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

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Solar Batteries Could be Utilities' Next Headache



This is good news, because it shows how noncarbon solar is developing into a new phase.

CHRISTOPH STEITZ and STEPHEN JEWKES - Reuters

FRANKFURT, GERMANY and MILAN, ITALY -- Renewable energy is constantly evolving and challenging traditional utilities but one growing sector could make home-generated power much easier to use and cut customers' dependence on energy companies dramatically - solar batteries.

A major conundrum with solar panels has always been how to keep the lights on when the sun isn't shining.

Solar batteries allow homes and businesses to store solar power to use in the hours of darkness and can also help to create "smart grids" that react to sudden power swings and free stored energy when needed.

The technology is still expensive and not widely used but with energy bills soaring for consumers, it could quickly gain market share and reduce dependence on utilities, which are already struggling with overcapacity and weak demand.

Italy has some of the highest power prices in Europe and is looking at how ...

Read More - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...92709O20130308

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Phoenix in the Climate Crosshairs: We Are Long Past Coal Mine Canaries

This is a report on what is taking place in Pheonix, to my mind one of the bellweather cities in the Great Migrations trend: the population shifts out of the Southwest, because of heat and lack of water; and, away from the coasts, as a result of sea rise. This report gives an excellent assessment of what is happening, and what this process is like.

WILLIAM DEBUYS - truthout

If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New ...

Read More - http://truth-out.org/news/item/15126...-mine-canaries

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Researchers: House Dust Mites Evolving in Reverse



Here is a powerful new insight into the processes of a physical organism's mutability.

ARTURO GARCIA - The Raw Story

Researchers at the University of Michigan said in a study published on Friday that house dust mites are living evidence against the popular theory that organisms cannot reverse their own evolutionary process.

“All our analyses conclusively demonstrated that house dust mites have abandoned a parasitic lifestyle, secondarily becoming free-living, and then speciated in several habitats, including human habitations,” said Pavel Klimov and Barry O’Connor in the study, published in the journal Systematic Biology.

According to Science Daily, Klimov and O’Connor’s research indicated that dust mites evolved from parasitic organisms known as skin mites, commonly found on livestock, cats and dogs. The skin mites are themselves descended from independent lifeforms millions of years ago.

The two biologists collected 700 mite species for their study, which used large-scale DNA sequencing, statistical analyses and reconstructed evolutionary trees to evaluate 62 different theories regarding dust mites’ origins.

Klimov said their findings were surprising, given that, according to Dollo’s law, evolution can only move forward over time. In the case of parasites, he said, they can often lose the ability to function independently as they become better-equipped to feed off of the resources available thru their host lifeforms.

“[Parasites] often experience degradation or loss of many genes because their functions are no longer required in a rich environment where hosts provide both living space and nutrients,” he said. “Many researchers in the field perceive such specialization as evolutionarily irreversible.”

According to Klimov and O’Connor’s study, dust mites were able to use some of their ancestors’ traits — increased weather tolerance and adaptability in seeking hosts, and the development of enzymes allowing them to eat more kinds of biological material — to gradually wean themselves off of living exclusively off any given host.

Source page: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/0...ng-in-reverse/

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New Evidence: CIA and MI6 Were Told Before Invasion That Iraq had no Active WMD



Little by little the truth comes out about the war criminals that were leading the U.S. and the U.K. and the endless lies they told that resulted in both countries becoming embroiled in two wars, representing perhaps the worst geopolitical decisions in several centuries.

RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story

Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was 'active”, 'growing” and 'up and running”.

A special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had 'virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was 'totally fabricated”...

Read more - http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/1...no-active-wmd/

post edit:

here's the documentary ...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UOsHLA1CMPI

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Monarch Butterflies Drop Ominously in Mexico

It looks like we are now facing another crisis like the bee crisis. These are the canaries in the mine, and few seem to be interested. We don't seem to be able to develop the political will to do anything about these species wide failures, so we may soon follow them.

MARK STEVENSON - The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY -- The number of Monarch butterflies making it to their winter refuge in Mexico dropped 59 percent this year, falling to the lowest level since comparable record-keeping began 20 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday.

