, because I'm an American.

Reich is a tiny man. One hardly sees him when he walks into his lecture hall in Berkeley. In addition to being an academic, Reich, who served as labor secretary under Clinton, is the left conscience of the Democratic Party. The two men met on a ship bound for England, where they were both going to study. Reich became seasick and Clinton offered him some chicken soup. Later on, Clinton brought his friend Reich into the White House, but when the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton, a pragmatist, moved toward the center and his friend Reich resigned. "We tried," Clinton said by way of farewell.

For Reich, just trying isn't enough. He hates compromises, especially today, with the country being threatened by what he calls a "perfect storm." The wind is blowing from three directions. The rich keep getting richer, with the top 0.1 percent of income earners making more money than the 120 million people at the bottom of the income scale. The rich, says Reich, are trying to buy the elections. Meanwhile, the government is not helping the poor, and in fact is telling them: There's no money left for you. It is human nature to want what others have, says Reich, but the real problem is that people aren't making enough money, and that America's wealth is concentrated within the small upper class.

An Outbreak of Nativism

All of this is making radicals more vocal. "I think what we're seeing now in America is an outbreak of isolationism, nativism and xenophobia," Reich says, pointing toward animosity toward immigrants, accusations against China and growing skepticism of foreign trade.

When the dotcom boom suddenly ended on the stock markets around the turn of the millennium, prices fell by 78 percent on the NASDAQ. Investors pulled their money out of stocks and invested it in real estate instead. The stock market bubble turned into the real estate bubble.

"The US economy has been losing momentum for the last decade," says Edmund Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for economics. According to Phelps, it has been increasingly clear, since the beginning of the millennium, that no new jobs are being created on balance, because the US economy has undergone structural change. Companies are dominated by investors interested only in the kinds of quick and large profits that can be achieved by reducing the workforce. Almost 6 million jobs have been eliminated since 2000. Today only 9 percent of Americans work in the manufacturing industry -- half as many as in 1985.

"America has to change," says Obama's economic advisor Paul Volcker in New York. "I wish we had fewer financial engineers and more real engineers instead, like mechanical engineers." America, according to Volcker, must "rebuild its industrial sector." Since World War II, job growth has kept up with population growth, ranging from 10 to 20 percent per decade. The country was firmly convinced that it could continue to do so. In the last decade, the population grew by 25 million, but there were no new jobs, or at least no net job creation. But a minimum of 100,000 new jobs a month was needed just to serve those who wanted to enter the job market.

When Greenspan cleared out his Washington office on Jan. 31, 2006, he left behind a country deeply in debt. Two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, had already cost the country $1 trillion. The government debt continued to grow, from 57 percent of GNP in 2000 to 83 percent when Obama took office in 2009. The current national debt of $13.8 trillion amounts to 94.3 percent of GNP, and in two years it will exceed 100 percent. But what's the next threshold if the pain threshold has already been breached?

TODAY: IN THE LAND OF RAGE

The Petersons have two children, two cats and two cars. They were high school sweethearts. Marc Peterson has a small business that sells windows and his wife, Amie, is a nurse. They have a three-bedroom, single-story house with a garden in Cape Coral, where they have lived since 1991, when they became engaged. The Petersons are a model middle-class family, the kinds of people everyone recognizes from the colorful TV series that celebrate the American dream.

This week, the banks will decide whether the Petersons will lose their house.

Marc's business isn't doing well anymore. He had been selling his windows to retirees, to those whose income in large part depends on their savings and the financial markets. The business tanked after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, "like somebody flipped a light switch," says Marc, smiling uncomfortably. Now even the retirees have stopped coming to Florida.

Can he find a different job? "There are no jobs," he says. The Petersons haven't been able to make their mortgage payments for the last 16 months.

"It's all so frustrating," says Marc. He is referring to their imminent move, his sons' anxiety, their debt, of course, and, most of all, the realization of not having made any progress after working for 20 years. "Salaries did not rise, but the cost of living did," says Amie. "We scaled back, even our dreams. The things we hoped for will not come true."

'How Did it Come to This?'

The naked fear of the undertow is palpable throughout the entire country, where people who once considered themselves part of the middle class, the solid center of the country, now feel threatened. These are the people who, now that the smoke has cleared, are suddenly realizing that 30 years of economic growth, all the boom years, have virtually passed them by. In 1978, the average income for men in the United States was $45,879. In 2007, it was $45,113, adjusted for inflation. "I have been thinking a lot about this, how it came to this," Amie says.

Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard, offers one answer. Americans have been dealing with rising basic expenses for the last two years, says Warren. At the beginning of the millennium, families were paying twice as much for health insurance than a generation before. "To make ends meet, both parents have had to go to work in millions of families," says Warren, adding that the average family has already used up its income and savings "just to stay afloat." Everything was paid for with borrowed money. Total US household debt is now approaching $14 trillion, which is 20 times as much as in the 1970s.

The Petersons paid $69,000 for their light-brown ranch house, a few hundred meters from the ocean. Then the value of the property went up to $300,000. When Amie needed money to pay for a supplementary medical education, the couple took out a second mortgage. She says they took out less than half as much as the bank would have given them. But it was enough to bring about their financial downfall when the recession arrived.

The Petersons are in the same boat as millions of American homeowners: Their dream has become their trap. This has consequences for the job market. In the past, 15 million Americans moved every year for job-related reasons, but people who are trapped are no longer mobile. They also stop being optimistic -- they lose precisely what was once their country's biggest strength.

The New American Nightmare
One Monday in September, six weeks before the mid-term elections, the CNBC television network invited President Obama to a town hall meeting with voters. One after another, members of the audience stood up to air their grievances: about the job crisis, America's crisis and the feeling of hope that the country has lost since the excitement of the 2008 presidential election.

Velma Hart, a stout woman in her mid-40s, stepped up to the microphone. "Mr. President," she said, as her eyes teared up, "I'm a mother. I'm a wife. I'm an American veteran and I'm one of your middle-class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are."

Hart, who is black, voted for Obama. It was an obvious choice for her at the time, and she says that has never felt closer to an American president before. She is about the same age as the president and, like Obama, she has children and a job as an executive. She works at Amvets, the American veterans association. If anyone is a natural Obama voter, it's Velma Hart.

"The financial recession has taken an enormous toll on my family," Hart said. "My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed. And quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly: Is this my new reality?"

No Real Answer

The president smiled thinly. He mentioned the "right steps" that had been taken but he had no real answer. He couldn't reassure her or even argue with her point. Her dream was his dream, he said.

The unemployment rate in the United States is at about 10 percent. But when the people who have stopped looking for work and are not registered anywhere are included, the real number is likely to be closer to 20 percent. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans have a problem with long-term unemployment.

Hart's worries, in other words, have become the new American nightmare for many. In a country with a limited concept of social cohesion, laughable from a European perspective, the quiet demise could have unforeseen consequences. How strong is the cement holding together a society that manically declares any social thinking to be socialist? The US economy lost almost 100,000 jobs in September. Is this Obama's fault?

Dinesh D'Souza, a former advisor in the White House of President Ronald Reagan who is now the president of The King's College in New York, has written a 258-page bestseller about Obama, "The Roots of Obama's Rage." The title itself ought to be a joke.

It has been a long time since the United States has had such a levelheaded president as Obama, a man who governs so dialectically and didactically, who spends so much time listening, weighing options and calmly arriving at his decisions. The president has a lot of problems, including many inherited from his predecessor. He also has a hard time coming across as warm and empathetic. He is good at generating enthusiasm in crowds but, unlike Clinton, he is not adept at connecting to people on a more personal level. Obama feels uncomfortable when he faces someone like Velma Hart. But angry? Obama?

Full of Hatred

The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. And so is Dinesh D'Souza.

Indeed, the United States of 2010 is a hate-filled country.

D'Souza says that Obama's father was an anti-colonialist and that he dreamed of his native Kenya liberating itself from its British colonial rulers. His son Barack has the same dream, says D'Souza. He wants to put America, the neo-colonial power of the 21st century, in its place. "The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s," D'Souza writes. "America today is governed by a ghost."

D'Souza's book has been a huge success, reaching fourth place on the New York Times bestseller list. The Washington Post published an opinion piece by the author, Forbes had him write a cover story, and D'Souza himself thinks he knows why so many people believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is a Muslim. People can't identify with him, says D'Souza, because he doesn't believe in the American dream.

This is the climate in the country leading up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 2. It isn't shaped by logic or an interest in rational debate. The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits. Is it because this is all too threatening?

Gridlock as the American Status Quo

It has become a country of plain solutions. People with college degrees are suspect and intelligence has become a blemish. Manfred Henningsen, a German political scientist who teaches in Honolulu, Hawaii, calls it "political and economic paralysis." One reason for the crisis, says Henningsen, is that the American dream, both individual and national, has in fact always been a fiction. "This society was never stable. It was always socially underdeveloped, and anyone who talks about the good old days today is forgetting the injustices of racist America."

Agitators like Glenn Beck are "nationalist, racist and proto-fascist," says Henningsen. "They take advantage of the economic situation, almost the way the right-wing intelligentsia did back in the Weimar Republic."

Gridlock has become the modern America status quo, and the condition Henningsen calls "institutional idiocy" is especially obvious in the country's most important legislative body, the Senate, which has come to resemble a royal court where nothing has happened in centuries.

Each state elects two senators, including Wyoming, with its 540,000 inhabitants, and California, with a population of 37 million. If enough senators from states with small populations band together, they have the capacity to block everything, which is precisely what they do. And no one questions the rules, both written and unwritten. The Senate is no longer a club in which the members speak to one another. The filibuster, a way of blocking legislation through continuous debate, was the exception in the past, but today it's the rule. The Republicans have already used the filibuster to torpedo more than 100 of Obama's proposals.

A Brighter Future?
One feels the despondency and timidity of political America in Washington. Tim Adams is sitting in the Hotel Willard InterContinental, a stone's throw from the White House. He says that the term "lobbyist" was coined at the hotel, where supplicants used to wait in the lobby for the president. Adams, who served as undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs in the Bush administration, is now a consultant to hedge funds -- the big fish.

Adams talks about how America lived beyond its means, how the budget has spun out of control, and how imperative it is to start thinking about a new tax system. Adams is well aware that the subject isn't popular in Washington, and certainly not in his party. Adams is a Republican. "Debates about the issues are difficult right before the elections," he says, adding that the opposition has become too accustomed to instinctively opposing every Obama proposal. "But they might not be happening for another two years. Currently, the debate on economic policy is paralyzed."

And then he says something that could sum up the entire dilemma of the Obama presidency: "The Democrats refuse to talk about budget cuts. The Republicans refuse to discuss budget increases. So the debate has come to a standstill."

Back in Florida, the Petersons, in their little house not far from the beach, are packing boxes and unscrewing their flat-screen TV from the wall. They've been working on a short sale -- selling the house for less than the balance on their mortgage -- for months, and the bank that holds their primary mortgage has agreed. They also have a buyer. Axel Jakobeit, the German real estate agent, brokered the deal. Now everything depends on the bank that holds the second mortgage, which will be left with nothing but its minimum share of $2,500 if the sale goes through.

Maybe the Petersons will have to move out of their American dream tomorrow, or maybe in a week. They plan to rent in the future. "Owning a house today is not what it seemed to be," says Marc.

TOMORROW: AMERICA'S FUTURE, THE WORLD'S FUTURE

A creative country doesn't stop being creative because of a crisis. A society that has produced universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford or MIT, companies like Apple and Microsoft on the West Coast, and institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York doesn't suddenly become stultified. There are always new projects, even in the United States of 2010. There are startups, new companies and, of course, great thinkers.

But once a decline has gotten underway, it isn't easy to change direction. Many young companies in Silicon Valley don't last very long because they are unable to secure financing or find customers. The country seems lethargic in a very un-American way -- or perhaps it's just the new American way. The demonization of political opponents, the end of debates, the condemnation of intellect -- these are all ominous signs.

Americans are saving again, for the first time in a long time. The rate of personal saving as a percentage of disposable income, negative only a few years ago, has reached 5.8 percent. It could be a good sign, but it may also be an indication of rampant uncertainty.

There is no easy way out of the debt crisis. Obama could raise taxes and reduce the federal budget, but according to Reagan's former budget director, David Stockman, the country has become "fiscally ungovernable." If Washington can't help America, who then can help Washington and America?

One of the last hopes is the US Federal Reserve, the same institution that helped maneuver the United States and the global economy into the crisis in the first place. Despite the Fed already having reduced the prime rate to between 0 and 0.25 percent, the credit business still hasn't pick up. The Fed then sought to influence the markets in a different way by buying US treasury bonds and securitized mortgage loans, injecting $1.75 trillion in freshly printed cash into the market. The policy, know as quantitative easing, was met with enthusiasm on Wall Street. A second round, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is expected to take place after the mid-term elections.

Ineffectual Fiscal Policy

The leaders of the international financial world have come together twice in recent weeks. Central bankers and finance ministers met in October at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, and last weekend at the summit meeting of the G-20 finance ministers in South Korea. Both times, Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke, used somber language to describe the economic situation and to defend his monetary policy.

Unemployment remains stuck at record high levels, a second collapse in the real estate market is not unthinkable, and the classic tools of fiscal policy, tax cuts or economic stimulus packages, are hitting a wall, Bernanke said. The calls for structural reforms are correct, he added, but the problem is that fundamental reform takes time. In the end, the only path out of the crisis leads through monetary policy, the Fed chairman said.

This sounds as if the United States had found a convenient way out of the debt crisis. But it's also a risky solution, both for the United States and the entire world economy. It can trigger processes that could gain momentum and spin out of control. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz warns of the consequences of a flood of liquidity. "It's doing nothing for the American economy, but it's causing chaos over the rest of the world," he says.

More money means that the value of the dollar falls relative to other currencies. This is an advantage at first, because it makes exports cheaper and imports more expensive, making the US economy more competitive. But does US industry even make enough products anymore to allow it to increase sales to the global market? And what happens if the world loses confidence in its reserve currency and unloads its dollar reserves onto the market? The resulting dollar crash could plunge the global economy into the next abyss.

The Next Bonanza

More money also means more inflation, and the faster the money becomes devalued, the faster the debts are reduced. In early 2010, the IMF proposed that central banks commit themselves to a higher inflation goal of up to 4 percent.

No one knows how the experiment will end. "We are in the drug trial phase of monetary policy," says John Makin of the American Enterprise Institute. "We have some very nice ideas, but no experience to show whether they work." Former Labor Secretary Reich doesn't even think there are any good ideas at the moment. He believes that all the cheap money will flow into the next stock market bubble, and that companies, banks and hedge funds already sense the next bonanza coming.

Financial expert Tim Adams says that there is no alternative. "Nobody wants another stimulus package right now," he says. "It has been defined as a symbol of a state and government that overreaches. The Democrats are running away from it and the Republicans are condemning it. Everyone is talking about budget cuts now."

This, according to Adams, only leaves Fed Chairman Bernanke with the option of cheap money, knowing all too well that it won't be met with enthusiasm from politicians abroad. "The Europeans will probably have to carry a share of the adjustment costs at first, because their euro will gain value and their exports will become more expensive," says Adams. And once inflation spreads across the entire global economy, the assets of Germans will also decline.

The Danger of Currency Warfare
It will also be a test for the relationship between China and the United States, which is already tense at the moment. The Chinese have pegged their currency to the dollar, which keeps the value of the yuan artificially low. This allows the Chinese to supply cheap goods to the world. Until now, the two economic powers had a pact: The United States would buy cheap products from China, while the Chinese would invest the dollars they had earned in American treasury bonds. This enabled the Americans to live beyond their means and the Chinese to keep the value of their currency artificially low.

But even this arrangement has not fared well. The imbalance in the American balance of trade became too large, and with it grew the Chinese dollar reserves, which are now estimated at about $2 trillion. If the United States puts too much money into circulation, these reserves will be in jeopardy. Beijing, which the United States needs as a partner, fears as a rival and hates as a world power of the future, will hardly continue to keep up its end of the bargain. This is why the Americans want to see the yuan revalued and, if necessary, to impose import duties on Chinese goods, which would lead to a trade war and a worldwide recession.

The US, of course, is right to complain that the Chinese are keeping the value of the yuan artificially low. But at the same time, the US is manipulating the valued of the dollar via monetary policy. Axel Weber, the chairman of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, abandoned his diplomatic reserve for a moment on the sidelines of the IMF annual meeting. "Competitiveness is gained within companies, not on the foreign currency markets," he said heatedly. Exchange rates, Weber added, should "reflect a country's key economic indicators."

It will be dangerous for Europe if the Chinese and perhaps the Japanese, as well, counter the devaluation of the dollar with the renewed devaluation of their currencies. That's when currencies become weapons. "Our currency -- your problem," the phrase then US Treasury Secretary John Connally coined in 1971, referring to dollar, is gaining a new meaning.

Big Enough to Trigger Future Crises

Everyone would lose a currency war, especially the Europeans. If the European Central Bank (ECB) remained neutral, the price of the euro would climb rapidly. German products would become more expensive worldwide. And if ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet and his associates in Frankfurt's Eurotower jumped on the devaluation bandwagon and also catapulted their currencies onto the markets, price stability in Europe would be in jeopardy. One of the biggest losers in such an escalation would be Germany, currently the world's second-largest exporter.

It could certainly be a comfort to the Germans that the United States is no longer so powerful that it can foist its ideas on the rest of the world. Almost 45 million Americans are considered poor, with 4 million falling below the poverty line in 2009 alone. The Department of Agriculture warns of growing "food insecurity." One fourth of all children in the United States depend on government food stamps. But the American patient certainly remains powerful enough to trigger future crises.

One man who has disagreed with the people on Wall Street and at the Fed for years is Dov Seidman, a philosopher and management consultant from California, who moved to New York a few months ago. Seidman writes books and gives speeches, and his company, which now has 300 employees, is expanding.

Seidman is concerned about things like ethics, sustainability and a different way of thinking in America. One could also say that Seidman is interested in a new American dream.

Sitting in his office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Seidman says: "We'd have to be seriously worried if we, as a country, simply chose to fix and get back to the same behavior that got us into the crisis. The problem with the American dream has been during the last couple of years that people believed they deserved it, that they somehow were chosen because they were Americans. They thought you could rent or buy the dream."

Earning the American Dream

There are ultimately two kinds of crises, says the economic philosopher. There are what Seidman calls the "end-of-life crises," the wars and natural disaster, and then there are the "way-of-life crises." He says that the current crisis must serve to question and change our way of life.

Seidman recalls the America of Obama's election campaign, when everything seemed possible. "I really hope that those who hate and yell are so visible only because they are louder," he says. "We would be in serious trouble if they actually are the majority."

Seidman, for his part, dreams of an America that starts producing products that are needed, products that are competitive and create jobs because they serve a new market, such as the market for renewable energy. He also dreams of honesty and the end of greed.

He believes that every politician and every business executive must realize by now that crises are happening with growing frequency, because each country is connected to all the other countries. "If every crisis affects everybody, shouldn't that lead to everybody being concerned about sustainability and recoverability?"

"The American dream," Seidman says finally, "is within us. It's in our DNA, our history. With our mentality we have to get back to where we once were, after World War II: dream the dream; work for it; earn it."

By Klaus Brinkbäumer, Marc Hujer, Peter Müller, Gregor Peter Schmitz and Thomas Schulz

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

view slideshow below;
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-61125.html

Source;
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447,00.html

giovonni

6th November 2010, 17:50

Geoengineering is going to be one of the major conversations of this century. As it becomes clear even to the Deniers that we are moving into a potentially catastrophic era they will, consistent with their world view, look for the quick mechanical fix. In fact, I believe the solution to our problems lie is mirroring and partnering with nature wherever and whenever possible.

http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2010/11/06/st/20101106_stp001.jpg

Geoengineering
Lift-off
Research into the possibility of engineering a better climate is progressing at an impressive rate—and meeting strong opposition

Nov 4th 2010

AS A way of saying you’ve arrived, being the subject of some carefully contrived paragraphs in the proceedings of a United Nations conference is not as dramatic as playing Wembley or holding a million-man march. But for geoengineering, those paragraphs from the recent conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, marked a definite coming of age.

Geoengineering is shorthand for the idea of fixing the problem of man-made climate change once the greenhouse gases that cause it have already been emitted into the atmosphere, rather than trying to stop those emissions happening in the first place. Ideas for such fixes include smogging up the air to reflect more sunlight back into space, sucking in excess carbon dioxide using plants or chemistry, and locking up the glaciers of the world’s ice caps so that they cannot fall into the ocean and cause sea levels to rise.

Many people think such ideas immoral, or a distraction from the business of haranguing people to produce less carbon dioxide, or both—and certain to provoke unintended consequences, to boot. It was the strength of that opposition which drove the subject onto the agenda at Nagoya. But that strength is also a reflection of the fact that many scientists now take the idea of geoengineering seriously. Over the past few years research in the field has boomed. What is sometimes called Plan B seems to be taking shape on the laboratory bench—and seeking to escape outside.

Stratospheric thinking

The most widely discussed way of cooling the Earth is to imitate a volcano. Volcanoes inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it eventually forms small particles of sulphate that reflect sunlight back into space. Volcanoes, though, do this on a one-off basis. Geoengineers would need to leave the cloud up for a long time, which could get tricky. If you put sulphur dioxide into air that already has a haze of particles in it, the gas will glom onto those particles, making them bigger, rather than forming new small particles of its own. Since what is needed for cooling is a lot of small particles rather than a few big ones, this approach would face problems.

David Keith, of the University of Calgary, and his colleagues recently came up with a way of keeping the particles small: use sulphuric acid rather than sulphur dioxide. Released as a vapour at high altitude it should produce a screen of properly sized particles, even in a sky that is already hazed. And the fleet of aircraft needed to keep that screen in being turns out to be surprisingly small. A study that Dr Keith commissioned from Aurora Flight Sciences, a Virginia-based company that makes high-altitude drones, concludes that it could be done by an operation smaller than an airline like Jet Blue, operating from a few bases around the world.

That airline would, however, do best with a fleet of newly designed aircraft. The most straightforward option, according to the report, would be to develop a vehicle capable of flying at altitudes of 20-25km (about 65,000-80,000 feet), distributing ten tonnes of acid a flight. Such craft might look like slightly portly U-2 spy planes, or possibly like the White Knight mother ship developed to launch Virgin Galactic’s tourist spaceships. About 80 such planes would allow the delivery to the stratosphere of a million tonnes of acid every year at a cost of one or two billion dollars over an operational life of 20 years.

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A more intriguing idea suggested in the study would be to use a sort of hybrid plane-blimp along the lines of Lockheed’s experimental P-791 (pictured above), which generates lift through both buoyancy and aerodynamics. Lift is a problem in the rarefied air of the stratosphere, and it seems such a design can help. The study dismisses another blimpish idea, though: that of pumping sulphurous chemicals up a long pipe held aloft by a large tethered balloon. It also rejects the use of rockets and guns, both of which have also been proposed as ways of getting sulphur into the stratosphere (see chart).

On the face of it Aurora’s study is extraordinary. Given that a few million tonnes of sulphur a year might be enough to cool the Earth by a degree or two, the report seems to confirm what Scott Barrett, a political scientist at Columbia University, has called the “incredible economics” of geoengineering. The thought that a couple of billion dollars a year spent on sulphur could offset warming as effectively as hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in low-carbon energy suggests there is a real bargain to be had here. Maybe. But opponents of the idea are inclined to insert the word “Faustian” first.

The smog of war

One reason for rejecting sulphate hazing out of hand might be the damage it could do to the ozone layer. Ozone-destroying reactions happen faster on surfaces, such as those provided by sulphate particles, than they do in the open air. It is therefore likely that the addition of sulphate to the stratosphere would result in a loss of ozone, and thus in more ultraviolet radiation getting through. Indeed, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 led to just such a loss, even as it cooled the climate.

Current research suggests, though, that any risk to the ozone layer is probably not sufficient reason to abandon the idea. The Montreal protocol, which banned various ozone-depleting chemicals, has left the ozone layer’s long-term prospects looking quite bonny. Sulphate-based geoengineering would certainly slow down its recovery, but would not send it into reverse. The climatic gains might thus be worth the ultraviolet losses.

Might. But that, too, is an area that would bear investigation. For another risk lies in the subtle distinction between “global warming” and “climate change”. Double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the average global temperature will go up. Add the right amount of stratospheric sulphur and the temperature will come back down to where it began. There will, in other words, be no net global warming. But though the average temperature is unchanged, the climate is not. Modelling suggests that a world where additional greenhouse warming has been cancelled out this way will still be warmer at the poles and cooler at the tropics. Moreover—and more worryingly—it will have less rainfall.

Every computer model of a stratospheric haze shows some decrease in rainfall, though the details vary. The more carbon dioxide that gets put into the atmosphere and the more sunshine that is removed from the sky, the greater the drying becomes. And that drying is worse in some places than in others. One recent study, for example, suggested that engineered cooling of this sort would lead to a much bigger loss of rainfall in China than in India. That might have political ramifications—even though both countries come closer to their original climates with the other’s optimal level of geoengineering than with no geoengineering at all.

Understanding the mechanism and implication of these effects is another crucial research step, and a difficult one to take at the moment because it is hard to assess the results from one paper on geoengineering in the light of another. That is because they all start from different assumptions, something that Alan Robock of Rutgers University hopes to overcome. Dr Robock, who carries out geoengineering research while taking an avowedly hostile approach to any suggestion of deploying the technology, has teamed up with climate modellers at other institutions to produce a set of options that could be run on a range of computer models.

This grand intercomparison, which may involve ten or more modelling teams, should allow researchers to get a better grip on what is really happening, and to see which of their results might be dependent on the vagaries of a particular piece of software. Considering that, a few years ago, it was rare to get the computer time needed to do even a single geoengineering simulation with a state-of-the-art climate model, this investment of time and effort marks a big step forward.

Whatever the models reveal about the pattern, impacts and nature of the loss of rainfall, it is hard to imagine that it will not be bad news of some sort. This is one of the reasons why most in the geoengineering field reject the notion that the “incredible economics” offer a real bargain. Hazy cooling and greenhouse warming cannot be traded one for the other; simply adding more and more sulphate to counterbalance more and more carbon dioxide would be dessicatory and dangerous. Cooling might take the edge off the peak of a planetary fever, or perhaps buy time as emissions cuts begin to have the desired effects. But hazing is a complementary medicine, not an alternative one.

Screening sunlight from the sky with sulphates is not, though, the only suggestion around. Various entrepreneurial researchers are looking at ways of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashing it out of harm’s way.

Suck it and see

Nature already provides one method: photosynthesis. Using political and financial tools to encourage the growth of forests, and chemical ones to encourage the growth of photosynthetic plankton, are both possibilities—though both, especially the chemical approach, have their sceptics. Planet hackers of an industrial bent, however, propose proper bent-metal engineering: so-called “direct air capture” technology that would chemically scrub carbon dioxide out of the air, then release it from those scrubbers in a concentrated form that could be sequestered underground. Various companies, including one started by Dr Keith, are trying to produce demonstrators for such technologies. One way is to use arrays of fans to pass air in large volumes through cleverly contrived surfaces along which an absorbing fluid flows.

An alternative approach is to use the ocean as your absorber. Among those investigating this possibility is Tim Kruger, fellow and currently sole employee of the newly founded Oxford Geoengineering Programme at the eponymous university. Mr Kruger proposes dumping quicklime—calcium oxide—into the sea. That change in ocean chemistry would encourage carbon dioxide dissolved in the water to turn into ions of carbonate and bicarbonate, freeing chemical “space” into which carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could flow.

The chemically literate will spot a potential snag. Calcium oxide is made by heating up limestone (calcium carbonate). This drives off carbon dioxide. Generating the heat is also likely to involve the release of that gas. All this carbon dioxide will have to be squirrelled away in the same way carbon dioxide scrubbed from the air (or a power station’s chimney) would. But that might not be too hard. The gas will already be concentrated and pure if the kilns work the right way.

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An airscrubber, from an artist’s imagination

The idea of liming is a comparatively old one, first mooted by Haroon Kheshgi, a researcher at ExxonMobil, in the mid-1990s. Dr Kruger’s work, meanwhile, was recently supported by a grant from another oil company, Shell, through what it calls its GameChanger programme. Cynics may smile at the oil companies’ involvement, and at the intellectual property and plans for profit that companies trying to pull carbon out of the atmosphere all rely on. But money is needed. Shell’s money, for instance, paid for a panel of researchers to look into Mr Kruger’s plans. They concluded that if put to use they might lock up carbon dioxide for $40 a tonne—which seems almost embarrassingly cheap, and which, as a preliminary figure, Mr Kruger is keen not to hype. Dr Keith thinks his air capture might, with luck, manage $100 a tonne. People further from the technology, but with less of a direct interest in its success, think prices will be higher.

Nor is Mr Kruger’s esprit untypical. Other fields of research are being drawn, blinking, into the light by geoengineering’s new-found popularity. “Cloud whitening” provides a nice example. Until 2006 work on the idea of cooling the planet with the help of a fine mist of sea salt sprayed into low layers of maritime cloud, to make them whiter, was the province of two semi-retired British academics. A mere four years later John Latham, the cloud physicist who thought up the idea, and Stephen Salter, a marine engineer who designed systems that might embody it, have been joined by 23 other authors from seven different institutions on a paper outlining current work on the matter. This paper looks not only at the cooling effects such a scheme might have on the climate and the practicalities of creating such a spray from boats at sea, but also at the possibilities of a field trial and what might be learned from such a trial about the way clouds work—a problem that climate scientists, limited to observations and models without the help of direct intervention, have yet to answer.

Whitening some clouds has a certain aesthetic appeal; it is certainly hard to see as an environmental threat in itself. Perhaps the most benign-sounding idea of all, though—and one that brings a Herculean sense of effort that messing around with the air and oceans cannot match—is Slawek Tulaczyk’s nascent proposal to lock the world’s ice caps in place.

Dr Tulaczyk, a specialist in glacial flow who works at the University of California, Santa Cruz, observes that one of the most catastrophic consequences of climate change could be a rise in sea level. The risk is not so much that the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica will melt, but that enough meltwater will get under them to lubricate their journey from the land into the sea. At a meeting held at his university last month he outlined ideas he has been developing which might slow that process down, either by pumping the meltwater out, or by refreezing it in situ using liquid nitrogen. What makes this scheme merely ambitious, rather than totally crazy, is that you might need do it in only a few places. A large fraction of the ice coming off Greenland, for example, flows down just three glaciers. Work out how to slow or stop those glaciers and you may have dealt with a big problem.

The Devil and the details

Polluting the stratosphere. Liming the oceans. Locking Greenland’s glaciers to its icy mountains. It is easy to see why sceptics balk at geoengineering. And if viewed as a substitute for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, a cover for business-as-usual into the indefinite future, then it might indeed prove a Faustian bargain. But that is probably the wrong way of looking at it. Better to use it as a means of smoothing the path to a low-carbon world. Most of the researchers working in the area of stratospheric hazing, for example, think that its best use might be reducing the peak temperatures the Earth would otherwise face at a time in the future when greenhouse-gas emissions have started falling but atmospheric levels are still going up.

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To see whether any form of geoengineering could work, though, small-scale experiments need to be carried out. Fertilising the ocean with iron has already been tried—admittedly without much success, but also without perceptible harm being done. Such experiments are, however, regulated by an international body, the London Convention on maritime dumping, which the CBD approves of. But what of other experiments? The CBD’s decision at Nagoya allows small-scale experimentation. But small by what standard? That of a laboratory or that of a planet? And small by whose? That of an enthusiast or that of an opponent?

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Take hazing experiments. Such experiments could start fairly soon, were money available. One could easily imagine releasing sulphuric acid from a high-altitude aircraft and studying the chemistry going on in its wake using another aircraft. NASA, America’s aerospace agency, is already equipped with a modified U-2 that would do the job well.

Experiments of this sort would not be harmless. But they would do a lot less harm to the stratosphere than Concorde or the space shuttle, devices that were accepted by most people. The harm done by stopping geoengineering experiments is that the good which might come from them will never be known.

Yet even some enthusiastic researchers worry about undue haste. Dr Keith, long an advocate of more research, says he unexpectedly finds himself thinking that things are moving, if anything, faster than he would want. “Taking a few years to have some of the debate happen is healthier than rushing ahead with an experiment. There are lots of experiments you might do which would tell you lots and would themselves have trivial environmental impact: but they have non-trivial implications.” Geoengineering’s growth spurt will need to be matched by some grown-up questioning. Who benefits? Who decides? Who faces the risk?

Source:
http://www.economist.com/node/17414216

giovonni

9th November 2010, 16:39

A new view of reality is emerging; here is a good explanation of it.

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Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time

by
Robert Lanza, M.D.
Scientist, Theoretician

Posted: November 4, 2010 08:52 AM

When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor's house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O'Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.

We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we're usually referring to change. But change isn't the same thing as time.

To measure anything's position precisely is to "lock in" on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can't isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it's 20 feet above the grandstand. But you've lost all information about its momentum. It's going nowhere; its path is uncertain.

Numerous experiments confirm that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a fundamental concept of quantum physics. However, it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world. Remember, you can't see through the bone surrounding your brain; everything you experience is woven together in your mind. So what's real? If the next image is different from the last, then it's different, period. We can award change with the word "time," but that doesn't mean that there's an invisible matrix in which changes occur.

At each moment we're at the edge of a paradox described by the Greek philosopher Zeno. Because an object can't occupy two places simultaneously, he contended that an arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight. Thus, motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time (motion) isn't a feature of the outer, spatial world, but rather a conception of thought?

An experiment published in 1990 suggests that Zeno was right. In this experiment, scientists demonstrated the quantum equivalent of the adage that "a watched pot doesn't boil." This behavior, the "quantum Zeno effect," turns out to be a function of observation. "It seems,"said physicist Peter Coveney, "that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing". Theoretically, if a nuclear bomb were watched intently enough -- that is, if you could check its atoms every million trillionth of a second -- it wouldn't explode. Bizarre? The problem lies not in the experiments but in our way of thinking about time. Biocentrism is the only comprehensible way to explain these results, which are only "weird" in the context of the existing paradigm.

In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal intuition. They're tools of the mind and thus don't exist as external objects independent of life. When we feel poignantly that time has elapsed, as when loved ones die, it constitutes the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. That, to us, is time. It belongs with us.

New experiments confirm this concept. In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment that showed that within pairs of particles, each particle anticipated what its twin would do in the future. Somehow, the particles "knew" what the researcher would do before it happened, as if there were no space or time between them. In a 2007 study published in Science, scientists shot particles into an apparatus and showed that they could retroactively change whether the particles behaved as photons or waves. The particles had to "decide" what to do when they passed a fork in the apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. It turns out what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle had behaved at the fork in the past. Thus the knowledge in our mind can determine how particles behave.

