detroit's "other"worldly decay...,

The Atlantic | Detroit is a city in flux. There are bright spots -- pockets of development, a vibrant art scene, sophisticated restaurants, and a growing number of community gardens -- but signs of life are overshadowed by miles and miles of blight. Last May, the state turned Detroit's public schools over to an emergency manager, a businessman named Roy Roberts with a long history in the auto industry and financial markets.

The city as a whole may soon find itself under the same kind of supervision. As I photographed a public school that's up for sale, I spoke to a developer who is trying to get a "green project" built. I asked him whether or not an emergency manager would be good for the city. He shrugged and said he could only hope the governor would put smart a smart person in charge.

Detroit's urban landscape is a mix of deserted schools and churches, factories, and houses. Its abandoned manufacturing plants have become otherworldly environments, the haunt of photographers shooting what has been called "ruin porn." Michigan Central, once the world's tallest train station, is fenced off as workers in hard hats scurry around. The Packard Automotive Plant, a graffiti artist's heaven, is set for demolition this summer. Plans for the redevelopment of these sites has yet to be revealed.

Things have been managed so badly for so long in Detroit that many find the idea of an emergency manager enticing. But the track records of emergency managers in Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and Ecorse have been controversial. Organizations such as Michigan Forward warn Detroit's citizens' not to hand over their city, arguing that services will get worse and people in the "99 percent" will have to pay more for them. The benefits, according to these groups, will be reaped by major corporations, at the expense of the poor and middle class. And once an emergency manager is in place, they argue, the entire political process will be put on hold -- there will be no votes, no city council, no way for citizens to make their voices heard

Could Detroit become the first major city in America to have all of its public services privatized? Signs are pointing in that direction. The question for those living on the precipice in the Metro Detroit area is whether to stay and turn things around or leave before they get worse.

To view the rules concerning eligibility for emergency managers in Michigan and a current list of cities deemed eligible, see this page at Michigan.gov.

greece will run out of money in six weeks unless it bends over for the "bailout"

telegraph | Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph, Theodoros Pangalos said he was "very much afraid of what is going to happen" after Greek voters rejected the deal in elections last Sunday.

"The majority of the people voted for a very strange mental construction," he said. "We want to be in the EU and the euro, but we don't want to pay anything for the past."

The main beneficiary of the election, the hard-Left Syriza coalition, came a startling second on a promise to tear up the deal, which promises EU loans to keep massively-indebted Greece afloat, but demands crippling spending cuts in return. Germany, the principal lender, has said it will stop payments if Greece breaks its promises on spending.

Mr Pangalos warned: "There is a school of thought that says the Germans are bluffing. They need Greece and will never throw us out of the eurozone. But what will happen, which is almost certain, is they will not give us the money to pay our debts.

"We will be in wild bankruptcy, out-of-control bankruptcy. The state will not be able to pay salaries and pensions. This is not recognised by the citizens. We have got until June before we run out of money.

"We have been spending the future for half a century. What [the anti-bailout forces] are really asking from the EU is not just to pay our bills, but also to pay for the deficit which we are still creating.

"I'm sure the Germans don't want Greece to leave the euro. What I don't know is how much they're willing to pay. It depends on the German man on the street. Is he willing to pay his taxes to save Greece? I doubt it."

After each of the top three parties at the election failed to form a government, Greece's president, Karolos Papoulias, will on Sunday hold last-ditch talks to cobble together a national unity coalition. The alternative is a fresh election next month which polls show Syriza is likely to win.

Mr Pangalos compared Syriza's charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

"Are the Germans going to pay for a guy that wants to imitate Chavez?" he said. "Except that Chavez has oil, and an army."

The deputy prime minister also warned that chaos could boost the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which won an unprecedented seven per cent of the vote, and 21 seats, in Sunday's election.

"In the places where the police voted, the fascists got 25 per cent," he said. "They are a serious threat. They have used violence already – you don't know where it will stop.

