big bank exorcisms

Video - Rev. Billy leads Deutschebank exorcism.

Evolver | In recent days we have challenged the devils in the Deutschbank in Dusseldorf, and the ING and UBS in Amsterdam, and HSBC in Liverpool - laying our hands on the cash machines and calling our demons. What are these exorcisms? Why these muscular hexing prayers at the ATM? Of course the big banks have their famous bad practices - redlining, foreclosures, demolitions of communities. But now with the earth crisis there is a broader deeper big bank attack. In the Church of Earthalujah we have come to believe that big banks distance us from each other. The global storm of capital consumerizes and militarizes us. The force of the money leaves us dispirited and alone, more intimate with products and sentimental patriotism than the people around us...

If we human beings don't re-ignite a new kind of meeting - don't meet down in the city square in that crushing crashing way - despite the Spanish Greek Syrian Sri Lankan NYC Liverpool banker's police. If we don't physically re-crowd in a way that collapses nation states and corporations and armies in that touching/shouting/marching that we've seen from Tunis to Madison. If our uprisings don't continue to rise and engulf the planet in the good fire - then the official silence that heats the atmosphere more each day will be the quiet time that kills us all.

Most earth scientists, if you speak to them privately and off the record, will confide that it is, in fact, too late. There will be rapid and chaotic changes on the Earth's surface, and it seems to be in the tectonic plates beneath the surface as much as the polar caps and jet streams and oceans above. Despite this, we can still hope that the Earth might be persuaded to go forward in some kind of collaboration with the human species if it's convinced by the living it feels from us, as a species, as people. The social animal that we are will have to humanize in an extreme way. We will have to become much more intensely human to escape and make irrelevant or flip over the nationstates, working as they do for the distant banks.

So - thinking of another exorcism in a few hours. I know that there will be that sensation that we're asking the Earth to come up through us and it might just feel like bad acting delivered in the manner of most bad action - with misguided, hopeful energy. Our script is from earth scientists and native wisdom and radical faeries from the drag parade. And the script keeps changing as between our sweating and shouting one of the singers comes into the room reading from a book by John Berger. I know that one point of these exorcisms is to - just be together in the act of doing it. We're feeling this as the tour progresses. We are so close together that we ourselves are changing with the effort of willing some kind of forgotten magic that would spiritually hack into the evil. The effort changes us as we make up new songs and leap and push against the bullet-proof edifice of global banking, as we press back against the cash machine's strange hypnosis.

the beginning of the beginning of the end...,

Video - Someone at IEA leaked SPR release announcement

Utilipoint | I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but …

On June 23rd, 2011 the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a significant announcement. For just the third time in its history, it announced the release of oil from strategic reserves — some 60 million BBLs over the preceding month. The announcement pointed to the Libyan situation, where it estimated some 132 million BBLs of light, sweet crude oil had been removed from the market by the end of May, 2011 and noting that greater supply tightness (and the resulting run in up in prices) could threaten the fragile global recovery. The impact of this "shock" announcement was pretty immediate as crude prices fell with Brent Futures falling close to 7.5 percent in the immediate aftermath.

Reuters analyst, John Kemp1, immediately saw the move as targeted against speculators in the market. A view echoed by many U.S. newspapers which ran ugly headlines proclaiming the end of speculation in the market and a return to "fundamentals" and saner prices. If this unheralded and hugely coordinated and difficult decision by the IEA was targeted at speculators, it failed. The sudden unexpected downwards move did hit long biased hedge funds for sure—that can be seen in some rather disappointing returns for May from many managers, but was it even an effective "warning shot" as The Street2 put it? Was it a warning shot at all?

Strangely enough, oil prices were declining prior to the announcement and there was much speculation that the IEA move wasn't as much as a surprise as initially thought. According to one oil-trader, Mark Fisher, it wasn't and he made his accusation on CNBC."This information, in my opinion for what it's worth, was leaked. It was leaked," he rasped. "Somebody knew something." It wouldn't be too much of a surprise if the decision, which not only required agreement of IEA members but likely consultations with OPEC and others, was leaked as crude was down by four percent already.

What is clear is that the IEA's move was a direct market intervention, and yes, it was very much a speculative move by big governments to try to control what should be a free market. So who is crying foul now? After the announcement, the idea that another move by the IEA to keep down prices may be on the table was also mooted. But there is a problem with that strategy—the IEA simply doesn't have enough credible political capability to keep adding from the strategic reserve to the global oil supply. In a matter of months its reserves would be gone and the price of oil would still be close to record highs. As Fisher puts it—it's a risky gamble that the IEA can't win.