Of course, we live in the same world. Critics claim that this behavior is limited to the quantum world. But this "two-world" view (that is, the view that there is one set of laws for quantum objects and another for the rest of the universe, including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year, researchers published a study in Nature suggesting that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of ions were coaxed to entangle, and then their properties remained bound together when separated by large distances ("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it) as if there were no time or space. And in 2005, KHCO3 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges half an inch high, demonstrating that quantum behavior could nudge into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.

In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, "There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

That night, while lying awake at my neighbor's house, I had found the answer -- that the missing piece is with us. As I see it, immortality doesn't mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time -- past or future -- as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.

"Time and space are but the physiological colors which the eye maketh," said Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self-Reliance." "But the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night."

Source;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/is-death-the-end-new-expe_b_774814.html

giovonni

12th November 2010, 17:28

Yet another explanation of why meditation, in which the practitioner learns a technique for focusing one's intention and awareness, produces a sense of peace and happiness.

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Study finds the mind is a frequent, but not happy, wanderer
People spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about what isn’t going on around them

Public release date: 11-Nov-2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television. On average, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

"Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities," says Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard. "This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present."

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

"Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness," Killingsworth says. "In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged."

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person's happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person's mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects' mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness.

"Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to 'be here now,'" Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. "These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Killingsworth and Gilbert's 2,250 subjects in this study ranged in age from 18 to 88, representing a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupations. Seventy-four percent of study participants were American.

More than 5,000 people are now using the iPhone web app the researchers have developed to study happiness, which can be found at www.trackyourhappiness.org.

Source;
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/hu-sft110210.php

For Contact: Steve Bradt
steve_bradt@harvard.edu
617-496-8070
Harvard University

giovonni

13th November 2010, 18:28

This is such a rational self-empowering policy it should be a model for America. Actually it was American policy for many years. America is a nation of immigrants. Every single person here, including what we call Native Americans either themselves immigrated, or is alive today because a forbearer immigrated. The question is not stopping immigration but having a coherent policy that builds the nation's potential for success.

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Defying Trend, Canada Lures More Migrants

By JASON DePARLE

November 12, 2010

WINNIPEG, Manitoba — As waves of immigrants from the developing world remade Canada a decade ago, the famously friendly people of Manitoba could not contain their pique.

What irked them was not the Babel of tongues, the billions spent on health care and social services, or the explosion of ethnic identities. The rub was the newcomers’ preference for “M.T.V.” — Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver — over the humble prairie province north of North Dakota, which coveted workers and population growth.

Demanding “our fair share,” Manitobans did something hard to imagine in American politics, where concern over illegal immigrants dominates public debate and states seek more power to keep them out. In Canada, which has little illegal immigration, Manitoba won new power to bring foreigners in, handpicking ethnic and occupational groups judged most likely to stay.

This experiment in designer immigration has made Winnipeg a hub of parka-clad diversity — a blue-collar town that gripes about the cold in Punjabi and Tagalog — and has defied the anti-immigrant backlash seen in much of the world.

Rancorous debates over immigration have erupted from Australia to Sweden, but there is no such thing in Canada as an anti-immigrant politician. Few nations take more immigrants per capita, and perhaps none with less fuss.

Is it the selectivity Canada shows? The services it provides? Even the Mad Cowz, a violent youth gang of African refugees, did nothing to curb local appetites for foreign workers.

“When I took this portfolio, I expected some of the backlash that’s occurred in other parts of the world,” said Jennifer Howard, Manitoba’s minister of immigration. “But I have yet to have people come up to me and say, ‘I want fewer immigrants.’ I hear, ‘How can we bring in more?’ ”

This steak-and-potatoes town now offers stocks of palm oil and pounded yams, four Filipino newspapers, a large Hindu Diwali festival, and a mandatory course on Canadian life from the grand to the granular. About 600 newcomers a month learn that the Canadian charter ensures “the right to life, liberty and security” and that employers like cover letters in Times New Roman font. (A gentle note to Filipinos: résumés with photographs, popular in Manila, are frowned on in Manitoba.)

“From the moment we touched down at the airport, it was love all the way,” said Olusegun Daodu, 34, a procurement professional who recently arrived from Nigeria to join relatives and marveled at the medical card that offers free care. “If we have any reason to go to the hospital now, we just walk in.”

“The license plates say ‘Friendly Manitoba,’ ” said his wife, Hannah.

“It’s true — really, really true,” Mr. Daodu said. “I had to ask my aunt, ‘Do they ever get angry here?’ ”

Canada has long sought immigrants to populate the world’s second largest land mass, but two developments in the 1960s shaped the modern age. One created a point system that favors the highly skilled. The other abolished provisions that screened out nonwhites. Millions of minorities followed, with Chinese, Indians and Filipinos in the lead.

Relative to its population, Canada takes more than twice as many legal immigrants as the United States. Why no hullabaloo?

With one-ninth of the United States’ population, Canada is keener for growth, and the point system helps persuade the public it is getting the newcomers it needs. The children of immigrants typically do well. The economic downturn has been mild. Plus the absence of large-scale illegal immigration removes a dominant source of the conflict in the United States.

“The big difference between Canada and the U.S is that we don’t border Mexico,” said Naomi Alboim, a former immigration official who teaches at Queens University in Ontario.

French and English from the start, Canada also has a more accommodating political culture — one that accepts more pluribus and demands less unum. That American complaint — “Why do I have to press 1 for English?” — baffles a country with a minister of multiculturalism.

Another force is in play: immigrant voting strength. About 20 percent of Canadians are foreign born (compared with 12.5 percent in the United States), and they are quicker to acquire citizenship and voting rights. “It’s political suicide to be against immigration,” said Leslie Seidle of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, a Montreal group.

Some stirrings of discontent can be found. The rapid growth of the “M.T.V.” cities has fueled complaints about congestion and housing costs. A foiled 2006 terrorist plot brought modest concern about radical Islam. And critics of the refugee system say it rewards false claims of persecution, leaving the country with an unlocked back door.

“There’s considerably more concern among our people than is reflected in our policies,” said Martin Collacott, who helped create the Center for Immigration Policy Reform, a new group that advocates less immigration.

Mr. Collacott argues high levels of immigration have run up the cost of the safety net, slowed economic growth and strained civic cohesion, but he agrees the issue has little force in politics. “There’s literally no one in Parliament willing to take up the cudgel,” he said.

The Manitoba program, started in 1998 at employers’ behest, has grown rapidly under both liberal and conservative governments. While the federal system favors those with college degrees, Manitoba takes the semi-skilled, like truck drivers, and focuses on people with local relatives in the hopes that they will stay. The newcomers can bring spouses and children and get a path to citizenship.

Most are required to bring savings, typically about $10,000, to finance the transition without government aid. While the province nominates people, the federal government does background checks and has the final say. Unlike many migrant streams, the new Manitobans have backgrounds that are strikingly middle class.

“Back home was good — not bad,” said Nishkam Virdi, 32, who makes $17 an hour at the Palliser furniture plant after moving from India, where his family owned a machine shop.

He said he was drawn less by wages than by the lure of health care and solid utilities. “The living standard is higher — the lighting, the water, the energy,” he said.

The program has attracted about 50,000 people over the last decade, and surveys show a majority stayed. Ms. Howard, the immigration minister, credits job placement and language programs, but many migrants cite the informal welcomes.

“Because we are from the third world, I thought they might think they are superior,” said Anne Simpao, a Filipino nurse in tiny St. Claude, who was approached by a stranger and offered dishes and a television set. “They call it friendly Manitoba, and it’s really true.”

One complaint throughout Canada is the difficulty many immigrants have in transferring professional credentials. Heredina Maranan, 45, a certified public accountant in Manila, has been stuck in a Manitoba factory job for a decade. She did not disguise her disappointment when relatives sought to follow her. “I did not encourage them,” she said. “I think I deserved better.”

They came anyway — two families totaling 14 people, drawn not just by jobs but the promise of good schools.

“Of course I wanted to come here,” said her nephew, Lordie Osena. “In the Philippines there are 60 children in one room.”

Every province except Quebec now runs a provincial program, each with different criteria, diluting the force of the federal point system. The Manitoba program has grown so rapidly, federal officials have imposed a numerical cap.

Arthur Mauro, a Winnipeg business leader, hails the Manitoba program but sees limited lessons for a country as demographically different as the United States. “There are very few states in the U.S. that say, ‘We need people,’ ” he said.

But Arthur DeFehr, chief executive officer of Palliser furniture, does see a lesson: choose migrants who fill local needs and give them a legal path.

With 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, he sees another opportunity for Manitoba. “I’m sure many of those people would make perfectly wonderful citizens of Canada,” he said. “I think we should go and get them.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/13/world/americas/13immig.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=global-home

giovonni

14th November 2010, 16:43

Let it be told~

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wSGz6WKOUfo/SQiEhEpKyII/AAAAAAAABuM/2JpVCFxsZio/s1600/Faith+Base+Intiative.jpg

by
FRANK SCHAEFFER - AlterNet

Tens of millions of American voters got duped badly in the 2010 election. The bible-thumping white underclass thought they hit back at what they regarded as the nefarious forces trying to 'take our country away.”

They were bought, paid for, sold, traded and manipulated by the most powerful in the US election: a Billionaire Lynch Mob led by Rupert Murdoch, Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, and hundreds of millions in organize corporate cash. They peddled a fear agenda: fear of immigrants, fear of government control of our lives, fear that their country would become irrevocably changed.

Here's how it happened:

Where the fear and loathing began

A bedrock article of faith among many of the anti-Obama white voters is that America had 'Christian origins,” and that today America must be 'restored” to 'our religious heritage.” The 'Puritan heritage” of America is constantly cited as evidence for

our need to return to our “biblical roots.” The Constitution is also waved around as if it too is some sort of Bible to be religiously believed in. Of course the Billionaire Lynch Mob doesn’t care about such quaint ideas as individual liberties, let alone “biblical absolutes,” but many of the people who believed the anti-Obama lies did care.

The earnest, mostly Evangelical dupes have a point: by calling for a “return to our roots” (be they biblical and/or constitutional) they are actually maintaining a grand old American tradition: religious delusion as the basis for conquest. The Puritans believed that they were importing “authentic Christianity” to America, especially as written in the Old Testament. They said that they were on a divine mission, even calling themselves “The New Israel” and a “city set upon a hill.” John Winthrop (governor of Massachusetts Bay) transferred the idea of “nationhood” in biblical Israel to the Massachusetts Bay Company. And the Puritans claimed they were God’s “Chosen People.” They said that they had the right to grab land from the “heathen.” These were the American Indians whom the Puritans thought of as the “new Canaanites,” to be slaughtered with God’s blessing and in the case of the Pequot Indians burned alive.

There are many threads in the anti-Obama tapestry but three are ignored at our peril: 1) The End Times fantasies of the Evangelicals; 2) The rise of so-called Reconstructionist theology and 3) the culture war launched over the These “threads,” not the economy alone, are also the source of the vote where white lower class and white middle class Americans voted in droves against their own self-interest. Let’s unpick these fraying threads one at a time.

1. “End Times” Fantasies

The evangelical/fundamentalists/Republican far right is in the grip of an apocalyptic “Rapture” cult centered on revenge and vindication. This “End Times” death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. This fantasy has many followers. For instance to take one of many examples, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series of sixteen novels represents both a “reason” and a symptom of the hysteria that grips so many voters.

The “Left Behind” novels have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an “End Times” cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms of End Times paranoia include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, freeze dried food (pitched to them, by the way, by Billionaire Lynch Mob-handmaid Glenn Beck), gold (also sold to them by Glenn Beck), adopting "Christ-centered" home school curricula, fear of higher education (“we’ll lose our children to secularism”), embracing rumor as fact (“Obama isn’t an American”) and fighting against Middle East peace iniatives, lest they delay the “return of Jesus,” for instance through Houston mega church pastor John Hagee’s Christian Zionist-centered “ministry.”

A disclosure: My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder and leader of the American Religious Right. For a time in the 1970s and early 80s I joined him in pioneering the Evangelical anti-abortion Religious Right movement. I changed my mind. I explain why I quit the movement in my book CRAZY FOR GOD -- How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All - Or Almost All - Of It Back.

John Hagee, mega church pastor and founder of Christians United for Israel said: “For 25 almost 26 years now, I have been pounding the Evangelical community over television. The Bible is a very pro-Israel book. If a Christian admits ‘I believe the Bible,’ I can make him a pro-Israel supporter or they will have to denounce their faith. So I have Christians over a barrel you might say.” The assumption Hagee makes -- that “Bible-believing Christians” will be pro-Israel -- is the dominant view among American Evangelical Christians. These are the people who goad us to make perpetual war worldwide. And these are the people who supposedly follow a teacher who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Few within the Evangelical community have dared to publically question such Haggee’s approach. The Christian Zionists led by Hagee et al even went after their very own George W Bush for backing peace talks between Palestinians and the Israeli government. So can you imagine the hatred the Christian Zionists have for President Obama, who also wants peace in the Middle East?

The momentum for building a subculture that’s seceding from mainstream society (in order to await "The End Times" has irrevocably pried loose a chunk of the American population from both sanity and from their fellow citizens. The Christian Zionist franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that -- at last -- everyone will know "We born-again Christians" were right and "They" were wrong. But here’s the political significance of the Christian Zionist dominance: the evangelical/fundamentalists’ imagined victimhood.

Few within the Evangelical community have dared to publically question such Haggee’s approach. The Christian Zionists led by Hagee et al even went after their very own George W Bush for backing peace talks between Palestinians and the Israeli government. So can you imagine the hatred the Christian Zionists have for President Obama, who also wants peace in the Middle East?

The momentum for building a subculture that’s seceding from mainstream society (in order to await "The End Times" has irrevocably pried loose a chunk of the American population from both sanity and from their fellow citizens. The Christian Zionist franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that -- at last -- everyone will know "We born-again Christians" were right and "They" were wrong. But here’s the political significance of the Christian Zionist dominance: the evangelical/fundamentalists’ imagined victimhood.

I say imagined victimhood, because the born-agains are hardly outsiders let alone victims. They’re very own George W Bush was in the White House for eight long, ruinous years and Evangelicals also dominated American politics for the better part of thirty years before that by enforcing a series of “moral” litmus tests that transformed the Republican Party into their very own culture wars lickspittle.

Nevertheless, the white evangelical/conservative Roman Catholic sense of being a victimized minority only grew with their successes. “You are not alone!” said Glenn Beck, playing to these “disenfranchised” “victims,” who – as the midterm results once again proved -- turn out to look more like a majority of white voters who had the power to turn Sarah Palin into a multimillionaire overnight and send the likes of Rand Paul to the Senate.

2. The Rise of Reconstructionist Theology

Where did the “victims” on the Far Right get their “theology” of perpetual damn-the-facts victimhood from? The history of theology (Christian or otherwise) is the history of people desperately trying to fit the way things actually are into the way their “holy” books say they should be. And since the facts don’t fit and never will, religious believers can either change their minds, embrace paradox, or find someone else to blame for their never-ending loss of face and self-esteem.

Most Americans have never heard of the Reconstructionists. But they have felt their impact through the Reconstructionists’ (often indirect) influence over the wider Evangelical community. In turn, the Evangelicals shaped the politics of a secular culture that barely understood the Religious Right let alone the forces within that movement that gave it its rage.

If you feel victimized by modernity (let alone humiliated by reality) then the Reconstructionists have The Answer to your angst: apply the full scope of the Biblical Law to modern America and to the larger world! Coerce “non-believers” to live in your imaginary universe! In other words Reconstructionists wanted to replace the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with their interpretation of the Bible.

Most Evangelicals are positively moderate by comparison to the Reconstructionist “thinkers.” Most libertarians, who formed the backbone of the Tea Party (at least until the Far Right Evangelicals began to take the Tea Party over) would hate them. But the Reconstructionist movement is a distilled version of the more mainstream evangelical version of exclusionary theology that nonetheless divides America into the “Real America” (as the Far Right claim only they are) and the rest of us “sinners.”

The Reconstructionist worldview is ultra Calvinist, but like all Calvinism has its origins in ancient Israel/Palestine, when vengeful and ignorant tribal lore was written down by frightened men (the nastier authors of the Bible) trying to defend their prerogatives to bully women, murder rival tribes and steal land. These justifications probably reflect later thinking: origin myths used as propaganda to justify political and military actions after the fact—i.e., to justify their brutality the Hebrews said that God made them inflict on others and/or that they were “chosen.”

In its modern American incarnation, which hardened into a twentieth century movement in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s, Reconstructionism was propagated by people I knew personally and worked with closely when I too was a Religious Right activist claiming God’s special favor. The leaders of the Reconstructionist movement included the late Rousas Rushdoony (Calvinist theologian, father of modern-era Christian Reconstructionism, patron saint to gold-hoarding Federal Reserve-haters, and creator of the modern Evangelical home-school movement), his son-in-law Gary North (an economist, gold-buff, publisher and leading conspiracy theorist), and David Chilton (ultra-Calvinist pastor and author.)

Reconstructionism, also called Theonomism, seeks to reconstruct “our fallen society.” Its worldview is best represented by the publications of the Chalcedon Foundation, which has been classified as an anti-gay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the Chalcedon Foundation website, the mission of the movement is to apply “the whole Word of God” to all aspects of human life: “It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of the Islamic Brotherhoods in Egypt and Syria and the rise of Reconstructionism took place in more or less the same twentieth-century time frame—as modernism, science and “permissiveness” collided with a frightened conservatism rooted in religion. The writings of people such as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and those of Rushdoony are virtually interchangeable when it comes to their goals of “restoring God” to his “rightful place” as he presides over law and morals. Or as the late Reconstructionist/Calvinist theologian David Chilton, writing in PARADISE RESTORED--A Biblical Theology of Dominion (and sounding startlingly al-Banna-like) explained:

Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else? Our Lord Himself taught us to pray: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6: 10)… The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the worldwide dominion of God’s Kingdom… a world of decentralized theocratic republics.... That is the only choice: pagan law or Christian law. God specifically forbids “pluralism.” God is not the least bit interested in sharing world dominion with Satan.

The message of Rushdoony’s work is best summed up in one of his innumerable Chalcedon Foundation position papers, “The Increase of His Government and Peace.” He writes: “[T]he ultimate and absolute government of all things shall belong to Christ.” In his book Thy Kingdom Come -- using words that are similar to those the leaders of al Qaida would use decades later in reference to “true Islam” -- Rushdoony argues that democracy and Christianity are incompatible: “Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life,” he writes. “One [biblical] faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state… Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.”

3. The Culture Wars Launched over the Abortion Debate

The significance and rise of the Reconstructionists and their (often indirect) impact on the wider evangelical subculture can only be understood in the context of the January 22, 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Roe energized the culture war like nothing else before or since. This war has even fed the passion that burned within the so-called Tea Party movement’s reaction to Obama’s moderate legislative health care reform predicting “Death Panels.” Roe also indirectly energized even those members of the Far Right – for instance the Tea Party’s pro-choice libertarians -- who didn’t care about abortion per se. Roe had such far-reaching effects because reactions to Roe defined the scorched-earth, winner-take-all and rabidly anti-government tone of the culture war fights since 1973.

Fast forward thirty years to the first decade of the twenty-first century: The messengers and day-to-day “issues” changed but the volume of the anti-government “debate” and anger originated with the anti-abortion movement. “Death Panels!”, “Government Takeover!”, “Obama is Hitler!” and all such “comments” were simply updated versions of “pro-life” rhetoric. And ironically, at the very same time as the Evangelicals who began the anti-abortion crusade (along with conservative Roman Catholics) had thrust themselves into bare knuckle politics over Roe, they also (I should say we also) retreated to what amounted to virtual walled compounds.

Evangelicals created a parallel “Christian America,” our very own private world, as it were, posted with “No Trespassing” signs. Our new “world” was about creating a Puritan/Reconstructionist-style holy-nation-within-our-fallen-nation.

This went far beyond mere alternative schools and home schools. Thousands of new Christian bookstores opened, countless Evangelical radio programs flourished in the 1970s and 80s, and new TV stations went on the air. Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christ-centered plumbers,” accountants and the like who “honor Jesus.” New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight with a clearly defined mission to “take back” each and every profession – including law and politics – “for Christ.” For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was the creation of the late Jerry Falwell, who told me in 1983 of his vision for Liberty’s programs: “Frank, we’re going train a new generation of judges and world leaders in the law from a Christian worldview to change America.” This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in America Can Be Saved: “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.”

To the old-fashioned Goldwater-type conservative mantra of “big government doesn’t work,” in the 1970s the newly-radicalized Evangelicals added “the US Government is Evil!” Our swap of spiritual faith for the illusion of political power – I say “illusion” since even in the 70s and 80s the real power was in the hands of the Billionaire Lynch Mob -- m

Source page;
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/148795/how_republicans_and_their_big_business_allies_dupe d_tens_of_millions_of_evangelicals_into_voting_for _a_corporate_agenda/?page=entire

ALTER NET > home- source link;
http://www.alternet.org/

daledo

14th November 2010, 20:57

Just a side note on your cannibus post. I just read from Fritz Springmeier's online book on Mind Control ( he has many ) that one type of drug is NOT used by handlers and programmers of Mind Control and that is Marijuana. I find that extraordinary since they use every other kind of drug, the list is so long and devastating. The reason for not using weed was because they could NOT control the victims. How is that possible? From my son's perspective on the experience years ago was that it made his brain sleepy and dull and fogged and useless. Any comments?

Peace

Mind control is definitely one of the reasons that it is illegal... along with the greedy pharmaceutical companies wanting total domination of substances that help in the healing process. I think that it has enlightening properties. Not everyone can have this type of high... maybe it depends on the plant, he must have been smoking ditch weed lol. Cultures from around the world have always smoked herbs.

giovonni

17th November 2010, 17:37

For those who want to know more about the Roman tanks and their implications for the global warming debate, this video> (In Search of Lost Time: Ancient Eclipses, Roman Fish Tanks and the Enigma of Global Sea Level Rise), a talk by Harvard scientist Jerry X. Mitrovica sheds additional light...below this article :thumb:
Please note this insight > the Moon is having a major affect on all this !!!

Roman Decadence and Rising Seas

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/14/science/tank1/tank1-blogSpan.jpg
The inner dividing walls of a Roman-era fish tank at Punta della Vipera north of Rome. They are now below sea level even at the lowest tide.

By Justin Gillis
November 15, 2010, 7:18 am

Sea level is rising in relation to many of the world’s shorelines, and has been for decades. The main reason is that the volume of the ocean is increasing as a result of the melting of land ice and the warming of the sea itself. (Warm water expands, just as warm air does.)

Scientists once thought this volume increase had been going on, in fits and starts, for thousands of years. This widespread belief was often used as a debating point by climate-change skeptics, who argued that sea-level rise was nothing to worry about because it had existed throughout the history of human civilization.

But research in recent years has turned that notion on its head. The matter is not entirely settled, but some persuasive evidence points to the conclusion that the volume of the ocean was fairly stable for the last 2,000 years and began rising only recently, more or less in sync with industrialization. This is important because it suggests that sea level might be pretty sensitive to the greenhouse gases that humans are dumping into the atmosphere.

I made a brief mention of this issue in a long article on Sunday on sea-level rise but did not have the space to go into much detail. Here is some of the background:

Archaeological discoveries that shed light on ancient sea level are prized finds for the experts in this field. One of the most compelling studies of recent years was carried out by an Australian scientist named Kurt Lambeck, who worked with colleagues in Italy. They focused on ancient fish tanks built at the edge of the Mediterranean by the Romans over the 300 years when their civilization was at its height, ending in the second century A.D.

These tanks were sometimes decorative, but mostly they were used as storage pens to keep fish fresh for the lavish banquets that wealthy Romans held in their seaside villas. The tanks, described in some detail by Roman historians, have long fired the imaginations of classicists, since they represent Roman civilization at its decadent height. The tanks made an appearance in the popular Robert Harris novel “Pompeii,” for instance.

The tanks were usually carved into rock at the edge of the shore and constructed in such a way that some of their features bore precise relationships to sea level at the time. For instance, walls and sluice gates had to be built to let water into the tanks while keeping fish from escaping at high tide. A few years ago, Dr. Lambeck, of the Australian National University, and his team realized that these features could be used to arrive at an estimate of sea level in the time of the Romans.

The work demanded careful measurements, and taking account of land movements in relation to the sea. In fact, this is a factor in sea-level studies the world over, one that greatly complicates the interpretation of features like ancient beaches and coral reefs. Land can rise or sink across a large region as a result of numerous factors, including volcanism, so the sea level in a given place and time depends on how those local factors are intersecting with the global change in ocean volume.

Taking all these factors into account, Dr. Lambeck’s team used the Roman fish tanks to reach the conclusion that global ocean volume had not changed much from the Roman era to the 19th century. That means, in essence, that human civilization reached its present size and complexity during a period when shorelines were reasonably stable in much of the world. Perhaps that explains why so many millions of us are living on those shorelines.

But the longer history of the earth shows that sea level is by no means fixed, as a Columbia University scientist named Robin E. Bell pointed out in my article. The sea surface has gone up and down by hundreds of feet, and it has done so repeatedly as ice ages waxed and waned. The most recent large change occurred at the end of the last ice age. As the ice sheets melted over a period stretching from 20,000 years to 6,000 years before the present, sea level rose by nearly 400 feet.

Now, the volume of the ocean is once again increasing, with an average global rise of perhaps eight inches since the Industrial Revolution. The pace of the increase has recently jumped to about a foot per century, and as I reported in my article, many scientists fear it will increase further, perhaps raising the sea level by an average of three feet by the year 2100 — a challenge for coastal communities worldwide.

Dr. Lambeck, a past president of the Australian Academy of Science, told me the jury was still out on how much of today’s sea-level rise could be attributed to human activities, but he added: “Personally, I feel fairly confident that what we are seeing today is largely an anthropogenic signal.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/11/14/tank2/tank2-blogSpan.jpg
A sluice gate for a channel controlling the flow of seawater into a fish tank on Ventotene Island, south of Rome, with a modern-day red and white measuring rod. The gate is made of limestone with holes to allow flow during high tide, and it can slide vertically into the stone blocks to the left and right. When it was operating 19 centuries ago, low tide occurred at the level of the base of the sliding block. Today the entire gate is below sea level.

Source;
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/roman-decadence-and-rising-seas/

In Search of Lost Time: Ancient Eclipses, Roman Fish Tanks and the Enigma of Global Sea Level Rise

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdfTUdU9x-k

giovonni

20th November 2010, 08:06

America's problem is not al-Qa'ida but ignorance, willful and otherwise.

Take the survey yourself: http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/

Public Knows Basic Facts about Politics, Economics, But Struggles with Specifics

November 18, 2010

The public sees the big picture when it comes to the changing balance of power in Washington. Fully 75% say that the Republican Party is generally regarded as doing best in this month's midterm elections.

Far fewer are familiar with the specifics relating to the GOP's victories. Fewer than half (46%) know that the Republicans will have a majority only in the House of Representatives when the new Congress convenes in January, while 38% can identify John Boehner as the incoming House speaker.

The Pew Research Center's latest News IQ Quiz, conducted Nov. 11-14 among 1,001 adults, finds a similar pattern in the public's knowledge about economics. The quiz is composed of 13 multiple-choice questions about current events.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1804-1.png

Nearly eight-in-ten (77%) say correctly that the federal budget deficit is larger than it was in the 1990s and 64% know that in recent years the United States has bought more foreign goods than it has sold overseas. As in recent knowledge surveys, about half (53%) estimate the current unemployment rate at about 10%.

But the public continues to struggle with questions about the Troubled Asset Relief Program known as TARP: Just 16% say, correctly, that more than half of the loans made to banks under TARP have been paid back; an identical percentage says that none has been paid back. In Pew Research's previous knowledge survey in July, just 34% knew that the TARP was enacted under the Bush administration. (See "Well Known: Twitter; Little Known: John Roberts," July 15, 2010.)

The new survey finds that an overwhelming percentage (88%) identify BP as the company that operated the oil well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. But as in the past, the public shows little awareness of international developments: 41% say that relations between India and Pakistan are generally considered to be unfriendly; 12% say relations between the two long-time rivals are friendly, 20% say they are neutral and 27% do not know.

Just 15% know that David Cameron is the prime minister of Great Britain; about as many say it is Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP. The proportion correctly identifying Cameron as the British prime minister is about the same now as it was in July (19%).

On a different subject, 26% of Americans know that Android is the name of the Google operating system for smartphones. As in past news quiz questions about technology, there is a sizable age gap in awareness of Android. Far more people younger than age 50 (37%) than those ages 50 and older (11%) correctly identify Android as the Google phone's operating system.
Fewer than Half Know GOP Won House

On the subject of government spending, many Americans (77%) are aware that the U.S. has a larger budget deficit today than in the 1990s, yet far fewer correctly answer a question about what the government spends more on: national defense, education, Medicare or interest on the national debt. Roughly equal proportions of Republicans (81%), Democrats (78%) and independents (78%) know that the federal budget deficit is larger now than in the 1990s.

Overall, 39% of the public knows that the government spends more on national defense than on education, Medicare or interest on the national debt. About one-in-four (23%) say the government spends more on interest payments and 15% say Medicare is the largest expenditure of these four alternatives. Government accounting estimates indicate that the government spends about twice as much on defense as on Medicare, and more than four times as much on defense as on interest on the debt.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1804-2.png

More Democrats (46%) than Republicans (28%) know that the government spends more on national defense than on the other items listed. Republicans are as likely to say the government spends most on interest on the debt (29%) as on defense (28%). A plurality of independents (44%) know that the government spends most on national defense.
Partisan Differences in Knowledge

About six-in-ten Republicans (63%) correctly estimated the unemployment rate at about 10%, compared with 48% of Democrats. A wide partisan gap is also seen in awareness of the U.S. trade deficit: 72% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats say that the U.S. buys more good from abroad that it sells.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1804-4.png

Republican are also more likely to know than the GOP was perceived as winning the midterms and to know that the Republicans won a majority in the House. And while only about half of Republicans (47%) could identify John Boehner as the next House speaker, slightly fewer Democrats (38%) know this.

Republicans and Democrats each are largely unaware of how much of the TARP loans have been repaid and relatively few in both parties estimated the inflation rate at about 1%. As noted, more Democrats than Republicans know that the government spends more on national defense than on interest on the national debt, Medicare or education.
The Knowledge Age Gap

As in previous knowledge quizzes, young people struggle with many questions about politics, economics and foreign affairs.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1804-5.png

Just 14% of those younger than age 30 know that John Boehner will be the next House speaker; about as many (19%) say it will be Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker. Among older age groups, Boehner is far better known.

Just 27% of those younger than age 30 say Republicans will have a majority in the House, while the same percentage (27%) says that India-Pakistan relations are generally regarded as unfriendly. On each question, at least four-in-ten among older age groups answered correctly.

However, 45% of those younger than age 30 know that the government spends most on national defense, about the same percentage as those ages 30 to 49 (41%) and slightly higher than those 50 and older (35%).

And about four-in-ten young people (42%) know that Android is the operating system for Google smartphones, compared with 34% of those ages 30 to 49, 16% of those ages 50 to 54, and just 4% of those ages 65 and older.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1804-6.png

Comparing Knowledge on Average

An alternative way of comparing quiz performance across groups is to look at the average results.

Twelve of the 13 items on the survey were used to form a knowledge scale for this installment of the Pew News IQ quiz. Each question is worth one point on the scale ranging from zero (none right) to 12 (a perfect score).

This was a difficult quiz. Americans answered an average of five out of these 12 questions correctly. That means the public averaged fewer than half right answers (42%). Illustrating the difficulty of some questions, less than one percent of the public answered 12 correctly while 4% missed them all.

College graduates did much better on average than those with some or no college experience. Those with college degrees answered an average of 6.8 questions correctly, compared with 3.8 on average for those with a high school degree or less education.

College graduates did better on almost every question in the quiz. One exception was the item about government spending. Roughly four-in-ten of both college graduates (41%) and those with no college experience (38%) knew that the government spends more on defense than the alternatives offered.

As described above, older Americans did significantly better than young people. Quiz takers ages 65 and older correctly answered 5.3 questions on average while those younger than age 30 averaged four right answers. Republicans did somewhat better than Democrats on average.

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/think-tank-afghans-dont-know-911/

giovonni

20th November 2010, 08:36

i find this item very telling of the differences of cultures and experiences upon this plane.

The Afghans see us as invaders. They know nothing of our context for being in their country. With that truth it is clear to see why this can never end well. If Afghans invaded the United States what would you think? These wars were grounded in lies and deceptions, the hubristic acts of neocon triumphalists and no one seems to have the courage to admit the truth and bring our troops home.

As for the opium we should have begun a controlled medical poppy growing program to produce the medical opiates, at least the raw material, to service the medical community needs for morphine These farmers just want to make a living in a land where that is not easy. But we can't do this because coupled to the insanity of the war, is the insanity of our national drug policies. We are bleeding away our wealth in the service of what exactly?

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTd8NqwD0Y4EIt8Khi-Zs01KgfPXp3lbM6-L9gXzxs7uI-zqqs6rw

Think tank: 92% of Afghans never heard of 9/11

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, November 19th, 2010

Fewer than one in 10 Afghans are aware of the 9/11 attacks and their precipitation of the war in Afghanistan, says a study from an international think tank.

A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of those surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan."

To be sure, the survey can't claim to be definitive: It only canvassed men, and relied primarily on respondents from Helmand and Kandahar, the two most war-torn provinces in the country. But the results nonetheless show that Western forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan have largely failed to connect with the local population.

“We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,” ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.

The survey also suggests that Afghans are skeptical of their own government's ability to protect them, and have little regard for the fledgling democratic institutions the country is building. Fully 43 percent could not name one positive aspect of democracy, and nearly two-thirds -- 61 percent -- said they didn't think Afghan forces would be able to keep up the fight against the Taliban if and when Western forces withdrew.

The ICOS study recommends a publicity campaign to explain to Afghans why foreign forces are fighting on their soil. The think tank also proposes a number of other initiatives meant to improve the image of foreign forces in the country, including having NATO forces deliver humanitarian aid where aid groups fear to travel, providing farmland to the poor, setting up women's councils, and "safe village convoys" which would see foreign troops escort villagers in dangerous rural areas.

ICOS has a permanent presence in Afghanistan and has been studying the nearly decade-long war's impact on Afghan society. The think tank has previously proposed that Afghanistan license the growing of opium. The group argues that eliminating the opiate trade from Afghanistan is virtually impossible due to its entrenched place in the culture. At the same time, Afghan farmers could earn money by selling opiates to painkiller manufacturers.

Opponents of the idea say that Afghanistan is not stable enough to develop a proper opium-manufacturing industry, and a licensing scheme would only encourage the sale of opium to heroin manufacturers.

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/think-tank-afghans-dont-know-911/

giovonni

23rd November 2010, 06:17

The evidence continues to pile up that if we are going to create a successful school system we are going to have to take into account the environment in which the students live.

