25 signs of a horrific global water crisis...,

Video - the coming global water crisis

economicollapseblog | Every single day, we are getting closer to a horrific global water crisis. This world was blessed with an awesome amount of fresh water, but because of our foolishness it is rapidly disappearing. Rivers, lakes and major underground aquifers all over the globe are drying up, and many of the fresh water sources that we still have available are so incredibly polluted that we simply cannot use them anymore. Without fresh water, we simply cannot function. Just imagine what would happen if the water got cut off in your house and you were not able to go out and buy any. Just think about it. How long would you be able to last? Well, as sources of fresh water all over the globe dry up, we are seeing drought conditions spread. We are starting to see massive "dust storms" in areas where we have never seem them before. Every single year, most of the major deserts around the world are getting bigger and the amount of usable agricultural land in most areas is becoming smaller. Whether you are aware of this or not, the truth is that we are rapidly approaching a breaking point.

If dramatic changes are not made soon, in the years ahead water shortages are going to force large groups of people to move to new areas. As the global water crisis intensifies, there will be political conflicts and potentially even wars over water. We like to think of ourselves as being so "advanced", but the reality is that we have not figured out how to live without water. When the water dries up in an area, most of the people are going to have to leave.

And yes, it will even happen in the United States too. For example, once Lake Mead dries up there is simply no way that so many people are going to be able to live in and around Las Vegas.

Right now, most of us take for granted that we will always have access to an unlimited amount of clean water.

But when you take a hard look at the data, it quickly becomes clear that everything that we have always taken for granted about water is about to dramatically change.

That following are 25 signs that a horrific global water crisis is coming. The first 12 facts are about the United States, and the last 13 are about the rest of the world.... Fist tap Big Don.

how energy drains water supplies

NYTimes | The worst single-year drought in the recorded history of Texas has caused cotton crops to wither and ranchers to sell off cattle. It may also hurt power plants, which need vast amounts of water to cool their equipment.

“We will be very concerned” if it does not rain by spring, said Kent Saathoff, an official with the Texas electric grid operator.

The worries in Texas bear out what an increasingly vocal group of researchers has been warning in recent years: that planners must pay more attention to how much water is needed in energy production.

“Water and energy are really linked,” said Henrik Larsen, a water policy expert with the DHI Group, a research and consulting firm based in Denmark. “If you save water, you save energy, and vice-versa.”

Experts call this the “water-energy nexus.” It takes huge quantities of water to produce electricity from a plant powered by nuclear energy or fossil fuels, and it also takes lots of energy to pump and process the water that irrigates fields and supplies cities.

In the United States, 4 percent of all fresh water is consumed in the energy sector, and 3 percent of all electricity used daily goes toward water and wastewater pumping, distribution, and treatment, according to Mike Hightower, a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories.

A big problem, experts say, is that water is often taken for granted.

“We simply don’t value water in the same way that we value energy,” said Mr. Larsen of DHI. He noted that whereas barrels of oil get shipped around the globe, nobody wants to ship water in the same way.

With needs for both water and energy growing worldwide and climate change threatening to roil rainfall patterns, the issue could grow more pressing.

Given the scarcity of water resources, stronger regional cooperation will be important in making sure power plants are located in the best places, according to Jakob Granit, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, which has been trying to promote such cooperation among countries in southern Africa.

“We are not very mature on this type of cross-sector analysis,” Mr. Granit said.

The water needs of power plants are actually greater than the raw consumption numbers suggest. According to Mr. Hightower, more than 50 percent of the water withdrawn every day from rivers and lakes in the United States goes toward energy production.

Power plants discharge almost all of that water back into rivers or ponds after it has helped cool the plant (which explains the difference between 4 percent consumption and 50 percent withdrawals).

However, this means that in times of drought, when rivers or reservoirs are drying up, power plants may have trouble finding enough water, even if they end up discharging most of it.

“You don’t just pick these things up and move them,” Mr. Hightower said, referring to power plants.

The water the plants discharge is also warmer and can affect the environment downstream, Mr. Hightower said.