Central to this issue is this: the price is where it is at because of fundamentals, not speculators. I have argued this many times before. "To me, price volatility cannot be significantly dampened by reducing the ability of investors to "speculate" nor can it be addressed by greater market oversight and regulation (not that this may not be required for other reasons). It can only be addressed by recognizing and understanding the fact that for now, and the future, we are truly in a supply constrained world and that demands a higher level of thinking, a more strategic set of thinking and strategies at both the national and trans national levels,"4 I stated back in 2009. Even the IEA announcement points to fundamentals as its raison d'etre with its statement about Libyan oil. But hold on … 60 million BBLs to replace 132 million BBLs already lost from the market? Two million BBLs/day for 30 days to replace 1.5 million BBLs per day of lost Libyan oil? No wonder the speculators barely flinched.

The real reason for the release may be indeterminable. Some suggest President Obama has an eye on re-election and sees lower gas prices at the pump as a way to sweeten his chances. Others might suggest the move was really aimed at OPEC, the other speculators in the oil market, but the ones who really can impact prices. The fact is that it is irrelevant. What is relevant today, three years after my last article on this topic, is that nothing much worthwhile has been done to address the underlying issues of supply and demand. The United States still doesn't have an energy policy worth squat, and neither do many other Western economies. In fact, to me, it seems like only China has a practical energy/commodity policy these days—spend worthless T-bills on buying reserves in the ground anywhere you can—and fast.

But since 2009, the situation truly has gotten much worse. The population of this planet grew in those three years to 6.7 billion (by more than three times the population of Germany) and is set to rise to around 10 billion by 2050. Those extra people and their demands for food, energy and raw materials of every kind is the problem. In fact, policy decisions across the board have been counterproductive and counterintuitive. For example, The World Trade Organization changed its rules on subsidies, meaning that rather than buy and stockpile produce from farmers building reserves, governments pay subsidies without buying any of the produce. The impact of that move? No reserves to protect against volatility when some crisis arises. Another example is the move to biofuels again driven by government subsidies&3151that means farmers are turning arable farmland into corn or other ethanol making materials rather than grow food people can actually eat.

Through all of 2011, the cost of food has sat at record levels as measured by FAO price index5. I don't see any inkling of a sign that that situation will improve in the medium to longer-term., which brings me back to the title of this article, "The Beginning of the Beginning of the End." To me, the move by the IEA signals the beginning of the beginning of the end of the life we know. Something has to change and fast, but no one seems willing to tackle the issue. Boris Johnson, Lord Mayor of London, said it better than I back in 2007, "How the hell can we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the number of consumers? The answer is politics, and political cowardice."6 "The debate is surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the insatiable Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls in the doomed fashion of Diocletian or Edward Heath," he states further in his article. Before concluding, he writes, "It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet.” Amen to that.

peak tin: solder is 60% tin and 40% lead...,

DeclineofEmpire | Tin Production — A Classic Case Of Limits To Growth

The tin production story is out there is in plain sight, but only those directly involved in supplying the tin ore, refining it, consuming tin metal or trading commodities are paying any attention. Bloomberg's Bear Market in Tin Ending as Shortages Mean PT Timah’s Profit Advances 55% explains what's going on now, and what's been going on for years now—Erfandi’s fleet of bamboo rafts are dredging 33 percent less tin ore from the rivers of Indonesia's Bangka Island than in 2008, as miners fail to keep pace with consumption that jumped 14 percent in two years.

The vessels operating in the world’s largest exporting nation are hauling up no more than 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of ore daily, from 60 kilograms, as reserves get depleted, said the 46-year-old foreman. Miners from China to Peru are also struggling to meet demand for the metal, used to solder components in almost all electronic equipment...

The market will be in deficit for the fourth time in five years, Barclays Capital says...

Prices climbed 51 percent to $26,185/ton in the past 12 months on the London Metal Exchange [price chart 2000-present, above]

The market is “critically dependent” on exports from Indonesia, Peru and Bolivia, said Edward Meir, a senior analyst at MF Global Holdings Ltd. in Darien, Connecticut. Output from the two South American nations may drop to a combined 48,000 tons this year from 51,100 in 2010, CRU estimates. Indonesian supply may increase “slightly,” ITRI forecasts.

The average metal content of ore is declining because richer deposits are now exhausted, Mohd. Ajib Anuar, group chief executive officer of Malaysia Smelting Corp., the country’s biggest producer, said in an interview in January. Mining companies are removing twice as much waste as they did two decades ago to get to the ore, he said.Lest you think this is a temporary dislocation in the tin market, let there be little doubt that tin is supply-constrained and has been for some time. Stuart Burns wrote Tin — Driven By Fundamentals in August, 2010.