Growing up digital, wired for distraction

http://www.ndtv.com/news/images/studentscellphone295.jpg

November 23, 2010

Redwood City (California): On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh's life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: Book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, "you can get a whole story in six minutes," he explains. "A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification."

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks -- and less able to sustain attention.

"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently."

But even as some parents and educators express unease about students' digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students' technological territory.

It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal's school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.

"I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games," he says. "To a degree, I'm using technology to do it."

The same tension surfaces in Vishal, whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them. At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.

He acts as his family's tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.

But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a "YouTube bully."

Several teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students, and they wonder why things are not adding up. Last semester, his grade point average was 2.3 after a D-plus in English and an F in Algebra II. He got an A in film critique.

"He's a kid caught between two worlds," said Mr. Reilly -- one that is virtual and one with real-life demands.

Vishal, like his mother, says he lacks the self-control to favor schoolwork over the computer. She sat him down a few weeks before school started and told him that, while she respected his passion for film and his technical skills, he had to use them productively.

"This is the year," she says she told him. "This is your senior year and you can't afford not to focus."

It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.

Growing up with gadgets

When he was 3, Vishal moved with his parents and older brother to their current home, a three-bedroom house in the working-class section of Redwood City, a suburb in Silicon Valley that is more diverse than some of its elite neighbors.

Thin and quiet with a shy smile, Vishal passed the admissions test for a prestigious public elementary and middle school. Until sixth grade, he focused on homework, regularly going to the house of a good friend to study with him.

But Vishal and his family say two things changed around the seventh grade: his mother went back to work, and he got a computer. He became increasingly engrossed in games and surfing the Internet, finding an easy outlet for what he describes as an inclination to procrastinate.

"I realized there were choices," Vishal recalls. "Homework wasn't the only option."

Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families. Jacob L. Vigdor, an economics professor at Duke University who led some of the research, said that when adults were not supervising computer use, children "are left to their own devices, and the impetus isn't to do homework but play around."

Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that half of students from 8 to 18 are using the Internet, watching TV or using some other form of media either "most" (31 percent) or "some" (25 percent) of the time that they are doing homework.

At Woodside, as elsewhere, students' use of technology is not uniform. Mr. Reilly, the principal, says their choices tend to reflect their personalities. Social butterflies tend to be heavy texters and Facebook users. Students who are less social might escape into games, while drifters or those prone to procrastination, like Vishal, might surf the Web or watch videos.

The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types -- not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.

"The technology amplifies whoever you are," Mr. Reilly says.

For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but they can get more in-depth, like "if someone tells you about a drama going on with someone," Allison said. "I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else."

But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B's on her recent progress report.

"I'll be reading a book for homework and I'll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, 'Oh, I forgot to do my homework.' "

Some shyer students do not socialize through technology -- they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

Escaping into games can also salve teenagers' age-old desire for some control in their chaotic lives. "It's a way for me to separate myself," Ramon says. "If there's an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I'll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape."

With powerful new cellphones, the interactive experience can go everywhere. Between classes at Woodside or at lunch, when use of personal devices is permitted, students gather in clusters, sometimes chatting face to face, sometimes half-involved in a conversation while texting someone across the teeming quad. Others sit alone, watching a video, listening to music or updating Facebook.

Students say that their parents, worried about the distractions, try to police computer time, but that monitoring the use of cellphones is difficult. Parents may also want to be able to call their children at any time, so taking the phone away is not always an option.

Other parents wholly embrace computer use, even when it has no obvious educational benefit.

"If you're not on top of technology, you're not going to be on top of the world," said John McMullen, 56, a retired criminal investigator whose son, Sean, is one of five friends in the group Vishal joins for lunch each day.

Sean's favorite medium is video games; he plays for four hours after school and twice that on weekends. He was playing more but found his habit pulling his grade point average below 3.2, the point at which he felt comfortable. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study, because he finds it hard to quit when given the choice. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus, asserting that in another era he would have been distracted by TV or something else.

"Video games don't make the hole; they fill it," says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. Sean, a senior, concedes that video games take a physical toll: "I haven't done exercise since my sophomore year. But that doesn't seem like a big deal. I still look the same."

Sam Crocker, Vishal's closest friend, who has straight A's but lower SAT scores than he would like, blames the Internet's distractions for his inability to finish either of his two summer reading books.

"I know I can read a book, but then I'm up and checking Facebook," he says, adding: "Facebook is amazing because it feels like you're doing something and you're not doing anything. It's the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway."

He concludes: "My attention span is getting worse."

The lure of distraction

Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and Vishal. They have begun to understand what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.

In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework.

On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like "Harry Potter" or "Star Trek," rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys' brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a "significant decline" in the boys' ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the boys' learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience overrode the brain's recording of the vocabulary.

"When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store," he said. "Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary."

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.

In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.

Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities.

"Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body," said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. "But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation."

"The headline is: bring back boredom," added Dr. Rich, who last month gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, "Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens."

Dr. Rich said in an interview that he was not suggesting young people should toss out their devices, but rather that they embrace a more balanced approach to what he said were powerful tools necessary to compete and succeed in modern life.

The heavy use of devices also worries Daniel Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who is known for research showing that children are not as harmed by TV viewing as some researchers have suggested.

Multitasking using ubiquitous, interactive and highly stimulating computers and phones, Professor Anderson says, appears to have a more powerful effect than TV.

Like Dr. Rich, he says he believes that young, developing brains are becoming habituated to distraction and to switching tasks, not to focus.

"If you've grown up processing multiple media, that's exactly the mode you're going to fall into when put in that environment -- you develop a need for that stimulation," he said.

Vishal can attest to that.

"I'm doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I'm doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age," he says. "Sometimes I'll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can't."

"If it weren't for the Internet, I'd focus more on school and be doing better academically," he says. But thanks to the Internet, he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: filmmaking. Without the Internet, "I also wouldn't know what I want to do with my life."

Clicking toward a future

The woman sits in a cemetery at dusk, sobbing. Behind her, silhouetted and translucent, a man kneels, then fades away, a ghost.

This captivating image appears on Vishal's computer screen. On this Thursday afternoon in late September, he is engrossed in scenes he shot the previous weekend for a music video he is making with his cousin.

The video is based on a song performed by the band Guns N' Roses about a woman whose boyfriend dies. He wants it to be part of the package of work he submits to colleges that emphasize film study, along with a documentary he is making about home-schooled students.

Now comes the editing. Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying woman was shot separately from the image of the kneeling man, and he is trying to fuse them.

"I'm spending two hours to get a few seconds just right," he says.

He occasionally sends a text message or checks Facebook, but he is focused in a way he rarely is when doing homework. He says the chief difference is that filmmaking feels applicable to his chosen future, and he hopes colleges, like the University of Southern California or the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, will be so impressed by his portfolio that they will overlook his school performance.

"This is going to compensate for the grades," he says. On this day, his homework includes a worksheet for Latin, some reading for English class and an economics essay, but they can wait.

For Vishal, there's another clear difference between filmmaking and homework: interactivity. As he edits, the windows on the screen come alive; every few seconds, he clicks the mouse to make tiny changes to the lighting and flow of the images, and the software gives him constant feedback.

"I click and something happens," he says, explaining that, by comparison, reading a book or doing homework is less exciting. "I guess it goes back to the immediate gratification thing."

The $2,000 computer Vishal is using is state of the art and only a week old. It represents a concession by his parents. They allowed him to buy it, despite their continuing concerns about his technology habits, because they wanted to support his filmmaking dream. "If we put roadblocks in his way, he's just going to get depressed," his mother says. Besides, she adds, "he's been making an effort to do his homework."

At this point in the semester, it seems she is right. The first schoolwide progress reports come out in late September, and Vishal has mostly A's and B's. He says he has been able to make headway by applying himself, but also by cutting back his workload. Unlike last year, he is not taking advanced placement classes, and he has chosen to retake Algebra II not in the classroom but in an online class that lets him work at his own pace.

His shift to easier classes might not please college admissions officers, according to Woodside's college adviser, Zorina Matavulj. She says they want seniors to intensify their efforts. As it is, she says, even if Vishal improves his performance significantly, someone with his grades faces long odds in applying to the kinds of colleges he aspires to.

Still, Vishal's passion for film reinforces for Mr. Reilly, the principal, that the way to reach these students is on their own terms.

Hands-on technology

Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly's new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.

"Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We've got it. It's the program used by the best music studios in the world," he says.

In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had secured iPads to help teach the language.)

"Some of these students are our most at-risk kids," he says. He means that they are more likely to tune out school, skip class or not do their homework, and that they may not get healthful meals at home. They may also do their most enthusiastic writing not for class but in text messages and on Facebook. "They're here, they're in class, they're listening."

Despite Woodside High's affluent setting, about 40 percent of its 1,800 students come from low-income families and receive a reduced-cost or free lunch. The school is 56 percent Latino, 38 percent white and 5 percent African-American, and it sends 93 percent of its students to four-year or community colleges.

Mr. Reilly says that the audio class provides solid vocational training and can get students interested in other subjects.

"Today mixing music, tomorrow sound waves and physics," he says. And he thinks the key is that they love not just the music but getting their hands on the technology. "We're meeting them on their turf."

It does not mean he sees technology as a panacea. "I'll always take one great teacher in a cave over a dozen Smart Boards," he says, referring to the high-tech teaching displays used in many schools.

Teachers at Woodside commonly blame technology for students' struggles to concentrate, but they are divided over whether embracing computers is the right solution.

"It's a catastrophe," said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a "balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina," and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology.

"When rock 'n' roll came about, we didn't start using it in classrooms like we're doing with technology," he says. He personally feels the sting, since his advanced classes have one-third as many students as they had a decade ago.

Vishal remains a Latin student, one whom Mr. Eaton describes as particularly bright. But the teacher wonders if technology might be the reason Vishal seems to lose interest in academics the minute he leaves class.

Mr. Diesel, by contrast, does not think technology is behind the problems of Vishal and his schoolmates -- in fact, he thinks it is the key to connecting with them, and an essential tool. "It's in their DNA to look at screens," he asserts. And he offers another analogy to explain his approach: "Frankenstein is in the room and I don't want him to tear me apart. If I'm not using technology, I lose them completely."

Mr. Diesel had Vishal as a student in cinema class and describes him as a "breath of fresh air" with a gift for filmmaking. Mr. Diesel says he wonders if Vishal is a bit like Woody Allen, talented but not interested in being part of the system.

But Mr. Diesel adds: "If Vishal's going to be an independent filmmaker, he's got to read Vonnegut. If you're going to write scripts, you've got to read."

Back to reading aloud

Vishal sits near the back of English IV. Marcia Blondel, a veteran teacher, asks the students to open the book they are studying, "The Things They Carried," which is about the Vietnam War.

"Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?" she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

"How can you have a discussion in class?" she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

She adds: "You can't become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations."

As the group-reading effort winds down, she says gently: "I hope this will motivate you to read on your own."

It is a reminder of the choices that have followed the students through the semester: computer or homework? Immediate gratification or investing in the future?

Mr. Reilly hopes that the two can meet -- that computers can be combined with education to better engage students and can give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought.

But in Vishal's case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive. Ms. Blondel says that Vishal, after a decent start to the school year, has fallen into bad habits. In October, he turned in weeks late, for example, a short essay based on the first few chapters of "The Things They Carried." His grade at that point, she says, tracks around a D.

For his part, Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking, accelerating work with his cousin on their music video project. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos on YouTube. The evidence of the shift comes in a string of Facebook updates.

by Matt Richtel, New York Times
Source;http://www.ndtv.com/article/technology/growing-up-digital-wired-for-distraction-67640

giovonni

25th November 2010, 17:19

Very little thought is given to the amount of em radiation we are subjected to just in the course of ordinary daily life. This study suggests we need to pay much more attention to this issue.

Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick, Study Says http://greenopolis.com/files/images/wifi_trees02.jpg

Editorial note: A Dutch agency that looks into the health effects of electromagnetic radiation issued a statement that the results of the research described in this story were unconfirmed. "Based on the information now available [it] can not be concluded that the Wi-Fi radio signals leads to damage to trees or other plants," it said, according to a Google translation.

Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn't be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.

Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.

Besides the electromagnetic fields created by mobile-phone networks and wireless LANs, ultrafine particles emitted by cars and trucks may also be to blame. These particles are so small they are able to enter the organisms.

The study exposed 20 ash trees to various radiation sources for a period of three months. Trees placed closest to the Wi-Fi radio demonstrated a "lead-like shine" on their leaves that was caused by the dying of the upper and lower epidermis of the leaves. This would eventually result in the death of parts of the leaves. The study also found that Wi-Fi radiation could inhibit the growth of corn cobs.

The researchers urged that further studies were needed to confirm the current results and determine long-term effects of wireless radiation on trees.

Source;
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/211219/wifi_makes_trees_sick_study_says.html?tk=mod_rel

giovonni

27th November 2010, 18:11

All the Climate Change Deniers better buckle up we are in for a very scary ride, in part because they have attempted to block all rational response to this issue. SR reader and Greenpeace co-founder, Rex Wyler, writes about one aspect of this change that is already impacting the world's cities.

Deep Green: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities

Deep Green is Rex Weyler's monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace's past, present, and future. The opinions here are his own.

November 2010

Cities at sea level around the world – including Bangkok, New Orleans, Shanghai and Amsterdam – are bracing themselves for rising seas and sinking ground. Populations on river deltas, atolls and islands face flooding and displacement. Sea-level rise accumulates slowly, measured in millimetres a year, but the incremental pace can deceive us. Sea-level rise, particularly when combined with sinking land, presents a growing problem.

Consider that the rate of sea-level rise is itself rising. Sea rise remained virtually zero over the last several millennia. Then, in the 20th century, the sea rose about 20 centimeters. Now, today, the rate has reached about 30 centimeters per century, and still increasing. Recently, oceanographers have boosted their predictions of 21st century sea level rise from about 20 centimetres to a metre or more.

Sea-level rise is not uniform around the world. Gravitational forces, including the gravity of ice caps themselves, cause uneven fluctuations. Meanwhile, some coastal plains sink as others rise, so exaggerating sea-level rise in some regions and cancelling it in others. Furthermore, if humanity cannot change its hydrocarbon habits quickly enough, we risk runaway warming that could accelerate sea-level rise.

In an extreme runaway scenario, a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet would add 7 metres to the world’s oceans, and a complete melting of the Antarctic sheet would add 60 metres. Those scenarios would require a massive restructuring of human civilisation as we know it. However, even a one-to-two metre rise in sea level will inundate certain port cities, islands, atolls, flood deltas and coastal plains, obliterate vulnerable species and displace millions of people.

Sea changes in history

Earth’s coastal plains and inland seas have dried out and flooded many times. Historically, sea-level changes disrupt marine shallows, intertidal zones and coastal ecosystems - the most productive habitats - leading to substantial species loss. About 235 million years ago a massive ecosystem collapse, associated with warming and sea rise, obliterated 95% of all living species, the greatest diversity loss event in Earth history. Sixty-five million years ago a meteorite struck the Gulf of Mexico region and initiated a long cooling trend. As water froze, the sea level dropped and 75% of all species, including the dinosaurs on land, perished.

Over the last 20 million years, during the Miocene period, the Mediterranean basin dried and flooded several times. The basin finally filled with a catastrophic flood about 5.3 million years ago, when human ancestors Kenyapithecus and ‘Toumaï’ (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) roamed the forests of east Africa.

Later floods affected human settlements. During the most recent glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, sea levels dropped about 125 metres. The Mediterranean basin partially dried and was re-flooded in about 16,000 BCE. The Caspian and Black Seas may have flooded later, about 13,000 BCE, from melting Scandinavia ice sheets. The Black Sea likely flooded twice again about 10,000 and 7,600 years ago as the world’s oceans rose.

The Dogger Banks and other shallows around Britain and Ireland were dry lowlands during the last glaciation. The plains provided reindeer for human hunters and a land link from the European mainland to the British Isles. Human encampments have been identified on the ocean floor. During the post-glacial melt, sea water and fresh water from ice-dammed lakes flooded Doggerland and separated Britain and Ireland from Europe.

The lower Tigris-Euphrates valley also flooded during the post-glacial melt under the rising Persian Gulf. Lowlands around Indonesia, Australia, New Guinea and East Asia also flooded. Many of these floods submerged human settlements and hunting regions, likely inspiring the universal deluge and flood stories found in most human cultures. There may be a thousand submerged Atlantis-like cities, still undiscovered, and there may be more in the future.

Modern sea rise
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/community_images//84/2284/13429_25035.jpg
August 11 2010: After breaking off the Petermann Glacier six days earlier, a massive ice island floats slowly down the fjord toward the Nares Strait. Scientists warn that loss of the ice from this glacier is almost certain to speed up the rate at which ice from the Greenland icesheet melts into our oceans. Image: NASA

After the last ice age, as Earth warmed, melting ice raised sea levels by an average of about one metre a century, peaked at four metres a century, until about 7,000 years ago when Earth’s sea level stabilised. During the 2,000 years between 200 BCE and the year 1800, Earth’s sea level only rose about 20 centimetres, one centimetre a century, not enough to disrupt human coastal settlements.

However, after 1800 - during a century of human hydrocarbon industrialisation - the seas rose ten times faster, 10 centimetres a century. In the 20th century, this rate doubled to 20 centimetres, and now stands at 30 centimetres a century, 30 times faster than any period during the previous 7,000 years prior to 1800.

The rate of sea rise continues to increase, and this acceleration makes predictions challenging. We do not know how fast the sea may rise in the future. Most oceanographers last century believed the rise would be about 20 centimetres a century. By 2007, the IPCC assumed an average rate during the 21st century of 50 centimetres. Oceanographers now estimate that the seas will rise between one and two metres this century.

But we must keep in mind that the seas won’t suddenly stop rising in 2100, and the rate could be much higher by then. Sea-level change follows what mathematicians refer to as ‘compound integration’. First, human carbon emissions drive temperature change, which in turn melts ice and drives sea-level change. This double integration means that there could be a centuries-long lag between the initial carbon emissions and the final sea-level effect.

Furthermore, global heating from greenhouse gasses can be jolted by non-linear effects, dramatic jumps in impact from relatively small carbon emissions. One such non-linear effect is dynamic ice response, whereby melting creates cavities in ice sheets that increase the melt rate. Other ‘runaway’ factors include methane released from permafrost, the reflective power of water versus ice, forests dying in the heat, and so forth. If humanity triggers runaway global warming, then Earth could enter a long warming period independent of human mitigation efforts. If such a heating period melts the world’s glaciers and both poles, the seas would rise by some 70 metres, creating another thousand Atlantises and a billion displaced people.

Sinking Cities Today
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/community_images//84/2284/13430_25037.jpg
Anjana Koyal lives in Satjellia island, India and is one of the many people affected by sea level rise: "I am a student and my school is flooded with water. There are too many mosquitoes, flies, and a bad smells comes from the water." Image: Peter Caton / Greenpeace

The Netherlands land base is sinking, as deep mantle rock flows from this region, adding to the effect of sea-level rise. Amsterdam sits four metres below sea level. The Dutch Veerman Committee for coastal maintenance expects the sea level to rise between 65 and 130 centimetres over the next century, requiring a billion-euro annual budget in coastal maintenance and dam construction. Each year, crews deposit some 14 million cubic metres of sand on the intertidal zones just to combat erosion.

Other cities, such as Houston, Texas and Shanghai, China, battle rising seas and sinking ground caused by human activity. Houston is sinking from both groundwater and oil extraction, which undermines the coastal substrate foundation. Shanghai, on the Yangtze River delta, grew from a fishing village to a city of over 20 million people. The city is simply too heavy for its swampland foundation. Aggravated by water extraction, the city sank 2.5 metres between 1921 and 1965, and continues to sink. According to China's State Oceanic Administration, ‘Sea level rises worldwide cannot be reversed’ so China must ‘adapt to the change’ by building levees and dykes.

A topographical study at the University of Colorado, concluded that ‘most of the world’s low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity ... putting tens of millions of people at risk’. Vulnerable river deltas include the Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, Pearl River in China, and the Mekong in Vietnam, and 24 of the worlds’ 33 major deltas. Regions such as Florida, Belize, the Bahamas and the Maldives, and cities such as Trieste, Bangkok and Dacca, also remain vulnerable.

Sinking cities and rising seas are symptoms of unsustainable human activity and habitat overshoot. Humanity has grown beyond the biological and physical limits of its Earth habitat. These limits manifest as global warming, rising seas, sinking cities, drained aquifers, disappearing species, dying forests, human starvation and islands of floating plastic.

Meanwhile, the cost of adapting – billions of dollars for new levees, dams and climate change mitigation – demands scarce resources that are needed to expand education, food production and social services. To meet the costs of adaption, industrial nations will push their economies to grow, adding to the root problem of habitat overshoot. Every millimetre of rising sea water, every drop of water from the melting ice, is a message from Earth to humanity.

-Rex Weyler
October 2010

Source:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/deep-green-rising-seas-sinking-cities/blog/28416#

Note~ Here is the real world result Rex Wyler was writing about ~ Earlier this year before moving out west, i paid a visit to the Eastern Shore of Virginia
(Chincoteague-Assateague Islands) area~ i had a realization then~ this fragile land was not long in remaining in its current existence.

Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/science/earth/26norfolk.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

giovonni

29th November 2010, 05:01

Yet another indicator of the decay of American infrastructure: "According to Akamai's Q3 State of the Internet report, the United States' Internet speed did not qualify for a place in the top 10 list of countries with the fastest Internet in the world, and its average overall speed has actually decreased by 2.4% year-over-year from 2008 to 2009." http://mashable.com/2010/01/16/united-states-internet-speed/. This article is talking about 100 megabit, the average in the U.S. is 3.9 megabit, and there are still large sections of the country operating at old-fashioned dial-up speeds, much slower than that.

The United States actually ranked 18 out of the 203 nations tested in terms of average connection speeds, falling behind speed leaders like South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.

'Fourth generation' Internet arrives in Hong Kong
Fri Nov 26, 2010 http://d.yimg.com/a/p/afp/20101126/capt.photo_1290757769677-1-0.jpg?x=213&y=130&xc=1&yc=1&wc=409&hc=250&q=85&sig=0ePftwU_Z6sQkuK4mpDN8w--

HONG KONG (AFP) – The latest generation of wireless Internet that will allow people to watch a crystal clear movie or live sporting event on the street or atop a hill is being deployed throughout Hong Kong.

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) network will give super high speeds across the city and could mean the end of computers ever needing to be plugged into a wall for a connection to the net.

The so-called "fourth generation" system is being rolled out by Hong Kong mobile network operator CSL in partnership with telecoms equipment maker ZTE Corporation.

"The first launch of an LTE network any place in Asia is truly historic," Joseph O'Konek, CSL's chief executive, told AFP.

"For a lot of people, this will be their first experience of the Internet. They are at a huge advantage to previous Internet generations because they are leapfrogging all those fixed line technologies.

"It is truly going to unleash the power of human networks as this kind of system rolls out more and more across the world."

LTE enables faster data downloads and uploads on mobile devices compared with a third-generation network.

The system will give speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and should make the high quality viewing of full length movies or realtime live sporting events possible anywhere in the city.

LTE networks are already operating in Europe, Scandinavia and North America. Japan will have an LTE system before the end of the year and huge growth in LTE connections is expected over the next five years, especially in China.

Meanwhile CSL's owner, the Australian telecoms giant Telstra, said it is looking to make acquisitions to strengthen its position in the Asia-Pacific region.

"Organic growth is always the best growth. But you do need to acquire new technology that's going to allow you to fuel the growth in the future," David Thodey, the company's CEO, told the Wall Street Journal.

"Sometimes you expand geographically... or sometimes you want to expand your market share. We will be doing all three because it's critically important for a company to keep pushing the limits as you go forward."

Source;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101126/tc_afp/hongkongitinternetasia_20101126075024/print

grannyfranny100

29th November 2010, 18:36

Wow, now I understand why the government allows so many illegal immigrants. Some of them may strive hard to accomplish something with their lives. And from this group of articles, American kids are only looking for the most shallow forms of brain stimulation. They sound ready to be household drones. Sit them in the corner and stimulate them electronically until some household task needs to be done. If they refuse, just shut off the brain stimulation until they break out into an addictive sweat and do the required task. Look for your household slave coming soon to Walmart.

How did my niece (Berkeley) and Nephew (Calpoly) avoid this fate? Perhaps because they had a full time mom and a variety of activities.

giovonni

29th November 2010, 19:59

:twitch:

I found this trend quite revealing. Not only for the points listed but for a point not noted: To think this way one has to have the capacity to spend between $11,000 to $18,000 a month from one's cash flow and be unconcerned there is no return. It also says that real estate at that level was hyper-inflated and is dropping so fast renting seems the better choice.

Rich Americans Ditch Home Ownership For Renting

http://media.cnbc.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/__Story_Inserts/graphics/__REAL_ESTATE/_HOME_TYPES/Strawberry_Mill_Valley_200.jpg
This town house in Marin County, Calif. is renting for $7,000 a month. It has San Francisco and bay views.

By: Joseph Pisani
Published: Friday, 26 Nov 2010

Patrick Lee went from homeowner to home renter this year.

It may sound like a downgrade, but the New Yorker didn't make the switch because he couldn't keep up with payments or because he lost his job. Instead, Lee was nervous about the state of the housing market.

So in March he sold the Manhattan apartment he bought in 2008 for about the same price he paid and moved — along with his wife and child — a few steps away into a luxury, two-bedroom rental unit in a brand new building.

Lee wouldn't disclose what he's paying, but similar two-bedroom apartments in the building usually rent for $11,000 a month.

“I wanted to protect ourselves from prices going down,” says Lee, who is a managing director at a major bank. “I didn’t want to be an owner anymore.”

Lee has company. Demand for luxury rental units has increased as wealthier individuals who can afford to buy are deciding not to, according to brokers and real estate analysts in affluent areas of the country such as New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.

“More affluent Americans are opting to rent as oppose to buy,” says Jack McCabe, an independent real estate analyst and CEO of McCabe Research and Consulting in Deerfield Beach, Fla. “Within the last year, so many people have seen their family and friends get burned in real estate. They don’t see it as being a risk free investment as they used to.”

And they're paying top dollar to rent.

In Manhattan the demand for high-end rentals has never been hotter. In the third quarter of 2010 there were 200 new leases signed for rentals charging $10,000 a month and up, more than double the 89 leases signed the year before, according to Jonathan Miller, CEO and president of New York City-based real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel.

What’s considered luxury in New York City? Currently on the market now at The Corner, Lee's new address, are a couple of three-bedroom apartments ranging from $14,800-$20,000 a month. At The Anthrop, another luxury building in Manhattan, a 3,331-square-foot four bedroom unit rents for $18,000.

Miller says that while high-end sales have picked up recently in Manhattan, the increased demand for luxury rentals shows that more would-be buyers are concerned and taking the “wait and see approach.”

The demand is also being seen in Marin County, right across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Last year, the phones at Foundation Rentals & Relocation office were ringing constantly with high-end homeowners wanting to rent property that they couldn’t sell, but no one was interested in renting them.

Now the firm is getting calls from executives, especially in the technology sector, looking to move into a rental.

“They’re entrepreneurs. They would rather put their cash in their business,” says Darcy Barrow, who founded the firm with her husband Christopher Barrow.

“And get a greater return,” adds Christopher.

This year, the firm handled a rental house with an 8-car garage for $12,500 a month. Another 6,500-square-foot, five-bedroom home is renting for $11,900. They also have a 2,658-square-foot town house on the market, boasting views of San Francisco for $7,000 a month.

“When I tell people I rent homes for $10,000, people ask, ‘Why would anybody rent at that price?,’” says Darcy. “They’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Just because they choose to rent, doesn’t mean they’re going to rent a two bedroom.”

In Chicago, Aaron Galvin, the broker and owner of rental agency Luxury Living Chicago, says that he has rented 30 percent more luxury apartments in 2010 than last year.

Luxury in Chicago means anything over $3,000 a month, and a building with amenities like granite kitchen counters, stainless steel appliances and washing machines and dryers in the unit, says Galvin.

http://media.cnbc.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/__Story_Inserts/graphics/__COMPANY_IMAGES/B/bank_of_america/bank_america4_new_150.jpg
Three bedrooms at The Corner in New York City go for $14,800-$20,000 a month.

A recent client sold a multi-million dollar home in the suburbs to move into a rental building, waiting to buy a property until she got a feel for the neighborhood.

“The cachet that came with owning seems to be gone now,” he says.

The same is happening in south Florida.

Chris Wells, a broker working in the Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Coconut Cove area, says he has seen “skepticism” from would-be buyers, who ultimately decide to rent a home before making a purchase, easily spending about $8,000 to $15,000 a month, because they are waiting to see if home prices continue to fall.

“In Florida, we’re really not out of the recession yet,” says McCabe, the analyst. “There is no urgency to buy.”

Lee says that he’s the first of his peers to make the switch to renting. But that doesn't mean they don't want to.

“I suspect a lot of people are underwater and can’t get out,” says Lee. “A lot of people are just stuck.”

He says he doesn’t regret selling his apartment and moving to a rental, especially since the building he lives in has all the amenities and handiwork of his previous place. And he can rest easier knowing that if he has to relocate for his job, he can leave without having the burden of trying to sell an apartment.

“With so much uncertainty,” says Lee, “It gives me a lot of peace of mind.”

Source;
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40260336:twitch:

giovonni

1st December 2010, 18:52

It's so simple. So why aren't we doing it? The answer is we seem to have lost the capacity to think in terms of what would make a happy functional society. Instead, we only consider short-term profit, which benefits only a tiny percentage of the population.
Thanks to Kevin Kelley.

China's Ban Kept 100 Billion Plastic Bags Out of the Trash
by Brian Merchant

11.30. 2010

http://www.treehugger.com/china-plastic-bag-ban-billion.jpg

It's so simple -- so gloriously simple. In 2008, China instated a law that made it illegal for stores to give out plastic bags for free. Instead, shop owners were required to charge for the bags, and allowed to keep any profit they made for themselves. The results? After two years, the poorly-enforced law has nonetheless dropped plastic bag consumption by a whopping 50% -- keeping an estimated 100 billion plastic bags out of the landfills.

It's a beautiful demonstration of how a simple piece of policy can achieve big results -- while keeping everyone (except perhaps the plastic bag manufacturers) happy. Small business owners make a small additional profit, consumers learn to reuse bags, and the environment, of course, emerges the biggest winner of all.

GOOD points to a Chinese student's research on the ban, and how it impacted consumer behavior. Here are his findings:

Consumers in Beijing and Guiyang used an average of 21 new plastic bags weekly before the bag-fee ordinance was passed in June, 2008, and rarely used the same bag twice. But after the law was imposed, consumption dropped 49 percent and nearly half of the bags were re-used. While that represents a significant reduction, researchers say there is much room for improvement, especially when it comes to enforcement. Months after the law was enacted, the researchers say, nearly 60 percent of all plastic bags were still given away free.

So the law is impressively effective even with piss-poor enforcement. I'll turn to GOOD's Andrew Price for the takeaway: "After its first year, The Guardian reported the ban had saved the country 40 billion plastic bags. By now the cumulative number of bags saved is probably more like 100 billion, and if the law were enforced well, it'd be a lot higher." Yes indeed -- with those kinds of results, seems it's high time we started pushing a little harder for similar policy models (we already have some cities that charge a tax for plastic bags) here in the states.

More on Plastic Bag Bans
As U.S. Cities Waver on Plastic Bag Tax, China's Bag Ban Saved 1.6 Tons of Waste
Plastic Bag Bans Sweep Cities Across Nation
60000 Plastic Bags are Being Used This Second: Help Slow it Down

Source TreeHuggers.com
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/china-ban-kept-100-billion-plastic-bags-out-trash.php

giovonni

2nd December 2010, 18:23

:argue:

The country is coming unglued and the patriotic Republicans have decided, as Senator Mitch McConnell says quite blatantly, that their uppermost priority is to make sure Obama is a one term President. Forget about food programs for children, unemployment extension, and on and on. Forget about anything constructive. The argument that extending tax cuts for the wealthy because this will create jobs does not pass the smell test -- as the Congressional Budget Office said explicitly. If you voted for a Republican and you are not a millionaire you voted against your own self-interest, and against the well-being of your country. And let me also say that I think the Democrats, including the President, have been astonishingly pusillanimous.

SENATE
GOP Will Filibuster All Bills if Taxes, Budget Not Addressed
"We will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item," their letter to Reid says.

http://media.nationaljournal.com/?controllerName=image&action=get&id=2748&format=homepage_fullwidth
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and all of the Senate's Republicans are pledging to stop the chamber from moving ahead on other priorities.

All 42 Senate Republicans have signed a letter refusing to vote for cloture on any bill before the Senate until the federal government is funded beyond this week and the Bush-era income tax cuts are addressed before they expire December 31.

“We write to inform you that we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers,” said the letter, which was sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this morning.

While Congress is expected to clear a short-term extension of federal funding today or tomorrow, the letter derails chances for relatively quick passage of bills Democrats are considering taking up before addressing the tax cuts. The two most prominent are a defense authorization that includes a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military and the Dream Act, giving some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children a path to legal residence.

Reid was weighing action on both those bills before a final deal on the so-called Bush tax cuts. But with 42 votes, Republicans appear poised to successfully filibuster them.

“The true effect of this letter is to prevent the Senate from acting on many important issues that have bipartisan support,” Reid said this morning on the Senate floor. He said the letter codifies a GOP strategy of delaying action “on critical matters, then blaming the Democrats for not addressing the needs of the American people. Very cynical, but very obvious, very transparent.”

Reid said he is also lining up action on a labor-backed bill to guarantee collective bargaining rights to first responders, such as police and firefighters, and a bill to extend health care coverage and compensation to people who worked in the World Trade Center ruins after 9/11 and since became sick. He said he plans to file cloture on the bills and the Dream Act at the same time later this week.

But he acknowledged the Republican letter means those votes will fail. “Passing either will require Republican votes,” Reid said.

The bills could still move after completion of a tax deal, if that occurs, but the move by the GOP complicates that plan.

Source;
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/gop-will-filibuster-all-bills-if-taxes-budget-not-addressed-20101201

By Dan Friedman
Wednesday, December 1, 2010 | 9:53 a.m.:argue::dizzy:

giovonni

3rd December 2010, 02:27

OMG!:faint2:

"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America."
Sen. Bernard Sanders Independent the State of Vermont

Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/08/26/PH2010082606283.jpg

By Jia Lynn Yang, Neil Irwin and David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 2, 2010; 12:15 AM

The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009.

The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector reached across a broad spectrum of the economy, benefiting stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank's aid programs also supported U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before.

Fed officials emphasize that their actions were meant to stabilize a financial system that was on the verge of collapse in late 2008. They note that the actions worked to prevent a complete financial meltdown and that none of the special lending programs has lost money. (Some have recorded healthy profits for taxpayers.)