It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada to spend the winter sheltering in mountaintop fir forests in central Mexico. Six of the last seven years have shown drops, and there are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997.

The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, the experts said.

But they differed on the possible causes.

Illegal logging in the reserve established in the Monarch wintering grounds was long thought to contribute, but such logging ...

Read More - http://www.usnews.com/science/news/a...usly-in-mexico

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I don't think it is really clear to people how fragile the world economy is. I am in Paris right now to make a presentation at the Sorbonne -- which I did tonight -- and have been struck by how stressed people are about the Euro and the EU itself. This report gives a good assessment of the situation. If the Euro crashes the American economy will be deeply affected.

Europe’s Leaders Run Out of Credit in Cyprus




GIDEON RACHMAN - Financial Times (U.K.)

European leaders must surely know that they are taking a big risk with Cyprus. The danger is obvious. Now that everybody with money in Cypriot banks is being forced to take a hit, nervous depositors elsewhere in Europe might notice that a dangerous precedent has been set. Rather than run even a small risk of an unwanted financial 'haircut” in the future, the customers of Greek, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian banks might choose to get their money out now. If that starts to happen, the euro crisis will be back on again – with a vengeance.

The people behind the Cyprus plan hope that the risks of contagion are small. They reckon that the Spanish banks are on the mend, and that Greece too has pulled back from the brink. There is no reason for depositors to draw lessons from the peculiar case of Cyprus, whose banks are stuffed with Russian money.

Maybe so. And yet EU leaders have got these kinds of calculations badly wrong before. At a summit in Deauville in September 2010, they announced that the holders of sovereign bonds in bailed-out countries would lose some of their money. The result was a severe worsening of the euro crisis, as investors began to demand much higher rates to lend to risky-seeming countries, such as Italy or Spain.

So why – after all the painstaking efforts to put euro-humpty back together again – have European leaders taken such a gamble in Cyprus? The answer is that they too are out of credit – political credit.

This credit shortfall takes different forms in northern and southern Europe. For leaders of nations such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, there was a sense that their voters and parliaments just would not approve another bailout – unless heavy penalties were attached.

Cyprus is a small place, and so the amounts of money needed to shore the country up are relatively small – “just” €17bn. The problem is that Cyprus is also a particularly clear-cut example of the fundamental deficit in trust between northern and southern Europeans. Ever since the crisis began, the German media has been full of stories of southern corruption. German voters have been encouraged to believe that their hard-earned money is going to shore up fundamentally rotten countries.

Cyprus is a particularly big problem because its banks have a well-earned reputation for being a haven for dirty money from Russia. The amount being “round-tripped” through Cyprus – as it goes in and out of Russia – does suggest that the Cypriot banking laundry has been spinning wildly. Hitting depositors with more than €100,000 looks like an effective way to target illicit Russian money. The baffling and dangerous decision also to tax small depositors shows the extent to which sympathy has run out – even for the “little guy” in southern Europe.

In theory, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other European leaders could have told their voters that they had to bite the bullet – and bail out Cyprus, without demanding a price – because the alternative is risking a European bank-run that eventually leads to bank failures back home. But the likely reaction would have been even more voter anger and incomprehension.

Cyprus’s rulers also had very little political credit left in the rest of Europe. Many EU leaders had been deeply reluctant to admit Cyprus into the union in 2004, without a peace settlement that reunified the island. But Greece had threatened to veto the entire enlargement of the EU – blocking Poland, the Czech Republic and the rest – unless Cyprus was admitted. Reluctantly, EU leaders succumbed to this act of blackmail. But the whole episode left a bitter taste, particularly when Greek Cypriot voters rejected the Annan peace plan. As a result, when Cyprus ran into trouble the well of sympathy was fairly shallow.

The bigger problem remains, however, the gap in trust and political cultures between northern and southern Europe. Back before the crisis, when things were going well, it was considered politically incorrect, even xenophobic, to suggest that standards of probity in public life vary widely across Europe and that this is a problem for an organisation dedicated to “ever closer union”.