Peak Tin
Tin has supply constraints and yet along with all base metals demand has come back relatively strongly last year and this. Consequently, exchange inventories have dropped and the price has risen. Tin has the best fundamental prospects of all the base metals and will be the first to reach a new all-time price high, Stephen Briggs, metals strategist at BNP Paribas is quoted as saying in a Financial Times article.

Briggs went on to say, “World tin mine production peaked as long ago as 2005. A further decline in Indonesia, serious supply constraints elsewhere and only small sources of new supply suggest that mine output will at best be flat in 2010. It may grow by just 4% in 2011, with little further progress in 2012”. Indonesia’s problems do not appear to be getting any better in spite of significant investment in the development of offshore placer deposits, production is not markedly up.

More recently, Michael Montgomery, writing for Tin Investing News, explained what's going on in Tin Prices At Historic Highs on Supply Deficit.

Currently, the price is well above the pre-crash highs of 2008. The driving force behind the rise in value is simply the tight supply of the metal, and the increasing use of tin as a substitute for lead in solder for electronic equipment...

Supply side tightness and a lack of new production will continue to be the drivers of the tin market in 2011. These issues will not be resolved in the short term, and may continue for quite some time.

Indonesia has stated that it plans to cap tin production at 100,000 tonnes, leaving only 10,000 tonnes to grow from the predicted 90,000 output this year. With China capping production as well, supply deficits may continue over the next few years.

Indonesia would not cap production unless they were planning to conserve their depleting reserves to milk them for all they're worth over the long run.

What about the demand side? Bloomberg tells the story—

Solder represents 52 percent of demand and tinplate 17 percent, according to ITRI Ltd., a St. Albans, England-based researcher. The metal is used in electronic goods and a high proportion of electrical appliances, ITRI said.

critical phosphate: misused and running low...,

Yale | If you wanted to really mess with the world’s food production, a good place to start would be Bou Craa, located in the desert miles from anywhere in the Western Sahara. They don’t grow much here, but Bou Craa is a mine containing one of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate rock. Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from this mine. And there is no substitute.

The Western Sahara is an occupied territory. In 1976, when Spanish colonialists left, its neighbor Morocco invaded, and has held it ever since. Most observers believe the vast phosphate deposits were the major reason that Morocco took an interest. Whatever the truth, the Polisario Front, a rebel movement the UN recognizes as the rightful representatives of the territory, would like it back.

Not many people would call phosphate a critical issue or one with serious environmental consequences. But even leaving aside the resource politics of the Sahara, it is an absolutely vital resource for feeding the world. It is also a resource that could start running low within a couple of decades — and one we grossly misuse, pouring it across the planet and recycling virtually none of it.

The world’s food supplies are alarmingly dependent on the phosphate fertilizer that is hewn from the desert of the Western Sahara. The vast open-cast mine at Bou Craa delivers several million tons of phosphate rock every year down a 150-kilometer-long conveyor belt, the world’s longest, to the Atlantic port of El Ayoun. From there, it is distributed around the world and made into fertilizer.

Morocco’s phosphate reserves are owned by the Office Cherifien des Phosphates, a Moroccan state agency. Given the almost unlimited executive powers of the Moroccan monarch, it might reasonably be said that most of the world's known reserves of phosphate are, in effect, owned by King Mohammed VI and his Alaouite dynasty, which has reigned in Morocco since the 17th century.

If the people of Western Sahara ever resume their war to get their country back — or if the Arab Spring spreads and Morocco goes the way of Libya — then we may be adding phosphate fertilizer to the list of finite resources, such as water and land, that are constraining world food supplies sooner than we think.

Phosphorus is one of the building blocks of all life. Every living cell requires it. Plants need phosphorus to grow as much as they need water. Many soils do not have enough to meet the voracious demands for phosphorus of the high-yielding crop varieties of the Green Revolution. But we can provide more by mining phosphate rock and turning it into fertilizer to spread on the land.

It takes one ton of phosphate to produce every 130 tons of grain, which is why the world mines about 170 million tons of phosphate rock every year to ship around the world and keep soils fertile.

Currently, only about 15 percent of that comes from mines in the Western Sahara and Morocco. But the only other large producers, the U. S. and China, mostly keep supplies for their own use. So Morocco is by far the biggest contributor to international trade, with more than half the total business. The people of India, the world’s largest importer, would be starving without Morocco’s phosphates. Brazil’s agricultural boom would never have happened otherwise.