"You know how it happened in Germany – it started with the Jews, then the Communists, then everybody – it could happen here. This is the country, after the Soviet Union and Germany itself, with the biggest percentage of [Second World War] casualties in its population."

discovering the "end" in "extend and pretend"

automaticearth | There was a rumor over the weekend that the Troika may be willing to relax the terms of the dreaded memorandum for the Greek government if it formed a "pro-European" coalition government and avoided new elections. This rumor is ridiculous on both fronts - 1) the Troika and Germany would NEVER make such a concession for fear that every single penny pledged to peripheral nations would become contingent on the outcome of national elections and, essentially, a gift with no conditions attached (something that would pit the German people against their crony, bankster-run government once and for all), and 2) the left-wing Syriza party in Greece would NEVER commit itself to the Euro while it continues to gain popularity each day before the new elections.

Last year or the year before, such extend & pretend tactics may have actually worked. The Eurozone was still officially out of recession, the people were relatively docile and unaware of how bad their economic situation could get and everyone still had a modicum of faith in the conventional wisdom that bailouts and austerity measures, drawn out over time, could work. Back then, the "fringe" anti-establishment political parties in Europe still had a steep hill to climb before they could credibly threaten those holding the reigns of power. Now, not so much. The tide of popular resistance seems to have turned much too fast for even the most powerful among us.

These elections in Europe are no joke. The Eurocrats will bring everything they can muster to co-opt the platforms of those who have emerged with support and/or maneuver around the snowballing anti-austerity momentum, but it should be painfully clear by now that some things are simply outside of their control. The party leaders of Syriza continue to defy any and all attempts to be seduced into a "Unity Government", knowing full well that, as soon as they accept, the entire party will be rendered irrelevant. Maria Petrakis, Natalie Weeks and Marcus Bensasson report for Bloomberg:

european voters have rejected austerity, so, what now?

Time | So voters in France and Greece sent an inescapable signal to the euro zone: No more austerity. In doing so, they showed that the average guy on the street understands economics better than the people in power. Rather than reducing debt and returning the European economy to health, the all-austerity approach to solving the debt crisis was sending the weaker economies of Europe into a death spiral of recession, unemployment, and ultimately, continued strain on national finances.

But there’s a problem. Whatever the verdict of the ballot box, Europe can’t avoid austerity. Its indebted governments can’t simply return to spending and borrowing as they had in the past. Financial markets just wouldn’t stand for it. So the question going forward is not what replaces austerity, but what new mix of policies along with austerity are needed to restore prospects for growth, fix national finances and quell the debt crisis.

There are no easy answers. Austerity, by its very nature, is growth-killing. The trick is finding a combination of policies, both at the national and Europe-wide levels, that can balance out that effect. There is no agreement on how that can be achieved. What we are about to see in Europe is a continent-wide debate on what the next steps might be to both end the debt crisis and restore the euro zone to economic health. The outcome of that debate is highly uncertain.

(MORE: Ballot Box Breakdown: How Europe’s Elections Will Heat Up the Debt Crisis)

There is a case to be made that the problem with austerity is not the austerity itself, but the pace at which it is being imposed. Rather than a mad rush to meet euro-zone deficit limits, more flexibility is needed to allow governments to adjust over a longer period of time and benefit from economic recovery. Here how Christina D. Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, explained it in a recent essay in The New York Times:

them what's got, shall get, them what's not, shall lose...,

thenational | One of the world's biggest oil producers and consumers has launched a renewable energy programme that may make Riyadh a new global hub for clean power.

In 2010, Saudi Arabia made a huge splash on the international stage when Ali Al Naimi, the oil minister, announced that "Saudi Arabia aspires to export as much solar energy in the future as it exports oil now".

Observers were not impressed. They claimed it was simply not realistic. To achieve this, Saudi Arabia would need to produce and export as much as half the world's total annual installed capacity of solar energy. It could never happen. Or could it?

Less than two years later, the kingdom has hit back at its critics by launching the most ambitious solar programme the world has ever seen.

Under the stewardship of the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (Ka-care), it has unveiled a detailed programme that will see it generate 41 gigawatts of solar energy over the next 20 years.

Assuming that the policy-makers in Riyadh are able to stick to their timetable, by 2032 about a quarter of the country's electricity will be produced using solar energy.