The water-saving technologies in power plants are improving, and there is a trend toward cooling systems in which more water is recycled, said Mr. Larsen of DHI. The potential for improvements is large: A recent paper by University of Texas academics in the journal Environmental Research Letters reports that changing the cooling technologies used by power plants in 11 Texas river basins could reduce the water they divert each year by an amount equivalent to the annual water use of at least 1.3 million people.

Hydroelectric facilities — which account for about 16 percent of global electricity production — are also vulnerable to drought, of course.

Power plants are not the only reason energy production depends on water. Extracting oil and natural gas from the ground with hydraulic fracturing techniques requires prodigious amounts of water. Fist tap Nana.

big pie in the big sky by-and-by...,

IEEE | We don’t need nuclear power, coal, or biofuels. We can get 100 percent of our energy from wind, water, and solar (WWS) power. And we can do it today—efficiently, reliably, safely, sustainably, and economically.

We can get to this WWS world by simply building a lot of new systems for the production, transmission, and use of energy. One scenario that Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and I developed, projecting to 2030, includes:

• 3.8 million wind turbines, 5 megawatts each, supplying 50 percent of the projected total global power demand

• 49 000 solar thermal power plants, 300 MW each, supplying 20 percent

• 40 000 solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants supplying 14 percent

• 1.7 billion rooftop PV systems, 3 kilowatts each, supplying 6 percent

• 5350 geothermal power plants, 100 MW each, supplying 4 percent

• 900 hydroelectric power plants, 1300 MW each, of which 70 percent are already in place, supplying 4 percent

• 720 000 ocean-wave devices, 0.75 MW each, supplying 1 percent

• 490 000 tidal turbines, 1 MW each, supplying 1 percent.

We also need to greatly expand the transmission infrastructure in order to create the large supergrids that will span many regions and often several countries and even continents. And we need to expand production of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, ships that run on hydrogen fuel cell and battery combinations, liquefied hydrogen aircraft, air- and ground-source heat pumps, electric resistance heating, and hydrogen for high-temperature processes.

To make a WWS world work, we also need to reduce demand. Reducing demand by improving the efficiency of devices that use power, or substituting low-energy activities and technologies for high-energy ones—for example, telecommuting instead of driving—directly reduces the pressure to produce energy.

Because a massive deployment of WWS technologies requires an upgraded and expanded transmission grid and the smart integration of the grid with battery-electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles—using both types of these vehicles for distributed electricity storage—governments need to carefully fund, plan, and manage a long-term, large-scale restructuring of the electricity transmission and distribution system. In much of the world, we’ll need international cooperation in planning and building supergrids that span across multiple countries, because many individual countries just aren’t big enough to permit enough geographic dispersion of generators to mitigate local variability in wind and solar intensity. The Desertec project proposes a supergrid to link Europe and North Africa, and 10 northern European countries are beginning to plan a North Sea supergrid for offshore wind power. Africa, Asia and Southeast Asia, Australia/Tasmania, China, the Middle East, North America, South America, and Russia will need supergrids as well.

Although this is an enormous undertaking, it does not need to be done overnight, and there are plenty of examples in recent history of successful large-scale infrastructure, industrial, and engineering projects. Fist tap Arnach.

much too expensive, but at least a token step in the right direction...,

Video - Energy efficient home-building decathalon

USAToday | The California house looks like a pillow but has an iPad app to control window shades and 3-D cameras to adjust lighting based on movement inside.

The University of Maryland's "WaterShed" has a waterfall designed to control humidity, and Purdue University's "InHome" has a self-watering biowall with vertically arranged plants.

For New Zealand's vacation-style house, or "Kiwi bach," students sheared sheep and "stuffed (wool) in the walls" for insulation, says team member Nick Officer.

Welcome to the 2011 Solar Decathlon, a showcase of state-of-the-art green building by 19 of the world's most innovative academic teams. The biennial competition, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, opens to the public today for two weeks in Washington's West Potomac Park, near the National Mall.

The teams — 15 from the USA and one each from Canada, China, Belgium and New Zealand — are vying to see who built the most stylish, efficient and affordable solar-powered house.

Their prototypes, which the students designed and built during a two-year period, then reassembled within a week at the decathlon site, reflect rapid changes in technology.