Even more critically in the longer term, the U.S. Geological Survey says that of the 65 billion tons of the world’s known phosphate rock reserves — and the estimated 16 billion tons that might be economic to mine — almost 80 percent is in Western Sahara and Morocco. Add in China’s reserves, and the figure rises to almost 90 percent. The U.S., with 1.4 billion tons, is close to running out. You can see why agronomists are starting to get worried.

The world is not about to run out of phosphate. But demand is rising, most of the best reserves are gone, and those that remain are in just a handful of countries. Dana Cordell of Linkoping University in Sweden, who runs an academic group called the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, says we could hit “peak phosphorus” production by around 2030.

As domestic production wanes, the U.S. is starting to join those countries — most of the world, in fact — that import phosphate from Morocco and the Western Sahara. American imports cross the Atlantic courtesy of Potash Corp, the Canada-based fertilizer company whose hostile takeover bid by the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was blocked by the Canadian government last year. And phosphate mining in Florida, which is home to the world’s largest phosphate mine, is being challenged by environmentalists concerned about its impact on waterways and drinking water supplies.

Already, like other key commodities with once-dominant sources running low, the price of phosphate is starting to yo-yo alarmingly. Prices spiked at an 800-percent increase in 2008.

the mind's eye: pheromones, neuroscience, sexual preferences

Video - Marilyn Monroe puffing on a phatty.

JVKohl | Human physical attraction may not cognitively equate with definitive indications of sexual preferences or definitive sexual behavior, because sexual preferences can be cognitively denied and sexual behavior can be suppressed. Thus, when comparing human and non-human animal behavior, it is difficult to separate cognitive effects, like thoughts, from unconscious affects, like neuroendocrine changes, that may be manifest as human emotions. Therefore, sex researchers cannot be sure whether they are sampling some vague unconscious affect of human behavior that is not cognitively considered by their subjects—and not considered in the study design or the data analysis.

The failure to fully consider unconscious affects that may be manifest as opportunistic behavioral tendencies leads to a lack of clear findings, and the underlying biological underpinnings of sexual preferences can readily be missed. Accordingly, the reporting of incongruous and ill-defined results that are, nonetheless, meaningfully interpreted, is problematic. Meaningful results require an important consideration in any scientific endeavor; we must first get the model right!

No model is consistently used in the scientific study of human sexuality. For example, the effect of auditory stimuli in songbirds or visual stimuli like the colorful plumage of the peacock’s tail are used as examples of sensory input from the social environment that somehow influences sexual behavior in some species. In contrast, the effect of olfactory/pheromonal input from the social environment is more typically used as an example of sensory input that influences levels of hormones and sexual behavior in mammals.

A consistent mammalian model that links olfactory/pheromonal input from the social environment to hormonal influences on sexual behavior should help to reduce disparate findings and debate over inconsistent results from studies of human sexual behavior. Currently, disparate findings and debate tend to weakly support a false nature versus nurture dichotomy. This false dichotomy might well be eliminated from further consideration if individual studies began to more fully address a causal link between nature and nurture. Such a link can be addressed within the context of a developmental model of how olfactory/pheromonal input influences sexual preferences and how these sexual preferences influence sexual behavior.

In non-human animals, a causal relationship must exist among the development of sexual preferences for attractive physical features and how these preferences are manifest in sexual behavior. This causal relationship must develop before sexual preferences or sexual behaviors are expressed. Whether or not it is acknowledged, such a causal relationship appears to exist before human sexual preferences are fully developed and long before adult sexual behavior is expressed. Extension to humans of the mammalian olfactory/pheromonal model presented here addresses a causal relationship that includes the unconscious affect of olfactory/pheromonal input from the social environment on hormones and the development of sexual preferences manifest in the expression of sexual behavior.

why it's hard to eat just one...,

Video - Burt Lahr as the potato chip devil.

MSNBC | It's hard to eat just one potato chip, and a new study may explain why.

Fatty foods like chips and fries trigger the body to produce chemicals much like those found in marijuana, researchers report today (July 4) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). These chemicals, called "endocannabinoids," are part of a cycle that keeps you coming back for just one more bite of cheese fries, the study found.

"This is the first demonstration that endocannabinoid signaling in the gut plays an important role in regulating fat intake," study researcher Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement.

Homemade marijuana chemicals
The study found that fat in the gut triggers the release of endocannabinoids in the brain, but the gray stuff between your ears isn't the only organ that makes natural marijuana-like chemicals. Human skin also makes the stuff. Skin cannabinoids may play the same role for us as they do for pot plants: Oily protection from the wind and sun.