Now, however, it is apparent that this lack of convergence in trust and political culture is at least as important as a lack of economic convergence. It is also true that the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandinavians have their own problems with corruption in public life, and that the caricature of the whole of southern Europe as corrupt and lazy is grossly unfair.

And yet it is a fact that tax-evasion is rife in countries such as Greece and Italy. That has always made it hard to persuade northern voters to bail out the south.

Even casual observation confirms that attitudes to public money vary widely. A couple of years ago, I was invited to a meeting of all Dutch ambassadors from around the world. Lunch was a not terribly appetising array of sandwiches and crisps, eaten standing up. I suspected that, even though the public finances of Italy or Greece were in worse shape, their ambassadors were eating better.

It is a trivial anecdote. But it is the kind of cultural difference that explains why the northern Europeans have now said “basta”, when it comes to the Cypriot banks.

Unless Europe can create a real convergence in standards in public life, then the resulting gap in trust could ultimately break up first the euro – and the EU itself.

gideon.rachman@ft.com

Source: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cd6ad...#axzz2O2TTWxF2

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The Last Letter: A Message to George Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran

Here is the truth the American corporate media will not speak.

TOMAS YOUNG - Truthdig

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf ...

Read More - http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the...tter_20130318/

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Solar Power to Hit Cost Parity Next Year



Here is some very good news on the noncarbon energy transition trend. But it is also a cautionary story. Reading it I kept thinking: How much quicker could we have gotten to this point if old carbon energy corporate interests had not blocked the development of alternatives wherever they could.

RP SIEGEL - Triple Pundit

They said it couldn’t be done. They tried to tell us that renewable energy could only survive if it were propped up with government subsidies. Never mind that our whole system of economic development, beginning with the patent office, is predicated on the idea that fledgling, underfunded industries need special protection for a limited time until they are strong enough to go it alone. Never mind that the fossil fuel industry, which can hardly be considered fledgling or underfunded, is still receiving billions in taxpayer subsidies.

But like the little engine that could, or the middle aged rock star that, after twenty years of struggling in sleazy dives has suddenly become an overnight sensation, solar power, having now surpassed the 100 GW threshold, has finally arrived and is good to go, in many places, without subsidies.

True, almost a third of that is in Germany, where the government ...

Read More - http://www.triplepundit.com/2013/03/...ity-next-year/

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these two items kind of go hand and hand ...

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Human Stupidity Is Destroying the World



Here is why movements like the Tea Baggers, the modern version of the Know Nothings who plagued America in the 19th century, prosper. Willful Ignorance is like a dark cloud spreading across the nation. This essay is too polemic, but the points it makes are sound.

MARK MORFORD - AlterNet (U.S.)/San Francisco Chronicle

Six percent of Americans believe in unicorns. Thirty-six percent believe in UFOs. A whopping 24 percent believe dinosaurs and man hung out together. Eighteen percent still believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Nearly 30 percent believe cloud computing involves… actual clouds. A shockingly sad 18 percent, to this very day, believe the president is a Muslim. Aren’t they cute? And Floridian?

Do you believe in angels? Forty-five percent of Americans do. In fact, roughly 48 percent – Republicans and Democrats alike – believe in some form of creationism. A hilariously large percent of terrified right-wingers are convinced Obama is soon going to take away all their guns, so when the Newtown shooting happened and 20 young children were massacred due to America’s fetish for, obsession with and addiction to firearms, violence and fear, they bought more bullets. Because obviously.

In sum and all averaged out, it’s safe ...

Read More - http://www.alternet.org/education/hu...t=5&paging=off

Also ~


Chinese Eugenics Factory Collects 'Genius” DNA To Breed 'Enhanced” People

This is the latest in the Homo Superiorus Trend. I predict this is going to become a major issue very quickly.

JURRIAAN MAESSEN - Blacklisted News

According to a leading evolutionary biologist, the Chinese are engaging in a massive breeding operation with the aim of ultimately creating a breed of cognitively enhanced individuals. And what’s more, the China-based eugenics factory recently bought up a large genome research institute in the United States, giving the Chinese access to the DNA of Americans.