But the extent of the lending to major banks - and the generous terms of some of those deals - heighten the political peril for a central bank that is already under the gun for a wide range of actions, including a recent decision to try to stimulate the economy by buying $600 billion in U.S. bonds.

"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America," said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime Fed critic whose provision in the Wall Street regulatory overhaul required the new disclosures. "Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations. As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions."

The Fed launched emergency programs totaling $3.3 trillion in aid, a figure reached by adding up the peak amount of lending in each program.

Companies that few people would associate with Wall Street benefited through the Fed's program to ease the market for commercial paper, a form of short-term debt used by major corporations to fund their daily activities.

By the fall of 2008, credit had frozen across the financial system, including the commercial paper market. The Fed then purchased commercial paper issued by GE 12 times for a total of $16 billion. It bought paper from Harley-Davidson 33 times, for a total of $2.3 billion. It picked up debt issued by Verizon twice, totaling $1.5 billion.

"It is hard to say what would have happened without the facility, and how its absence might have affected GE, but overall the program was extremely effective in helping stabilize the market," GE spokesman Russell Wilkerson said by e-mail.

Verizon spokesman Robert A. Varettoni said that it was "an extraordinary time," adding that there was no credit available otherwise at the time.

The data revealed that the Fed continued making purchases into the summer of 2009 - after the official end of the recession - showing that it was still concerned about a fundamental part of the financial system even as economic growth was returning.

The disclosure shows "how really profound the financial crisis was in the fall of 2008 and the firepower the Fed mustered in response," said analyst Karen Shaw Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics.

Foreign-owned banks also benefited from the Fed's commercial-paper facility. The Korean Development Bank, owned by the South Korean government, used the program to the tune of billions of dollars, including a $407 million short-term loan on a single day. Many foreign banks, including the French BNP Paribas, the Swiss UBS and the German Deutsche Bank, took extensive advantage of various programs. Even a major bank in Bavaria benefited, as well as another one headquartered in Bahrain, a tiny island country in the Middle East.

Another Fed program allowed investment banks for the first time to borrow directly from the Fed as officials sought to stem the panic that had taken down Wall Street titan Bear Stearns. The central bank assisted 18 companies through this program. Among the biggest beneficiaries was Citigroup, which in a single day in November 2008 borrowed $18.6 billion from the Fed.

The data also demonstrate how the Fed, in its scramble to keep the financial system afloat, eventually lowered its standards for the kind of collateral it allowed participating banks to post. From Citigroup, for instance, it accepted $156 million in triple-C collateral or lower - grades that indicate that the assets carried the greatest risk of default.

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher defended the Fed's actions during the financial crisis, saying the central bank "stepped into the breach" in its role as a lender of last resort.

"That's what we are paid to do," he said. "We took an enormous amount of risk with the people's money," he acknowledged. But the crisis lending programs are now all closed, he said, "and we didn't lose a dime, and in fact we made money on every one of them."

The banks universally hailed the Fed on Wednesday.

"In late 2008, many of the US funding markets were clearly broken," Goldman Sachs said in a statement, echoing similar comments made by Bank of America and Citigroup. "The Federal Reserve took essential steps to fix these markets and its actions were very successful."

By 2009, Goldman and other Wall Street firms were reporting their best profits ever. That allowed these banks to pay out huge salaries again, but it also drew the ire of lawmakers and ordinary Americans.

Sanders, for one, said these banks got off easy while receiving extraordinary aid. In rescuing these firms, the Fed never required them to lend to small businesses, modify the mortgages of homeowners or invest in a way that would create jobs.

"We bailed these guys out, but the requirements placed upon them had very little positive impact on the needs of ordinary Americans," Sanders said.

Source;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/01/AR2010120106870.html

giovonni

11th December 2010, 18:41

After reading some of the recent 'Wikileaks' cable releases ~ this should not surprise anyone :doh:

***http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/images-8/nuclear-enrichment-facility.jpg

We have been bungling the geopolitical challenge of North Korea for at least two decades -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- and the story just gets scarier as it goes along.

What I Found In North Korea
Pyongyang’s Plutonium is No Longer the Only Problem

Siegfried S. Hecker
December 9, 2010

In November 12, during my most recent visit to the Yongbyon nuclear complex, North Korean scientists showed me and my colleagues, John W. Lewis and Robert Carlin, a small, recently completed, industrial-scale uranium-enrichment facility and an experimental light-water reactor (LWR) under construction.

I was stunned by the sight of 2,000 centrifuges in two cascade halls and an ultramodern control room. But it was not until the long drive back to Pyongyang that the political implications of these findings hit home. It will be more important than ever to limit Pyongyang's nuclear progress and calm tensions on the Korean peninsula. This is particularly true in light of the clash in the Yellow Sea between the two Koreas late last month.

Although I and other nonproliferation experts had long believed that North Korea possessed a parallel uranium-enrichment program -- and there was ample evidence for such a belief -- I was amazed by its scale and sophistication. Instead of finding a few dozen first-generation centrifuges, we saw rows of advanced centrifuges, apparently fully operational. Our hosts told us that construction of the centrifuge facility began in April 2009 and was completed a few days before our arrival. That is not credible, however, given the requirements for specialty materials and components, as well as the difficulty of making the centrifuge cascades work smoothly.

How North Korea managed to obtain all these materials is a troubling question for the global nonproliferation regime. Indeed, there is no evidence that North Korea can produce high-strength aluminum or steel alloys on its own, or that ring magnets, bearings, and vacuum valves were manufactured indigenously.

The most likely scenario is that the equipment was built and brought into operation over many years at a different location and then moved into the new facility. The items needed to manufacture the centrifuges were likely obtained through North Korea's complex and far-reaching procurement network -- in which Pakistan likely played a significant role. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf admitted in his memoirs that the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan delivered what amounted to an enrichment starter kit of 24 centrifuges around the year 2000. There were also reports that before A. Q. Khan's house arrest in 2004, North Korean scientists had cooperated closely with the Khan Research Laboratories, which provided hands-on training at their centrifuge facilities. In addition, in late 2001, the CIA reported to Congress that North Korea had attempted to acquire centrifuge-related materials in large quantities from Russia and Germany to support a uranium-enrichment program. It is also quite likely that the North Koreans fabricated at least some of the many components themselves.

And Washington cannot rule out North Korean cooperation with Iran, since the two have collaborated closely on missile technologies before. North Korea's centrifuge facilities appear to be more sophisticated than what Iran has shown to international inspectors, but it is well known that Tehran is developing next-generation centrifuges. Moreover, North Korea has much greater experience in uranium processing and reactor technologies than Iran, raising concerns that such expertise could flow from Pyongyang to Tehran.

These findings demonstrate the difficulty of accurately evaluating clandestine uranium-centrifuge programs. The small footprints and signatures of such facilities make assessment problematic. The best indicators of North Korea's progress were its procurement activities and technical cooperation with other countries -- in this case, Pakistan. These markers led the CIA to conclude in 2002 that by mid-decade North Korea could produce two highly enriched uranium (HEU) atomic bombs annually. The George W. Bush administration used this evidence to confront Pyongyang in October 2002 in a manner that led to the termination of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which had foreseen eventual diplomatic normalization in exchange for denuclearization. Terminating the agreement provided North Korea with an excuse to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, reprocess bomb-grade plutonium from the spent uranium fuel rods, and build its first bomb.

In retrospect, it was not faulty intelligence that led to the disastrous outcome of the October 2002 confrontation but rather the Bush administration's misguided political determination to end the Agreed Framework without preparing for the consequences. At Yongbyon, the North Koreans told us that they will eventually build larger power reactors, and although they anticipate difficulties because the technologies for the reactor and fuel are new to them, they are confident of success. Our Foreign Ministry host reminded us that they had previously threatened to build a LWR and do their own enrichment but that "no one believed us, including you, Dr. Hecker." He made it clear that, in their minds, they had no choice; U.S. actions had pushed them in this direction.

The existence of a North Korean light-water reactor poses its own set of policy challenges. Pyongyang has seriously pursued LWRs since 1985, when it struck a deal with Moscow to supply two such reactors. The Agreed Framework was an attempt to replace its gas-graphite reactors, which are useful for making bombs but bad for generating electricity. By contrast, LWRs, which are less suitable for bombs, are very good for electricity. Shortly after the North's April 5, 2009, rocket launch and the predictable UN condemnation that followed, an official government press release stated, "We will see a light water reactor, which is vigorously 100 percent running on our own raw materials and technology." Now, as promised, they have started construction on a small, experimental LWR designed to deliver roughly 25 to 30 megawatts of electric power.

I believe North Korea's expressed interest in nuclear electricity is genuine. Although it is technically possible that the LWR will be used to produce bomb-grade plutonium, such a scenario is unlikely. Plutonium from an LWR is much less suitable for bombs than the plutonium already produced in the existing gas-graphite reactor. In fact, if Pyongyang wanted more plutonium bomb fuel, it would simply restart that reactor, not build an LWR. Still, the construction of the reactor raises a number of policy issues: an LWR requires enriched uranium, and once enrichment capabilities are established for reactor fuel, they can be readily reconfigured to produce HEU bomb fuel -- precisely Washington's concern about Iran's nuclear program.

In revealing these facilities, Pyongyang is sending a signal that policymakers must take seriously. In this case, the revelation appears to be part of a calculated plan developed around the time of the U.S. presidential transition to proceed with its nuclear program in a way that would influence the diplomatic situation in its favor. After the international community condemned North Korea's April 2009 rocket launch, Pyongyang officially terminated its participation in the six-party talks and conducted a second nuclear test to demonstrate to its own satisfaction and to the world that it had a functioning nuclear device.

At the same time, the North Koreans designed a small LWR and began building the enrichment facility by tearing down Yongbyon's fuel-rod-fabrication facility and building a centrifuge hall. They timed our visit to show off their completed project. With these moves, Pyongyang managed to justify its need for an enrichment program while moving toward its long-standing ambition of using LWRs for nuclear power.

The truth is that North Korea has run both plutonium and uranium programs in a dual-use mode -- that is, for bombs and electricity -- from the beginning. It favored the plutonium program for both weapons and electric power in the early 1990s, but it was willing to trade in the plutonium bomb program for electricity from LWRs to be supplied by the United States as part of the Agreed Framework. It appears to have rejuvenated its uranium program for bombs later in the 1990s, when A. Q. Kahn came calling and the Agreed Framework was moving along very slowly. By 2002, much as the intelligence reports indicated, the North was making major procurements of centrifuge materials and components. The October 2002 diplomatic confrontation allowed the North to accelerate the plutonium bomb program in 2003, and subsequent nuclear tests allowed it to demonstrate its success.

The modern centrifuge facility the North Koreans showed us this time indicates that Pyongyang never gave up on the uranium path to the bomb. The North must have been able to procure enough materials and components, fabricate and assemble them into working centrifuges, get them functioning in an undisclosed facility and then install them in short order at Yongbyon. The centrifuge facility we saw is most likely designed to make reactor, not bomb, fuel, because it would not make sense to construct it in a previously inspected site and show it to foreign visitors. However, it is highly likely that a parallel covert facility capable of HEU production exists elsewhere in the country.

The question now is how this affects Northeast Asia's security calculus. North Korea already has plutonium -- by our estimates, enough for four to eight basic nuclear weapons. Possession of similar amounts of HEU does not fundamentally change the threat. HEU is easier to fashion into a crude bomb but offers no advantages for more sophisticated, miniaturized designs. If Pyongyang is content with its current arsenal or modest growth, it would be better off restarting the existing plutonium production reactor. However, if Pyongyang wants to increase its arsenal substantially, it could expand the capacity of the current enrichment facility or build parallel clandestine facilities. Pyongyang cannot expand centrifuge capacity at will, however. It is limited by the need to import key materials and components -- hence the international community must redouble its efforts to shut down Pyongyang's extensive illicit procurement network.

Even more troubling than an expansion of the North's nuclear arsenal is its potential export of fissile materials or the means of producing them, which now include centrifuge technologies. Moreover, by unveiling the LWR and enrichment facility, Pyongyang has complicated the diplomatic process by, in effect, redefining what is meant by denuclearization. Not only is it unlikely that Pyongyang will give up its nuclear arsenal anytime soon, but it will almost certainly insist on keeping its LWR program and centrifuges. Shutting down the plutonium program was within reach, but the same is not likely for the uranium program, because the justification for its peaceful nature is more credible than for the plutonium program, even though it is no less problematic.

Nevertheless, our Foreign Ministry host maintained that Pyongyang continues to support the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula as agreed to in the September 2005 Six-Party Joint Statement. As a starting point, he suggested that it would be helpful if Washington reaffirmed part of the October 2000 U.S.-North Korean Joint Communiqué. That document, which was the culmination of a long diplomatic process, stated that neither government would have hostile intent toward the other and confirmed the commitment of both to make every effort to build a new relationship free from past enmity.

It is time for the United States to conduct a thorough review of its policies on Northeast Asia, including but not limited to the nuclear issue. The fundamental and enduring goal must be the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. However, since that will take time, the U.S. government must quickly press for what I call "the three no's" -- no more bombs, no better bombs, and no exports -- in return for one yes: Washington's willingness to seriously address North Korea's fundamental insecurity along the lines of the joint communiqué. Our Foreign Ministry host framed his no's in terms of no vertical or horizontal proliferation. When we asked specifically if Pyongyang would entertain the concept of three no's and one yes, he said, "If the U.S. government asks that question, I will answer it."

Pyongyang's revelation of the centrifuge facility makes it more challenging and more pressing than ever to ask that question.

Source;
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67023/siegfried-s-hecker/what-i-found-in-north-korea?page=show#

giovonni

12th December 2010, 02:20

This situation is getting crazy :der:
Note~ this story was published the day after the previous story :twitch:

Pyongyang will rely on nuclear might to defend itself against the United States and South Korea, North Korea's Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun told Russia's Interfax news agency Friday.

"We are once again assured of the rectitude of our choice of the songun (army first) policy, and in strengthening a defence that relies on nuclear forces for deterrence," he said.

Moments after his comments, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement stating that "all sides must avoid taking any actions that can escalate the situation."

Source;
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.a8f77417d0291e36102d6723ad98a57 c.611&show_article=1

giovonni

13th December 2010, 17:01

This is long but worth the read ~
The tentacles of the Illness Profit System reach throughout the world, and the drive for profit corrupts like an acid everyone it touches.

Vanity Fair
Politics
Deadly Medicine
Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele•

Photo illustration by Chris Mueller
January 2011

TAKE TWO ASPIRIN
More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?

http://www.vanityfair.com/images/politics/2011/01/deadly-medicine.jpg

You wouldn’t think the cities had much in common. Iaşi, with a population of 320,000, lies in the Moldavian region of Romania. Mégrine is a town of 24,000 in northern Tunisia, on the Mediterranean Sea. Tartu, Estonia, with a population of 100,000, is the oldest city in the Baltic States; it is sometimes called “the Athens on the Emajõgi.” Shenyang, in northeastern China, is a major industrial center and transportation hub with a population of 7.2 million.

These places are not on anyone’s Top 10 list of travel destinations. But the advance scouts of the pharmaceutical industry have visited all of them, and scores of similar cities and towns, large and small, in far-flung corners of the planet. They have gone there to find people willing to undergo clinical trials for new drugs, and thereby help persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to declare the drugs safe and effective for Americans. It’s the next big step in globalization, and there’s good reason to wish that it weren’t.

Once upon a time, the drugs Americans took to treat chronic diseases, clear up infections, improve their state of mind, and enhance their sexual vitality were tested primarily either in the United States (the vast majority of cases) or in Europe. No longer. As recently as 1990, according to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 271 trials were being conducted in foreign countries of drugs intended for American use. By 2008, the number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000 percent. A database being compiled by the National Institutes of Health has identified 58,788 such trials in 173 countries outside the United States since 2000. In 2008 alone, according to the inspector general’s report, 80 percent of the applications submitted to the F.D.A. for new drugs contained data from foreign clinical trials. Increasingly, companies are doing 100 percent of their testing offshore. The inspector general found that the 20 largest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies now conducted “one-third of their clinical trials exclusively at foreign sites.” All of this is taking place when more drugs than ever—some 2,900 different drugs for some 4,600 different conditions—are undergoing clinical testing and vying to come to market.

Some medical researchers question whether the results of clinical trials conducted in certain other countries are relevant to Americans in the first place. They point out that people in impoverished parts of the world, for a variety of reasons, may metabolize drugs differently from the way Americans do. They note that the prevailing diseases in other countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis, can skew the outcome of clinical trials. But from the point of view of the drug companies, it’s easy to see why moving clinical trials overseas is so appealing. For one thing, it’s cheaper to run trials in places where the local population survives on only a few dollars a day. It’s also easier to recruit patients, who often believe they are being treated for a disease rather than, as may be the case, just getting a placebo as part of an experiment. And it’s easier to find what the industry calls “drug-naïve” patients: people who are not being treated for any disease and are not currently taking any drugs, and indeed may never have taken any—the sort of people who will almost certainly yield better test results. (For some subjects overseas, participation in a clinical trial may be their first significant exposure to a doctor.) Regulations in many foreign countries are also less stringent, if there are any regulations at all. The risk of litigation is negligible, in some places nonexistent. Ethical concerns are a figure of speech. Finally—a significant plus for the drug companies—the F.D.A. does so little monitoring that the companies can pretty much do and say what they want.

Consent by Thumbprint

Many of today’s trials still take place in developed countries, such as Britain, Italy, and Japan. But thousands are taking place in countries with large concentrations of poor, often illiterate people, who in some cases sign consent forms with a thumbprint, or scratch an “X.” Bangladesh has been home to 76 clinical trials. There have been clinical trials in Malawi (61), the Russian Federation (1,513), Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589), Kazakhstan (15), Peru (494), Iran (292), Turkey (716), and Uganda (132). Throw a dart at a world map and you are unlikely to hit a spot that has escaped the attention of those who scout out locations for the pharmaceutical industry.

The two destinations that one day will eclipse all the others, including Europe and the United States, are China (with 1,861 trials) and India (with 1,457). A few years ago, India was home to more American drug trials than China was, thanks in part to its large English-speaking population. But that has changed. English is now mandatory in China’s elementary schools, and, owing to its population edge, China now has more people who speak English than India does.

While Americans may be unfamiliar with the names of foreign cities where clinical trials have been conducted, many of the drugs being tested are staples of their medicine cabinets. One example is Celebrex, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that has been aggressively promoted in television commercials for a decade. Its manufacturer, Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, has spent more than a billion dollars promoting its use as a pain remedy for arthritis and other conditions, including menstrual cramps. The National Institutes of Health maintains a record of most—but by no means all—drug trials inside and outside the United States. The database counts 290 studies involving Celebrex. Companies are not required to report—and do not report—all studies conducted overseas. According to the database, of the 290 trials for Celebrex, 183 took place in the United States, meaning, one would assume, that 107 took place in other countries. But an informal, country-by-country accounting by VANITY FAIR turned up no fewer than 207 Celebrex trials in at least 36 other countries. They ranged from 1 each in Estonia, Croatia, and Lithuania to 6 each in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Russia, to 8 in Mexico, 9 in China, and 10 in Brazil. But even these numbers understate the extent of the foreign trials. For example, the database lists five Celebrex trials in Ukraine, but just “one” of those trials involved studies in 11 different Ukrainian cities.

The Celebrex story does not have a happy ending. First, it was disclosed that patients taking the drug were more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes than those who took older and cheaper painkillers. Then it was alleged that Pfizer had suppressed a study calling attention to these very problems. (The company denied that the study was undisclosed and insisted that it “acted responsibly in sharing this information in a timely manner with the F.D.A.”) Soon afterward the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine reported an array of additional negative findings. Meanwhile, Pfizer was promoting Celebrex for use with Alzheimer’s patients, holding out the possibility that the drug would slow the progression of dementia. It didn’t. Sales of Celebrex reached $3.3 billion in 2004, and then began to quickly drop.

“Rescue Countries”

One big factor in the shift of clinical trials to foreign countries is a loophole in F.D.A. regulations: if studies in the United States suggest that a drug has no benefit, trials from abroad can often be used in their stead to secure F.D.A. approval. There’s even a term for countries that have shown themselves to be especially amenable when drug companies need positive data fast: they’re called “rescue countries.” Rescue countries came to the aid of Ketek, the first of a new generation of widely heralded antibiotics to treat respiratory-tract infections. Ketek was developed in the 1990s by Aventis Pharmaceuticals, now Sanofi-Aventis. In 2004—on April Fools’ Day, as it happens—the F.D.A. certified Ketek as safe and effective. The F.D.A.’s decision was based heavily on the results of studies in Hungary, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The approval came less than one month after a researcher in the United States was sentenced to 57 months in prison for falsifying her own Ketek data. Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell, of Gadsden, Alabama, seemingly never met a person she couldn’t sign up to participate in a drug trial. She enrolled more than 400 volunteers, about 1 percent of the town’s adult population, including her entire office staff. In return, she collected $400 a head from Sanofi-Aventis. It later came to light that the data from at least 91 percent of her patients was falsified. (Kirkman-Campbell was not the only troublesome Aventis researcher. Another physician, in charge of the third-largest Ketek trial site, was addicted to cocaine. The same month his data was submitted to the F.D.A. he was arrested while holding his wife hostage at gunpoint.) Nonetheless, on the basis of overseas trials, Ketek won approval.

As the months ticked by, and the number of people taking the drug climbed steadily, the F.D.A. began to get reports of adverse reactions, including serious liver damage that sometimes led to death. The F.D.A.’s leadership remained steadfast in its support of the drug, but criticism by the agency’s own researchers eventually leaked out (a very rare occurrence in this close-knit, buttoned-up world). The critics were especially concerned about an ongoing trial in which 4,000 infants and children, some as young as six months, were recruited in more than a dozen countries for an experiment to assess Ketek’s effectiveness in treating ear infections and tonsillitis. The trial had been sanctioned over the objections of the F.D.A.’s own reviewers. One of them argued that the trial never should have been allowed to take place—that it was “inappropriate and unethical because it exposed children to harm without evidence of benefits.” In 2006, after inquiries from Congress, the F.D.A. asked Sanofi-Aventis to halt the trial. Less than a year later, one day before the start of a congressional hearing on the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug, the agency suddenly slapped a so-called black-box warning on the label of Ketek, restricting its use. (A black-box warning is the most serious step the F.D.A. can take short of removing a drug from the market.) By then the F.D.A. had received 93 reports of severe adverse reactions to Ketek, resulting in 12 deaths.

During the congressional hearings, lawmakers heard from former F.D.A. scientists who had criticized their agency’s oversight of the Ketek trials and the drug-approval process. One was Dr. David Ross, who had been the F.D.A.’s chief reviewer of new drugs for 10 years, and was now the national director of clinical public-health programs for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. When he explained his objections, he offered a litany of reasons that could be applied to any number of other drugs: “Because F.D.A. broke its own rules and allowed Ketek on the market. Because dozens of patients have died or suffered needlessly. Because F.D.A. allowed Ketek’s maker to experiment with it on children over reviewers’ protests. Because F.D.A. ignored warnings about fraud. And because F.D.A. used data it knew were false to reassure the public about Ketek’s safety.”

Trials and Error

To have an effective regulatory system you need a clear chain of command—you need to know who is responsible to whom, all the way up and down the line. There is no effective chain of command in modern American drug testing. Around the time that drugmakers began shifting clinical trials abroad, in the 1990s, they also began to contract out all phases of development and testing, putting them in the hands of for-profit companies. It used to be that clinical trials were done mostly by academic researchers in universities and teaching hospitals, a system that, however imperfect, generally entailed certain minimum standards. The free market has changed all that. Today it is mainly independent contractors who recruit potential patients both in the U.S. and—increasingly—overseas. They devise the rules for the clinical trials, conduct the trials themselves, prepare reports on the results, ghostwrite technical articles for medical journals, and create promotional campaigns. The people doing the work on the front lines are not independent scientists. They are wage-earning technicians who are paid to gather a certain number of human beings; sometimes sequester and feed them; administer certain chemical inputs; and collect samples of urine and blood at regular intervals. The work looks like agribusiness, not research.

What began as a mom-and-pop operation has grown into a vast army of formal “contract-research organizations” that generate annual revenue of $20 billion. They can be found conducting trials in every part of the world. By far the largest is Quintiles Transnational, based in Durham, North Carolina. It offers the services of 23,000 employees in 60 countries, and claims that it has “helped develop or commercialize all of the top 30 best-selling drugs.”

Quintiles is privately owned—its investors include two of the U.S.’s top private-equity firms. Other private contractors are public companies, their stock traded on Wall Street. Pharmaceutical Product Development (P.P.D.), a full-service medical contractor based in Wilmington, North Carolina, is a public company with 10,500 employees. It, too, has conducted clinical trials all around the world. In fact, it was involved in the clinical trials for Ketek—a P.P.D. research associate, Ann Marie Cisneros, had been assigned to monitor Dr. Anne Kirkman-Campbell’s testing in Alabama. Cisneros later told the congressional investigating committee that Kirkman-Campbell had indeed engaged in fraud. “But what the court that sentenced her did not know,” Cisneros said, was that “Aventis was not a victim of this fraud.” Cisneros said she had reported her findings of fraud to her employer, P.P.D., and also to Aventis. She told the congressional committee, “What brings me here today is my disbelief at Aventis’s statements that it did not know that fraud was being committed. Mr. Chairman, I knew it, P.P.D. knew it, and Aventis knew it.” Following her testimony the company released a statement saying it regretted the violations that occurred during the study but was not aware of the fraud until after the data was submitted to the F.D.A.

The F.D.A., the federal agency charged with oversight of the food and drugs that Americans consume, is rife with conflicts of interest. Doctors who insist the drug you take is perfectly safe may be collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company selling the drug. (ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that is compiling an ongoing catalogue of pharmaceutical-company payments to physicians, has identified 17,000 doctors who have collected speaking and consulting fees, including nearly 400 who have received $100,000 or more since 2009.) Quite often, the F.D.A. never bothers to check for interlocking financial interests. In one study, the agency failed to document the financial interests of applicants in 31 percent of applications for new-drug approval. Even when the agency or the company knew of a potential conflict of interest, neither acted to guard against bias in the test results.

Because of the deference shown to drug companies by the F.D.A.—and also by Congress, which has failed to impose any meaningful regulation—there is no mandatory public record of the results of drug trials conducted in foreign countries. Nor is there any mandatory public oversight of ongoing trials. If one company were to test an experimental drug that killed more patients than it helped, and kept the results secret, another company might unknowingly repeat the same experiment years later, with the same results. Data is made available to the public on a purely voluntary basis. Its accuracy is unknown. The oversight that does exist often is shot through with the kinds of ethical conflicts that Wall Street would admire. The economic incentives for doctors in poor countries to heed the wishes of the drug companies are immense. An executive at a contract-research organization told the anthropologist Adriana Petryna, author of the book When Experiments Travel: “In Russia, a doctor makes two hundred dollars a month, and he is going to make five thousand dollars per Alzheimer’s patient” that he signs up. Even when the most flagrant conflicts are disclosed, penalties are minimal. In truth, the same situation exists in the United States. There’s just more of a chance here, though not a very large one, that adverse outcomes and tainted data will become public. When the pharmaceutical industry insists that its drugs have been tested overseas in accordance with F.D.A. standards, this may be true—but should provide little assurance.

The F.D.A. gets its information on foreign trials almost entirely from the companies themselves. It conducts little or no independent research. The investigators contracted by the pharmaceutical companies to manage clinical trials are left pretty much on their own. In 2008 the F.D.A. inspected just 1.9 percent of trial sites inside the United States to ensure that they were complying with basic standards. Outside the country, it inspected even fewer trial sites—seven-tenths of 1 percent. In 2008, the F.D.A. visited only 45 of the 6,485 locations where foreign drug trials were being conducted.

The pharmaceutical industry dismisses concerns about the reliability of clinical trials conducted in developing countries, but the potential dangers were driven home to Canadian researchers in 2007. While reviewing data from a clinical trial in Iran for a new heart drug, they discovered that many of the results were fraudulent. “It was bad, so bad we thought the data was not salvageable,” Dr. Gordon Guyatt, part of the research group at McMaster University in Hamilton, told Canada’s National Post.

In addition to monitoring trials abroad, which it does not really do, the F.D.A. is responsible for inspecting drug-manufacturing plants in other countries, which it also does not really do. In 2007 and 2008, hundreds of patients taking the blood thinner heparin, which among other purposes is used to prevent blood clots during surgery and dialysis, developed serious allergic reactions as a result of a contaminant introduced at a Chinese manufacturing facility. It took months for the F.D.A., its Chinese counterpart, and Baxter International, the pharmaceutical company that distributed the drug, to track the source of contamination to Changzhou, a city of 3.5 million on the Yangtze River.

The delay was perhaps understandable, given the manufacturing process. The raw material for Baxter’s heparin comes from China’s many small pig farms. To be precise, it’s derived from the mucous membranes of the intestines of slaughtered pigs; the membranes are mixed together and cooked, often in unregulated family workplaces. By the time the source of the contaminant was pinpointed, many more patients in the United States had experienced severe reactions, and as many as 200 had died. It later turned out that the F.D.A. had indeed inspected a Chinese plant—but it was the wrong one. The federal regulators had confused the names.

The good news was that, in this instance, the F.D.A. at least knew which country the heparin had come from. The bad news is that it does not always know where clinical trials are being conducted, or even the names or types of drugs being tested, or the purpose for which they will be prescribed once approved. Companies may withhold the foreign test data until they actually submit the application to the F.D.A. for approval. By then the agency has lost the ability to see whether the trials were managed according to acceptable standards, and whether the data collected was manipulated or fabricated.

$350 per Child

If the globalization of clinical trials for adult medications has drawn little attention, foreign trials for children’s drugs have attracted even less. The Argentinean province of Santiago del Estero, with a population of nearly a million, is one of the country’s poorest. In 2008 seven babies participating in drug testing in the province suffered what the U.S. clinical-trials community refers to as “an adverse event”: they died. The deaths occurred as the children took part in a medical trial to test the safety of a new vaccine, Synflorix, to prevent pneumonia, ear infections, and other pneumococcal diseases. Developed by GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company in terms of global prescription-drug sales, the new vaccine was intended to compete against an existing vaccine. In all, at least 14 infants enrolled in clinical trials for the drug died during the testing. Their parents, some illiterate, had their children signed up without understanding that they were taking part in an experiment. Local doctors who persuaded parents to enroll their babies in the trial reportedly received $350 per child. The two lead investigators contracted by Glaxo were fined by the Argentinean government. So was Glaxo, though the company maintained that the mortality rate of the children “did not exceed the rate in the regions and countries participating in the study.” No independent group conducted an investigation or performed autopsies. As it happens, the brother of the lead investigator in Santiago del Estero was the Argentinean provincial health minister.

In New Delhi, 49 babies died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences while taking part in clinical trials over a 30-month period. They were given a variety of new drugs to treat everything from high blood pressure to chronic focal encephalitis, a brain inflammation that causes epileptic seizures and other neurological problems. The blood-pressure drugs had never before been given to anyone under 18. The editor of an Indian medical journal said it was obvious that the trials were intended to extend patent life in Western countries “with no consequence or benefit for India, using Indian children as guinea pigs.” In all, 4,142 children were enrolled in the studies, two-thirds of them less than one year old. But the head of the pediatrics department at the All India Institute maintained that “none of the deaths was due to the medication or interventions used in clinical trials.”

For years, American physicians gave anti-psychotic medicines to children “off label,” meaning that they wrote prescriptions based on testing for adults, sometimes even for different conditions. That didn’t work out so well for the children, who, when it comes to medicine, really are not just little adults. To provide the pharmaceutical industry with an incentive to conduct clinical trials on children’s versions of adult drugs, Congress in 1997 enacted legislation, known as the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision, extending the patent life of certain drugs by six months. It worked so well that the industry has, in the ensuing years, been able to put younger and younger children on more and more drugs, pocketing an extra $14 billion. Between 1999 and 2007, for instance, the use of anti-psychotic medications on children between the ages of two and five more than doubled.

A study of 174 trials under the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision found that 9 percent of them did not report the location or number of sites of the clinical trials. Of those that did, two-thirds had been conducted in at least one country outside the United States, and 11 percent were conducted entirely outside the United States. Of the 79 trials with more than 100 subjects participating, 87 percent enrolled patients outside the United States. As is the case with adult studies, many children’s trials conducted abroad are neither reported nor catalogued on any publicly accessible government database. There is no public record of their existence or their results.

In the mid-90s, Glaxo conducted clinical trials on the antidepressant Paxil in the United States, Europe, and South America. Paxil is a member of a class of drugs called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. The class includes Zoloft, Prozac, and Lexapro. In the United Kingdom, Paxil is sold as Seroxat. The clinical trials showed that the drug had no beneficial effect on adolescents; some of the trials indicated that the placebo was more effective than the drug itself. But Glaxo neglected to share this information with consumers; annual sales of the drug had reached $5 billion in 2003. In an internal document obtained by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the company emphasized how important it was to “effectively manage the dissemination of these data in order to minimize any potential negative commercial impact.” The memo went on to warn that “it would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated.” After the document was released a Glaxo spokesperson said that the “memo draws an inappropriate conclusion and is not consistent with the facts.”

“Smoke and Mirrors”

It may be just a coincidence, but as controversy swirls around new drugs, and as the F.D.A. continues to slap medicines with new warning labels—especially the black-box warnings that indicate the most serious potential reactions—most of the problematic drugs have all undergone testing outside the United States. Clinical-trial representatives working for GlaxoSmithKline went to Iaşi, Romania, to test Avandia, a diabetes drug, on the local population. Glaxo representatives also showed up in other cities in Romania—Bucureşti, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova, and Timişoara—as well as multiple cities in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. That was for the largest of the Avandia clinical trials. But there have been scores of others, all seeking to prove that the drug is safe and effective. Some took place before the drug was approved by the F.D.A. Others were “post-marketing” studies, done after the fact, as the company cast about for ways to come up with more positive results so it could expand Avandia’s use for other treatments. Based on the initial evaluations, Avandia was expected to—and did—become another Glaxo multi-billion-dollar best-seller.

While sales soared, so, too, did reports of adverse reactions—everything from macular edema to liver injury, from bone fractures to congestive heart failure. In 2009 the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit group that monitors the prescription-drug field, linked the deaths of 1,354 people to Avandia, based on reports filed with the F.D.A. Studies also concluded that people taking the drug had an increased risk of developing heart disease, one of the very conditions that doctors treating diabetics hope to forestall. The risk was so high that worried doctors inside and outside the F.D.A. sought to have the drug removed from the market, an incredibly difficult task no matter how problematic the medicine. As always, the F.D.A. was late to the party. In 2008 the American Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes had warned against using Avandia. The Saudi Arabian drug-regulatory agency yanked it from the market, and the Indian government asked Glaxo to halt 19 of its Avandia trials in that country. In September 2010 the European Medicines Agency pulled Avandia from the shelves all across Europe. The F.D.A. still could not bring itself to take decisive action. This even though the F.D.A. knew that Glaxo had withheld critical safety information concerning the increased risk of heart attacks, and the F.D.A. itself had estimated that the drug had caused more than 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 2007. The agency settled for imposing new restrictions on the availability of the drug in the United States. Glaxo released a statement saying that it “continues to believe that Avandia is an important treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes,” but that it would “voluntarily cease promotion of Avandia in all the countries in which it operates.”