Endocannabinoids are also known to influence appetite and the sense of taste, according to a 2009 study in PNAS, which explains the munchies people get when they smoke marijuana.

In the new study, Piomelli and her colleagues fitted rats with tubes that would drain the contents of their stomachs as they ate or drank. These stomach tubes allowed the researchers to tell whether fat was acting on the tongue, in which case they would see an endocannabinoid release even with the tubes implanted, or in the gut, in which case they wouldn't see the effect.

The rats got to sip on a health shake (vanilla Ensure), a sugar solution, a protein-rich liquid called peptone, or a high-fat beverage made of corn oil. Then researchers anesthetized and dissected the rats, rapidly freezing their organs for analysis.

For the love of fat
Tasting sugars and proteins didn't affect the release of the body's natural marijuana chemicals, the researchers found. But supping on fat did. The results showed that fat on the tongue triggers a signal to the brain, which then relays a message down to the gut via a nerve bundle called the vagus nerve. This message commands the production of endocannabinoids in the gut, which in turn drives a cascade of other signals all pushing the same message: Eat, eat, eat!

This message would have been helpful in the evolutionary history of mammals, Piomelli said. Fats are crucial to survival, and they were once hard to come by in the mammalian diet. But in today's world, where a convenience store full of junk food sits on every corner, our evolutionary love of fat easily backfires.

The findings suggest that by blocking the reception of endocannabinoid signals, medical researchers might be able to break the cycle that drives people to overeat fatty food. Blocking endocannabinoid receptors in the brain can cause anxiety and depression, Piomelli said, but a drug designed to target the gut might not trigger those negative side effects.

body malodours and their topical treatment agents

Wileyonline | Body odour, which encompasses axillary and foot odour, can communicate a strong non-verbal signal [1, 2]. These odours are often unnoticed by the offender because that person has specific anosmia [3]. As a result, the individual is embarrassed when alerted, and his or her self-confidence is compromised. The offensive body odour also has economical consequences stemming from the need to replace damaged/stained clothes and shoes [4, 5].

In contrast to clear findings in animals, the presence of human vomeronasal organs is still being debated. Clearly, the ability to appreciate underarm and foot odours depends solely on an individual’s evolutionary culture and perceptual development. However, the emission of odourless human pheromones has been reviewed and is becoming a popular discussion topic [6].

The human scent is genetically controlled and systemically influenced by dietary and medicinal intake, as well as the application of fragrance products [6–8]. Heavy sweating or hyperhidrosis, particularly at axillary sites, leads to unpleasant odours that cause social embarrassment and reduce self-confidence, especially among women. Hyperhidrosis results from the oversecretion of sweat. Because there is an excessive amount of water in which bacteria can grow, hyperhidrosis is often accompanied by bromhidrosis or osmidrosis or offensive body odour. Both conditions can be treated by topically applying anti-perspirant and deodourant products. Body odour treatment products are part of a multibillion dollar industry [9]. High levels of fragrance are often used in these products to mask malodour [10]. Surprisingly, there is little discussion of odour treatment products in the literature [6], in contrast to other personal care products [11, 12].

This review will summarize the chemical composition and formation of body odour, the use of anti-perspirant, deodourant and herbal products to treat body odour, and a new class of treatment agents that do not change the balance of the skin’s bacterial population.

how does it feel?

Transitionvoice | Joined by wholesale environmental collapse and also by the acceleration of global climate change, the systemic collapse of western civilization is under way.

In fact, it becomes more difficult with every passing day to ignore any of these three phenomena, despite the ongoing irrelevant spew emanating from politicians and the media.

Economic recession? Check, since 2000. Economic depression? Check, since 2008. Rampant “natural” disasters? Check, with increasing frequency. Climate chaos? Indeed, only the willfully ignorant can miss it.

When it rains it pours

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what simultaneous, systemic collapses look like. We’re awash in tell-tale interactions between climate change, “natural” disasters, and the industrial economy. A parched planet blows through major cities, obscuring the sun even as record-high temperatures are eclipsed. Fire and flood are on the rise. We used to be able to exert a modicum of control over the latter two phenomena, back when climate chaos wasn’t exploding and the industrial economy wasn’t imploding.

On the other hand, we used to contain nuclear power within nuclear power plants, too. Well, except the occasional Hiroshima and Chernobyl. Now it’s Fukushima, Fort Calhoun, Cooper, and Los Alamos, and all at the same time.