In a recent interview with Vice magazine, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller admits to have donated his DNA to an endeavor headed up by the world’s largest genetic research institution based in China’s Shenzhen province. Miller, by his own admission, is one of 2000 'brainiacs” selected by IBG Shenzhen for their transhumanist project. Asked how the company goes after potential DNA-contributors, Miller answers:

'They seem mostly interested in people of Chinese and European descent. They’re basically recruiting through a scientific conference, through word of mouth. You have to provide some evidence that you’re as ...

Read More - http://www.blacklistednews.com/Chine...0/0/0/Y/M.html

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Scientists Find Visions of a Benevolent Future Society Motivate Reform




This is a study which should be read, and acted upon, by all politicians. People, not surprisingly, want things to get better.

The actual study is to be found at: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/39/4/523.abstract

ERIC W. DOLAN - The Raw Story

Activists, take note: People support reform if they believe the changes will enhance the future character of society, according to a study published online this month in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Namely, people support a future society that fosters the development of warm and moral individuals.

'There are implications for communication, but also for policies themselves. The ‘easy’ answer would be to promote a policy or cause in terms of how it will make people more warm/moral,” Paul G. Bain of the University of Queensland, the lead author of the study, explained to Raw Story via email. 'But I think for this to really work it needs to be authentic/real and not just rhetoric – the policies themselves need to promote this.”

Bain, alon g with four colleagues, sought to explore Noam Chomsky’s dictum that 'social action must be animated by a vision of a future society” ...

Read More - http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/2...tivate-reform/

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Science Fiction Comes Alive as Researchers Grow Organs in Lab

This is excellent news. I have been covering this trend for about eight years now, and am heartened by its growing success. This trend will eliminate the rejection issues transplant patients now face, and will allow people who are profoundly disfigured, or who would otherwise die, to survive. It will also eliminate the grey world of body parts suppliers.

GAUTAM NAIK - Wall Street Journal

MADRID -- Reaching into a stainless steel tray, Francisco Fernandez-Aviles lifted up a gray, rubbery mass the size of a fat fist.

It was a human cadaver heart that had been bathed in industrial detergents until its original cells had been washed away and all that was left was what scientists call the scaffold.

Next, said Dr. Aviles, "We need to make the heart come alive."

Inside a warren of rooms buried in the basement of Gregorio Marañón hospital here, Dr. Aviles and his team are at the sharpest edge of the bioengineering revolution that has turned the science-fiction dream of building replacement parts for the human body into a reality.

Since a laboratory in North Carolina made a bladder in 1996, scientists have built increasingly more complex organs. There have been five windpipe replacements so far. A London researcher, Alex Seifalian, has transplanted lab-grown tear ...

Read More - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...DDLE_Video_Top

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Chicago Now Home to Nation’s Largest Vertical Farm



This is some wonderful good news; it offers an alternative to the chemical and poison driven agriculture model that dominates our world now. It also offers an answer to the vast youth unemployment problem we have in our inner cities, as well as eliminating a great deal of pollution arising from trucking food across the country. It is not an entire solution to the poison model, of course, but it could go a long way towards ameliorating the toxic web in which we are now trapped.

The article has one major flaw: it's assessment of costs, does not include any of what I have mentioned above and, therefore should be disregarded as a criticism.

Click through and look at the video, and listen to these young people talk about what they are doing.

ERIC W. DOLAN - The Raw Story

An formerly abandoned warehouse in Chicago is now home to the nation’s largest hydroponic vertical farm.

FarmedHere LLC opened the 90,000-square-foot farm in Bedford Park on Friday. The facility utilizes aquaponics, a sustainable system that combines raising fish with growing soil-free plants.

'The tilapia fertilize our plants. Their primary job is eat, produce waste. The plants are able to soak it up. The plants clean the water for the fish and it comes back to the tanks,” one worker, Max Gonzales, explained to WGN.

The vertical farm is expected to produce more than 1 million pounds of basil, arugula and mixed greens. Thanks to a partnership with Windy City Harvest, an urban agriculture training program, the unique farm is also expected to create 200 jobs for young adults in Chicago.