The Avandia case and others like it have prompted the U.S. Justice Department to mount an investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. While it is legal for doctors in this country to accept money from drug companies for acting as consultants, this is not the case abroad, where doctors often are government employees, and such payments can be considered bribes. There are other legal issues. So far, Glaxo has paid out more than $1 billion to settle lawsuits arising from claims against Avandia and other drugs. The Senate Finance Committee calculates that, since May 2004, seven drug companies have paid out more than $7 billion in fines and penalties stemming from unlawful drug dealings. Pfizer paid the largest such fine in history—$2.3 billion for promoting off-label uses of the arthritis drug Bextra.

In theory, pharmaceutical companies are barred from selling a drug for any purpose other than the one that the F.D.A. has approved on the basis of clinical testing. But the reality is different. The minute a drug receives the green light from the F.D.A. for a specific treatment, the sponsoring company and its allies begin campaigns to make it available for other purposes or for other types of patients. The antidepressant Paxil was tested on adults but sold off-label to treat children. Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, was marketed as a treatment for depression. Physicians, often on retainer from pharmaceutical companies, are free to prescribe a drug for any reason if they entertain a belief that it will work. This practice turns the population at large into unwitting guinea pigs whose adverse reactions may go unreported or even unrecognized.

To secure the F.D.A.’s approval for Seroquel, which ultimately would go to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder, AstraZeneca, the fifth-largest pharmaceutical company, conducted clinical trials across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Among the sites: Shenyang and more than a dozen other cities in China, and multiple cities in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Ukraine, and Taiwan. The F.D.A. initially approved the drug for the treatment of schizophrenia. But while schizophrenia may have opened the door, off-label sales opened the cash register. Money poured in by the billions as AstraZeneca promoted the drug for the treatment of any number of other conditions. It was prescribed for children with autism-spectrum disorders and retardation as well as for elderly Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes. The company touted the drug for treatment of aggression, anxiety, anger-management issues, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dementia, and sleeplessness. Up to 70 percent of the prescriptions for Seroquel were written for a purpose other than the one for which it had been approved, and sales rose to more than $4 billion a year.

It turned out, however, that AstraZeneca had been less than candid about the drug’s side effects. One of the most troubling: patients often gained weight and developed diabetes. This meant a new round of drugs to treat conditions caused by Seroquel. In an internal e-mail from 1997 discussing a study comparing Seroquel with an older anti-psychotic drug, Haldol, a company executive praised the work of the project physician, saying she had done a great “smoke-and-mirrors job,” which “should minimize (and dare I venture to suggest) could put a positive spin (in terms of safety) on this cursed study.” After the e-mail was disclosed, in February 2009, the company said that the document cannot “obscure the fact that AstraZeneca acted responsibly and appropriately as it developed and marketed” the drug. In April, AstraZeneca reached a half-billion-dollar settlement with the federal government over its marketing of Seroquel. The U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, where the settlement was filed, declared that the company had “turned patients into guinea pigs in an unsupervised drug test.” Meanwhile, the company was facing more than 25,000 product-liability lawsuits filed by people who contended the drug had caused their diabetes.

Death Toll

The only people who seem to care about the surge of clinical trials in foreign countries are the medical ethicists—not historically a powerhouse when it comes to battling the drug companies. A team of physician-researchers from Duke University, writing last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, observed that “this phenomenon raises important questions about the economics and ethics of clinical research and the translation of trial results to clinical practice: Who benefits from the globalization of clinical trials? What is the potential for exploitation of research subjects? Are trial results accurate and valid, and can they be extrapolated to other settings?” The Duke team noted that, in some places, “financial compensation for research participation may exceed participants’ annual wages, and participation in a clinical trial may provide the only access to care” for those taking part in the trial. In 2007, residents of a homeless shelter in Grudziadz, Poland, received as little as $2 to take part in a flu-vaccine experiment. The subjects thought they were getting a regular flu shot. They were not. At least 20 of them died. The same distorting economic pressures exist for local hospitals or doctors, who may collect hundreds of dollars for every patient they enroll. In theory, a federal institutional review board is supposed to assess every clinical trial, with special concern for the welfare of the human subjects, but this work, too, has now been outsourced to private companies and is often useless. In 2009 the Government Accountability Office conducted a sting operation, winning approval for a clinical trial involving human subjects; the institutional review board failed to discover (if it even tried) that it was dealing with “a bogus company with falsified credentials” and a fake medical device. This was in Los Angeles. If that is oversight in the U.S., imagine what it’s like in Kazakhstan or Uganda. Susan Reverby, the Wellesley historian who uncovered the U.S. government’s syphilis experiments in Guatemala during the 1940s, was asked in a recent interview to cite any ongoing experimental practices that gave her pause. “Frankly,” she said, “I am mostly worried about the drug trials that get done elsewhere now, which we have little control over.”

The pharmaceutical industry, needless to say, has a different view. It argues that people participating in a clinical trial may be getting the highest quality of medical care they have ever received. That may be true in the short term. But, unfortunately, the care lasts only until the trial is completed. Many U.S. medical investigators who manage drug trials abroad say they prefer to work overseas, where regulations are lax and “conflict of interest” is a synonym for “business as usual.” Inside the United States, doctors who oversee trials are required to fill out forms showing any income they have received from drug companies so as to guard against financial biases in trials. This explains in part why the number of clinical-trial investigators registered with the F.D.A. fell 5.2 percent in the U.S. between 2004 and 2007 while increasing 16 percent in Eastern Europe, 12 percent in Asia, and 10 percent in Latin America. In a recent survey, 70 percent of the eligible U.S. and Western European clinical investigators interviewed said they were discouraged by the current regulatory environment, partly because they are compelled to disclose financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. In trials conducted outside the United States, few people care.

In 2009, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, 19,551 people died in the United States as a direct result of the prescription drugs they took. That’s just the reported number. It’s decidedly low, because it is estimated that only about 10 percent of such deaths are reported. Conservatively, then, the annual American death toll from prescription drugs considered “safe” can be put at around 200,000. That is three times the number of people who die every year from diabetes, four times the number who die from kidney disease. Overall, deaths from F.D.A.-approved prescription drugs dwarf the number of people who die from street drugs such as cocaine and heroin. They dwarf the number who die every year in automobile accidents. So far, these deaths have triggered no medical crusades, no tough new regulations. After a dozen or so deaths linked to runaway Toyotas, Japanese executives were summoned to appear before lawmakers in Washington and were subjected to an onslaught of humiliating publicity. When the pharmaceutical industry meets with lawmakers, it is mainly to provide campaign contributions.

And with more and more of its activities moving overseas, the industry’s behavior will become more impenetrable, and more dangerous, than ever.

Source; http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz1811hG4J8

giovonni

14th December 2010, 08:40

Finally, however inadvertently, the truth comes out. You are no more important than the dog waste on a banker's shoe and the government has no interest in governing for your behalf. Republican Spencer Bachus, the incoming chairman of the House Banking Committee spells it out for you: ""In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." I will say it again. If you voted Republican, and you are not rich, you voted against your own self-interest, and this is going to become clearer and clearer to you as time goes on. I make that statement not as a Democrat or as a Republican, but as an historian.

As for Bachus, as Raw Story points out: "He has received over $800,000 from the real estate industry, $700,000 from securities and investment firms, and $415,000 from credit companies -- all of which he will have extraordinary influence over as banking committee chair." How does one distinguish this from outright bribery.

Regulators exist to ‘serve the banks,’ next House finance chairman declares http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NUZ_fM-TQKQ/ScFRQ8nfm-I/AAAAAAAAMrI/LIVIh5yD4is/s400/09-02-10c_bachus.png
Alabama Republican Spencer Bachus, the incoming chairman of the House banking committee, suggested Congress and federal regulators should play a subservient role with banks.

"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," Bachus told The Birmingham News in an interview.

The Republican leadership last week designated Bachus the next chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which is tasked with overseeing banks, financial markets, housing and consumer credit.

Democrats characterized the remark as a Freudian slip, nicknaming the Alabaman "Big Bank Bachus" and claiming the new Republican-controlled House will put the interests of financial institutions ahead of the American public.

"Congressman Spencer 'Big Bank' Bachus has given Americans a startlingly honest answer about the House Republican agenda – do whatever is good for the big banks and Wall Street special interests, rather than what’s good for hardworking Americans,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Bachus later told the Birmingham News he merely meant Congress shouldn't micromanage banks.

The congressman from Alabama's 6th district has throughout his 18-year House career raised millions from financial interests, including over $1 million from commercial banks alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

He has received over $800,000 from the real estate industry, $700,000 from securities and investment firms, and $415,000 from credit companies -- all of which he will have extraordinary influence over as banking committee chair.

Bachus was an important negotiator for the $700,000 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008 -- often derided as the "bank bailout" -- which angered the public but also prevented a widespread collapse of the financial system. It passed with wide bipartisan support.

The outgoing chairman, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), played an instrumental role in developing sweeping financial regulatory reforms enacted by President Barack Obama in July.

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/incoming-gop-chairman-congress-exists-serve-banks/

giovonni

17th December 2010, 16:53

Once again we are indebted to Wikileaks to reveal how complicit our government is on this assault on that most basic commodity -- food. It is going to be up to individuals and families to make compensatory arrangements, because it is going to become harder and harder to get healthy food.

Leaked Cable: Hike food prices to boost GM crop approval in Europe
Posted on December 14, 2010
http://foodfreedom.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/food-bubble-350.jpg?w=250&h=250

By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.

All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.

Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.

In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:

“This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.”

That pessimism was largely unfounded, as “Spain planted 80 percent of all the Bt maize in the EU in 2009 and maintained its record adoption rate of 22 percent from the previous year,” noted a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:

* One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, which Richard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”

* In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.

* According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GMO Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.

* In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my Dec. 12 piece, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”)

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

Mother Jones describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

“As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….

“Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”

Not only did that Act enable the subprime meltdown that crashed the economy and put tens of millions into foreclosure, it also enabled Wall Street investors to artificially spike the price of food.

“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.

After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 thru the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:

“They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.”

(Kaufman summarizes his report in this June 2010 interview by Thom Hartmann, and in this July Democracy Now interview.)

Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion. The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.

The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades. Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:

“The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million. The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…”

The final bill was signed into law in July 2010 (summarized by the New York Times), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues to issue new rules purportedly aimed at regulating financial markets. “But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups,” notes another New York Times piece.

Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?

No, in fact ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”

A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:

* In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.

* The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.

* At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.

* However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.

* Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.

* In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.

* In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.

For updates and a more thorough history of EU actions on GM foods, see GMO-Free Europe. European states handle the issue differently than in the US, allowing regions within a nation to maintain GM-free zones. Each step a nation takes toward GM approval invariably draws regional resistance.

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere. Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:

http://foodfreedom.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/gm-crops-1996-2009.jpg?w=500&h=327

In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”

Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes. But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejected Monsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds. However, the big push remains in Africa and China.

A Wary Future

Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.

Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger. This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: There is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.

Source;
Food Freedom
Decentralize, Grow Your Own, Buy Local
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/leaked-cable-bubble-gmo-eu/

giovonni

18th December 2010, 20:11

In search of the Woodpecker ~
The woodpeckers, piculets and wrynecks are a family, Picidae, of near-passerine birds. Members of this family are found worldwide, except for Australia and New Zealand, Madagascar, and the extreme polar regions. Most species live in forests or woodland habitats, although a few species are known to live in treeless areas such as rocky hillsides and deserts.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50479000/jpg/_50479683_50479682.jpg

Space laser spies for woodpeckers
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco
17 December 2010 Last updated at 22:33 ET

US scientists are developing techniques to monitor woodpeckers from space.

An Idaho University team has been using a satellite-borne laser to try to predict in which part of a State forest the birds might be living.

The instrument cannot see individual woodpeckers or trees, but it can determine the key characteristics of a woodland, like how dense it is.

Initial work has shown maps built from such data can locate areas favoured by North American pileated woodpeckers.

The scientists want to know where these birds are because they are seen as good indicators of overall bird diversity in a forest.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50207000/jpg/_50207998_pileated.jpg
Pileated woodpeckers prefer a dense stand as they forage for ants

"They create homes for lots of other species in the forest setting," explained Dr Kerri Vierling from the university's fish and wildlife department.

"They make cavities and those cavities are then used by other species for nesting and roosting.

"Woodpeckers are very sensitive to forest characteristics, and so they're very selective about where they decide to live."

The Idaho research has been presented here in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists.

The team assessed some 20,000 hectares of forest in the northern part of the state around Moscow Mountain. They used data acquired by laser altimeters flown on aircraft and on Nasa's Icesat spacecraft before its recent retirement (it was de-orbited in August).

Originally conceived as a means to measure the height of ice surfaces in polar regions, the Icesat instrument has also proved hugely effective in gathering information about vegetation cover in other parts of the globe.

Because of the way the beam of light sent down by the laser bounces back off canopy leaves, tree trunks and the ground, it is possible to make general statements about important forest characteristics.

Team-member Patrick Adam told BBC News: "We try to measure the diameter of the trees and their density. We can't do that directly from these instruments, but to get at diameter we can measure the height of the trees because tall trees are fatter than short trees; and we get at the density of the forest by looking at the relative amount of light that is returned from the foliage versus that which is returned from the ground.

"So by looking at the areas that have the tallest trees, we know that they also have the largest trees in diameter, and that there's a better chance of there being woodpeckers there. We don't just hypothesise that, we go out and we actually conduct ground-based woodpecker surveys in these locations as well to verify it."

Dr Lee Vierling from the university's department of forest ecology and biogeosciences added: "There's one species that needs to have high-density forest. That's the pileated woodpecker.

"It's a magnificent bird with a tall red crest on its head. It's a carpenter-ant foraging species so the denser the forest, the better for that particular bird."

Past survey's of forest structure have tended to be fairly labour intensive endeavours, involving sending many people into an area on foot to make the evaluation. And while such assessments produce very detailed results, they are necessarily limited in their spatial information.

Allying remotely sensed data to the ground effort should make habitat surveys more relevant over much broader areas of forest.

"If we are able to predict where woodpeckers are just based on satellite data then we can also surmise, based on some other vegetation characteristics, that we might also have higher diversity of forest songbirds or even some mammals and reptiles. That's useful in land management planning and biodiversity planning," said Mr Adam.

"It's a lot easier to use satellite data. It's important to still do some ground-truthing at a few select points just to make sure we're not totally going off tangent from reality. But in general, yes, we can cover large areas with the airborne lidar, and we're really hopeful with what we can use the space-borne lidar for because that has global coverage, so we could use that at a much larger scale."

The Icesat instrument is no longer in space, but it will be replaced later this decade. In addition, the US space agency is thinking of flying another laser instrument on its Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI) mission.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50208000/jpg/_50208000_50207999.jpg

Source;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11867165

note ~ this is a substitute thread post by giovonni

giovonni

20th December 2010, 05:20

Well~ here's some more leaks, that should not surprise anyone here :yell:

Pollinators -- principally honey bees -- are essential to agricultural. You and your family depend on these small beings to survive. Apparently corporate profits are more important than your survival. You think I'm kidding?

Thanks to Terrence A. Glassman.

Leaked document shows EPA allowed bee-toxic pesticide despite own scientists’ red flags

http://www.grist.org/phpThumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.grist.org/i/assets/beesmoker_krisfricke_flickr2.jpg&w=307
Follow the honey: Smoking bees makes them less mad when you move them, but leaked EPA documents might have the opposite effect.

It's not just the State and Defense departments that are reeling this month from leaked documents. The Environmental Protection Agency now has some explaining to do, too. In place of dodgy dealings with foreign leaders, this case involves the German agrichemical giant Bayer; a pesticide with an unpronounceable name, clothianidin; and an insect species crucial to food production (as well as a food producer itself), the honeybee. And in lieu of a memo leaked to a globetrotting Australian, this one features a document delivered to a long-time Colorado beekeeper.

All of that, plus my favorite crop to fixate on: industrial corn, which blankets 88 million acres of farmland nationwide and produces a bounty of protein-rich pollen on which honeybees love to feast.

It's The Agency Who Kicked the Beehive, as written by Jonathan Franzen!

Hive talking

An internal EPA memo released Wednesday confirms that the very agency charged with protecting the environment is ignoring the warnings of its own scientists about clothianidin, a pesticide from which Bayer racked up €183 million (about $262 million) in sales in 2009.

Clothianidin has been widely used on corn, the largest U.S. crop, since 2003. Suppliers sell seeds pre-treated with it. Like other members of the neonicotinoid family of pesticides, clothianidin gets "taken up by a plant's vascular system and expressed through pollen and nectar," according to Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA), which leaked the document along with Beyond Pesticides. That effect makes it highly toxic to a crop's pests -- and also harmful to pollen-hoarding honeybees, which have experienced mysterious annual massive die-offs (known as "colony collapse disorder") here in the United States at least since 2006.

The colony-collapse phenomenon is complex and still not completely understood. While there appears to be no single cause for the annual die-offs, mounting evidence points to pesticides, and specifically neonicotinoids (derived from nicotine), as a key factor. And neonicotinoids are a relatively new factor in ecosystems frequented by honeybees -- introduced in the late 1990s, these systemic insecticides have gained a steadily rising share of the seed-treatment market. It does not seem unfair to observe that the health of the honeybee population has steadily declined over the same period.

According to PANNA, other crops commonly treated with clothianidin include canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat -- all among the most widely planted U.S. crops. Bayer is now petitioning the EPA to register it for use with cotton and mustard seed.

The document [PDF], leaked to Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald, reveals that EPA scientists have declared essentially rejected the findings of a study conducted on behalf of Bayer that the agency had used to justify the registration of clothianidin. And they reiterated concerns that widespread use of clothianidin imperils the health of the nation's honeybees.

On Thursday, I asked an EPA press spokesperson via email if the scientists' opinion would inspire the agency to remove clothianidin from the market. The spokesperson, who asked not to be named but who communicated on the record on behalf of the agency, replied that clothianidin would retain its registration and be available for use in the spring.

Wimpy watchdogging

Before we dig deeper into the leaked memo, it's important to understand the sorry story of how an insecticide known to harm honeybee populations came to blanket a huge swath of U.S. farmland in the first place. It's nearly impossible not to read it as a tale of a key public watchdog instead heeling to the industry it's supposed to regulate.

In the EPA's dealings with Bayer on this particular insecticide, the agency charged with protecting the environment has consistently made industry-friendly decisions that contradict the conclusions of its own scientists -- and threaten to do monumental harm to our food system by wiping out its key pollinators.

According to a time line provided by PANNA, the sordid story begins when Bayer first applied for registration of clothianidin in 2003. (All of the documents to which I link below were provided to me by PANNA.) By 2003, U.S. beekeepers were reporting difficulties in keeping hives healthy through the winter, but not yet on the scale of colony collapse disorder. In February of this year, the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division (EFED) withheld registration of clothianidin, declaring that it wanted more evidence that it wouldn't harm bee populations.

In a memo [PDF], an EFAD scientist explained the decision:

The possibility of toxic exposure to nontarget pollinators [e.g., honeybees] through the translocation of clothianidin residues that result from seed treatment (corn and canola) has prompted EFED to require field testing that can evaluate the possible chronic exposure to honeybee larvae and the queen. In order to fully evaluate the possibility of this toxic effect, a complete worker bee life cycle study (about 63 days) must be conducted, as well as an evaluation of exposure to the queen.

So, no selling clothianidin until a close, expert examination of how pollen infused with it would affect worker bees and Her Majesty the queen.

Again, that was in February of 2003. But in April of that year, just two months later, the agency backtracked. "After further consideration," the agency wrote in another memo, the EPA has decided to grant clothianidin "conditional registration" -- meaning that Bayer was free to sell it, and seed processors were free to apply it to their products. (Don't get me started on the EPA's habit of granting dodgy chemicals "conditional registration," before allowing their unregulated use for years and even decades. That's another story.)

The EPA's one condition reflected the concerns of its scientists about how it would affect honeybees: that Bayer complete the "chronic life cycle study" the agency had already requested by December of 2004. The scientists minced no words in reiterating their concerns. They called clothianidin's effects "persistent" and "toxic to honeybees" and noted the the "potential for expression in pollen and nectar of flowering crops."

These concerns aside and "conditional registration" in hand, Bayer introduced clothianidin to the U.S. market in spring 2003. Farmers throughout the corn belt planted seeds treated with clothianidin, and billions -- if not trillions -- of plants began producing pollen rich with the bee-killing stuff.

http://www.grist.org/phpThumb/phpThumb.php?src=http://www.grist.org/i/assets/beecornflower_purplekey_flickr.jpg&w=307
A bee does what it does best -- thankfully, not in a corn field.

n March of 2004, Bayer requested an extension on its December deadline for delivering the life-cycle study. In a March 11 memo [PDF], the EPA agreed, giving the chemical giant until May 2005 to complete the research. Clothianidin continued flowing from Bayer's factories and from corn plants into pollen.

But the EPA also relayed a crucial decision in this memo: It granted Bayer the permission it had sought to conduct its study on canola in Canada, instead of on corn in the United States. The EPA justified the decision as follows:

[Canola] is attractive to bee [sic] and will provide bee exposure from both pollen and nectar. An alternative crop, such as corn, which is less attractive to bees as a forage crop, would provide exposure from pollen, only.

Bee experts cite three problems with this decision:

1. Corn produces much more pollen than does canola;
2. its pollen is more attractive to honey bees; and
3. canola is a minor crop in the United States, while corn is the single most widely planted crop.

What happened next was ... not much. Bayer let the deadline for completing the study lapse; and the EPA let Bayer keep selling clothianidin, which continued to be deposited into tens of millions of acres of farmland.

Not until August of 2007, more than a year after its deadline, did Bayer deliver its study. In a November 2007 memo [PDF], EPA scientists declared the study "scientifically sound," adding that it, "satisfies the guideline requirements for a field toxicity test with honeybees."

Beeing and nothingness

So what were the details of that study, on which the health of our little pollinator friends depended?

Well, the EPA initially refused to release it publicly, prompting a Freedom of Information Act by the Natural Resources Defense Council. When the EPA still refused to release it, NRDC filed suit in response. Eventually, the study was released. Here it is [PDF].

Prepared for Bayer by researchers at Canada's University of Guelph, the study is a bit of a joke. The researchers created several 2.47-acre fields planted with clothianidin-treated seeds and matching untreated control fields, and placed hives at the center of each. Bees were allowed to roam freely. The problem is that bees forage in a range of 1.24 to 6.2 miles -- meaning that the test bees most likely dined outside of the test fields. Worse, the test and control fields were planted as closely as 968 feet apart, meaning test and control bees had access to each other's fields.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found "no differences in bee mortality, worker longevity, or brood development occurred between control and treatment groups throughout the study."

Tom Theobald, the Colorado beekeeper who obtained the leaked memo, assessed the study harshly on the phone to me Thursday. "Imagine you're a rancher trying to figure out if a noxious weed is harming your cows," he said. "If you plant the weed on two acres and let your cows roam free over 50 acres of lush Montana grass, you're not going to learn much about that weed."

James Frazier, professor of entomology at Penn State, concurred. Frazier has been studying colony-collapse disorder since 2006. "When I looked at the study," he told me in a phone interview, "I immediately thought it was invalid."

Meanwhile, Bayer continued selling clothianidin under its conditional registration. Then, on April 22 of this year, the EPA finally ended clothianidin's long period of "conditional" purgatory -- by granting it full registration.

The agency gifted the bee-killing pesticide with its new status quietly; to my knowledge, the only public acknowledgment of it came through the efforts of Theobald, who is extremely worried about the fate of his own bee-keeping business in Colorado's corn country. Theobald forwarded me a Nov. 29 email exchange with Meredith Laws, the acting chief of the EPA's herbicide division in the Office of Pesticide Programs, to whom he'd written to enquire about clothianidin's registration status. Laws' reply is worth quoting in its entirety:

Clothianidin was granted an unconditional registration for use as a seed treatment for corn and canola on April 22, 2010. EPA issued a new registration notice, [but] there is no document that acknowledges the change from conditional to unconditional. This was a risk management decision based on the fulfillment of data requirements and reviews accepting or acknowledging the submittal of the data.

So, the EPA gave Bayer and its dubious pesticide a full pass without even bothering to let the public know.

Just bee very careful, please

Now we get to the leaked memo [PDF]. It is dated Nov. 2 -- three weeks before Laws' reply to Theobald. It relates to Bayer's efforts to expand clothianidin's approved use into cotton and mustard. Authored by two scientists in the EPA's Environmental Fate and Effects Division -- ecologist Joseph DeCant and chemist Michael Barrett -- the memo expresses grave concern about clothianidin's effect on honeybees:

Clothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees).

Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct ... risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.

The real kicker is that the researchers essentially invalidated the Bayer-funded study -- i.e., the study on which the EPA based clothianidin's registration as an fully registered chemical. Referring to the pesticide, the authors write:

A previous field study [i.e., the Bayer study] investigated the effects of clothianidin on whole hive parameters and was classified as acceptable. However, after another review of this field study in light of additional information, deficiencies were identified that render the study supplemental. It does not satisfy the guideline 850.3040, and another field study is needed to evaluate the effects of clothianidin on bees through contaminated pollen and nectar. Exposure through contaminated pollen and nectar and potential toxic effects therefore remain an uncertainty for pollinators. [Emphasis mine.]

So, here we have EPA researchers explicitly invalidating the study on which clothianidin gained registration for corn. But as I wrote above, despite this information's being made public, the EPA has signaled that it has no plans to change the chemical's status.

In the 2011 growing season, tens of millions of acres of farmland will bloom with clothianidin-laced pollen -- honeybees, and sound science, be damned.

Now, in my correspondence with the EPA, the agency has denied that the downgrading of the Bayer study from "acceptable" to "supplemental" meant that the agency should be compelled to clothianidin's approval. In a Thursday email to me, the agency delivered a limp defense of the Bayer study, contradicting its own scientists and addressing none of the critiques of it:

EPA's evaluation of the study determined that it contains information useful to the agency's risk assessment. The study revealed the majority of hives monitored, including those exposed to clothianidin during the previous season, survived the over-wintering period.

And it downplayed the study's importance to Bayer's application to register clothianidin: The study in question is "not a 'core' study for EPA as claimed," the agency insisted. "It is not a study routinely required to support the registration of a pesticide."

I ran that response by Jay Feldman of Beyond Pesticides, the group that collaborated with PANNA in publicizing the leaked document. "I find the EPA response either misinformed or misleading," he told me. "The paper trail on this is clear. We're talking about a bad study required by EPA [that is central] to the registration of this chemical."

Feldman's assessment appears to bear out. He pointed me back to the above-linked Nov. 27 document in which EPA originally accepted the Bayer study. There, on page 5, we find this statement:

Specifically, the test was conducted in response to a request by the Canadian PMRA [Pesticides and Pest Management Agency] and the U.S. EPA; as a condition for Poncho@ [clothianidin] registration in these countries, Bayer CropScience was asked to investigate the long-term toxicity of clothianidin-treated canola to foraging honey bees.

So evidently, the discredited Bayer study does lie at the heart of clothianidin's acceptance. (I have requested an interview with an EPA official who can talk knowledgeably and on the record about these matters; the anonymous-by-request spokesperson is, at the time of publication, still looking for the "right person," I was informed via email.)

A stinging assessment

At the very least, we have ample evidence that the EPA has been ignoring the warnings of its own staff scientists and green-lighting the mass deployment of a chemical widely understood to harm pollinators -- at a time when honeybees are in grave shape.

But why? Tom Theobald, the Colorado beekeeper who broke this story, ventured an answer. "It's corporatism, the flip side of fascism," he said. "I'm not against corporations, I think they have a good model. But they're like children -- we have to rein them in or they get out of hand. The EPA's supposed to do that."

When regime change came to Washington in 2008, many of us hoped that an EPA under Barack Obama would be a better parent. EPA Director Lisa Jackson inherited quite a mess from her predecessor, and she faces the Herculean challenge of regulating greenhouse gases against fierce Republican and industry opposition.

But as concern mounts -- from her own staff and elsewhere -- that clothianidin is harming honeybees, there's no excuse for Jackson's agency to keep coddling Bayer. Frazier, the Penn State entomologist, put it to me like this: "If the Bayer study is the core study the EPA used to register clothianidin, then there's no basis for registering it." He urged the EPA to withdraw registration to avoid unnecessary risk to a critical player in our ecosystem -- as have the governments of Germany, France, Italy, and Slovenia.

Source;
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-12-10-leaked-documents-show-epa-allowed-bee-toxic-pesticide-/PALL/print

giovonni

20th December 2010, 16:29

Seems like the FDA is on a roll...:bowl:

Is it any wonder that Americans are less and less well each year. If you eat a lot of meat, this is what you are eating.

Thanks to Kevin Kelley.

What's in Your Meat? FDA Reveals Antibiotic Use in Livestock

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.slashfood.com/media/2010/12/beef-cattle-livestock-590.jpg

Until now, we've only guessed the amount of antibiotics used were high to keep our pig, cattle and poultry stocks healthy. In fact, the Animal Health Institute predicted 11.1 million kilograms were used nationwide in 2005. But the Food and Drug Administration's records don't go back that far.

For the first time, the FDA has released an estimate. In 2009 alone, "13.1 million kilograms of antimicrobial drugs were sold or distributed for use in food-producing animals" in the U.S., cites Livable Future from the report (.pdf) made available to the public last Thursday. There's also a chart listing approved antibiotics in each drug class.

That 13.1 million kilograms is just short of 29 million pounds. "That's a lot," writes Maryn McKenna on her Wired magazine blog. (McKenna is a journalist specializing in infectious diseases, and the author of Superbug, notes Food Safety News.)

We think of antibiotics as a good thing, something to rid ourselves of disease, but overuse can lower resistance, and that's exactly what we're seeing in meat production. This in turn calls for stronger antibiotics, which don't just stay with the animal. It carries through to the land and those working on it, not to mention its unidentified consequences to those who consume the meat.

Nutritionist Marion Nestle notes in The Atlantic that since this is the first report, "it is not possible to say whether the numbers are going up or down. But the agency is now requiring meat producers to report on antibiotic use so we now have a baseline for measuring progress."

Source;
http://www.slashfood.com/2010/12/15/whats-in-your-meat-fda-reveals-antibiotic-use-in-livestock/#ixzz18M3PWhRl

giovonni

21st December 2010, 07:19

Yet another example showing how corporate lobbying against adequate regulatory oversight has left Americans at great health risk.

The report was supposed to be available Monday at www.ewg.org, but I couldn't find it, maybe tomorrow. I am also trying to find a list of the 31 cities. I think each of you would be wise to check the water coming out of your taps. You can get it tested for a modest cost -- particularly when you think of the medical costs. For many, I fear, it is going to be a nasty surprise.

Probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium found in drinking water of 31 U.S. cities

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 19, 2010; 12:02 AM http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/Drinking_water.jpg/220px-Drinking_water.jpg

An environmental group that analyzed the drinking water in 35 cities across the United States, including Bethesda and Washington, found that most contained hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen that was made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich."

The study, which will be released Monday by the Environmental Working Group, is the first nationwide analysis of hexavalent chromium in drinking water to be made public.

It comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to set a limit for hexavalent chromium in tap water. The agency is reviewing the chemical after the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, deemed it a "probable carcinogen" in 2008.

The federal government restricts the amount of "total chromium" in drinking water and requires water utilities to test for it, but that includes both trivalent chromium, a mineral that humans need to metabolize glucose, and hexavalent chromium, the metal that has caused cancer in laboratory animals.

Last year, California took the first step in limiting the amount of hexavalent chromium in drinking water by proposing a "public health goal" for safe levels of 0.06 parts per billion. If California does set a limit, it would be the first in the nation.

Hexavalent chromium was a commonly used industrial chemical until the early 1990s. It is still used in some industries, such as in chrome plating and the manufacturing of plastics and dyes. The chemical can also leach into groundwater from natural ores.

The new study found hexavalent chromium in the tap water of 31 out of 35 cities sampled. Of those, 25 had levels that exceeded the goal proposed in California.

The highest levels were found in Norman, Okla., where the water contained more than 200 times the California goal. Locally, Bethesda and Washington each had levels of 0.19 parts per billion, more than three times the California goal.

The cities were selected to be a mix of big and smaller communities and included places where local water companies had already detected high levels of "total chromium."

"This chemical has been so widely used by so many industries across the U.S. that this doesn't surprise me," said Erin Brockovich, whose fight on behalf of the residents of Hinkley, Calif., against Pacific Gas & Electric became the subject of a 2000 film. In that case, PG&E was accused of leaking hexavalent chromium into the town's groundwater for more than 30 years. The company paid $333 million in damages to more than 600 townspeople and pledged to clean up the contamination.

"Our municipal water supplies are in danger all over the U.S.," Brockovich said. "This is a chemical that should be regulated."

Max Costa, who chairs the department of environmental medicine at New York University's School of Medicine and is an expert in hexavalent chromium, called the new findings "disturbing."

"At this point, we should strive to not have any hexavalent chromium in drinking water" or at least limit the amounts to the level proposed by California, Costa wrote in an e-mail.

Hexavalent chromium has long been known to cause lung cancer when inhaled, but scientists only recently found evidence that it causes cancer in laboratory animals when ingested. It has been linked in animals to liver and kidney damage as well as leukemia, stomach cancer and other cancers.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical industry, says the California goal is unrealistic because some water supplies have naturally occurring hexavalent chromium that is higher than .06 parts per billion.

In a written statement, the group's senior director, Ann Mason, said that "even the most sophisticated analytical methods used by EPA are not able to detect the extremely low levels that California wants to establish."

The group supports a "uniform, national standard for hexavalent chromium in drinking water, based on sound science," Mason wrote. "Research is underway to provide EPA with critical data that will allow for a more informed risk assessment of hexavalent chromium. This data will be complete by mid-2011. Given the potential impact on drinking water supplies, EPA should incorporate this data in its assessment."

Brendan Gilfillan, an EPA spokesman, said that the agency was aware of the new study by the Environmental Working Group and that the findings will be considered as the agency reviews total chromium in drinking water, work that is expected to be completed next year.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said that water utilities across the country are resistant to the regulation.

"It's not their fault. They didn't cause the contamination. But if a limit is set, it's going to be extraordinarily expensive for them to clean this up," Cook said. "The problem in all of this is that we lose sight of the water drinkers, of the people at the end of the tap. There is tremendous push-back from polluters and from water utilities. The real focus has to be on public health."