Ka-care has also set bold plans to build wind, geothermal, waste-to-energy and nuclear energy plants. This huge undertaking, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is set to make Riyadh a global hub for clean energy investments. It would be a huge leap forward for Saudi Arabia, given that today it is among the world's top five biggest polluters on a per capita basis.

The immediate benefit of this new policy is oil savings. Saudi Arabia currently burns almost 1 million barrels of hydrocarbons each day for domestic power generation. This includes some 600,000 barrels per day of its coveted crude oil. Alarmingly, this flow is expected to rise by about 10 per cent annually.

Oil supplied to power plants domestically at the subsidised price of US$4 per barrel is oil that could otherwise have been sold on international markets at a much higher price. The Saudi Electricity and Co-Generation Regulatory Agency estimates the country loses at least Dh50 billion ($13.61bn) annually by selling oil domestically compared to what it would fetch internationally.

With its renewable energy policy now in place, the kingdom will be able to start satisfying its unparalleled thirst for power through solar-generated rather than oil-generated electricity.

Concentrated solar power plants will be installed to meet winter demand while photovoltaic power plants will be erected to crunch peak-time usage during the summer months. Each megawatt of solar power installed will be able to meet the annual electricity needs of some 50 single-family homes.

Another major benefit is job creation. Today, some 60 per cent of Saudi nationals are under 25. These youths will be looking for jobs soon. By building a world-class clean energy sector, the kingdom will ensure a steady supply of new jobs.

According to the European Photovoltaic Technology Platform, every megawatt of solar power installed creates about 50 jobs in research, manufacturing, installation, and distribution activities.

In other words, by rolling out 41 gigawatts, the kingdom will help to create, both directly and indirectly, some 2 million new jobs.

japan will experience power shortages this summer

bloomberg | Kansai Electric Power Co. (9503) and two other Japanese utilities may have power shortages this summer without supplies from nuclear reactors, a government panel said.

Kansai Electric, the utility most dependent on nuclear power, may face the biggest shortage of 14.9 percent, the independent committee said in a draft report published May 12. Kyushu Electric Power Co. and Hokkaido Electric Power Co. may have shortages of 2.2 percent and 1.9 percent, the report said.

Japan is reviewing its electricity outlook as it heads toward a nuclear-free summer while debating the first restart of atomic reactors idled for regular safety checks since the Fukushima disaster in March last year. Based on the conclusion of the panel, the government will decide on power-saving measures, which may include rolling blackouts.

Kansai Electric’s service area may face a more severe power shortage than the deficit forecast in Tokyo Electric’s region last year, according to the report. In addition to the Kansai region, power supply and demand are expected to be tight in Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu.

Utilities should have at least 3 percent surplus capacity to deal with potential demand spikes or accidents at power plants, the report said. Tokyo Electric Power Co. and four other utilities were estimated to meet the target, it said.

Power Saving

As part of measures to get through the summer, the government should set power-saving targets across the country, and utilities with excess capacity should supply electricity to others, the report said.

The government may ask western prefectures supplied by Chubu Electric Power Co., Hokuriku Electric Power Co. (9505), Chugoku Electric Power Co. and Shikoku Electric Power Co. to reduce power consumption by 5 percent, the Yomiuri newspaper reported May 12. Saved electricity may be supplied to the Kansai region, it said. Kansai accounts for about a fifth of Japan’s economy.

Users there may be asked to cut electricity consumption by as much as 20 percent, while those in Kyushu and Hokkaido may be requested to reduce 12 percent and as much as 8 percent, the Yomiuri said, without saying how it got the information.

All of Japan’s 50 reactors are now offline for maintenance or safety checks and none have been approved for restarts due to local opposition following the disaster. Utilities increased use of gas and oil-fired power plants to make up for the loss.

italian "anarchists" kneecap nuclear executive...,

Guardian | An anarchist group claimed responsibility on Friday for kneecapping an Italian nuclear engineering executive and warned it would strike another seven times at the firm's parent company, Finmeccanica.

In a four-page letter sent to an Italian newspaper, the group, calling itself the Olga Nucleus of the Informal Anarchist Federation-International Revolutionary Front, said two of its members had shot Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, in Genoa on Monday.

The firm is owned by Italian state-controlled defence and aerospace group Finmeccanica, which operates 16 sites and employs 10,000 people in the UK.