FarmedHere has opened two other vertical farms in southern Chicago and central Illinois. Produce from those ...

Read More - http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/2...vertical-farm/

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on a related note ...

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The Drought That Ravaged US Crops Is Only Going to Get Worse



In this report we see the convergence of two major trends: Water as destiny, and climate change. This is also another argument for the today's lead story, and why the new urban farming model should be pursued.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG - Mother Jones

The historic drought that laid waste to America's grain and corn belt is unlikely to ease before the middle of this year, a government forecast warned on Thursday.

The annual spring outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted hotter, drier conditions across much of the US, including parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, where farmers have been fighting to hang on to crops of winter wheat.

The three-month forecast noted an additional hazard, however, for the midwest: with heavy, late snows setting up conditions for flooding along the Red and Souris rivers in North Dakota.

"It's a mixed bag of flooding, drought and warm weather," Laura Furgione, the deputy director of NOAA's weather service told a conference call with reporters.

Last year produced the hottest year since record keeping began more than a century ago, with several weeks in a row of 100+degree ...

Read More - http://www.motherjones.com/environme...oing-get-worse

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With the most recent banking crisis in Cyprus ...
This new and controversial futuristic monetary system is back in the news ...

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Have You Heard of Bitcoin ?

This is a fascinating new trend that you may already know about. If not you might find it worthwhile to explore it. The implications are profound ...

Click through to see the video.

ALEXANDER REED KELLY - Truthdig

It’s a virtual currency that travels beyond the reach of banks and centralized regulatory institutions and allows you to transfer money to anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere at any time.

'Bitcoin is to banks what email was to postal offices,” says Mihai Alisie, editor of Bitcoin Magazine. 'Instead of going through a bank, respecting their schedule, paying their fees, I can transfer money to Ethiopia, India or China without anyone knowing who’s behind address B and address A.” It is currently being used, for example, to surmount the funding block on WikiLeaks, in which American and European credit card companies have cooperated with government requests to prevent any money from being donated to the whistle-blowing organization.

In the introductory video by The Guardian below, Alisie and Bitcoin developer, Amir Taaki, can be seen in hooded sweatshirts and beanies, walking the brightly lit halls of the deserted London ...

Read More - http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item...coin_20130323/

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Solar Cell Power Breakthrough

Here is what may turn out to be very important news for solar energy. I am always struck by what might have happened if the political will to quickly make the transition out of carbon energy had been mustered.

University of Copenhagen - Niels Bohr Institute

Scientists from the Nano-Science Center at the Niels Bohr Institut, Denmark and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, have shown that a single nanowire can concentrate the sunlight up to 15 times of the normal sun light intensity. The results are surprising and the potential for developing a new type of highly efficient solar cells is great.

Due to some unique physical light absorption properties of nanowires, the limit of how much energy we can utilize from the sun's rays is higher than previous believed. These results demonstrate the great potential of development of nanowire-based solar cells, says PhD Peter Krogstrup on the surprising discovery that is described in the journal Nature Photonics.

The research groups have during recent years studied how to develop and improve the quality of the nanowire crystals, which is a cylindrical structure with a diameter of about 10,000 part of a human ...

Read More - http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/45761

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'Monsanto Protection Act' Slips Silently Through US Congress



The best law money can buy. And you aren't even going to be able to seek redress when your health is damaged.

RT (Russia)

The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week - including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.

The rider, which is officially known as the Farmer Assurance Provision, has been derided by opponents of biotech lobbying as the 'Monsanto Protection Act,” as it would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.

The provision, also decried as a 'biotech rider,” should have gone through the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees for review. Instead, no hearings were held, and the piece was evidently unknown to most Democrats (who hold the majority in the Senate) prior to its approval as part of HR 993, the short-term funding bill that was approved to avoid a federal government ...

Read More - http://rt.com/usa/monsanto-congress-silently-slips-830/

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Moms Serve Up Solid Food Too Soon, Study Finds



If you know someone with a small baby you might pass this along.