Unlike the first decathlon in 2002 or even the last one in 2009, almost all of the houses now have smart meters or automation devices that track energy use in real time, plus triple-pane windows and LED (light emitting diode) fixtures.

"The shift has been pretty dramatic," says Fred Maxik, chief technology officer of Lighting Science Group, an LED manufacturer that donated lights to six of the homes. "Today, (LEDs) are ubiquitous."

The solar devices themselves have improved. They include a canopy of 42 bi-facial solar panels collecting sunlight from above and reflected light from below for Appalachian State University's house, and a rounded rooftop system for the University of Calgary entry.

Perhaps the biggest change this year is cost. DOE is emphasizing affordability and will subtract points for houses that cost more than $250,000. Each team accepted into the competition is given $100,000 in grants as start-up funding. DOE estimates each house's final price tag, based on a list of parts.

"It brings parity to the contest," says Richard King, decathlon director. "We don't want people buying it." In 2009, Team Germany won with an ultra-modern, cube-like house that King says cost about $800,000.

WW-III will have its own little gratifications...,

LATimes | Reporting from Beijing — At a glance, it is clear this is no run-of-the-mill farm: A 6-foot spiked fence hems the meticulously planted vegetables and security guards control a cantilevered gate that glides open only to select cars.

"It is for officials only. They produce organic vegetables, peppers, onions, beans, cauliflowers, but they don't sell to the public," said Li Xiuqin, 68, a lifelong Shunyi village resident who lives directly across the street from the farm but has never been inside. "Ordinary people can't go in there."

Until May, a sign inside the gate identified the property as the Beijing Customs Administration Vegetable Base and Country Club. The placard was removed after a Chinese reporter sneaked inside and published a story about the farm producing organic food so clean the cucumbers could be eaten directly from the vine.

Elsewhere in the world, this might be something to boast about. Not in China. Organic gardening here is a hush-hush affair in which the cleanest, safest products are largely channeled to the rich and politically connected.

Many of the nation's best food companies don't promote or advertise. They don't want the public to know that their limited supply is sent to Communist Party officials, dining halls reserved for top athletes, foreign diplomats, and others in the elite classes. The general public, meanwhile, dines on foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests.

"The officials don't really care what the common people eat because they and their family are getting a special supply of food," said Gao Zhiyong, who worked for a state-run food company and wrote a book on the subject.

In China, the tegong, or special supply, is a holdover from the early years of Communist rule, when danwei, work units of state-owned enterprises, raised their own food and allocated it based on rank. "The leaders wanted to make sure they had enough to eat and that nobody poisoned their food," said Gao.

In the 1950s, Soviet advisors helped the Chinese set up a food procurement department under the security apparatus to supply and inspect food for the leadership, according to a biography of Mao Tse-tung written by his personal physician. Lower levels of officialdom were divided into 25 gradations of rank that determined the quantity and quality of rations.

In modern-day China, it is the degradation of the environment and a limited supply of healthful food that is fueling the parallel food system for the elite.

"We flash forward 50 years and we see the only elements of China society getting food that is reliable, safe and free of contaminants are those cadres who have access to the special food supply," said Phelim Kine of the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch.

predictable and richly deserved...,

Wired | Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers who discontinue monthly service.

OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.

Adam Denison, a spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle’s every movement and its speed, though it’s not clear where that’s stated in the old policy.

“What’s changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise,” Denison said in a telephone interview.

The connection will continue, he said, to make it “easier to re-enroll” in the program, which charges plans from $19 to $29 monthly for help with navigation and emergencies. Canceling customers must opt out of the continued surveillance monitoring program, according to the privacy policy.

The privacy changes take effect in December, Denison said, adding that the policy reinforces the company’s right to sell anonymized data.

“We hear from organizations periodically requesting our information,” he said.

He said an example of how the data might be used would be for the Michigan Department of Transportation “to get a feel for traffic usage on a specific section of freeway.” The policy also allows the data to be used for marketing purposes by OnStar and vehicle manufacturers.