The report will be available Monday at www.ewg.org

Source;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/18/AR2010121802810.html?sid=ST2010121803715

giovonni

22nd December 2010, 02:22

The statistics of the collapse of the country just keep piling up.:photo:

22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

MICHAEL SNYDER - Business Insider

:http://static.businessinsider.com/image/4c3f34fe7f8b9a77423b0300-256-191/beaver.jpg

statistics in pics & graphs here;
http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7?slop=1#slideshow-start

giovonni

22nd December 2010, 08:21

:preggers:

This trend, which SR has been following for several years, is now so pregnant its effects will come into play in 2011, possibly as early as this Spring. And its isn't just cities. Illinois is functionally bankrupt, as is Arizona and California.

$2tn debt crisis threatens to bring down 100 US cities

Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/cartoons/2010/12/20/1292867785352/detroit-dereliction-007.jpg
huttered homes and businesses in downtown Detroit, Michigan. American cities and states have debts that could be as high as $2tn.

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.

Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.

"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.

"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."

New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."

American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.

Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk.

Whitney's intervention is likely to raise the profile of the issue of municipal debt. While she was an analyst at Oppenheimer, the New York investment bank, in October 2007 she wrote a damning report on Citigroup, then the world's largest bank, predicting it would cut its dividend. She was criticised for being too pessimistic but was vindicated when the bank was forced to seek government support a year later. She has since set up her own advisory firm and is rated one of the most influential women in American business.

US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning.

Detroit is cutting police, lighting, road repairs and cleaning services affecting as much as 20% of the population. The city, which has been on the skids for almost two decades with the decline of the US auto industry, does not generate enough wealth to maintain services for its 900,000 inhabitants.

The nearby state of Illinois has spent twice as much money as it has collected and is about six months behind on creditor payments. The University of Illinois alone is owed $400m, the CBS programme said. The state has a 21% chances of default, more than any other, according to CMA Datavision, a derivatives information provider.

California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back.

Potential defaults could also hit Florida, whose booming real estate industry burst two years ago, said Guy J. Benstead, a partner at Cedar Ridge Partners in San Francisco. "We are not out of the woods by any stretch yet," he said.

"It's all part of the same parcel: public sector indebtedness needs to be cut, it needs a lot of austerity, and it hit the central governments first, and now is hitting local bodies," said Philip Brown, managing director at Citigroup in London.

In Europe, where cities have traditionally relied more on bank loans and state transfers than bonds, financing habits are changing. The Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia have issued debt to their own citizens after financial markets shut their doors because of the regions' high deficits. Moody's cut to the rating of the Basque country on Friday left it still within investment grade but noted "the rapid deterioration in the region's budgetary performance in recent years". It said it expected it to continue over the medium term.

In Italy, Moody's and S&P have threatened to downgrade Florence, while Venice has been forced over the past few months to put some of the palazzi on its canals up for sale to fund the deficit.

"Cities are on their own. Governments won't come to their rescue as they have problems of their own," said Andres Rodriguez-Pose, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. "Cities will have to pay for their debts, and in some cases they will have to carry out dramatic cuts, such as Detroit's."
California crunch
Vallejo, a former US navy town near San Francisco, is still trying to emerge from the Chapter Nine bankruptcy protection it entered in 2008.

The city, now a symbol of distressed local finances, is still negotiating with the unions, which refused to accept a salary cut plan two years ago. Paul Dyson, an analyst with the Standard & Poor's credit agency, said Vallejo, which is mostly a dormitory town for Oakland or San Francisco employees, did not have enough local industry to sustain its finances and property tax – a major source of local income – plunged with the collapse of the real estate market. The S&P credit-rating agency has a C rating on the town – the lowest level.

With a population of about 120,000, Vallejo has $195m (£125m) of unfunded pension obligations and has to present a bankruptcy-exit plan to a Sacramento court by 18 January. Since 1937, 619 local US government bodies, mostly small utilities or districts, have filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News recently reported. US cities tend to default more than European municipalities as they usually rely on bonds issued to investors, which enter into a default if the creditor misses payments. European towns, by contrast, traditionally depend on bank loans and government bailouts.

Source;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/20/debt-crisis-threatens-us-cities

giovonni

23rd December 2010, 17:50

Just like our military programs ~ the U.S. prison system is totally out of control :hand:

Like Don't Ask Don't Tell I think we are slowly coming to our senses about marijuana. I certainly never expected to hear this.

Shock: Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson favors marijuana legalization

http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/patrobertson.jpg

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 -- 3:29 pm

Update: Following publication of this story, a spokesman for the religious CBN television station contacted Raw Story to clarify Robertson's comments. His statement is reflected in the text below.

Count this among the 10 things nobody ever expected to see in their lifetimes: 700 Club founder Pat Robertson, one of the cornerstone figures of America's Christian right movement, has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana.

Calling it getting "smart" on crime, Robertson aired a clip on a recent episode of his 700 Club television show that advocated the viewpoint of drug law reformers who run prison outreach ministries.

A narrator even claimed that religious prison outreach has "saved" millions in public funds by helping to reduce the number of prisoners who return shortly after being released.

"It got to be a big deal in campaigns: 'He's tough on crime,' and 'lock 'em up!'" the Christian Coalition founder said. "That's the way these guys ran and, uh, they got elected. But, that wasn't the answer."

His co-host added that the success of religious-run dormitories for drug and alcohol cessation therapy present an "opportunity" for faith-based communities to lead the way on drug law reforms.

"We're locking up people that have taken a couple puffs of marijuana and next thing you know they've got 10 years with mandatory sentences," Robertson continued. "These judges just say, they throw up their hands and say nothing we can do with these mandatory sentences. We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes and that's one of 'em.

"I'm ... I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it's just, it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That's not a good thing."

Robertson has in recent years come under fire for increasingly flamboyant comments, such as calling for the assassinations of foreign leaders and blaming gay people for the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

In this instance, even though he clearly expressed support for the reform of US marijuana laws, a spokesman for religious television station CBN walked back Robertson's comments, telling Raw Story on Thursday morning the Christian Coalition founder "did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana."

"He was advocating that our government revisit the severity of the existing laws because mandatory drug sentences do harm to many young people who go to prison and come out as hardened criminals," CBN spokesman Chris Roslan wrote. "He was also pointing out that these mandatory sentences needlessly cost our government millions of dollars when there are better approaches available. Dr. Robertson's comments followed a CBN News story about a group of conservatives who have proven that faith-based rehabilitation for criminals has resulted in lower repeat offenders and saved the government millions of dollars. Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs."

Conservatives signing up for drug policy reform http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/marijuanacannabisplant.jpg

The segment, while significant for illustrating a key conservative stalwart's shifting opinion on the drug war, was mainly a plug for a new conservative group called "Right on Crime," which parlays the arguments of groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) into conservative-leaning messages.

"Our marijuana prohibition laws, which send people to prison for merely possessing a plant, are clearly immoral," LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics officer, told Raw Story.

"As a Christian, and as a former law enforcer who is now working to undo the damage these laws have done to our families and our communities, I'm glad to see Pat Robertson joining the chorus of faith leaders calling for reform."

Some faith-based groups, like the Council of Churches and Church IMPACT, also helped promote California's failed Prop. 19 ballot initiative, which would have legalized marijuana cultivation, sales and consumption by adults over 21-years-old. It failed to gain a majority in the state's 2010 elections.

President Obama has maintained his opposition to the legalization of marijuana, although his Department of Justice has largely taken a hands-off approach to states where voters have approved the drug's use if prescribed by a doctor.

Pat Robertson was a Republican candidate for the presidency in 1980, but saw his political ambitions dashed in the primaries by Ronald Reagan. Though he later earned Robertson's endorsement, President Reagan went on to significantly escalate the war on America's drug users.

click here for video and source page;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/shock-christian-leader-pat-robertson-favors-marijuana-legalization/

giovonni

23rd December 2010, 23:09

One can only wonder ~ at what kind of world ~ ours could presently be, if all the developed nations spent just one quarter of their defense budgets ~ and in unison directed the resources into this renewable energy technology. Note ~ renewable energy replaces conventional fuels in four distinct areas: power generation, hot water/ space heating, transport fuels, and rural (off-grid) energy services. Solar technologies are broadly characterized as either passive solar or active solar depending on the way they capture, convert and distribute solar energy.

23 December 2010 Last updated at 14:11

New solar fuel machine 'mimics plant life'
By Neil Bowdler Science reporter, BBC News

A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.

The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.

Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night.

Details are published in the journal Science.

The prototype, which was devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland, uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with cerium oxide, also known as ceria.

Ceria has a natural propensity to exhale oxygen as it heats up and inhale it as it cools down.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50525000/gif/_50525938_solar_machine2_304.gif
In the prototype, sunlight heats a ceria cylinder which breaks down water or carbon dioxide

f as in the prototype, hydrogen and/or water are pumped into the vessel, the ceria will rapidly strip the oxygen from them as it cools, creating hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide.

Hydrogen produced could be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells in cars, for example, while a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be used to create "syngas" for fuel.

It is this harnessing of ceria's properties in the solar reactor which represents the major breakthrough, say the inventors of the device. They also say the metal is readily available, being the most abundant of the "rare-earth" metals.

Methane can be produced using the same machine, they say.
Refinements needed

The prototype is grossly inefficient, the fuel created harnessing only between 0.7% and 0.8% of the solar energy taken into the vessel.

Most of the energy is lost through heat loss through the reactor's wall or through the re-radiation of sunlight back through the device's aperture.

But the researchers are confident that efficiency rates of up to 19% can be achieved through better insulation and smaller apertures. Such efficiency rates, they say, could make for a viable commercial device.

"The chemistry of the material is really well suited to this process," says Professor Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is the first demonstration of doing the full shebang, running it under (light) photons in a reactor."

She says the reactor could be used to create transportation fuels or be adopted in large-scale energy plants, where solar-sourced power could be available throughout the day and night.

However, she admits the fate of this and other devices in development is tied to whether states adopt a low-carbon policy.

"It's very much tied to policy. If we had a carbon policy, something like this would move forward a lot more quickly," she told the BBC.

It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. But Professor Haile thinks the analogy is over-simplistic.

"Yes, the reactor takes in sunlight, we take in carbon dioxide and water and we produce a chemical compound, so in the most generic sense there are these similarities, but I think that's pretty much where the analogy ends."

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50542000/jpg/_50542478_003927092-1.jpg
The PS10 solar tower plant near Seville, Spain. Mirrors concentrate the sun's power on to a central tower, driving a steam turbine

Daniel Davies, chief technology officer at the British photovoltaic company Solar Century, said the research was "very exciting".

"I guess the question is where you locate it - would you put your solar collector on a roof or would it be better off as a big industrial concern in the Sahara and then shipping the liquid fuel?" he said.

Solar technology is moving forward apace but the overriding challenges remain ones of efficiency, economy and storage.

New-generation "solar tower" plants have been built in Spain and the United States which use an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto tower-mounted receivers which drive steam turbines.

A new Spanish project will use molten salts to store heat from the Sun for up to 15 hours, so that the plant could potentially operate through the night.

Source and related stories here;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12051167

comments/giovonni

giovonni

27th December 2010, 18:22

So here's where we are America :(

I think this is a good assessment of what is happening. As I have written before the U.S. spends more on defense than all the rest of the world combined -- $683 billion of a world total of $1.1 trillion. Most of this money goes to companies that do nothing but service our grotesquely distorted defense sector. They don't want peace. It's not profitable.

*********************************

The Road to Recovery: Heeding Eisenhower's Warning

By Michael Gillespie

note~ Michael Gillespie is a contributing editor at The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans. He writes regularly for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

The first part of this series, The War Alarm: Waking Up from Reagan's Nightmare, examined Ronald Reagan's attempt to rewrite history by eliminating the extraordinary success of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)'s wartime economic policies, which included massive and systematic government intervention in and well-nigh complete control of the nation's industry and commerce. Roosevelt's economic policies, including rationing and wage and price controls, were instrumental in and essential to the U.S. military's greatest triumphs, the Allies crushing defeat of the fascist Axis powers less than four years after Japan's December 7, 1941 surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the USA's emergence as the world's economic and military superpower during and after the war.

This article explores the rise of what President Dwight David Eisenhower referred to as the "military-industrial complex" and the effects of "a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" on American life and culture. Though it fields the most expensive and technologically sophisticated military force on the world stage, the U.S. government has not decisively won any major military conflict since 1945. Understanding these developments is necessary if Americans are to effectively address their nation's economic decline and cultural deterioration.

http://www.opednews.com/populum/uploaded/dwight-d-eisenhower-circa1956-2-56863-20101221-2.jpg

Eisenhower's credibility can hardly be challenged. As FDR's choice for the position of Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, he was responsible for planning and supervising the invasion of France and Germany from the west. FDR had such confidence in him that Eisenhower sometimes worked directly with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to the chagrin of bypassed British leaders. He served as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)'s first supreme commander in 1951. As president (1953-1961), Eisenhower concluded negotiations with China to end the Korean War, maintained pressure on the Soviet Union, and avoided hostilities during two terms in the nation's highest office, a time of peace. Eisenhower's election as a Republican ended two decades of New Deal Coalition in the White House, but as president he continued New Deal policies, expanding Social Security and signing into law in 1956 the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, then the largest public works project in American history. Though he chose not to publicly criticize Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he helped remove the pathologically partisan Republican demagogue from power. Historians typically rank "Ike" among America's 10 greatest presidents. (Wikipedia)

In his farewell address to the American people, broadcast live from the White House on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower focused specifically on and warned against the dangers attendant upon the unprecedented development of a permanent armaments industry and war machine. In part, he said:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Noting that technological developments were, "largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture," Eisenhower warned against the "prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by "the power of money" and the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite," saying that, "it is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system - ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

It was imperative, Eisenhower declared, that "we - you and I, and our government, avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

"During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."

Not since our first president, George Washington, addressed the nation as he left office had a president delivered so prescient a speech. Yet the decades since have seen many of Eisenhower's greatest fears confirmed and most of his sage advice ignored as subsequent leaders and policy makers have thrown caution to the wind, acting too often without wisdom or restraint. The immense, unwarranted and still metastasizing influence of what has become a Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex destabilizes the nation and the world, sapping economic vitality, demoralizing politics at all levels, warping religious impulses and traditions, and hindering spiritual growth.

At the center of the nation's economic difficulties is the unrestrained power of corporations, private legal entities that have usurped the Constitutional rights of individual citizens and gained all but total control of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln's Gettysburg Address). In their relentless pursuit of greater profitability, U.S. corporations have largely ignored or denied the serious environmental damage and change their activities cause while exacerbating the transition difficulties necessarily associated with the development and introduction of labor-saving technologies. A November 1946 article in Fortune magazine titled "Machines Without Men" addressed the issue of automated industrial production and a consequent reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs. Authors E.W. Leaver and J.J. Brown minimized concern that, "the automatic factory may well loose waves of temporary unemployment.

"So potentially efficient a production system makes the two-or-three-day [work] week economically feasible. Its cheaper costs could be passed on to in higher wages to the worker and in greater value to the consumer. It must, therefore, balance out at a higher level of living than ever before. The new machines can emancipate the worker forever from stultifying, monotonous toil," declared the corporate propagandists.

A full-page ad in the January 1949 issue of American magazine, "A message prepared by the Advertising Council, a non-profit organization supported by labor, business, and the public, Published in the Public Interest by General Electric," bragged that "our American way " works better because " we are more inventive and we know how to use machine power to produce more goods at lower cost. We have more skilled workers than any other country. And we Americans save - and our savings go into new tools, new plants, and new and better machines. Because of this, we produce more every working hour and can buy more goods with an hour's work than any other people in the world. We can make the system work even better ... by working together to turn out more ... through better machines and methods, more power, greater skills, and by sharing the benefits through higher wages, lower prices, and shorter hours."

By the 1960s, corporations had begun the mass relocation of millions of American manufacturing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper, in order, corporate spokesmen would claim, to remain competitive. Republican and Democratic leaders and law makers alike conspired with business and financial interests - corporations - to eviscerate the nation's sound and vital manufacturing base, which of course had been absolutely essential to victory in WWII. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat with ties to Brown and Root, Inc., a Texas engineering and construction company, escalated the Vietnam War after the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Pentagon awarded Brown and Root contracts for major construction projects in Vietnam. On May 15, 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan, a former spokesman for General Electric, the nation's largest "defense" contractor, ordered some 800 California law enforcement officers to break up a peaceful protest by about 6,000 people at the University of California at Berkeley. Alameda County Sheriff's deputies firing shotguns loaded with '00' buckshot charged and then chased retreating protesters. Buckshot fatally wounded James Rector, a bystander, and permanently blinded carpenter Alan Blanchard. About 130 people sought treatment at local hospitals for head trauma, buckshot wounds, and other serious injuries. Reagan, who had referred to the Berkeley campus as "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants," then ordered the National Guard to occupy the entire city of Berkeley despite the Berkeley City Council's vote against the occupation. About year after the police riot and bloodshed, Reagan defended his actions publicly saying, "If it takes a bloodbath, then let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Less than a month later, on May 4, 1970, violence erupted at Ohio's Kent State University when National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war protesters killing four students and seriously wounding nine. As president, Reagan broke the back of organized labor in the USA when he fired striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) workers in 1981 and had the union de-certified.

Corporations are able to put the rapacious pursuit of profit before the national interest and workers' rights only because they have become powerful enough to control the nation's political institutions and processes. Nowhere are the crimes and excesses of corporations more evident than in the armaments, security, and intelligence sectors. Unlike the companies and corporations that FDR mobilized during WWII, most of these corporations have few or no profitable products or services to offer in peacetime. Because the end of hostilities necessarily means a substantially reduced need for the increasingly expensive weapons and services (mercenaries, security, espionage, intelligence, propaganda, disinformation, psychological operations, etc.) that these corporations provide, they have no interest in our government - or rather their government - ending or even winning the wars that they foment. We have endless war because endless war best suits the needs of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex.

By retaining arms industry research, development, and manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and locating their facilities in key Congressional districts spread across the country, "defense" industry giants gained enormous political influence. These huge corporations, which exist to profit from the production of expensive, increasingly sophisticated and destructive high-technology products, weapons systems designed to kill human beings, to destroy life, conspire to make government policy that suits their needs, while they prevent the formulation and implementation of policies that conform to legitimate national interests and to the principles upon which our nation was founded. So-called "defense" industry corporations have the active support and cooperation of interlocking media, security, and intelligence sector corporations. Taken together their share of the nation's total economic activity is such that it is impossible to overestimate their power on Wall Street and in official Washington. As much as President Barack Obama might have wished to end the immoral, budget-busting, counter-productive wars in and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to have done so and thus eliminated "defense" industry jobs in the midst of an economic crisis might well have precipitated the complete economic collapse he was struggling to prevent. The "defense" industry, the war machine, and its various components and enablers are "the power of money" and the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite" made manifest, just as Eisenhower feared.

Some may find it comforting to believe the sophistries of apologists for Wall Street, the financial services industry, and totally ineffective government watch dog - or lap dog - agencies, including the notion that the economic crisis of 2008 surprised everyone. Others note that creating an economic crisis that further damaged an already structurally unsound economy may have been a shrewd way of assuring a steady supply of cannon fodder for an all volunteer military neck deep in criminal wars of aggression, an utterly immoral and extraordinarily risky way to run a country. A run-amok arms industry and war machine do not a sound manufacturing base and a credible foreign policy make, nor will such abominations support a thriving economy or foster the vital cultural development and spiritual growth for which "Ike" expressed such grave concern.

The noxious effects of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex on religion threaten to take the nation and the world back to a more primitive era, during which a new "dark ages" of the interregnum of wisdom will bear witness to the inexorable restoration of the imbalance between self-liberty and self-control. Following the U.S. military's ignominious defeat in Vietnam, many conservative American Christian leaders looked to scripture for support and embraced Christian Zionism, which conflates Old Testament theology and the modern nation state of Israel to arrive at the notion that, as the late Grace Halsell put it, "every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us." Vengeful militant Christian Zionists have promote a chiliastic or millenialist theology that foresees their own rapture before a final, apocalyptic world-ending battle between the forces of good and evil at Megiddo in Israel, known as Armageddon in the New Testament.

Jewish religious fundamentalists are at least as influential in politics in Israel as Christian religious fundamentalists are in the USA. The vast majority of American politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level, including those at the highest levels of the federal government, live and work at the end of a very short leash held firmly by Israeli leaders who exercise influence primarily through Israel's powerful lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an ethnic special interest group masquerading as a civil rights monitoring organization, and legions of pro-Israel operatives within government and in media organizations. The special relationship between Israel and the USA, regularly re-affirmed at AIPAC conventions, has long been based on AIPAC-organized political support for and generous campaign contributions to American politicians, and Israeli leaders' ability to command generous, well-nigh slavish, and almost unconditional military, diplomatic, and economic support from the U.S. government.

Israeli political leaders at the highest levels have long welcomed and rewarded the support of militant American Christian Zionists leaders who seek to make an idol of the state of Israel. For decades, Christian Zionist leaders and their political organizations have lobbied heavily and persistently for U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic support for Israel while donating millions of dollars of their own money in support of Israel's systematic program of land theft and ethnic cleansing in illegally occupied Palestine. Some Christian Zionist leaders have even actively supported Israeli Zionists who plan to re-introduce ritual animal sacrifice to worship in the temple in Jerusalem. This has raised serious concerns that blood sacrifice in religion might thus be more widely re-legitimized. It was Jesus' introduction of the symbolic use of bread and wine in the remembrance supper that, with the spread of Christianity, effectively removed blood sacrifice from religion, a singularly remarkable and important act of social engineering that has undergirded human religious, social, cultural, and spiritual progress for some 2,000 years.

If the paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another, clearly Eisenhower's grave concern for the economic, political, and spiritual wellbeing of Americans was well founded indeed.

America's recovery from the economic crisis requires reform, restoration of the imbalance between the power of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" and the power of corporations. Recovery from rigid ultranationalism, religious extremism, and racial bias requires a renewed emphasis on the ethic of reciprocity and rejection of the ethic of revenge, a renewed emphasis on education along with viable plans and concerted efforts to address the root causes of social unrest and political disaffection, primarily poverty, exploitation, and oppression. Corporate America's civic religion of "the free market" based on ruthless competition, mindless consumerism, and short-term profits must be countered by a well-educated, well-informed, and empowered citizenry committed to enduring values and working toward common goals that represent the best interests of all the people. The most sophisticated and comprehensive system of mass communications the world has ever seen could serve as an effective antidote to the poisons of ultranationalism, religious fanaticism, and racial animosity, were the imbalance of power restored and corporations, restrained by the rule of law, required by government to act responsibly in the public interest for the common good.

Will growing evidence of national decline and the dual threat of global economic and environmental catastrophe have the effect of focusing our leaders' attentions and efforts on essential reforms and laudable, achievable common goals? :pout:

Source;
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Road-to-Recovery-Heed-by-Michael-Gillespie-101221-528.html

giovonni

29th December 2010, 07:27

Those of you reading this in other parts of the world ~ should pay heed to this trend ~

This is a demonstration of the point I have been trying to make: Virtual Corporate States have no geographical or national allegiance. Expecting these corporations to feel an obligation to help America's working men and women, or to care about preserving the middle class, is a fool's worldview. Particularly because our workforce is increasingly unskilled and ignorant as a result of the politicization of education, and the campaign of Willful Ignorance actively pursued by the Religious Right. And just to be sure they won't be taken to task the VCSs are buying control of our government. Citizen's United opened the gates to speed this on. Get the law interpreted the way you want. Don't break the law; make the law.

US companies hiring at rapid pace … overseas http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/jobs-1105.jpg
By The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

US firms created 1.4 million jobs abroad in 2010, compared to less than 1 million at home

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.

"There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.

American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes.

And now many of the products being made overseas aren't coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil.

Meanwhile, consumer demand in the U.S. has been subdued. Despite a strong holiday shopping season, Americans are still spending 18 percent less than before the recession on furniture, and 10 percent less on electronics, according to MasterCard's SpendingPulse.

"Companies will go where there are fast-growing markets and big profits," says Jeffrey Sachs, globalization expert and economist at Columbia University. "What's changed is that companies today are getting top talent in emerging economies, and the U.S. has to really watch out."

With the future looking brighter overseas, companies are building there, too. Caterpillar, maker of the signature yellow bulldozers and tractors, has invested in three new plants in China in just the last two months to design and manufacture equipment. The decision is based on demand: Asia-Pacific sales soared 38 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared with 16 percent in the U.S. Caterpillar stock is up 64 percent this year.

"There is a shift in economic power that's going on and will continue. China just became the world's second-largest economy," says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, who notes that half of the revenue for companies in the S&P 500 in the last couple of years has come from outside the U.S.

Take the example of DuPont, which wowed the world in 1938 with nylon stockings. Known as one of the most innovative American companies of the 20th century, DuPont now sells less than a third of its products in the U.S. In the first nine months of this year, sales to the Asia-Pacific region grew 50 percent, triple the U.S. rate. Its stock is up 48 percent this year.

DuPont's work force reflects the shift in its growth: In a presentation on emerging markets, the company said its number of employees in the U.S. shrank by 9 percent between January 2005 and October 2009. In the same period, its work force grew 54 percent in the Asia-Pacific countries.

"We are a global player out to succeed in any geography where we participate in," says Thomas M. Connelly, chief innovation officer at DuPont. "We want our resources close to where our customers are, to tailor products to their needs."

While most of DuPont's research labs are still stateside, Connelly says he's impressed with the company's overseas talent. The company opened a large research facility in Hyderabad, India, in 2008.

A key factor behind this runaway international growth is the rise of the middle class in these emerging countries. By 2015, for the first time, the number of consumers in Asia's middle class will equal those in Europe and North America combined.

"All of the growth over the next 10 years is happening in Asia," says Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and formerly the World Bank's chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke's 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago.

The company would not say how many new U.S. hires it has made in 2010. But its latest new investments are overseas, including $240 million for three bottling plants in Inner Mongolia as part of a three-year, $2 billion investment in China. The three plants will create 2,000 new jobs in the area. In September, Coca-Cola pledged $1 billion to the Philippines over five years.

The strategy isn't restricted to just the largest American companies. Entrepreneurs, whether in technology, retail or in manufacturing, today hire globally from the start.

Consider Vast.com, which powers the search engines of sites like Yahoo Travel and Aol Autos. The company was founded in 2005 with employees based in San Francisco and Serbia.

Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous. In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society. He exhorted business leaders to find a way to link growth with job creation at home.

Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.

"We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people," says Sachs. "In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that."

Original News Source AP News
link source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/us-companies-hiring-overseas/

giovonni

30th December 2010, 06:21

Recently i found this article and it really got my attention. i never considered myself a survivalist, but here is a heads-up and a excellent review of what would be required (of one) in possibly succeeding in this endeavor.

The Psychology of a Survivalist

What makes a person a survivalist? What mental attributes and worldview does a survivalist have that allows him or her to continue striving over and above others that may be more intelligent, have more book sense, or be better equipped to survive than anyone else? It all comes down to a few words.

The mind.

Yes, I know the whole premise of the article is about the psychology of a survivalist, so logically the mind is the place we’ll start. But the mind is more than just a collection of knowledge or common sense ideas that help us to live. It’s the ability to take something from thought to conception, to adapt to the environment, and to maintain a healthy outlook when everything seems hopeless. It is attitude as well as ability, and as the Bible says, as a man thinks, so he is.

These attributes are taken from Cody Lundin’s book 98.6 Degrees and makes for some interesting thoughts on how personality affects outcome, and particularly how your thoughts and feelings will affect your individual chances of surviving.

Staying Cool Under Pressure

Face it—if you’re a hot head or emotionally reactive, your chances of surviving any disastrous situation are diminished from the start. There are times when you’re going to have to FORCE your mind and body to stop, think, observe, plan…and then act.

STOP – sit down and chill, get your emotions and body in check so you’ll have better clarity of mind and response to a situation.

THINK – assess your situation.

OBSERVE – take a reading of your surroundings, the obstacles you face, and the options you may have. Give yourself the time to respond analytically to the situation, using your brain and senses instead of your emotions.

PLAN – now that you have all the data you need and a sense of the situation, decide on a plan of action and then act.

Adapt and Improvise

Adaptation is one of the major keys to survival. It’s planning for all eventualities possible and having a response in mind. It’s facing the scenario you never considered, and utilizing the things you have to force a positive conclusion. It’s an attitude of responding, assessing, and rethinking a plan as needed.

Decisiveness

The ability to make decisions is paramount in any survival scenario. Vacillating between one choice and another is how you over-think a situation to the point you are useless. Make a decision and then accept responsibility for that decision. There can be no finger-pointing in a survival situation and no one must be afraid of failure. All decisions can be rethought in hindsight. The important thing is that, after a decision is made, continuous adaptation and improvisation is applied.

The Ability to Toughen Up

Let’s face it—a survival condition is not a walk in the park. You are going to be taxed emotionally, spiritually, and physically. You will be challenged more than you ever thought possible. There are two things that will make your chances of coming through bottom out: the desire for creature comforts and complacency.

The desire for creature comforts can make you act irrationally and compromise your survival plan, putting you and those trusting you at risk. A complacent attitude will not afford you the quick wittedness that you need to assess and confront a disaster situation. When you are thrust into survival mode, you’re just going to have to put your big girl panties on and deal. Bottom line.

The Ability to Intuit and Read Other People

Your observation and reasoning skills will need to extend to being able to read other people and intuit their thoughts and emotions. This isn’t some mental telepathy, ESP junk science. This is reading signs and subtle signals that others give off, and being able to interpret those signs accurately. Learn to think from another’s standpoint so that you can better gauge anticipated reactions that might endanger you or your loved ones.

Maintain Hope…But Prepare

You cannot live your life day in and day out in fear. That’s not living. Being prepared does not negate hope in the future. It simply strategizes and prepares for an eventuality that may or may not come. Due diligence to survival prep is not foolish. Your skills may be the only thing that keeps you and others alive. Disaster comes in a moment. Remember Katrina. Remember Haiti. Remember the tornados and floods and mudslides and ice and snow that come in an instant and devastate sections of the country each year. Remember…and then prepare.

Keep Laughing

Maintaining your sense of humor is a must. Laughing releases endorphins in your brain that actually help your body cope with mental and physical stress, along with relieving pain, reducing blood pressure, and mitigating headaches and chronic illnesses. People in all walks of life cope by utilizing humor, even if it’s a morbid gallows humor or laughing at the insanity or foolishness in which they find themselves.

In the midst of it all, if you are so inclined, try to hold on to faith. We are told that God does not give us a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7) We are told to be diligent and watchful, but in the end we can only control a limited amount of what goes on. Once we reach that point where nothing we do will have an effect on the outcome of an event, then is the time to sit back and put the future in God’s hands.

Incorporating these psychological attributes into your survival preparedness plans will help you come through any disaster situation you might face. In fact, successful incorporation of these traits may be the difference between life and death for you and your loved ones.

Source;
http://www.offthegridnews.com/2010/12/20/the-psychology-of-a-survivalist/

comments/giovonni

giovonni

2nd January 2011, 17:10

Part of what is driving the Teabagger movement is the fear and discomfort arising from America becoming a majority non-white country; from which it follows our educational system is becoming majority nonwhite as well. And, as the multipolar world emerges from the collapse of the bipolar world we have known all our lives this same trend will only become magnified. Notably the younger generations suffer far less from these prejudices.The problem is principally the bias of older white conservatives with those enlarged Amagdylas.

Universities Are Challenged as Demographics Shift http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/01/02/us/02TTSTUDENTS/02TTSTUDENTS-articleInline.jpg

By REEVE HAMILTON and JON MARCUS
January 1, 2011

In August, 60 years after the University of Texas admitted its first black student, the school welcomed the first freshman class in which white students were in the minority.

White students, who accounted for 51 percent of U.T.’s freshman class in 2009, made up 48 percent in 2010. Black and Hispanic students represented about 5 percent and 23 percent, respectively, with Asians and other races making up the rest.

The state’s flagship university passed the demographic milestone earlier than some had anticipated, reflecting a similar shift that is rapidly taking place at other top-level educational institutions across the country.

Although the changing demographics of college campuses may be grabbing the headlines, the more compelling issue is how the growing number of minority students presents serious social and academic challenges for financially strapped universities, even as the schools are under pressure to boost graduation rates.

Nationally, 52 percent of Hispanic students and 58 percent of black students are unable to earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 40 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

“What is increasingly evident now that wasn’t evident 10 or 20 years ago is the extent to which this is a national phenomenon,” said Steve Murdock, a sociology professor at Rice University and previously the state demographer of Texas and head of the United States Census Bureau. “This is not a Texas issue. It’s not a California issue. It’s a national issue.”

For the United States to maintain — let alone grow — a college-educated work force, Mr. Murdock said, those graduation numbers will have to change.

Stan Jones, former Indiana commissioner of higher education and the current president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit group dedicated to boosting the number of college graduates, said the numbers have been telling the story for years. “But it hasn’t necessarily gotten through to policy-makers that this was going on, and clearly not to the general public,” Mr. Jones said. “All of us are seeing it happening faster than we had expected.”

For example, although their birth rate is growing at a significant clip, Mr. Jones said, Hispanics do not graduate from high school, go on to college or graduate in the same numbers as white students. “If you look at the freshman class everywhere in this country, it is more representative than it’s ever been,” he said. “But in four years, if you look at the graduating class, it is not going to be representative of the country, because many of those students from the underrepresented groups won’t make it to graduation.”

Educators give several reasons for the disparity, including economic differences, the comparative quality of college preparation at urban, rural and suburban schools, and a sense of isolation among those who are the first in their families to go to college.

“These are terrific students,” said William Powers Jr., president of U.T. “Often, they may have gone to a high school where they didn’t have a calculus class or Advanced Placement classes. The challenges are also financial and what I call cultural. They might be away from home, and they don’t have parents and aunts and uncles who have already been here.”

In 2007, recognizing the demographic shift — and its accompanying challenges — U.T. set up a Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. With an annual budget of $30.4 million, it encourages minority high school students to apply to college and then supports them with a complex framework of programs that include tutoring and personal advising.

“The question is, can we get them the support to help them over the gaps?” said Gregory J. Vincent, vice president of diversity and community engagement.

The results, so far, have been promising. Generally, students in the division’s programs have grade point averages and retention rates as good as or better than the average in their respective classes. “The good news is that our students come highly motivated, so our challenges aren’t as great as you’d expect, despite assumptions some people might make about their backgrounds,” said Aileen Bumphus, executive director of the Gateway Program, an initiative under the Diversity and Community Engagement umbrella that works with about 300 first-generation students in each class.

Such programs have been crucial for students like Oscar Ayala, a U.T. senior from Houston who majors in biomedical engineering. Both of his parents are from Mexico, and neither attended college. “When it came time in high school to get ready for college, I didn’t know what that meant,” Mr. Ayala said.