KATHLEEN STRUCK - ABC News

Many mothers in the U.S. start infants on solid foods -- including peanut butter, meat, and french fries -- earlier than experts recommend, and half of them do so with their doctor's support, according to new research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study found that 40.4 percent of U.S. mothers interviewed from 2005 to 2007 said they introduced solid foods to infants before they were 4 months old -- that represents an increase of about 29 percent from earlier studies, the researchers reported today in the journal Pediatrics.

More than half of the mothers (55 percent) cited a doctor's advice as one of the reasons for introducing solids before 4 months.

"With multiple sources of information on infant feeding and care from healthcare providers, family, friends, and media, specific information on the timing of solid food introduction may be conflicting and ...

Read More - http://abcnews.go.com/Health/moms-se...6#.UVCTaUQj_Oc

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Also ~ on the food nourishment topic ...

Walmart's Death Grip on Groceries Is Making Life Worse for Millions of People (Hard Times USA)



Once again, corporate profit trumps all other considerations, and national wellness is hardly considered.

STACY MITCHELL - AlterNet (U.S.)

This article was published in partnership with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance [3].

When Michelle Obama visited a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, a few weeks ago to praise the company's efforts to sell healthier food, she did not say why she chose a store in Springfield of all cities. But, in ways that Obama surely did not intend, it was a fitting choice. This Midwestern city provides a chilling look at where Walmart wants to take our food system.

Springfield is one of nearly 40 metro areas where Walmart now captures about half or more of consumer spending on groceries, according to Metro Market Studies. Springfield area residents spend just over $1 billion on groceries each year, and one of every two of those dollars flows into a Walmart cash register. The chain has 20 stores in the area and shows no signs of slowing ...

Read More - http://www.alternet.org/food/walmart...tter815950&t=3

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Expression of Emotion in Books Declined During 20th Century, Study Finds

This is an intriguing study. It is not quite clear what to make of it, but it may suggest that our ability to express emotion is declining as technology increases, and allows us to live our lives at arm's length, as it were.

HANNAH JOHNSON - University of Bristol (U.K.)

The use of words with emotional content in books has steadily decreased throughout the last century, according to new research from the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield, and Durham. The study, published today in PLOS ONE, also found a divergence between American and British English, with the former being more 'emotional' than the latter.

The researchers looked at how frequently 'mood' words were used through time in a database of more than five million digitised books provided by Google. The list of words was divided into six categories (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) previously used by one of the researchers, Dr Vasileios Lampos, to detect contemporary mood changes in public opinion as expressed in tweets collected in the UK over more than two years.

Dr Alberto Acerbi, a Newton Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol and lead author of the paper, said: "We thought that it would be interesting to apply the same methodology to different media and, especially, on a larger time scale. We were initially surprised to see how well periods of positive and negative moods correlated with historical events. The Second World War, for example, is marked by a distinct increase in words related to sadness, and a correspondent decrease in words related to joy."

In applying this technique, the researchers made some remarkable discoveries about the evolution of word usage in English books over the past century. Firstly, the emotional content of published English has been steadily decreasing over the past century, with the exception of words associated with fear, an emotion which has resurged over the past decades.

They also found that American English and British English have undergone a distinct stylistic divergence since the 1960s. American English has become decidedly more 'emotional' than British English in the last half-century.

The same divergence was also found in the use of content-free words, that is words which carry little or no meaning on their own, such as conjunctions ('and', 'but') and articles ('the').

Dr Acerbi said: "This is particularly fascinating because it has recently been shown that differences in usage of content-free words are a signature of different stylistic periods in the history of western literature."

This suggests that the divergence in emotional content between the two forms of English is paired by a more general stylistic divergence.

Co-author Professor Alex Bentley said: "We don't know exactly what happened in the Sixties but our results show that this is the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge. We can only speculate whether this was connected, for example, to the baby-boom or to the rising of counterculture.

"In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period so perhaps 'emotionalism' was a luxury of economic growth."

While the trends found in this study are very clear, their interpretation is still open. A remaining question, the authors say, is whether word usage represents real behaviour in a population, or possibly an absence of that behaviour which is increasingly played out via literary fiction. Books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.