The letter, which was deemed credible by investigators, said the cell named itself after Olga Ikonomidou, one of eight Greek anarchists it listed as currently jailed in Greece. Seven further attacks would be carried out, one for each of them, the letter stated.

After the shooting Finmeccanica's CFO, Alessandro Pansa, said the firm would not be intimidated. On Friday a spokesman declined to comment on the letter.

The letter takes aim at Adinolfi, calling him a "sorcerer of the atomic industry" and criticising him for claiming in an interview that none of the deaths during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011 were due to nuclear incidents.

"Adinolfi knows well that it is only a matter of time before a European Fukushima kills on our continent," the letter stated.

"Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self destruction and slavery," the group wrote, adding: "With our action we give back to you a small part of the suffering that you scientists are bringing to the world."

Adinolfi, who was discharged from hospital under police guard on Friday after he was wounded in the shooting, said "Thank God I am OK".

there is not enough money on planet earth...,

automaticearth | No matter how you look at it, as The Automatic Earth and others have pointed out ad infinitum, in the end the US economy rests on two pillars: Jobs and Housing. They are where both all the good and bad in economic terms begin and end. Ben Bernanke and his Fed policies are majestically failing on both counts.

That is the reality that is shaping America's reality today. Anything else is just a sideshow. Discard all the hubris on recovery, on falling unemployment; all that is but a mirage the political/industrial/financial/media conglomerate wishes you to see and believe in, so you won't pay attention to what truly goes on. Which is that Fed and Treasury policies were never designed to support or revive the economy you depend on for your income and your well-being in general. They were and are designed to take your wealth away from you.

What is at issue? Easy as pie: banks were bailed out with many trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds (which they won’t pay back, they’ll just come back for more) without any scrutiny to speak of.

Bernanke and Geithner at best (yeah, right!) just "hoped" they would lend again, but they never made it a condition of the bailouts. What we find now is what I have repeatedly been saying for years now: The banks are far too deep in debt, even after the bailouts, to revive lending even to "healthy buyers". The entire bailout circus has been a scam, since the money was handed out to banks without looking at how much debt they really have on their books.

It's all been one big massive wealth transfer, perpetrated under the guise of fixing the financial system and the economy in general. Neither was the real purpose behind the bailouts: they were and are nothing but a clever way to steal from the poor and fork over the loot to the rich. And they ain't done yet. That, you can put your money on. That is a safe bet.

You need to wake up to this. You really do. You need to cut your dependence on the financial/political system to the maximum extent that you can. If you don't, it will steamroller over you. The system is so deep in debt that it will come looking for every last penny it can find in your pockets. Many of you will be caught by surprise, and stuck with tens of thousands of dollars, and often many times, in debt. That will turn you into a potential slave. Or a prisoner, if you will. Terminology is not an urgent priority on the chaingang.

So where do Ben B.S. Bernanke's deliberate "failures" show up? Have a look, I'll try and paint you a picture.

europe's voters say NO to economic reality

whiskeyandgunpowder | “Europe fights back against austerity” was how The Daily Telegraph headlined its weekend election coverage. “Anti-austerity movements are gathering pace across Europe following political earthquakes in France and Greece. A total of 12 European governments have now been dismissed in three years.”

As the European welfare state is officially in its death-throes none of us should be surprised if political strife gets cranked up to eleven. I firmly expect that we will see much more of this in the future. While I can understand the anger of the electorate and sympathize with the sense of desperation and foreboding, I cannot, however, consider the electoral choices of the weekend particularly enlightened. They do not reflect a coherent, let alone intelligent strategy as the Daily Telegraph headline seems to imply.

If those who ‘won’ the election deliver on their promises, economic disintegration will only accelerate. What is being offered in terms of ‘solutions’ is a dangerous assortment of economic poisons, more suitable to describe the European disease than provide a recipe for stronger growth.

Recovery through early retirement and infrastructure spending? – C’mon. Nobody can take that seriously.

But it seems that just because this heap of economic stupidity can neatly be swept under the wide tent of ‘anti-austerity’, the commentariat seems somehow willing to believe in the wisdom of the crowds and look for some deeper insights here.