But that success may prove difficult to maintain, depending in large part on decisions the Texas Legislature will make this year to confront a budget shortfall that could reach $20 billion or more. About $5 million of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement budget comes from state money. Educators are particularly worried about cuts to the state’s largest financial aid program, which primarily serves minority students.

Robert S. Nelsen, president of the University of Texas-Pan American, a South Texas institution that is 89 percent Hispanic, said cuts to the aid program would be “devastating” to the area.

U.T.’s main campus is not immune from the tension caused by economic constraints. In November, a faculty panel proposed deep cuts to the ethnic studies programs, including the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Students, the Center for Asian American Studies and the Center for Mexican American Studies. Once the panel’s recommendations were made public, about 150 students and faculty members protested, many accusing the administration of racism. University administrators have since said the proposed cuts will be scaled back.

But the incident highlighted the fact that increased diversity does not necessarily mean increased harmony or interaction on a campus where you can see a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, not far from new memorials to Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez and Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from the South.

Kacie Sebek, a senior from Houston, who is white, said she has seen classmates from predominantly white hometowns appear uncomfortable. “You have someone closed off in their own neighborhood, and suddenly they’re in a world where people are different,” she said.

Mr. Ayala, who was surprised by the dearth of Hispanics in his engineering programs, said students gravitate toward those with similar backgrounds. “As I started realizing who hangs out with who, I see that it’s not as diversified as it could be,” he said. “But I know it can keep moving forward.”

Still, most U.T. students hardly noticed the demographic milestone reached by the current freshman class. “If you want to take sort of a benchmark of how we’ve progressed over 20 years, it would be that this went more unrecognized than you might have expected it to,” said Mr. Powers, the university’s president. “That, in itself, is a milestone.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/us/02ttstudents.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpw

rhamilton@texastribune.org

This article was produced by The Texas Tribune in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

giovonni

3rd January 2011, 20:31

Finally an institution with some integrity. Bravo to the UK, unfortunately Cambridge is not an American university.

Bankers rebuffed by university over request to censor scholarly paper http://www.rawstory.com/images/new/chipandpinsystem.jpg

By Eric W. Dolan
Friday, December 31st, 2010

A powerful banking association tried -- and failed -- to censor a Cambridge University student's thesis that exposed a flaw in electronic card security.

Chip and PIN is a smartcard payment system in the United Kingdom that requires customers to enter a personal identification number (PIN) when making a transaction. Secure as the industry would like this system to seem, it isn't, as a lone student proved earlier this year with the construction of an inexpensive device that eliminates the PIN requirement.

A thesis describing how the device works and how it was created was published on the Cambridge website in June.

The UK Cards Association (UKCA) sent a letter to the university requesting they remove the thesis, which describes how a hand-held device could allow a thief to make transactions with a stolen bank card using any PIN.

Melanie Johnson, a former Labour Treasury minister who is now chair of the UKCA, wrote that the thesis "breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure" and "places in the public domain a blueprint for building a device which purports to exploit a loophole in the security of chip and PIN."

The thesis , written by Omar Choudary, a PhD student within the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory, is titled "The smart card detective: a handheld EMV interceptor."

"During my MPhil within the Computer Lab I developed a card-sized device (named Smart Card Detective – in short SCD) that can monitor Chip and PIN transactions," Omar wrote on his blog.

"The main goal of the SCD was to offer a trusted display for anyone using credit cards, to avoid scams such as tampered terminals which show an amount on their screen but debit the card another. However, the final result is a more general device, which can be used to analyse and modify any part of an EMV (protocol used by Chip and PIN cards) transaction."

Johnson asked for the thesis to be removed from public access immediately and said she was concerned that "this type of research was ever considered suitable for publication."

"You seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient," Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the university's Computer Laboratory, replied. "This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values."

Anderson wrote that he and his colleagues had discovered the vulnerability in 2009 and disclosed the information to the banking industry at that time.

"You complain that our work may undermine public confidence in the payments system," he continued. "What will support public confidence in the payments system is evidence that the banks are frank and honest in admitting its weaknesses when they are exposed, and diligent in effecting the necessary remedies. Your letter shows that, instead, your member banks do their lamentable best to deprecate the work of those outside their cosy club, and indeed to censor it."

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/banks-censor-security-flaw-chip-pin-system/

giovonni

5th January 2011, 18:34

Another gift from Wikileaks showing we have the best corporatocracy money can buy. No wonder these people hate Wikileaks.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/11/23/cable_620x120.jpg

WikiLeaks: US targets EU over GM crops

US embassy cable recommends drawing up list of countries for 'retaliation' over opposition to genetic modification

John Vidal, environment editor
Monday 3 January 2011

The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/1/3/1294061988024/Genetically-modified-corn-007.jpg

In response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007, the ambassador, Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of former US president George Bush, asked Washington to penalise the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops.

"Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits.

"The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices," said Stapleton, who with Bush co-owned the St Louis-based Texas Rangers baseball team in the 1990s.

In other newly released cables, US diplomats around the world are found to have pushed GM crops as a strategic government and commercial imperative.

Because many Catholic bishops in developing countries have been vehemently opposed to the controversial crops, the US applied particular pressure to the pope's advisers.

Cables from the US embassy in the Vatican show that the US believes the pope is broadly supportive of the crops after sustained lobbying of senior Holy See advisers, but regrets that he has not yet stated his support. The US state department special adviser on biotechnology as well as government biotech advisers based in Kenya lobbied Vatican insiders to persuade the pope to declare his backing. "… met with [US monsignor] Fr Michael Osborn of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, offering a chance to push the Vatican on biotech issues, and an opportunity for post to analyse the current state of play on biotech in the Vatican generally," says one cable in 2008.

"Opportunities exist to press the issue with the Vatican, and in turn to influence a wide segment of the population in Europe and the developing world," says another.

But in a setback, the US embassy found that its closest ally on GM, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the powerful Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the man who mostly represents the pope at the United Nations, had withdrawn his support for the US.

"A Martino deputy told us recently that the cardinal had co-operated with embassy Vatican on biotech over the past two years in part to compensate for his vocal disapproval of the Iraq war and its aftermath – to keep relations with the USG [US government] smooth. According to our source, Martino no longer feels the need to take this approach," says the cable.

In addition, the cables show US diplomats working directly for GM companies such as Monsanto. "In response to recent urgent requests by [Spanish rural affairs ministry] state secretary Josep Puxeu and Monsanto, post requests renewed US government support of Spain's science-based agricultural biotechnology position through high-level US government intervention."

It also emerges that Spain and the US have worked closely together to persuade the EU not to strengthen biotechnology laws. In one cable, the embassy in Madrid writes: "If Spain falls, the rest of Europe will follow."

The cables show that not only did the Spanish government ask the US to keep pressure on Brussels but that the US knew in advance how Spain would vote, even before the Spanish biotech commission had reported.

Source;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/03/wikileaks-us-eu-gm-crops

giovonni

5th January 2011, 19:21

i found this reported cable leak very telling of the ongoing dicey socio/political situation in Iran -today.

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/rids/20101223/i/r1106354158.jpg?x=400&y=287&q=85&sig=RYshgpeEkh4DjpCenWdFNA--

WikiLeaks document dump: Iran President Ahmadinejad slapped by head of Revolutionary Guard

BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, January 4th 2011, 4:00 AM

The WikiLeaks document dump continues to kick up surprises.

A new diplomatic cable says the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard smacked President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the face for suggesting easing restrictions on the press.

The February 2010 cable, classified secret and puckishly headlined, "He Who Got Slapped," quotes an intelligence source recounting a contentious meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

The Iranian bigs were trying to figure out what to do in the wake of Tehran's explosive pro-democracy street protests of 2009.

"Ahmadinejad claimed that 'people feel suffocated,' and mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press," the cable says.

It continues, "Ahmadinejad's statements infuriated Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari, who exclaimed 'You are wrong! \[In fact\] it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!'

"Source said that Jafari then slapped Ahmadinejad in the face, causing an uproar," the cable says.

Iran denies the slap happened. A Revolutionary Guard spokesman told the Fars News Agency that WikiLeaks' publishers "invent false stories."

The leaked State Department cables have painted Iran as a great global pariah, with even many Arab countries privately urging the U.S. to attack before Tehran can get a nuclear bomb.

hkennedy@nydailynews.com

Source;
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2011/01/04/2011-01-04_a_slap_for_mahmoud.html

comments/giovonni

giovonni

8th January 2011, 20:35

The Illness Profit System in its toxic glory. Our prisons have become our principal social program for the mentally ill, and nursing homes are being turned into the place we warehouse the disabled young.

More young people are winding up in nursing homes http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20110107/capt.f6ce1cb231d842bba237d09c1dec36a4-f6ce1cb231d842bba237d09c1dec36a4-0.jpg?x=209&y=345&q=85&sig=N5qOt1YFMasPOY3C_ERFHQ--

By MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Press Matt Sedensky, Associated Press Fri Jan 7, 6:19 pm ET

SARASOTA, Fla. – Adam Martin doesn't fit in here. No one else in this nursing home wears Air Jordans. No one else has stacks of music videos by 2Pac and Jay-Z. No one else is just 26.

It's no longer unusual to find a nursing home resident who is decades younger than his neighbor: About one in seven people now living in such facilities in the U.S. is under 65. But the growing phenomenon presents a host of challenges for nursing homes, while patients like Martin face staggering isolation.

"It's just a depressing place to live," Martin says. "I'm stuck here. You don't have no privacy at all. People die around you all the time. It starts to really get depressing because all you're seeing is negative, negative, negative."

The number of under-65 nursing home residents has risen about 22 percent in the past eight years to about 203,000, according to an analysis of statistics from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That number has climbed as mental health facilities close and medical advances keep people alive after they've suffered traumatic injuries. Still, the overall percentage of nursing home residents 30 and younger is less than 1 percent.

Martin was left a quadriplegic when he was accidentally shot in the neck last year by his stepbrother. He spent weeks hospitalized before being released to a different nursing home and eventually ended up in his current residence, the Sarasota Health and Rehabilitation Center. There are other residents who are well short of retirement age, but he is the youngest.

The yellow calendar on the wall of Martin's small end-of-the-hall room advertises activities such as arts and crafts. In the small common room down the hall, a worker draws a bingo ball and intones, "I-16. I-one-six." As Martin maneuvers his motorized wheelchair through the hallway, most of those he passes have white hair and wrinkled skin.

"It's lonely here," Martin says, as a single tear drips from his right eye.

Martin exchanges muted hellos with older residents as he travels down the hall to smoke outside. His entire daily routine, from showering to eating to enjoying a cigarette, is dictated by the schedules of those on whom he relies for help.

He usually wakes up late, then waits for an aide to shower him, dress him and return him to his wheelchair. He watches TV, goes to therapy five days a week and waits most days for his friend to bring him meals.

He mostly keeps to himself, engaging in infrequent and superficial conversations with his elders.

Martin's parents are unable to care for him at home. His father is a truck driver who is constantly on the road, and his stepmother is sick with lupus. Medicaid pays his bills; it could take a lawsuit for him to get care outside a nursing home.

Advocates who help young patients find alternatives to nursing homes say people are often surprised to learn there are so many in the facilities. About 15 percent of nursing home residents are under 65.

"When I tell people I try to get kids out of nursing homes, they have no idea," says Katie Chandler, a social worker for the nonprofit Georgia Advocacy Office.

Federal law requires states to provide alternatives to institutional care when possible, though its implementation varies from place to place. Navigating the system can require a knowledgeable advocate and, sometimes, litigation.

Not all younger nursing home residents are there for good. Some nursing homes are seeing an increase in patients who come to recover there instead of in a hospital, because it is cheaper for their insurance company.

Like Martin, many younger residents have suffered a traumatic injury. Others have neuromuscular diseases such as multiple sclerosis, or have suffered a stroke.

Brent Kaderli, 26, of Baytown, Texas, became a quadriplegic after a car accident in 2006. He hopes rehabilitation will help him gain enough strength to move into an assisted living facility and eventually, to an apartment with his girlfriend.

He shares his nursing home room with an older man who suffers from dementia. It is not ideal, but because his parents' home is not modified to accommodate his wheelchair, he thinks it's the only option right now.

"Just knowing that one day I will be better, I'm still hoping and praying for that. In the meantime, I think about my family and my friends, what I used to be able to do, and I stay sad a lot," he says. "This is probably the best that I could have at this point."

The same generational tensions that exist outside nursing homes are inside them as well, and are sometimes exacerbated by the often close confines.

Older residents complain about loud music and visitors, younger residents complain about living with someone with dementia or being served creamed spinach. Many nursing homes try to house younger residents together, though in many cases their small numbers make that difficult.

For young people who find themselves newly disabled, the psychological and social needs are often even more challenging than their physical demands. That presents a challenge for nursing homes that are used to serving people near the ends of their lives.

At Bayshore Health Center in Duluth, Minn., 34 of the 160 residents are younger people, all living in private rooms in their own wing. The staff has found that subtle changes can improve their lives.

Instead of bingo night, there are poker games and outings to nightclubs. For someone who stays up late watching a movie, breakfast can be served at 10 a.m., rather than 7 a.m. Pizza is offered in place of lasagna; Mountain Dew and Coke are poured instead of coffee and tea.

Still, many younger residents sink into depression because of their physical limitations, their loneliness and their nursing home surroundings.

"For them it's a life sentence. When you're 40 years old you know you're never getting out. This is the way your life will be forever and ever. Amen," says Diane Persson, a gerontologist who has written about the boom in younger nursing home residents.

Martin fears that may be true for him. He used to look forward to joining the Army and earning a college degree in science or engineering. Now he simply looks forward to visits from his friend Paul Tuttle, who on this day brings him nachos he feeds him along with sips of water.

"If I'm not here, he's got no one his age to talk to about football or anything," Tuttle says, wiping Martin's face.

Propped in his wheelchair, Martin says: "It makes you feel old. If that's all you're around, that's what you become."

Source;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110107/ap_on_re_us/us_nursing_homes_young

giovonni

8th January 2011, 23:37

i sense they (the government) already has this implemented and in place :yes4:

Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/01/07/carousel_244x183.jpg

STANFORD, Calif. - President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it's calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

"We are not talking about a national ID card," Locke said at the Stanford event. "We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities."

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the "trusted identity" project are unusually scarce. Last year's announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.

Inter-agency rivalries to claim authority over cybersecurity have exited ever since many responsibilities were centralized in the Department of Homeland Security as part of its creation nine years ago. Three years ago, proposals were were circulating in Washington to transfer authority to the secretive NSA, which is part of the U.S. Defense Department.

In March 2009, Rod Beckstrom, director of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center, resigned through a letter that gave a rare public glimpse into the competition for budgetary dollars and cybersecurity authority. Beckstrom said at the time that the NSA "effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees, technology insertions," and has proposed moving some functions to the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

Source;
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20027837-501465.html

giovonni

10th January 2011, 19:12

This is a major crisis with planet-wide implications and it rates little notice. I will predict that this problem is going to turn out to be the creature of some kind of herbicide or soil preparation widely used in commercial agriculture.

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Bumblebee.jpg

Researchers discover a shocking 96 percent decline in four major bumblebee species

Friday, January 07, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

NaturalNews) New research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that another vitally important pollinator, the bumblebee, is in serious decline. According to the figures, there has been a shocking 96 percent decline in four major species of the bumblebee, and an up to 87 percent decrease in their overall geographic coverage.

"We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national level," explained researchers in their report. And in a phone interview with Reuters, study author Sydney Cameron from the University of Illinois, Urbana, explained that these bumblebee species are "one of the most important pollinators of native plants."

Over the course of three years, the research team evaluated 382 different sites in 40 states, and mulled data from over 73,000 museum records. They determined that bumblebees are needed to pollinate various fruits and vegetables, and that they accomplish this task in a very unique way.

"The 50 species (of bumblebees) in the United States are traditionally associated with prairies and with high alpine vegetations," said Cameron. "Just as important -- they land on a flower and they have this behavior called buzz pollination that enables them to cause pollen to fly off the flower."

In other words, without bumblebees and the special way in which they pollinate, entire segments of agriculture are threatened with extinction. Like honeybees (http://www.naturalnews.com/028899_h...) and bats (http://www.naturalnews.com/027971_p...), bumblebees are vital in order to grow food. Without them, humanity will starve to death.

Misleadingly, many experts largely blame various pathogens, fungi and viruses for the die-offs of these pollinators, while giving only a brief mention -- if any at all -- to the toxic pesticides and herbicides that are increasingly being linked to things like colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name given to the mass bee die-off phenomenon. A recently leaked report, for instance, has revealed that a popular Bayer herbicide is responsible for killing off bees

Source;
http://www.naturalnews.com/030944_bumblebees_decline.html

Paul

11th January 2011, 04:22

Bees dying, chemtrails poisoning us, GMO terminator seeds starving us, global governance tyrannizing us, world wide security tyrannizing us, full spectrum dominant military killing us, false flag attacks terrorizing us, global media lying to us, schools, fluoride in our water and vaccines dumbing us down, ...

The Dark Side seems Darker than a Black Hole.

giovonni

11th January 2011, 04:49

Yes ~ PythonicCow :rolleyes:
It does seems like there is a pattern going on here :suspicious:

giovonni

12th January 2011, 23:00

Here is proof there is another way, in an economy much like the U.S. -- Canada. Then ask yourself why this isn't being implemented.

Few foreclosures, no bank failures: Canada offers lessons http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs442.snc4/50234_20165746941_4859_n.jpg

January 11, 2011 04:31:22 PM

TORONTO — Maybe Canada has something to teach the U.S. about housing finance.

One in 4 U.S. homes is thought to be worth less that the mortgage being paid on it. One in every 492 U.S. homes received a foreclosure notice in November. For the fourth year running, analysts are speculating on where the bottom is for U.S. real estate.

No such worries up here in Canada — yet its system of mortgage finance gets little attention in the U.S.

Not a single Canadian bank failed during the Great Depression, and not a single one failed during the recent U.S. crisis now dubbed the Great Recession. Fewer than 1 percent of all Canadian mortgages are in arrears.

That's notable given that the recent U.S. economic turmoil was triggered by a meltdown in mortgage finance, forcing an unprecedented government rescue of Wall Street investment banks and the collapse of more than 300 smaller banks as the housing sector went bust.

How'd Canada avoid all that?

"This sounds very simple, but one of our CEOs has said we are in the business of making loans to people who will pay them back," said Terry Campbell, vice president of policy for the Canadian Bankers Association in Ottawa.

There's a certain amount of apples to oranges when comparing the two systems of mortgage finance. Canada's population last year was estimated at 34.3 million, while the U.S. population now exceeds 307 million. The U.S. economy is the world's biggest; Canada ranks ninth.

Canadian banks were recently named the best in the world by the World Economic Forum, but they're a much smaller universe of lenders — 71 that are federally regulated, compared with more than 8,000-plus U.S. lenders insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Even so, there's plenty to learn from Canada's conservative — yes, conservative — regulatory regime. It requires more rigorous loan underwriting standards and much bigger set-asides by banks for potential losses during market downturns.

Canada also lacks a big tax write-off for the interest that borrowers pay on their mortgages. They get a capital gains tax exemption on any profits on the sale of their primary residence, and that's it. Yet the rate of home ownership in Canada is equal to, or greater than the U.S. rate, and the lack of mortgage-interest deductions leads Canadians to swiftly pay down their mortgage debt.

"I'm not aware of any disparagement of the Canadian model or dismissal of the Canadian model. There are some interesting features to it," said Stuart Gabriel, a finance professor in the Anderson School of Management at the University of California-Los Angeles. "They've insisted all along on the more rigorous mortgage underwriting, and because of that never found themselves originating subprime and no-doc mortgages . . . some very basic items such as stringency of underwriting seem to go a long way."

Canada doesn't have an equivalent to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which purchase mortgages from banks and pool them into bonds. The argument for Fannie and Freddie is that they take loans off of a bank's books, freeing them to lend more.

Canada has no such secondary market for mortgages, yet it hasn't hurt the ability of its banks to lend or significantly raised the cost for borrowers.

Canadian mortgages aren't non-recourse loans, meaning homeowners can't simply walk away from their mortgages. Even if they lose their home, they still owe their mortgage debt.

"You mail your keys into the bank here and guess what, you are not off the hook," said Gregory Klump, the chief economist in Ottawa for the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Lessons from Canada could prove useful. In the next few weeks, the Obama administration must, by law, outline its vision for what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They've been in government conservatorship since the summer of 2008. The administration must unveil its roadmap for how and when they're to be changed and moved out of government control.

By July, the administration must establish the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose chief functions will include policing mortgage lending and defining suitable mortgages.

The issue of mortgage-interest deductions probably will come up this year when Congress debates deficit reduction. A blue-ribbon National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform late last year recommended a serious scaling back of the U.S. mortgage-interest deduction as a means of raising more revenue and lowering deficits and debt.

Defenders of the popular U.S. mortgage-interest deduction call it a big driver of U.S. home ownership, which peaked in 2005 at 69.1 percent. (It fell to 66.9 percent late last year.)

But even without a mortgage-interest deduction, Canada's percentage of home ownership_ at 68.4 percent, according to the most recent Canadian census in 2006 and now thought to be higher — is comparable to U.S. home ownership rates.

"There's an incentive for them to pay off their houses relatively quickly, but the home ownership rates in Canada and the U.S. are comparable. The fraction of people who own their houses free and clear in Canada is much bigger," said William Strange, a professor of real estate at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Added Klump: "The sooner you can get out of debt, the faster you can amass retirement savings."

Canadian banks generally provide 25-year mortgages, with 20 percent down payment. The first five years of the loan is a fixed rate, after which it adjusts to current market rates in five-year increments until the loan is paid off.

Should a borrower opt not to put down 20 percent on a home purchase, they must purchase mortgage insurance to cover the debt in the case of default.

U.S. borrowers are accustomed to fixed-rate loans of 15 years or 30 years, and U.S. mortgage bankers warn that the Canadian model of adjusting interest rates every five years may soon be less attractive.

"There is a lot of interest-rate risk that is being put on Canadian buyers. That has worked over the past couple of decades. Now that we're looking at increased borrowing demands by national governments, everyone is projecting interest rates going back up," said Jay Brinkmann, the chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. "As these Canadian mortgages reset, (borrowers) might start looking longingly at a U.S. system" that provides longer fixed interest rates on mortgages.

In some ways, the U.S. is already adopting big parts of the Canadian model.

"I think the U.S. system may be eliminating certain types of loans . . . I think we're seeing greater emphasis on down payments," said Brinkmann, who's careful to call it a return to past practices and not the Canadian model.

Lenders, he said, are shying away from second mortgages. And there are greater demands for private mortgage insurance, even on refinanced mortgages.

Source;
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/11/106599/few-foreclosures-no-bank-failures.html

giovonni

13th January 2011, 18:11

i sense this is no big surprise to many here...:music:

How listening to good music is like having sex

Health and Science
posted on January 11, 2011, at 7:00 AM

It turns out that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll can all affect you in the same way: By flooding your brain with the pleasure chemical dopamine

http://test.theweek.com/img/dir_0055/27641_article_main.jpg?21
For some people, listening to music can release as much dopamine into the brain as cocaine.

A new study shows that a favorite piece of music can make your brain release dopamine, just like having sex, using drugs, or eating good food. Researchers at Canada's McGill University say their findings, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, will help us understand both our minds and our evolution better. Here's a look at what sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll have in common:

What exactly did the McGill team study?
Valorie Salimpoor and her team had eight participants from a pool of 217 volunteers listen to a piece of instrumental music that consistently gave them "chills," and scanned their brains over the course of three listening sessions. They also measured the "chills" themselves, through changes in the subjects' temperature, skin conductance, heart rate, and breathing. The other 209 contenders were eliminated because they didn't reliably get goosebumps, or because they brought music with lyrics, which the McGill team avoided to keep the study focused on music.

So what did the participants want to hear?
The most popular piece was Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," both the orchestral version and a techno dance remix. Other hits included Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune" and the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. But participants didn't just pick classical: Punk, jazz, rock, and even bagpipe music made appearances, too.

How much happier does music make us?
The participants' dopamine levels rose by up to 9 percent when they were listening to music they enjoyed, and "one person experienced a 21 percent increase," says Salimpoor. "That demonstrates that, for some people, it can be really intensely pleasurable." People who don't get chills also experience the rise in dopamine, says study co-author Robert Zatorre, as did the eight subjects when they listened to other participants' selections, but the rush wasn't as strong.

How does music compare to other pleasures?
Studies involving psychoactive drugs like cocaine registered relative dopamine spikes of 22 percent and higher, Salimpoor says, and pleasurable foods can send dopamine levels up 6 percent.

What does this study say about music, and us?
"Art in general has survived since the dawn of human existence and is found in all human societies," says Zatorre. "There must be some strong value associated with it." The study does show that music is important to humans, but not why, says Vicky Williamson at University of London. It's a starting-off point to explore "why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing, or film to manipulate hedonistic states," says Salimpoor. We now know that dopamine can make you "like a crackhead for those sweet, sweet tunes you like," says Jeff Neumann in Gawker. Isn't that enough?

Source;http://theweek.com/article/index/210910/how-listening-to-good-music-is-like-having-sex
Sources: AP/Yahoo, BBC News, Guardian, Gawker, TheScientist

giovonni

14th January 2011, 06:52

Wow!

US banks to close foreign diplomatic mission accounts

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50793000/jpg/_50793777_chase.jpg
JP Morgan Chase is one of several banks that will be closing diplomatic accounts

The diplomats of several countries said they were actively searching for new banks but were having little success.

Federal officials heard the concerns of roughly 150 envoys during a closed-door briefing on Thursday at the United Nations in New York City.

Some diplomats said the UN budget could be affected by the account closures.

The Wall Street Journal newspaper suggested in November that the banks' decisions were prompted by difficulties in adhering to federal money-laundering regulations affecting international transfers.

Regulations have been tightened since 9/11 in an effort to stop the flow of illegal foreign funds for crimes like financing terrorist acts.

'Big concern'

Speaking after the briefing, state department official Patrick Kennedy told reporters the missions had been given advice on "alternative approaches" they could take to obtain banking services.

He stressed that the banks' decisions were based on commercial reasons and "not because the bank is saying that the embassy of Xanadu or the mission of Shangri-La is engaged in some nefarious activity".

The US would continue its work with both diplomats and the banking industry, he added.

JP Morgan Chase, which handles many diplomatic accounts, did not specify a reason for terminating the services.

But reports suggest it may be because monitoring the accounts has become too costly.

In a letter dated 30 September, the bank told its diplomatic clients it had "made the decision to close its division that serves diplomatic and foreign government entities" and that its decision was not a reflection on how the envoys handled their accounts.

The closures at JP Morgan are scheduled to come into effect on 31 March and will affect mission accounts but not those of individual diplomats.

The BBC's Barbara Plett at the United Nations says this is a big concern for diplomats, with at least six telling reporters they had not yet been able to find another bank for their mission, even though they have been shopping around.

If they fail to do so by the end-of-March deadline, they will have trouble paying their employees and bills, our correspondent adds.

Source;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12188368

giovonni

14th January 2011, 20:56

This is the latest useful piece i have read on this trend which is coming towards us like that Denzel Washington movie about the speeding train out of control!

The Great Food Crisis of 2011
It's real, and it's not going away anytime soon.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/tunisia1.jpg

BY LESTER BROWN | JANUARY 10, 2011

As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests. China is looking abroad for potentially massive quantities of wheat and corn. The Mexican government is buying corn futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises. And on January 5, the U.N. Food and Agricultural organization announced that its food price index for December hit an all-time high.

But whereas in years past, it's been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it's trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and -- due to climate change -- crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future.

There's at least a glimmer of good news on the demand side: World population growth, which peaked at 2 percent per year around 1970, dropped below 1.2 percent per year in 2010. But because the world population has nearly doubled since 1970, we are still adding 80 million people each year. Tonight, there will be 219,000 additional mouths to feed at the dinner table, and many of them will be greeted with empty plates. Another 219,000 will join us tomorrow night. At some point, this relentless growth begins to tax both the skills of farmers and the limits of the earth's land and water resources.

Beyond population growth, there are now some 3 billion people moving up the food chain, eating greater quantities of grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. The rise in meat, milk, and egg consumption in fast-growing developing countries has no precedent. Total meat consumption in China today is already nearly double that in the United States.

The third major source of demand growth is the use of crops to produce fuel for cars. In the United States, which harvested 416 million tons of grain in 2009, 119 million tons went to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars. That's enough to feed 350 million people for a year. The massive U.S. investment in ethanol distilleries sets the stage for direct competition between cars and people for the world grain harvest. In Europe, where much of the auto fleet runs on diesel fuel, there is growing demand for plant-based diesel oil, principally from rapeseed and palm oil. This demand for oil-bearing crops is not only reducing the land available to produce food crops in Europe, it is also driving the clearing of rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil plantations.

The combined effect of these three growing demands is stunning: a doubling in the annual growth in world grain consumption from an average of 21 million tons per year in 1990-2005 to 41 million tons per year in 2005-2010. Most of this huge jump is attributable to the orgy of investment in ethanol distilleries in the United States in 2006-2008.

While the annual demand growth for grain was doubling, new constraints were emerging on the supply side, even as longstanding ones such as soil erosion intensified. An estimated one third of the world's cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming through natural processes -- and thus is losing its inherent productivity. Two huge dust bowls are forming, one across northwest China, western Mongolia, and central Asia; the other in central Africa. Each of these dwarfs the U.S. dust bowl of the 1930s.

Satellite images show a steady flow of dust storms leaving these regions, each one typically carrying millions of tons of precious topsoil. In North China, some 24,000 rural villages have been abandoned or partly depopulated as grasslands have been destroyed by overgrazing and as croplands have been inundated by migrating sand dunes.

In countries with severe soil erosion, such as Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests are shrinking as erosion lowers yields and eventually leads to cropland abandonment. The result is spreading hunger and growing dependence on imports. Haiti and North Korea, two countries with severely eroded soils, are chronically dependent on food aid from abroad.

Meanwhile aquifer depletion is fast shrinking the amount of irrigated area in many parts of the world; this relatively recent phenomenon is driven by the large-scale use of mechanical pumps to exploit underground water. Today, half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling as overpumping depletes aquifers. Once an aquifer is depleted, pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge unless it is a fossil (nonreplenishable) aquifer, in which case pumping ends altogether. But sooner or later, falling water tables translate into rising food prices.

Irrigated area is shrinking in the Middle East, notably in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Yemen. In Saudi Arabia, which was totally dependent on a now-depleted fossil aquifer for its wheat self-sufficiency, production is in a freefall. From 2007 to 2010, Saudi wheat production fell by more than two thirds. By 2012, wheat production will likely end entirely, leaving the country totally dependent on imported grain.

The Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where spreading water shortages are shrinking the grain harvest. But the really big water deficits are in India, where the World Bank numbers indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain that is produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping provides food for some 130 million people. In the United States, the world's other leading grain producer, irrigated area is shrinking in key agricultural states such as California and Texas.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of yet another constraint on growth in global agricultural productivity: the shrinking backlog of untapped technologies. In some agriculturally advanced countries, farmers are using all available technologies to raise yields. In Japan, the first country to see a sustained rise in grain yield per acre, rice yields have been flat now for 14 years. Rice yields in South Korea and China are now approaching those in Japan. Assuming that farmers in these two countries will face the same constraints as those in Japan, more than a third of the world rice harvest will soon be produced in countries with little potential for further raising rice yields.

A similar situation is emerging with wheat yields in Europe. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, wheat yields are no longer rising at all. These three countries together account for roughly one-eighth of the world wheat harvest. Another trend slowing the growth in the world grain harvest is the conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses. Suburban sprawl, industrial construction, and the paving of land for roads, highways, and parking lots are claiming cropland in the Central Valley of California, the Nile River basin in Egypt, and in densely populated countries that are rapidly industrializing, such as China and India. In 2011, new car sales in China are projected to reach 20 million -- a record for any country. The U.S. rule of thumb is that for every 5 million cars added to a country's fleet, roughly 1 million acres must be paved to accommodate them. And cropland is often the loser.

Fast-growing cities are also competing with farmers for irrigation water. In areas where all water is being spoken for, such as most countries in the Middle East, northern China, the southwestern United States, and most of India, diverting water to cities means less irrigation water available for food production. California has lost perhaps a million acres of irrigated land in recent years as farmers have sold huge amounts of water to the thirsty millions in Los Angeles and San Diego.

The rising temperature is also making it more difficult to expand the world grain harvest fast enough to keep up with the record pace of demand. Crop ecologists have their own rule of thumb: For each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season, we can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This temperature effect on yields was all too visible in western Russia during the summer of 2010 as the harvest was decimated when temperatures soared far above the norm.

Another emerging trend that threatens food security is the melting of mountain glaciers. This is of particular concern in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau, where the ice melt from glaciers helps sustain not only the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, such as the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers, but also the irrigation systems dependent on these rivers. Without this ice melt, the grain harvest would drop precipitously and prices would rise accordingly.

And finally, over the longer term, melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, combined with thermal expansion of the oceans, threaten to raise the sea level by up to six feet during this century. Even a three-foot rise would inundate half of the riceland in Bangladesh. It would also put under water much of the Mekong Delta that produces half the rice in Vietnam, the world's number two rice exporter. Altogether there are some 19 other rice-growing river deltas in Asia where harvests would be substantially reduced by a rising sea level.

The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices -- and the political turmoil this would lead to -- that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

Source;
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01

giovonni

15th January 2011, 17:05

You're a bee on the wall. How do you think it went in the boardroom? "A third of the bees have disappeared. Without them agriculture is not possible. But, hey, we could make say a billion in the short term if we can co-opt Beekeepers Association, and get them to endorse our new pesticides.

"There is a long term down side, sure, but we'll have gotten out with our millions before that, so it's not on our watch. Can we do it? You bet, their Executive Director can't wait to be corrupted."

Beekeepers fume at association's endorsement of fatal insecticides

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Wednesday, 12 January 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/dynamic/00533/pg-10-bees-no-logo-_533477t.jpg
The British Beekeepers' Association sold its logo to four chemical firms for use on insecticide packaging despite the products being fatal to bees

ritain's beekeepers are at war over their association's endorsement for money of four insecticides, all of them fatal to bees, made by major chemical companies.

The British Beekeepers' Association has been selling its logo to four European pesticide producers and is believed to have received about £175,000 in return.

The active ingredient chemicals in the four pesticides the beekeepers endorsed are synthetic pyrethroids, which are among the most powerful of modern insect-killers.

The deal was struck in secret by the beekeepers' association executive without the knowledge of the overwhelming majority of its members.

After news of the deal emerged, some members expressed outrage and others resigned.