Dr Acerbi concluded: "Today we have tools that are revolutionising our understanding of human culture and of how it changes through time. Interdisciplinary studies such as this can detect clear patterns by looking at an unprecedented amount of data, such as tweets, Google trends, blogs, or, in our case, digitised books, that are freely available to everyone interested in them."

Source page: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-eoe031913.php

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Why Is Socialism Doing So Darn Well in Deep-Red North Dakota ?

Here is how banking could operate if we had the political will to make Obama put people first, and to elect a Congress that would face down the too-big-to-fail Wall Street financial institutions.

LES LEOPOLD - AlterNet (U.S.)

North Dakota is the very definition of a red state. It voted 58 percent to 39 percent for Romney over Obama, and its statehouse and senate have a total of 104 Republicans and only 47 Democrats. The Republican super-majority is so conservative it recently passed the nation's most severe anti-abortion resolution [3] – a measure that declares a fertilized human egg has the same right to life as a fully formed person.

But North Dakota is also red in another sense: it fully supports its state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND), a socialist relic that exists nowhere else in America. Why is financial socialism still alive in North Dakota? Why haven't the North Dakotan free-market crusaders slain it dead?

Because it works.

In 1919, the Non-Partisan League, a vibrant populist organization, won a majority in the legislature and voted the bank into existence. The goal was to ...

Read More - http://www.alternet.org/corporate-ac...ota?paging=off

[giovonni]

will share these two related news items ...

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State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America



While I do not entirely agree with this assessment, for instance, Norway with a Keynesian economy has done very well through the last decade, on the whole I think it is an accurate and scary report on our current situation, particularly his comments on the vampire capitalism that is destroying our country in favor of the uber-rich.

David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of 'The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.”

DAVID A. STOCKMAN - The New York Times

GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT -- The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later - within a few years, I predict - this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic ...

Read More - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/op...nted=all&_r=2&

Related ...

David Stockman On ‘The Great Deformation’ and Our Economic Doom

This interview when read as an accompaniment to the lead story in today's edition provides additional insight that helps understanding of Stockman's premises.

Taken together they suggest that very difficult times are coming.

DANIEL GROSS - The Daily Beast

Most 742-page jeremiads aren’t much fun to read. But The Great Deformation, David Stockman’s revisionist history of the past 100 years of capitalism American-style, is a spirited, occasionally gleeful, skewering of many of our most widely held assumptions and most lionized figures. A former divinity student, Stockman chronicles what he views as the moral rot in the American financial system-one fueled by easy money, profligate debt, and needless government intervention. To a degree, this book is autobiographical. As a congressman, Reagan-era budget official, and private equity executive, Stockman has lived through the booms and busts of the past half-century. He knows the world of which he writes from the inside out. And in The Great Deformation, few escape his opprobrium-current and past policymakers, Roosevelt and Reagan, Democrats and Republicans, leveraged buyout titans, and corporate CEOs. 'Sundown now comes to America because sound money, free markets, and fiscal rectitude have no ...

Read More - http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...omic-doom.html

[giovonni]

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Saudi Religious Police Lift Ban on Women on Bikes

It is hard to credit that this story could be true, but sadly it is. This is what happens when a nation allows religion and the state to become intertwined, and religious beliefs determine social policy. We should take it as a cautionary tale of the American Theocratic Right

ABDULLAH SHIHRI - The News Tribune/The Associated Press

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA -- A Saudi newspaper says the kingdom's religious police are now allowing women to ride motorbikes and bicycles but only in restricted, recreational areas.

The Al-Yawm daily on Monday cited an unnamed official from the powerful religious police as saying women can ride bikes in parks and recreational areas but they have to be accompanied by a male relative and dressed in the full Islamic head-to-toe abaya.

Saudi Arabia follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam and bans women from driving. Women are also banned from riding motorcycles or bicycles in public places. The newspaper didn't say what triggered the lifting of the ban.

The official says women may not use the bikes for transportation but "only for entertainment" and that they should shun places where young men gather "to avoid harassment." ...

Read More - http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/0...-lift-ban.html