I guess the reason for this is that the economic ideologies that are now being strenuously interpreted into the election results rhyme with the economic prejudices of most commentators. They, too, believe that state bankruptcy is best to be ignored or not to be taken too seriously so that we can spend our way out of this mess.

For a long time media pundits have treated us to the perceived wisdom that economic growth can only come from the actions of the government. Only devaluation through euro-exit, inflation through more money printing and more government deficit-spending, preferably by the still credit-worthy Germans and then fiscally-transferred to the maxed-out Greeks, can revive the economy because only this can lift aggregate demand, which is the magic cure-all of economic problems.

What is lost on these commentators is that the European mess is nothing but the inevitable result of government-stipulated aggregate demand. Easy money funded the Spanish and Irish real estate booms and bankrupted their banks and by extension their governments. Easy money allowed Greece’s political class to go on a borrowing binge that has now bankrupted the country and lured large parts of the population into zero-productivity, soon-to-be-eliminated public sector jobs.

Do you still want the state to ‘stimulate’ the economy? Be careful what you wish for.

happy mother's day!

it will take another 40 years to decommission fukushima

Guardian | In December, Japan's prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, declared that "a cold shutdown" had been achieved and that the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was now over. "Today, we have reached a great milestone", Noda told the Japanese people in a televised address. "The reactors are stable, which should resolve one big cause of concern for us all."

But Mr Noda's optimistic assessment appears to have been premature. Nuclear engineer and former power company executive Arnie Gunderson compared the prime minister's statement to President George Bush declaring "mission accomplished" on the deck of the USS Lincoln in 2003. Gunderson calls the situation at Fukushima "a long battle, far from over."

Even Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which owns the Fukushima facility, says that it will take another 40 years to fully decommission the reactors there, a project which poses unprecedented engineering challenges. But the company's own tests disclose a more immediate danger. Rising radiation levels within one of the reactors, the highest recorded so far, and evidence of a leak in the critical cooling system demonstrate that the situation is still far from stable.

Tepco revealed at the end of March that protective water levels in the containment vessel of Reactor No 2, were far shallower than they had expected, which might mean that the uranium fuel rods there are no longer completely submerged, and are heating up. The Japan Times reported on 29 March that radiation inside the vessel has reached 73 sieverts per hour – high enough to administer a lethal dose to a human in a matter of minutes, even to disable the robotic devices which are sent regularly into the reactor to monitor what is happening there.

Conditions elsewhere in the plant are more difficult to assess. Reactors 1 and 3, both of which melted down after the earthquake and tsunami last year, are currently sealed and impossible to enter, even by robots. So we don't know what is going on inside those crippled structures.

But nuclear experts say that their biggest concern involves Reactor 4, which sustained severe structural damage during the earthquake and subsequent hydrogen explosions which collapsed its roof. This is where hundreds of tons of spent fuel sits perched 100 feet above the ground in a cooling pool exposed to the open sky.

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the nuclear accident called this pool "the weakest link" at Fukushima. Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser at the US department of energy said: "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain it could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident."

How likely is this? While the structure of Reactor 4 is stable for the moment, the Dai-ichi plant lies miles from a big earthquake fault – as large as the one that caused last year's quake, but much closer to Fukushima. According to a study published in February (pdf) in the European Geosciences Union's journal Solid Earth, that fault is now overdue for a quake.

japanese bleeding from the eyes...,

fukushimadiary | My eye started bleeding all of a sudden yesterday. It was my first time to get on an ambulance. They say the blood vessel of eyelid was cut. thought I was going to lose my eye sight. so scary. The reason is not known.(Tokyo)

Bleeding from eyes. didn’t do anything, why ?! (From Ishinomaki city Miyagi = Disaster area.)

would you stay or would you go?

fukushimadiary | was taking a walk along Edogawa river before it started raining. The canola look so messed up.


fukushimadiary | Dandelions are becoming unusually huge in Funabashi Chiba too. I haven’t seen such a thing.

if every Chinese spat once, we could drown (the Philippines)

Telegraph | He Jia, anchor for China Central Television's (CCTV) nationally televised news broadcast, made the claim during a late Monday broadcast that has been repeatedly replayed on the internet.