The beekeepers have now said they will end their pesticide endorsements – but have left the door open to future deals with agrochemical companies.

The battling beekeepers will have a showdown this weekend at the National Beekeeping Centre at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire.

An open letter signed by prominent figures in the world of the environment and agriculture condemns the British Beekeepers' Association for its commercial relationship with the German chemicals giants Bayer and BASF, the Swiss-based Syngenta and the Belgian firm Belchim – and demands that it permanently sever commercial links with agrochemical companies.

"A charity that claims to have the interests of bees and beekeeping at heart should never put itself in a position where it is under the influence of corporations whose purpose is to sell insecticides which are able to kill bees," said Philip Chandler, a Devon beekeeper and one of the organisers of the open letter, which has been signed by the botanist David Bellamy, the author and television wildlife presenter Chris Packham and Lord Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, the organic farming body. "It is the equivalent of a cancer research charity being controlled by a tobacco company," Mr Chandler added.

The beekeepers' executive, which effectively controls all the association's affairs, has thus far fended off attempts by its membership at getting the policy reversed.

The beekeepers' association's deal with the chemical companies had been running since 2001, and it received £17,500 a year for endorsing four pesticides: Bayer's Decis, BASF's Contest (also known as Fastac), Syngenta's Hallmark and Belchim's Fury.

The British Beekeepers' Association referred to the pesticides on several occasions in the newsletter BBKA News as "bee friendly" or "bee safe". Yet a 2003 study in the Bulletin of Insectology on modelling the acute toxicity of pesticides to honey bees found that cypermethrin, the active ingredient of Fury and Contest, and deltamethrin, the active ingredient of Decis, were in the top four most toxic to bees of all the 100 substances evaluated. Cypermethrin was second most toxic, and deltamethrin was fourth. (The active ingredient of Hallmark, lambda-cyhalothrin, was not included in the test.) Other studies confirm these conclusions.

Protests have mounted as the revelations came out. Such has been the anger of grass-roots beekeepers that the executive announced a strategic review of its links with "the plant protection industry", which concluded that endorsement and "related product specific payments" would cease "as soon as practically possible".

Yesterday the British Beekeepers' Association president, Martin Smith, confirmed the pesticide endorsements had finished, although he said there might still be some pesticide packaging in circulation bearing the BBKA logo. "We would expect that to be withdrawn within three months," he said.

Mr Smith said that the deals had been originally done as a means of developing good practice in relation to bees with the pesticides when they had been introduced, but that this aim had been achieved – so they were no longer necessary.

His announcement left the door open to future deals by insisting that "the trustees do not preclude accepting funds in the future from either the crop protection industry... or individual companies". Some beekeepers feel this is insufficient and want all links to be broken.

At this weekend's meeting a motion put down by the Twickenham and Thames Valley Beekeeping Association stipulates that "the BBKA cease any commercial relationships with agrochemical or associated companies, including all endorsement of pesticides".

One of the drafters of the motion, Kate Canning, said last night: "They're leaving the door open for future agro-chemical relationships. Our bees deserve better than this. It's time for a clean, green break."

The beekeepers executive is trying to head off the move by inserting its own motion ahead of the Twickenham and Thames Valley one, which asks delegates to support them in the way in which it "should manage its intellectual property". It goes on: "This includes the use of its logo and maximises the benefits which can be gained from these assets and its reputation."

Mr Smith said the logo would not be used on pesticides in the future.

Source;
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/beekeepers-fume-at-associations-endorsement-of-fatal-insecticides-2182243.html

giovonni

17th January 2011, 05:34

Source: Jeffrey I. Rose "New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis."

Lost civilization under Persian Gulf? http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSnpScAR97UV3y2lVTcX99YYkOAV5-dk9IdkOTH8iu_ZgR4T61mTQ

A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published today in Current Anthropology.

Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham in the U.K., says that the area in and around this "Persian Gulf Oasis" may have been host to humans for over 100,000 years before it was swallowed up by the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Rose's hypothesis introduces a "new and substantial cast of characters" to the human history of the Near East, and suggests that humans may have established permanent settlements in the region thousands of years before current migration models suppose.

In recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago. "Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight," Rose said. "These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world."

But how could such highly developed settlements pop up so quickly, with no precursor populations to be found in the archaeological record? Rose believes that evidence of those preceding populations is missing because it's under the Gulf.

"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," Rose said. "These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."

Historical sea level data show that, prior to the flood, the Gulf basin would have been above water beginning about 75,000 years ago. And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by underground springs. When conditions were at their driest in the surrounding hinterlands, the Gulf Oasis would have been at its largest in terms of exposed land area. At its peak, the exposed basin would have been about the size of Great Britain, Rose says.

Evidence is also emerging that modern humans could have been in the region even before the oasis was above water. Recently discovered archaeological sites in Yemen and Oman have yielded a stone tool style that is distinct from the East African tradition. That raises the possibility that humans were established on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula beginning as far back as 100,000 years ago or more, Rose says. That is far earlier than the estimates generated by several recent migration models, which place the first successful migration into Arabia between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

The Gulf Oasis would have been available to these early migrants, and would have provided "a sanctuary throughout the Ice Ages when much of the region was rendered uninhabitable due to hyperaridity," Rose said. "The presence of human groups in the oasis fundamentally alters our understanding of human emergence and cultural evolution in the ancient Near East."

It also hints that vital pieces of the human evolutionary puzzle may be hidden in the depths of the Persian Gulf.

Source;
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-12/uocp-lcu120810.php

giovonni

18th January 2011, 00:02

Because I have said many harsh things about corporate manipulations I am always on the lookout for positive counter examples. Here's one.

***********

Unilever chief warns over global crisis in food output

As world business and political leaders prepare to gather in Davos, Unilever CEO Paul Polman tells Kamal Ahmed about the latest threat to the global economy

Unilever's Polman on how long term business can save the planet http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01804/polman_1804235c.jpg

By Kamal Ahmed 10:37PM GMT 15 Jan 2011

In a speech on Tuesday, Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, will say that market distortions created by European Union subsidies work against the needs of the developing world.

He will also demand fewer subsidies for harmful first-generation bio-fuels and say that climate change must be tackled by companies changing to sustainable models of agriculture.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph Mr Polman said that short-term speculators were also driving up prices. "One of the main things in food inflation is that it has attracted speculators for short-term profit at the expense of people living a dignified life," Mr Polman said. "It is difficult to understand if you want to work for the long-term interests of society." He revealed he had spoken to the European Commission's commissioner for internal markets, Michel Barnier, about the issue. Mr Polman says speculators should be forced to disclose their positions.

Unilever buys 12pc of the world's tea to make brands such as PG Tips and Liptons. It also purchases 6pc of the world's tomato supply for its leading brands such as Knorr soup and Pot Noodle.

In the speech, Mr Polman will say that such is his concern about climate change and water scarcity, Unilever is reviewing whether it can sustain tomato cultivation in southern Europe.

"We are becoming concerned about whether Greece and Spain will have adequate water in the coming decade to guarantee us a tomato harvest that our business needs.

***********

Davos 2011: Unilever's Paul Polman believes we need to think long term

Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever (150m customers a day, products available in 170 countries), likes to quote Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust. In Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, he says of the development of the West: "I recommend that the Statue of Liberty [on the east coast] be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast."

Mr Polman, formerly of Procter & Gamble and Nestlé, is a man on something of a mission. Sitting in an open-necked shirt in his office overlooking the Thames in London, the Unilever chief executive ranges widely – from criticisms of short-term speculators in the commodity markets, to the need to tackle rampant food inflation; from proposing that climate change is one of the major challenges facing global businesses to revealing that he wouldn't mind being a cow on the Ben and Jerry's "caring dairy" programme.

"Those animals have massage and scrubbing machines," he says. "Man, I wish I was a cow." Unilever owns Ben and Jerry's.

At its most basic, he argues, consumer-facing businesses need to rip up their business models and start again – working in partnership with local producers, NGOs and governments in ways that are sustainable. Growth and environmental degradation need to be "de-coupled", he says, explaining that Unilever wants to double its turnover at the same time as reducing its environmental impact. He admits that such targets, launched as part of Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan, have been described as "courageous". "Scary" is how he would put it.

In two weeks' time, world leaders from business and politics gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Among the Alpine peaks and snow 2 ft deep, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, will talk global finance alongside Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo; Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and therefore one of the most powerful people in technology, will tramp in her snow boots along with Prince Andrew, George Osborne and Bob Diamond, the new chief executive of Barclays who last week said it was time to end the period of remorse for bankers and "move on".

For those touched with a fleck of cynicism, Davos's broad, thematic discussions on future business trends, such as "responding to the new reality" and "building a risk response network", could be seen as so much hot air. A chance for chief executives to say some warm words in public while at the same time engaging in the deal-making and financing behind the scenes that make capitalism tick.

But Mr Polman has a different take. As one of the key leaders who will be travelling to Switzerland, he says that his generation of business leaders (those who grew up in the 1960s and are now at the top of the corporate ladder) are made of different stuff. He mentions Nike, TNT and Levis as companies which have built sustainability into their business. Those leaders who are not moving in that direction will be losers.

As part of this "new capitalism", Polman will argue this week in a major speech in London that the world economy has to take a new approach to agricultural production. He will say that, based on United Nations figures, the global population will be 9.6bn by 2050 and that the extra 3bn mouths to feed will need an increase in production of 70pc.

"According to the WWF, the world currently lives off 1.3 worlds in terms of use of resources," Polman said. "When you add 3bn people and increased standard of living, that figure rises to three Earths if you live like the US or the UK. That is just not going to work. We need to change things."

Ever increasing food inflation is causing another stress in the system as supply fails to keep up with demand. Polman will say in the speech that the world is moving into "dangerous territory".

Last week, the US department of agriculture said that the ratio of global stocks to demand would fall to "levels unseen since the mid-1970s".

"One of the main things in food inflation is that it has attracted the speculators for short-term profit at the expense of people living a dignified life," Polman says. "It is difficult to understand that if you really want to work for the long-term interests of society." He revealed that he has spoken to the European Commission's commissioner for internal markets, Michel Barnier, about the issue. Polman says that speculators should be forced to disclose their positions.

Polman suggests four practical proposals for change in agriculture – the development of more sustainable farming models to produce more food, a dramatic boost in investment to hit the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's target of $83bn (£52bn) a year to meet increasing demand, the ending of "market-distorting" subsidies which promote, for example, the production of unsustainable first-generation biofuels and the freeing up of trade and the end of European Union subsidies that discriminate against poorer nations.

A distaste for short-termism in the City has been a leitmotif for Polson. Last year at Davos, he sparked one of the most intense debates when he said that short-term City speculators were damaging the long-term needs of business to change the way they operate. Referring to hedge funds that were short-term holders of stock, he says: "They would sell their grandmother if they could make money. They are not people who are there in the long-term interests of the company."

Since Polman took charge of Unilever in 2009, the company has stopped providing earnings guidance and quarterly profit updates to investors, a move that caused the share price to drop by 8pc as worried investors pulled out their money.

One year on, does he believe that investors have understood the need for new approaches? "I say to a lot of people you have to measure success in terms of progress, not in terms of end state," he says.

"There is still too much pressure on short-termism in terms of the drivers of success. It is interesting, because the same consumer who is demanding change is encouraging that behaviour because it is their money and their pension funds that are chasing that shorter-term return. The average holding of a Unilever share in 1960 was 12 years; 15 years ago it was about five years, now it is less than a year, sometimes half a year. Our stock is not an exception."

Polman wants that figure to move in the opposite direction, a project for which he feels he is getting some traction.

"We definitely feel – and to some extent we are leading the pack – that we are moving our business model to the longer term. I tell our investors, if you don't like that, to be honest, then I fully respect you but look at other alternatives that might be better suited to your needs.

"I don't criticise hedge funds, they undoubtedly have a role to play otherwise they wouldn't be there, but they might not have a role to play with companies like ours. The world is big enough. I have seen a move in our shareholder base, I have seen that we have more investors supporting the strategy that we are doing.

"That can only be supported if you have the results, and fortunately we are having the results in the company and I hope that will continue. The worse thing would be to do what is probably right for the long-term benefit of society and being forced out of that because you don't get the short-term results. That is where the biggest pressures are, there is no doubt about it.

"I want people to focus on cash flow, which is a much longer-term measure than short-term profit, which doesn't take cost of capital into account, doesn't take capital investment into account."

Many analysts believe, as Polman does himself, that Unilever is an undervalued stock, with growth potential particularly in its skincare ranges and in the emerging markets.

Its full-year results later this year are expected to be some of the best that have been seen in 25 years as the global giant pulls out of recession. It may be the age of austerity but consumer appetite for their products – Knorr, PG tips, Persil, Marmite, Vaseline, Domestos, Walls, Dove, Hellmann's to name but a few – appears undimmed.

As with many global companies, up to 80pc of Unilever's growth will be in the emerging markets, which Polman says are now operating on a different economic cycle to the West. That of course puts a question mark against why globally-focused companies need to be headquartered in London, particularly if any of the major global banks make good on thinly-veiled threats to move operations to Hong Kong or Singapore.

"If you look at the changing forces in the world it is very clear that already now 75pc to 80pc of our growth is in the emerging markets," Polman says.

"A lot of that is about market development, it is about growing the pie. It is very difficult to see that change. From where we are as a company, in 10 years' time I will have 70pc of my business in the emerging markets.

"That, of course, requires you to think about your operating framework, your talent base, it requires you to think about the culture that you have to succeed and to attract and retain talent.

"Four of the world's top 10 banks are Chinese banks which many people in this part of the world can't even pronounce. Our investors in the US ask us, say, about the private label initiative of Wal-Mart in Arkansas but they don't know what's going on in Indonesia."

Last year, for the first time, Unilever hosted one of their major investor meetings in Singapore.

"We wanted people to understand the value creation opportunity in emerging markets so that they are able to fully value companies like ours. I believe that we are undervalued because too many of the capital discussions are made by people – with due respect – who do not truly understand the forces right now in value creation."

Polman says that the headquartering of a global company like Unilever is almost irrelevant.

"Where you are headquartered or what currency you consolidate in is frankly something of a theoretical discussion given the way we run our business," he says.

"Does that mean we'll leave the UK? I honestly think that is not important. We have great research here, but at the same time we have opened a research centre in China, opened a training centre in Singapore."

He has praise for David Cameron and George Osborne, saying that their decisions on cuts to balance the economy were right. In the short term, though, it does mean the private sector has to expand more rapidly and the economy could have a bumpier ride.

"The UK has taken a tremendous decision, which is the right decision long term, which is to significantly cut the deficit. But as the OECD estimates, any 1pc cut in deficit reduction results also in a 1pc cut in growth in the short term.

"There is tremendous need for the private sector to fill that vacuum and for businesses to pick up the slack. That is not immediately happening."

He is cautious about the global recovery – pointing out that £57 trillion was taken out of the system by the credit crunch and that consumers in the developed world, facing stagnant house prices, are still nervous. "We are not in for any quick fix," he says.

Whichever way the economy progresses, it must be done sustainably, Polman says. "People always think that to do the right thing costs you more. That is not true at all.

"It can actually ignite innovation and lower your costs. The alternative of not having sustainable sourcing, of having to deal with the effects of climate change, is a much higher cost on business.

"It is time to change, that is why I am here. I want to live in a better world."

***********

From The Telegraph Finance Section~ Tuesday 18 January 2011

Source pages;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/davos/8261856/Unilever-chief-warns-over-global-crisis-in-food-output.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/davos/8261178/Davos-2011-Unilevers-Paul-Polman-believes-we-need-to-think-long-term.html

giovonni

18th January 2011, 23:56

Note:
Richard Florida is the author of The Creative Class and founder of the Creative Class Group. Click through to see the charts and graphs that illustrate this article.

The Geography of Gun Deaths

Jan 13 2011, 10:38 AM ET

Terrible tragedies like last week's mass shootings in Tucson cause us to search for deeper answers. Many were quick to blame America's divisive and vitriolic political culture for the violence; others portray the shooter as an unhinged, clinically deranged person with his own unfathomable agenda. Arizona has been ground zero for the battle over immigration. Were the state's political and economic travails a contributing factor? There has been some talk about guns, too. Might tighter gun control laws have made a difference?

http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/richard_florida/assets_c/2011/01/FirearmDEDIT-thumb-600x463-40176.jpg

The map above charts firearm deaths for the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Note that these figures include accidental shootings, suicides, even acts of self-defense, as well as crimes. As of 2007, 10.2 out of every 100,000 people were killed by firearms across the United States, but that rate varies dramatically from state to state. In Hawaii, at the low end, it was 2.6 per 100,000; in New York and New Jersey it was 5.0 and 5.2 respectively. At the high end, 21.7 out of every 100,000 residents of the District of Columbia were killed by guns, 20.2 in Louisiana, 18.5 in Mississippi, and 17.8 in Alaska. Arizona ranked eighth nationally, with 15.1 deaths per 100,000.

With these data in hand, I decided to look at the factors associated with gun deaths at the state level. With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we charted the statistical correlations between firearm deaths and a variety of psychological, economic, social, and political characteristics of states. As usual, I point out that correlation does not imply causation, but simply points to associations between variables.

http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/richard_florida/assets_c/2011/01/Gun%20ViolenceEDIT-thumb-600x600-40178.jpg

Let's start by looking at factors that are sometimes assumed to be associated with gun violence but statistically are not.

It is commonly assumed that mental illness or stress levels trigger gun violence. But that's not borne out at the state level. We found no statistical association between gun deaths and mental illness or stress levels. We also found no association between gun violence and the proportion of neurotic personalities.

Images of drug-crazed gunmen are a commonplace: Guns and drug abuse are presumed to go together. But, again, that was not the case in our state-level analysis. We found no association between illegal drug use and death from gun violence at the state level.

Some might think gun violence would be higher in states with higher levels of unemployment and higher levels of inequality. But, again, we found no evidence of any such association with either of these variables.

So what are the factors that are associated with firearm deaths at the state level?

Poverty is one. The correlation between death by gun and poverty at the state level is .59.

An economy dominated by working class jobs is another. Having a high percentage of working class jobs is closely associated with firearm deaths (.55).

And, not surprisingly, firearm-related deaths are positively correlated with the rates of high school students that carry weapons on school property (.54).

What about politics? It's hard to quantify political rhetoric, but we can distinguish blue from red states. Taking the voting patterns from the 2008 presidential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearm-related deaths were positively associated with states that voted for McCain (.66) and negatively associated with states that voted for Obama (-.66). Though this association is likely to infuriate many people, the statistics are unmistakable. Partisan affiliations alone cannot explain them; most likely they stem from two broader, underlying factors - the economic and employment makeup of the states and their policies toward guns and gun ownership.

Firearm deaths were far less likely to occur in states with higher levels of college graduates (-.64) and more creative class jobs (-.52).

Gun deaths were also less likely in states with higher levels of economic development (with a correlation of -.32 to economic output) and higher levels of happiness and well-being (-.41).

And for all the terrifying talk about violence-prone immigrants, states with more immigrants have lower levels of gun-related deaths (the correlation between the two being -.34).

http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/richard_florida/assets_c/2011/01/preventionEDIT-thumb-600x463-40174.jpg

And what about gun control? As of July 29 of last year, Arizona became one of only three states that allows its citizens to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Might tighter gun control laws make a difference? Our analysis suggests that they do.

The map overlays the map of firearm deaths above with gun control restrictions by state. It highlights states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place - assault weapons' bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements.

Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48).

While the causes of individual acts of mass violence always differ, our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws. Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed.

Source;
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-geography-of-gun-deaths/69354/

giovonni

19th January 2011, 16:15

When Benjamin Franklin-the only founder who drafted and signed all three of the documents

that brought the United States to life, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783), and the Constitution-dreamed of the America he would like to see develop, the imagery that came to his mind was of a middle-class, largely urban culture made up of immigrants who were technologically sophisticated, family oriented, joyful, and upwardly mobile. And when he thought about how they might happen to become that society, it wasn't just the people he thought about. He also understood the importance of infrastructure as a factor in creating a middle class. He felt so strongly about this that he used his will to continue to support his plan for America beyond his death. He left specific bequests for public works and created the microlending model that has proven such a powerful transformative force, leaving what today would be several hundred thousand dollars each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia.1

The infrastructure money was to be used specifically to build such an infrastructure and nurture such a middle class. He explained his intent was to create that 'Which may be judged of most general utility to the Inhabitants, such as Fortifications, Bridges, Aqueducts, Public Buildings, Baths, Pavements or whatever may make living in the Town more convenient to its People and render it more agreeable to Strangers, resorting thither for Health or a temporary residence.”2

This is classic Franklin. He defines a goal, and a process for achieving it, but leaves any personal cherished outcomes as to how this should happen unstated. Franklin put his money on creating civic amenities-the kinds of things now seen as the prime targets for budget reductions-because he knew they are essential for a healthy city. His genius allowed him to conceive of the impact over time that parks, sanitation, and hospitals would have on the lives of all the city's people. He knew that each interaction with clean water, or decent medical care in an emergency, or a place to go for a picnic improves the quality of life and lifts morale. People think in larger terms, attempt more. Are more optimistic. The interaction each individual in the city has with these amenities might seem small and not terribly important, but in aggregate, over time, they are a powerful force in shaping a city's character through their impact on the lives of citizens and visitors alike.

How different that view is from the policies that seem to govern so many municipalities, states, and even the federal government today. Ultraconservative Grover Norquist voices this worldview: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”3 What he does not say, and what is not acknowledged, is that such a vision of governance can only be attempted through the radical reduction of the social safety net Franklin recognized as so important, because philosophically this worldview sees no role for government in doing such things.

So do these anti-Franklinian ideas really work?

A large percentage of politicians apparently think so and, through their voting, have attempted to create this Ayn Rand world, with the Bush tax reduction for the rich as one of its crown jewels. Just about this time last year, I wrote an essay 'The Vanishing Middle Class,” which dealt with what was happening in 2009 as a result of pursuing those kinds of policies.4 I talked about Franklin's view and the truth of what was happening, noting:

University of California, Berkeley, economist Emanuel Saez had reported that, in 2007, the disparity between the richest and the poorest reached a level never before seen, going all the way back to 1917 when modern tax data began to be collected. According to Saez's study, the top 10% of earners in America received 49.7% of all the income earned in the United States. To give this context as recently as the 1970s, the top 10% earned around 33% of all the income earned in the United States-a 17% shift. This contrast becomes even starker when only the super rich are considered. According to Saez, ‘The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.'4

Or, put another way, as of 2007 the top upper-class 1% of households owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

A year later, these trends have continued, and every one of my markers has become more distorted in favor of the top at a cost to the middle class and the poor. There are a hundred ways to show this breakdown. Here are seven, by which I hope you will see that I am not selectively picking my data to make a polemic case, but describing the actuality of American society just when it transits the midterm elections. Perhaps it will provide some guidance for the choices we now must make.

Tax Cuts

Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running, as I write this, on an economic platform centered on tax cuts, and proposing that the Bush cuts be made permanent for the richest Americans. The 2008 income tax data are now in, so we can assess what their economic theory is worth, and how it fulfilled its promise that tax cuts would produce widespread prosperity, by looking at all the years of the George W. Bush presidency. This is what David Cay Johnston, on the faculty of Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management, and Pulitzer Prize"winning tax analyst, concluded, based on the IRS data:

Total income was $2.74 trillion less during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels (all figures are in 2008 dollars). In only two years was total income up, but even when those years are combined they exceed the declines in only one of the other six years.

Even if we limit the analysis by starting in 2003, when the dividend and capital gains tax cuts began, through the peak year of 2007, the result is still less income than at the 2000 level. Total income was down $951 billion during those four years.

Average incomes fell. Average taxpayer income was down $3,512, or 5.7 percent, in 2008 compared with 2000, President Bush's own benchmark year for his promises of prosperity through tax cuts. Had incomes stayed at 2000 levels, the average taxpayer would have earned almost $21,000 more over those eight years. That's almost $50 per week. Just measuring the second through seventh years we find that total income was still nearly $2 trillion lower than if 2000 level income continued.5

Povertry Rate

That same US Census data also described what has happened to the nation's standard of living, comparing just the latest time period-2008 data with that of 2009. Here are some of the highlights:

Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year-the highest number since 1959, five years before President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty. The poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 and the highest level since 1994. Hispanic households took the hardest hit: Their poverty rate rose 2.1 percent from 2008's level, compared with a 1.1 percent jump in the rate for blacks and whites. (The US government considers an annual income of $21,756 to be the poverty line for a family of four.)

A record number of Americans, 50.7 million, were not covered by health-care insurance in 2009. At the same time the survey was being taken, Congress passed President Obama's contentious health-care reform law.6

Moving In

From the 50s until about five years ago, one of the strongest American familial trends was for children to grow up and move away. It was a central part of the nuclear family ethos. That is now reversing thanks to the grinding down of the middle class through unemployment, job loss, and reduction in income even when a person is employed.

From 2005 to 2009, family households added about 3.8 million extended family members, from adult siblings and in-laws to cousins and nephews. Extended family members now make up 8.2% of family households, up from 6.9% in 2005, according to Census data released in September 2010.

'Clearly, a big part of that is the economic recession and housing costs,” says Stephanie Coontz, cochair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research association. 'We're seeing a shift away from the 1950s and 1960s mentality against extended families, when ‘modern' women did not take in aging parents for fear of hurting their marriage.”7

And this shift involves far more than blood relations. 'For the first time in more than a century, more than half of people aged 25 to 34 have never been married. The number of people in non-family households-those whose members are not related-grew 4.4% from 2005 to 2009, faster than the 3.4% growth for family households.”7

Prison Population

According to the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project, the US prison population has more than quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million.8 The American Gulag is now larger than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate in the United States-753 inmates per 100,000-is five times that of the United Kingdom-itself an anomaly at 151 prisoners per 100,000. France, which is next, stands at 96, with Germany at 88. This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and one in every 28 children in the United States has a parent behind bars-up from one in 125 just 25 years ago.7

It probably won't surprise you to learn that a family with a parent in prison on average earns 22% less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before. After all, who wants to hire an ex-con in a tight labor market? And children with parents in prison are significantly likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23% of students with jailed parents are expelled, compared with 4% for the general population.

'Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children's future economic mobility,” the survey notes. 'With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children.”7

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and 'two-thirds of these children's parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses,” the study notes.7

And when you break the statistics down by race, it just gets nastier. There are large disparities. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4%, have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for white children it's one in 57.

I hope marijuana law reform passed in California, because this alone could help reverse these trends, simply by reducing the 858,000 arrests in the United States in 2010 for marijuana. That's marginally down from the 2007 peak of 872,000. It is notable that more than 50% of these arrests are nonviolent violations involving marijuana.9

The cost to states of this human warehousing now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every 15 state dollars expended.7 What is worse is that a growing number of small towns and cities now look to the gulag for their economic well-being. Like something from an Orwell novel, it is a complete cycle: one group of Americans lives on the incarceration of another group of Americans. And although it would appear illogical, it goes on even though it is well-known that the children of incarcerated parents face a much harder struggle in life. The gulag that incarcerates their parents, in the process, also often condemns the next generation to a life in jail.

Why would any society do this? Well, from the point of view of those who live on keeping them, and who mostly live in low-crime areas, isn't this exactly what is wanted? Thus, we have created a lobby whose rice bowl is dependent on the gulag. It is a truly Dickensian reality that few talk about for fear of being labeled 'soft on crime.” It is a form of willful ignorance on the part of politicians and citizens alike.

Physical Health

In 1950, before the inception of the present illness profit industry, the United States, compared with the world's other leading industrial nations, was fifth with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands.10 In 2010, the United States position concerning female life expectancy had fallen to 46th.11 And when both men and women were combined, it went to 49th.12, 13 Americans live 5.7 fewer years of 'perfect health”-a measure adjusted for time spent ill-than, for instance, the Japanese.14

Is this the result of lack of spending on the part of the United States? Most emphatically it is not.

Health policy expert Uwe E. Reinhardt, the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University, headed a team that specifically considered this. They found, 'per capita health spending in the United States increased at nearly twice the rate in other wealthy nations between 1970 and 2002.”15 As a result, the United States now spends well over twice the median expenditure of industrialized nations on healthcare, and far more than any other country as a percentage of its gross domestic product.15

Peter A. Muennig, assistant professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, in New York City, and Sherry A. Glied, professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health and currently on leave as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, analyzed Reinhardt's and many other studies in a groundbreaking exegetic survey of healthcare.16 They concluded:

We found that none of the prevailing excuses for the poor performance of the US health care system are likely to be valid. On the spending side, we found that the unusually high medical spending is associated with worsening, rather than improving, 15-year survival in two groups for whom medical care is probably important.

We speculate that the nature of our health care system specifically, its reliance on unregulated fee-for-service and specialty care may explain both the increased spending and the relative deterioration in survival that we observed. If so, meaningful reform may not only save money over the long term, it may also save lives.16

Hunger

It doesn't get much more basic that not having enough to eat. It is hard to think of America as a place where large numbers of people are facing hunger as a daily reality for themselves and, even worse, for their children. That happens in Africa, or maybe Asia, but surely not here. You think not? Millions of our fellow citizens routinely are forced to make life decisions based on whether they or their children will eat or go without to pay for housing or medical bills. And even the slender pipeline of assistance that does exist is problematic; 70% of emergency food centers face threats to their survival.

According to a study from the nation's largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46% in three years, including a 50% jump in the number of children needing food assistance and a 64% increase in hunger in senior citizens' homes.

According to the largest study of domestic hunger ever done, Hunger in America 2010, a study based on more than 61,000 interviews with clients and surveys of 37,000 feeding agencies, 'hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States”17:

1.Feeding America is annually providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase of 46% over 2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including nine million children, each year.

2.That means one in eight Americans now rely on Feeding America for food and groceries.

3.Feeding America's nationwide network of food banks is feeding one million more Americans each week than we did in 2006.

4.Thirty-six percent of the households we serve have at least one person working.

5.More than one third of client households report having to choose between food and other basic necessities, such as rent, utilities, and medical care.

6.The number of children the Feeding America network serves has increased by 50% since 2006.17

'Clearly, the economic recession, resulting in dramatically increasing unemployment nationwide, has driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, which operates some 200 food banks across the country.

'It is morally reprehensible that we live in the wealthiest nation in the world where one in six people are struggling to make choices between food and other basic necessities,” Escarra said in a statement.

She added that 'these are choices that no one should have to make, but particularly households with children. Insufficient nutrition has adverse effects on the physical, behavioral and mental health, and academic performance of children.”18

Feeding America's report is far from alone in reporting this food catastrophe.

'The Food Research and Action Center found that nearly one in five in the US-18.5 percent - report having gone hungry in the past year, up from 16.3 percent at the start of 2008. Households with children were even likelier to experience hunger, with nearly a quarter reporting hunger in the past year.

'Perhaps worst of all, the Feeding America study finds that 70 percent of emergency food centers are reporting 'one or more problems that threaten their ability to continue operating.”18

Justice

I have placed this last because I hope you will agree with me that where there is not justice, there is not civil society. It has always been my safe port that no matter what else happened in America, I always saw the justice system as fair. Perhaps you feel the same way, and will be as appalled as I was when I read the World of Justice Project (WJP) report, Rule of Law Index 2010.19

To understand why I think this report is such a big deal, perhaps it will help to say who funded it: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Neukom Family Foundation, the GE Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and LexisNexis. I list them to make the point that this is the pinnacle of nonpartisan philanthropy, not some political think tank with an agenda. We can trust the data.

The project, involving 900 researchers from 35 countries, who have polled 35,000 individuals, in addition to searching each nation's records, presents itself in this very Franklinian way:

'Establishing the rule of law is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity and equity-communities that offer sustainable economic development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights… . The rule of law is the cornerstone to improving public health, safeguarding participation, ensuring security, and fighting poverty.”

When the WJP talks about the rule of law, they spell out very carefully what they mean. They refer to 'a rules-based system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:

•the government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law;

•the laws are clear, publicized, stable, and fair, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property;

•the process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient;

•access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives, and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

With this as the basis for its analysis, the Rule of Law Index 2010 then lists what it calls the 10 'factors,” which break down further into 49 'subfactors.” These descriptors are the basis upon which the Rule of Law Index 2010 evaluates a nation's justice under the rule of law. The outcome of this exercise is a quite extraordinary assessment 'of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law-not in theory but in practice [emphasis added].”19 Here are the 10 factors; they all sound very 'American”:

•factor one: limited government powers

•factor two: absence of corruption

•factor three: clear, publicized, and stable laws

•factor four: order and security

•factor five: fundamental rights

•factor six: open government

•factor seven: regulatory enforcement

•factor eight: access to civil justice

•factor nine: effective criminal justice

•factor 10: informal justice19

As I started reading the report, I assumed that whatever other self-inflicted wounds we have brought to ourselves as a nation, our justice system was still solid, and that the United States would rank at the top of the world's list. Surprise. The WJP groups countries by regions as well as such considerations as income level, then evaluates them, dropping factor 10-'informal justice”-because it is does not involve law. Not surprisingly, the United States is grouped with North America and Western Europe, and there are seven nations in our bloc: Austria, Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and USA (Table 1). These are the nations where the survey was carried out for the 2010 report, with other countries to follow in later reports.
Table 1.

Nine-Factors Ranking Analysis

Countries are ranked from one to seven.

Nations

Austria 3 3 4 1 1 6 3 3 1
Canada 4 4 3 3 4 4 4 5 6
France 6 5 5 4 6 5 6 6 4
Netherlands 2 2 2 5 3 2 2 2 3
Spain 5 6 7 7 5 7 7 4 7
Sweden 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2
USA 7 7 6 6 7 3 5 7 5

For the United States, it is a death's head portrait of the reality that lies beneath the smug rhetoric we use to hector others about justice and the rule of law. I am embarrassed. We all should be. This has haunted me since I read the report. If America is not a leader in justice, what are we? I could pick a dozen other trends, from closing libraries, to depaving streets, to decline in educational performance, but do we need to go further? If America were a patient, what would you tell him about his lifestyle and habits? What would you see as his prognosis?

On the basis of data, it is impossible to say America's societal health is good. On the basis of that same data, we can also conclude policies based on cutting taxes, without recognizing that it is in the societal interest to assure a decent quality of life for all, are destructive. We know enough to see that democracy cannot function properly without a healthy and vibrant middle class, and to prove to ourselves that we are killing ours. We need to change course-not on the basis of political ideology-but on facts. Facts about what does and does not work.

It is the middle class that holds the key, just as Franklin saw all those years ago. The middle class has enough money to dream, but rarely enough to do it alone. Success requires working together, finding compromises. And that's what most of us say we want. According to research by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, 92% of Americans would choose to live in a society with far less income disparity than the United States, choosing Sweden's model over that of the United States.20 The America Benjamin Franklin imagined while sitting beneath his mulberry tree in the courtyard of his house in Philadelphia over two centuries ago.

Source;
http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2810%2900236-3/fulltext