The official line — “Notification of Unusual Event” — is becoming paradoxically common. Our collective, societal ability to keep the plates spinning is no longer a justifiable assumption.

rupert murdoch does the elliot carver dance

Video - Rupert Murdoch sponsored massive corporatist hacking and will not face charges.


Video - Elliot Carver does the Elliot Carver dance...,

You just know Faux News is up to its eyebrows in sketchy corporatist eavesdropping and unauthorized access to "private" information...,

assange still fighting extraordinary rendition...,

Video - Assange still fighting extradition to Sweden.

into eternity..,

Video - Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world's first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock -- a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.

resistance

Video - Tribute to resistance.

hanford whistle-blower backed by watchdog agency

Video - Talk by Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, the Research and Technology Manager of Hanford's Waste Treatment Plant, who was summarily terminated from his job after he raised safety issues associated with the design and operation of this nuclear facility

LATimes | Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation's nuclear weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing to do for the last year.

Tamosaitis' bosses sent him there when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy Department's project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas explosions.

"Walt is killing us," said Frank Russo, Bechtel Corp.'s top manager at the project, in an email to Tamosaitis' boss urging that the engineer be brought under control.

Now, an independent government watchdog agency, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, has backed up Tamosaitis and issued a rebuke to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, concluding that the safety culture at the $12.3-billion project is "flawed" and that significant risks exist in the plant's design.

The conclusion came after a nearly yearlong investigation, which took testimony from 45 witnesses and reviewed 30,000 documents. It confirmed that Tamosaitis had been "abruptly removed from the project" when he raised technical questions about its design, and that the actions against him had frightened other engineers.

"The board finds that expression of technical dissent affecting safety … were discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review," safety board Chairman Peter Winokur wrote to Chu on June 9. "As of the writing of this finding, Dr. Tamosaitis sits in a basement cubicle in Richland with no meaningful work."

In a five-page response Friday, the Energy Department said it was "committed to continuous improvement and teamwork."

"We believe the plant can operate safely," Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman said in an interview. "I am not going to kid you, it is challenging technically."

Hanford is the nation's most contaminated piece of property, housing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge in underground tanks that pose a long-term risk of leaking into the Columbia River.

The Energy Department wants to embed the waste into solid glass and ship it to a future dump, but so far not a single gallon has been treated. The project is more than 20 years behind the original schedule, and the cost has more than tripled.

"It's pitiful," said Tamosaitis, who was manager of research and technology for San Francisco-based URS Corp., a prime subcontractor to Bechtel Corp. in building the waste treatment plant.

Until he was removed from his job, Tamosaitis, 63, managed a technical staff of as many as 30 in-house scientists and engineers, and an external staff that numbered in the hundreds. He holds a doctorate in systems engineering. He spent 20 years working for DuPont Corp., running chemical plants all over the country, and then another 20 years in the nuclear cleanup industry.

Tamosaitis sent an email last year to a small circle of the top engineering experts in chemical mixing technology, raising concerns over the decision years ago to use an untested and potentially risky technology in the Hanford design.

The processing of the waste at Hanford requires a large number of mixing tanks up to 400,000 gallons in capacity where sludges, salts and liquids are separated into high-level and low-level radioactivity steams, using chemical processes and filters. More than two dozen key tanks at Hanford would use "pulse jet mixers," a system that engineers compare to turkey basters — liquid is sucked into a tube and then squirted out.

The system was supposed to be cheaper than mechanical agitators and less subject to failure, a crucial feature once the tanks are in operation and too radioactive to service. But no U.S. nuclear plant uses the technology, and Tamosaitis said there was significant doubt whether they could adequately keep the tanks mixed.

If tanks are not kept properly mixed, plutonium solids could settle at the bottom and go critical, he said. A poorly mixed tank could also result in large burps of explosive hydrogen gas. And finally, the solids could plug up pipes in the plant.

HO-41

Science Codex | An international research team has discovered a strain of gonorrhea resistant to all currently available antibiotics. This new strain is likely to transform a common and once easily treatable infection into a global threat to public health. The details of the discovery made by Dr. Magnus Unemo, Dr. Makoto Ohnishi, and colleagues will be presented at the 19th conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research (ISSTDR) which runs July 10-13 in Quebec City, Canada.

The team of researchers successfully identified a heretofore unknown variant of the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Analyzing this new strain, dubbed H041, allowed researchers to identify the genetic mutations responsible for the bacterium's extreme resistance to all cephalosporin-class antibiotics—the last remaining drugs still effective in treating gonorrhea.

"This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery," noted Dr. Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria. "Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it."