The presenter apparently meant to say that the Huangyan islands – known in the Philippines as the Scarborough Shoal, and claimed by both nations – is China's territory.

"We all know that the Philippines is China's inherent territory and the Philippines belongs to Chinese sovereignty, this is an indisputable fact," He said in the broadcast, which has since disappeared from the CCTV website but is available elsewhere on the web.

Viewers joked in online postings that the presenter's nationalistic fervour led to her mistake.

"This anchor woman is great, a good patriot, she has announced to the world the Philippines belongs to China," said a microblogger named helenjhuang.

"We should attack directly, send (Philippine President Benigno) Aquino packing and take back our inherent territory."

Another microblogger named kongdehua said, "the Philippines have basically been making irrational trouble, if they want to start a war then we will strike, no one fears them.

simians squabbling over food....,

Telegraph | Territorial rivalry has escalated throughout the seas around China as regional and international navies seek to establish rights of passage against an expanding Chinese presence.

Chinese and Philippine vessels have been locked in a high seas stand-off since the PLA Navy prevented a Philippine warship from arresting crews of Chinese fishing boats near the Scarborough Shoal on April 8.

Both countries claim the fish rich shoal as their own and protests by Philippine fishermen over their loss of livelihood have drawn mass support in the south-east Asian country.

China International Travel Service, the state-owned tourism operator, yesterday suspended ties with the Philippines after organisers announced plans to demonstrate outside Chinese embassy buildings and property today.

Beijing also issued a travel advisory warning its citizens to keep a low profile. "Avoid going out at all if possible, and if not, to avoid going out alone," it said. "If you come across any demonstrations, leave the area, do not stay to watch."

Reports in Japan said five Chinese warships – including two guided missile destroyers, two frigates and a amphibious landing ship – had passed through waters close to Okinawa moving to Philippine reefs.

As the dispute escalated, Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, met senators in a push to ratify a treaty that would bolster legal backing for US naval patrols in dispute regions such as the South China Sea.

Seizing on warnings of the dangers of escalating "gunboat diplomacy" Mr Panetta called on the senate to ratify the Laws of the Sea, a UN treaty that has been hindered by procedural disputes.

"By moving off the sidelines and leading the discussion, we would be able to influence those treaty bodies that develop and interpret the Law of the Sea," he said. "In that way, we would ensure that our rights are not whittled away by the excessive claims and erroneous interpretations of others."

us-japan backing philippines and vietnam against china

globalresearch | External forces' intervention in the South China Sea disputes has gradually become a reality despite China's opposition against the externalization of the disputes. Last week, the US and Japan reached a new agreement on the joint use of the US military bases in the Pacific region.

According to media reports, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces are expected to station forces alongside US troops in the Philippines. Once Manila approves, Japan, the US and the Philippines will conduct specific military training together in Philippine bases.

In recent years, countries like Vietnam and the Philippines have gained huge economic interests through developing gas and oil resources in the South China Sea region.

Driven by economic ambitions, they chase further expansion in the South China Sea, which intensifies the territorial disputes around the region. They see moving closer to Japan and the US as their strategy to prevent China seeking its legal rights over the South China Sea.

This provides favorable conditions and timing for Japan and the US to get involved in the South China Sea disputes.

In the process of refocusing its strategic attention to the Asia-Pacific region, Southeast Asia is an important US focus. For the last two years, the US has been increasing its strategic input in Southeast Asia.

Militarily, the US is seeking permanent stations in some military bases in this region. It has requested to return to the Subic Bay military base in the Philippines and to send its most advanced littoral combat ships there.

The US has also intensified military drills with different countries in the regions and waters around China. Though those drills are not all targeted at China, some are indeed aimed at deterring China and increasing US popularity in Asia.

Unlike the US, Japan acts quite subtly in intervening in the South China Sea disputes. But Japan lifted its restrictive policies on arms exports after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda took office. In essence this is a preparation to support countries involved in the South China Sea disputes by exporting weapons to them.

Besides, Japan also plans to supply patrol vessels to the Philippines and assist the country in training its coast guards.

These moves show that Japan is extending its military reach in the South China Sea, and the trend will further continue. A messy South China Sea situation is in Japan's interests. As the disputes between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands have intensified recently, Japan hopes confrontations with China in the South China Sea could distract China's attention.