Collecting location and speed data via GPS might also create a treasure trove of data that could be used in criminal and civil cases. One could also imagine an eager police chief acquiring the data to issue speeding tickets en masse.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an Ohio forensics scientist, blogged about the new terms Tuesday. In a telephone interview, he said he was canceling his service and making sure he was being disconnected from OnStar’s network.

He said the new privacy policy goes too far.

“They added a bullet point allowing them to collect any data for any purpose,” he said.

8 current livestock management technologies

We talked about this just a little bit, a little while ago, but I'm always mildly gratified when authoritative others are compelled to agree;

Mashable | In 20 years our technology will reach a level of personalization that will enhance every moment of our lives. We’ll be more physically comfortable with the furniture we sit on and the products we hold; only the most relevant and personalized information from friends and family will reach us; and our movement in the digital world will be near telepathic.

I foresee several of today’s technologies as relevant to this particular vision of the future. They will evolve to not only be more powerful, but also more integrated with one other.

can anyone help me understand this in a non-conspiratorial light?

Video - 80's commercial for Primatene Mist

WebMD | The Primatene Mist inhaler is going away on Dec. 31, and prescription inhalers are the only alternative to the over-the-counter asthma drug.

Don't wait to get that prescription. The FDA warns that Primatene supplies may not last until the end of the year.

"All inhalers that might substitute require a prescription," the FDA's Andrea Leonard-Segal, MD, said at a news teleconference. "So those who use Primatene need to take action now to see a health care provider to get a replacement product." Leonard-Segal is the director of the FDA's division of nonprescription clinical evaluation.

"The clock is ticking on Primatene Mist, the only over-the-counter asthma inhaler," FDA press officer Karen Riley said at the news conference.

The problem with Primatene is that it contains chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs, which deplete the Earth's ozone layer. Environmental treaties signed by the U.S. banned products that emit CFCs. Most of these products already are gone. But medicines got a special extension.

That extension has expired for Primatene. Sales must end at the end of the year. Although the manufacturer of Primatene promises to come up with a version propelled by a safer chemical, the company has not yet done so.

This means that users of Primatene, which has epinephrine as its active ingredient, must switch to drugs based on albuterol. And a prescription is needed for albuterol-based inhalers. These include Accuneb, ProAir, Proventil, Ventolin, and Vospire.

While albuterol is a safe and effective asthma drug, it is different from epinephrine.

"I think patients will feel a difference," Leonard-Segal said.

"One person may feel a certain drug works better for them, but all FDA-approved drugs work in the populations for which they are approved," Sally Seymour, MD, deputy director for safety in the FDA's division of pulmonary, allergy, and rheumatology products, said at the news conference.

One difference users may feel is the price. A replacement cartridge of Primatene Mist sells for about $18. The albuterol inhalers sell for about $45 and up. However, patients with health insurance that covers prescriptions, and those covered by Medicare and Medicaid, may actually pay less for the drugs.

The FDA is not at all clear about how many Primatene users there are. Their best estimate is that 2 million Americans purchase 4 million Primatene units each year.

Here's the FDA's advice to Primatene Mist users:

• See a health care professional soon to get another medicine. Primatene Mist may be harder to find on store shelves even before Dec. 31, 2011.
• Ask your health care professional to show you how to use your new inhaler or other medicine to make sure you are using it correctly and getting the right dose.
• Follow the directions for using and cleaning your new inhaler or other medicine to make sure you get relief of your asthma symptoms.
• If you haven’t used up your Primatene Mist by Dec. 31, it’s safe to continue using it as long as it hasn’t expired. Check the expiration date, which can be found on the product and its packaging.

money/status IS happiness with these humans...,

Video - 60% of the time, it works every time...,

Medicalxpress | Given the choice, would you take a good-paying job with reasonable demands on your time or a high-paying job with longer work hours, permitting only six hours of sleep? Many people opt for the cash, even when they know their decision will compromise their happiness, according to a new Cornell study.

"You might think of happiness as the ultimate goal that people pursue, but actually, people think of goals like health, family happiness, social status and sense of purpose as sometimes competing with happiness," said Alex Rees-Jones, a Cornell doctoral student in the field of economics and co-author of a paper to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal American Economic Review. His co-authors include Cornell assistant professors of economics Dan Benjamin and Ori Heffetz, as well as University of Michigan professor Miles Kimball.