"While it is still too early to assess if this new strain has become widespread, the history of newly emergent resistance in the bacterium suggests that it may spread rapidly unless new drugs and effective treatment programs are developed," Dr. Unemo continued.

Gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world. In the U.S. alone, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of cases is estimated at 700,000 annually.

Gonorrhea is asymptomatic in about 50% of infected women and approximately 2-5% of men. When symptomatic, it is characterized by a burning sensation when urinating and pus discharge from the genitals. If left untreated, gonorrhea can lead to serious and irreversible health complications in both women and men.

In women, the infection can cause chronic pelvic pain and ectopic pregnancy. It can lead to infertility, mostly in women but also in men, and it increases the risk of HIV transmission. In 3-4% of cases, untreated infections spread to the skin, blood, joints, or even the heart and can cause potentially mortal lesions. Babies born of infected mothers are at high risk of developing serious blood and joint infections, and passage through the birth canal of an infected mother can cause blindness in the infant.

simple, straightforward, obvious kwestin...,

Salon | Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.

This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.

Even here, the rich have options other than hiring American citizens. Wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives agree on one thing: the need for more unskilled immigration to the U.S. This is hardly surprising, as the rich are far more dependent on immigrant servants than middle-class and working-class Americans are.

3 months in juvie for a myspace joke?

Video - featuring Linda as a first-time offending 'prison virgin', thrown into a savage female prison

Alternet | Seventeen-year-old Hillary Transue did what lots of 17-year-olds do: Got into mischief. Hillary's mischief was composing a MySpace page poking fun at the assistant principal of the high school she attended in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Hillary was an honor student who'd never had any trouble with the law before. And her MySpace page stated clearly that the page was a joke. But despite all that, Hilary found herself charged with harassment. She stood before a judge and heard him sentence her to three months in a juvenile detention facility.

What she expected was perhaps a stern lecture. What she got was a perp walk - being led away in handcuffs as her stunned parents stood by helplessly. Hillary told The New York Times, "I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare. All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing."

It wasn't until two years later that she found out why. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback scheme involving juvenile offenders. The judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from a private prison company to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. Since 2003, Ciaverella had sentenced an estimated 5,000 juveniles. Conahan was accused of setting up the contracts. Many of the youngsters shipped off to the detention centers were first-time offenders.

PA Child Care is a juvenile detention center in Pittston Township, Pennsylvania. It was opened in February 2003. It has a sister company, Western PA Child Care, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Treatment at both facilities is provided by Mid Atlantic Youth Services. Gregory Zappala took sole ownership of the company when he purchased co-owner Robert Powell's share in June 2008.

In July 2009, Powell pled guilty to failing to report a felony and being an accessory to tax evasion conspiracy in connection with $770,000 in kickbacks he paid to Ciavarella and Conahan in exchange for facilitating the development of his facilities.

The childcare facilities have also been criticized for their costs, which ranged as high as $315 per child per day. Butler County paid Western PA Child Care about $800,000 in payments between 2005 and 2008. Butler County did not renew Western PA Child Care's contract after an extension of the contract ran out at the end of 2008.

The juvenile detention center Hillary was sent to was a private, for-profit facility run by one of the more than 50 companies operating in the five billion dollar private prison industry.

These companies have names you've probably never heard of - like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO.

Ironically, it's the federal and state criminal justice systems that produce the private prisons phenomenon and create the opportunity for private operators to capitalize. What they are capitalizing on is America's obsession with handing out long prison sentences out of all proportion to the crimes committed.

Today, the United States has locked up more prisoners than any other country in the world - 2.3 million-plus people locked up in state and federal prisons and county jails. This has predictably resulted in a shortage of publicly owned prison beds - a shortage increasingly being filled by companies that charge so many dollars for each convict sent their way.

criminal garden in oak park michigan

Julie Bass interview about her criminal front yard gardens in OakPark

oakparkhatesveggies | once upon a time there was a really sweet family who lived in oak park, michigan.

once upon a time, long before our heroes enter the story, the city planted a tree in front of each house in their tidy new suburb.

once upon a time, in the not too distant past, the city’s tree spread it roots (as trees sometimes do) and cracked the sewer pipe of the really sweet family in question.

fast forward to when things get good: WE are that really sweet family! we fixed the damage in the flooded basement, dug up the entire front lawn, removed the roots, replaced the sewer pipe (which was damaged by the city’s tree, please remember), and were left with mountainous heaps of dirt where our front lawn used to be.

we did some reading, did some thinking, and decided to use the space from the former front lawn and turn it into a beautiful garden. we had someone make us 5 pretty wood garden beds, and we planted some seeds. we have no gnomes (although i think they are cute), no overgrown wildflowers (nothing against flowers- just not our style), no man-eating plants (although some of our neighbors make me wish we did), and nothing in any way offensive- unless you count- drum roll, please- now astonished GASP… vegetable plants!

have the swiss been talking to will allen?