The external intervention in the South China Sea dispute complicates the regional dynamics. As the US and Japan are backing them, countries like the Philippines and Vietnam become more and more arrogant and constantly provoke China in the South China Sea, including illegally detaining Chinese fishermen.

us-philippine military exercises directed against china

globalresearch | Joint US-Philippine military exercises are currently underway that can only heighten tensions with China over disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea and in the Indo-Pacific region more broadly.

Yesterday, 4,500 US Marines and 2,500 Philippine troops staged an amphibious landing drill at Ulugan Bay on Palawan Island to simulate the recapture of an island from “militants.” Despite denials by American and Philippine officials, the exercise was pointedly aimed at China, which contests the sovereignty of waters and islands in the South China Sea, including the Spratly Islands, adjacent to Palawan Island.

The South China Sea is rich in gas and oil reserves, leading to disputes over energy exploration and drilling in its waters. Last weekend, US and Philippine special forces troops took part in a simulated assault to retake an offshore oil rig from “militants” off northern Palawan.

The drills are part of annual US-Philippine Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) military exercises, which began last week and are due to conclude today. The confrontational character of the exercise is underlined not only by their location and type, but also by the involvement of troops from Australia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia.

President Barack Obama declared last November that the US would focus on the Indo-Pacific region as its top strategic priority, announcing the greater use of military bases in northern Australia, including the stationing of US Marines near Darwin. Since mid-2009, the Obama administration has been engaged in an aggressive drive to strengthen alliances and strategic partnerships with countries throughout Asia in a bid to undermine Chinese influence.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted at an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in 2010 that the US had “a national interest” in ensuring “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea. Clinton’s comments signalled US backing for ASEAN nations to more vigorously press their territorial claims against China, and have resulted in the Philippines, in particular, taking a more aggressive stance.

The Balikatan exercises took place amid an ongoing standoff between Philippine and Chinese vessels at the disputed Scarborough Shoal to the west of the Philippine island of Luzon. Earlier this month, the Philippine military dispatched its largest vessel—a re-fitted, former US Coast Guard frigate handed over last December—to confront Chinese maritime surveillance ships that were preventing the Philippine navy from detaining Chinese fishing boats. While the standoff has eased, both countries are maintaining ships in the area.

In a TV interview on Monday, Philippine Foreign Minister Albert del Rosario appealed for other countries for support. “I think the current standoff is a manifestation of a larger threat to many nations. The bigger picture is that anybody can be targeted,” he warned.

ego-disruptive = non-toxic/ ego-reinforcing = toxic

realitysandwich | Since my normal presentation (which is mostly about my theory for a quantum nature for the transpersonal entheogenic experience that I outline in my book Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad) takes at least an hour, and since I was considering 'non-duality' to be another way of describing the 'classical' mystical experience of 'transpersonal Oneness' that occurs with the complete dissolution of Ego and Identity ('the loss of all opposites'), I decided to talk about a subject that I had been thinking about more recently, namely the correlation between the effect a 'drug' has on the Ego (one's personal sense of 'I') and its relative toxicity.

So for this conference, rather than discussing my usual subject (the endogenous entheogens, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT), I decided to consider the broad spectrum of different 'mood-enhancing' compounds available, and rather than considering how each particular 'drug' affects our bodies or our 'mental well-being' as most scientific studies would, I would instead rank each compound on how it affected our sense of Ego, our sense of "I". Since the total loss of Ego and the sense of "I" is the core of the transpersonal mystical experience (and I am an experiential-mystic at heart), I decided that I would assign each 'drug' its own 'Mystical Value', with the compounds that can induce the transpersonal state of total loss of Ego and Identity having the highest value (most value to an experiential mystic), while the compounds that reinforced or inflated the sense of the Ego would have the lowest. After ranking the various compounds (according to experiential reports in literature, EROWID, etc), it was obvious that the scale naturally descended by the chemical class of the compound -- tryptamine, phenethylamine, opiates, amphetamines, alcohol -- and that this corresponded to a noticeable increase in physical toxicity. My conclusion from ranking these various compounds by their unique 'Mystical Value' and then comparing their relative toxicity could then be expressed quite simply (as):

Oroc's First Law of Entheogens: The more a compound disrupts the Ego (the sense of 'I'), the physically safer (less toxic) that compound will be, while the more a 'drug' reinforces and inflates the sense of Ego, the more physically harmful (toxic) that compound will be.

For the purpose of elucidation, here is how I ranked the various compounds, along with my personal commentary on the effects of each compound, the relative toxicity, and a brief summary of its human history.

Warning! This table ranks PHYSICAL TOXICITY, and DOES NOT consider the well-documented potential PSYCHOLOGICAL SIDE-EFFECTS of psychedelic compounds that can occur for psychologically fragile people, from being unprepared for the psychedelic experience, or from taking too-high dosages of psychedelic compounds. All compounds in this table (other than alcohol) are currently illegal in the USA and most other countries.

the antisocial brain

kingscollege | New research provides the strongest evidence to date that psychopathy is linked to specific structural abnormalities in the brain. The study, led by researchers at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) is the first to confirm that psychopathy is a distinct neuro-developmental sub-group of anti-social personality disorder (ASPD).

The study was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London and published in Archives of General Psychiatry.

Most violent crimes are committed by a small group of persistent male offenders with ASPD. Approximately half of male prisoners in England and Wales will meet diagnostic criteria for ASPD. The majority of such men are not true psychopaths (ASPD-P). They are characterised by emotional instability, impulsivity and high levels of mood and anxiety disorders. They typically use aggression in a reactive way in response to a perceived threat or sense of frustration.

However, about one third of such men will meet additional diagnostic criteria for psychopathy (ASPD+P). They are characterised by a lack of empathy and remorse, and use aggression in a planned way to secure what they want (status, money etc.). Previous research has shown that psychopaths’ brains differ structurally from healthy brains, but until now, none have examined these differences within a population of violent offenders with ASPD.

Dr Nigel Blackwood from the IoP at King’s and lead author of the study says: ‘Using MRI scans we found that psychopaths had structural brain abnormalities in key areas of their ‘social brains’ compared to those who just had ASPD. This adds to behavioural and developmental evidence that psychopathy is an important subgroup of ASPD with a different neurobiological basis and different treatment needs’

‘There is a clear behavioural difference amongst those diagnosed with ASPD depending on whether or not they also have psychopathy. We describe those without psychopathy as ‘hot-headed’ and those with psychopathy as ‘cold-hearted’. The ‘cold-hearted’ psychopathic group begin offending earlier, engage in a broader range and greater density of offending behaviours, and respond less well to treatment programmes in adulthood, compared to the ‘hot-headed’ group. We now know that this behavioural difference corresponds to very specific structural brain abnormalities which underpin psychopathic behaviour, such as profound deficits in empathising with the distress of others.’

oh, it's more than that...., but at least this is a start

guardian | Bacteria, viruses and parasites cause around 2m cases of cancer in the world each year, experts believe.

Of the 7.5m global deaths from cancer in 2008, an estimated 1.5m may have been due to potentially preventable or treatable infections.

Scientists carried out a statistical analysis of cancer incidence to calculate that around 16% of all cancers diagnosed in 2008 were infection-related. The proportion of cancers linked to infection was three times higher in developing countries than in developed ones.

Key cancer-causing infectious agents include human papillomavirus (HPV), the gastric bug Helicobacter pylori and the hepatitis B (HBV) and C viruses.

These four were together believed to be responsible for 1.9m cases of cancer, mostly gastric, liver and cervical cancers.

Cervical cancer accounted for around half of infection-related women's cancers. In men, more than 80% of infection-related cancers affected the liver, stomach and colon.

Dr Catherine de Martel and Dr Martyn Plummer, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, wrote in the Lancet Oncology journal: "Infections with certain viruses, bacteria, and parasites are one of the biggest and preventable causes of cancer worldwide … Application of existing public-health methods for infection prevention, such as vaccination, safer injection practice, or antimicrobial treatments, could have a substantial effect on future burden of cancer worldwide."

The researchers used information from a number of sources, including a cancer-incidence database covering 27 cancers from 184 countries.