Video - Growing Power movement redux.

swissinfo | As people are recognising the need for more sustainably grown produce, new ideas about agriculture are taking shape.

Swiss entrepreneurs Urban Farmers are pushing the concept of local production and have come up with a pioneering solution to many of the problems of conventional farming methods.

Urban Farmers attended the International Federation of Landscape Architects' World Congress at the end of June. The event drew around 850 participants from around the world to Zurich's Kongresshaus to discuss issues including the integration of agriculture into an urban environment.

Using an almost closed-loop aquaponics system – that combines raising aquatic animals with cultivating plants in water – to produce fish, vegetables and herbs, the firm has developed one of the most ecologically friendly ways to eat. They believe the technology can soon be commercialised.

Top retailers Migros and Coop have expressed an interest in the company’s plans and the firm has been awarded a prize by environmental organisation, WWF Switzerland.

The Swiss Farmers Association said it approved of the idea as a complement to traditional farming, but that it was hard to know how workable it was.

"The concept of urban farming sounds like a good idea to us. Actually, it is a form of Suisse agriculture and our goals in miniature: Produce locally, ecologically food for the local population and pay attention that the circulation of nutrients is closed," spokeswoman Sandra Helfenstein told swissinfo.ch.

"Unfortunately, we cannot judge the potential and the viability of a production like this in the city. Are there enough suitable places and are the consumers interested to buy this product for a higher price?"

Rooftop boxes

With acquaponics there is no waste created, no need for soil or pesticides, and it is all contained in a box designed to be set up on the rooftops of urban buildings.

No transportation is required, thereby cutting out oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

WWF Switzerland sees one advantage as being that no land needs to be cultivated.

“If you can use a surface that is not otherwise being used, it’s worth a try,” spokesman Philip Gehri told Swiss public radio DRS. “It doesn’t mean though that we think cities can provide for all their food needs this way.”

The Urban Farmers box contains vegetables grown in a glasshouse on top of a tank of fish, which provide nutrients for the plants through their waste as it is taken up with the water through the roots of the plants.

"The beauty of this natural system is that it's a symbiosis of fish and plants which lives on its own," Urban Farmers CEO Roman Gaus told swissinfo.ch.

"The main reason for doing this is ecological," added Gaus.

"We think urban agriculture has a future because the current conventional agriculture is at its peak, with issues such as E-coli, CO2 and so on.”

the double-O portfolio...,

ironic effects of anti-prejudice messages

ScienceDaily | Organizations and programs have been set up all over the globe in the hopes of urging people to end prejudice. According to a research article, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, such programs may actually increase prejudices.

Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, from the University of Toronto Scarborough, were interested in exploring how one's everyday environment influences people's motivation toward prejudice reduction.

The authors conducted two experiments which looked at the effect of two different types of motivational intervention -- a controlled form (telling people what they should do) and a more personal form (explaining why being non-prejudiced is enjoyable and personally valuable).

In experiment one; participants were randomly assigned one of two brochures to read: an autonomy brochure or a controlling brochure. These brochures discussed a new campus initiative to reduce prejudice. A third group was offered no motivational instructions to reduce prejudice. The authors found that, ironically, those who read the controlling brochure later demonstrated more prejudice than those who had not been urged to reduce prejudice. Those who read the brochure designed to support personal motivation showed less prejudice than those in the other two groups.

In experiment two, participants were randomly assigned a questionnaire, designed to stimulate personal or controlling motivation to reduce prejudice. The authors found that those who were exposed to controlling messages regarding prejudice reduction showed significantly more prejudice than those who did not receive any controlling cues.

The authors suggest that when interventions eliminate people's freedom to value diversity on their own terms, they may actually be creating hostility toward the targets of prejudice.

According to Dr. Legault, "Controlling prejudice reduction practices are tempting because they are quick and easy to implement. They tell people how they should think and behave and stress the negative consequences of failing to think and behave in desirable ways." Legault continues, "But people need to feel that they are freely choosing to be nonprejudiced, rather than having it forced upon them."

Legault stresses the need to focus less on the requirement to reduce prejudices and start focusing more on the reasons why diversity and equality are important and beneficial to both majority and minority group members.