"We found that people make trade-offs between happiness and other things," Rees-Jones said. "For example, they explicitly told us in the free response sections that they would be happier one way, but their family would be happier if they took higher-paying options." They also said they were sometimes willing to choose a job that they thought would bring less happiness for themselves if they thought it would generate a greater sense of purpose, higher social status, a greater sense of control or a higher level of their family's happiness, Rees-Jones said.

The study asked more than 2,600 survey participants (including 633 Cornell students) to consider a variety of scenarios, including the choice between an $80,000 job with reasonable work hours and seven and a half hours of sleep each night, or a $140,000 job with long work hours and time for only six hours of sleep.

Subjects were then asked which option would make them happier.

"On average, there are systematic differences between what people choose and what people think would make them happier," Rees-Jones said. "For example, people are more likely to choose the higher-income/lower-sleep job even when they don't think it will make them happier."

The authors "wanted to see if people were trying to be as happy as possible," Rees-Jones said.

After the survey, subjects were asked if they thought their responses were in error. "Only 7 percent told us that they thought they were making mistakes," Rees-Jones said. "When we asked them if they would regret any cases where they had a discrepancy between choice and well-being, 23 percent said yes. In both cases the vast majority said no, it wasn't a mistake, and no, they wouldn't regret it."

"Overall, this indicates that many are willing to pursue a course that sacrifices happiness in favor of other important goals," said Rees-Jones. "These respondents seem to indicate that maximizing happiness was not perceived to be in their own best interest. However, even if happiness is only one of many goals, it was still the strongest single predictor of choice in our data."

the invisible hand of god...,

USAToday | About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.

"They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work," says sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey, released today by Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

"They think the economy works because God wants it to work. It's a new religious economic idealism," with politicians "invoking God while chanting 'less government,'" he says.

"When Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann say 'God blesses us, God watches us, God helps us,' religious conservatives get the shorthand. They see 'government' as a profane object — a word that is used to signal working against God's plan for the United States. To argue against this is to argue with their religion."

Most (81%) political conservatives say there is one "ultimate truth in the world, and new economic information of cost-benefit analysis is not going to change their mind about how the economy should work," Froese says.

At the opposite pole, another one in five Americans don't see God stepping in to their daily lives and favor reducing wealth and inequality through taxation.

"So they're less likely to see God controlling the economy. Liberal economic perspectives are synonymous with the belief that there is no one 'ultimate truth,'" Froese says.

This is a distinctly American cultural finding and specific to this point in history. It was different in the past, it might be different in the future and it's different now in Western Europe, Froese says.

The survey of 1,714 U.S. adults, conducted by Gallup in fall 2010, was funded by Baylor, the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

It finds nearly three in four Americans (73%) say "I know God has a plan for me." Within this group:

nytimes a vector for yergin denialism too...,

NYTimes | Brazil has begun building its first nuclear submarine to protect its vast, new offshore oil discoveries. Colombia’s oil production is climbing so fast that it is closing in on Algeria’s and could hit Libya’s prewar levels in a few years. ExxonMobil is striking new deals in Argentina, which recently heralded its biggest oil discovery since the 1980s.

Up and down the Americas, it is a similar story: a Chinese-built rig is preparing to drill in Cuban waters; a Canadian official has suggested that unemployed Americans could move north to help fill tens of thousands of new jobs in Canada’s expanding oil sands; and one of the hemisphere’s hottest new oil pursuits is actually in the United States, at a shale formation in North Dakota’s prairie that is producing 400,000 barrels of oil a day and is part of a broader shift that could ease American dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

For the first time in decades, the emerging prize of global energy may be the Americas, where Western oil companies are refocusing their gaze in a rush to explore clusters of coveted oil fields.

“This is an historic shift that’s occurring, recalling the time before World War II when the U.S. and its neighbors in the hemisphere were the world’s main source of oil,” said Daniel Yergin, an American oil historian. “To some degree, we’re going to see a new rebalancing, with the Western Hemisphere moving back to self-sufficiency.”

The hemisphere’s oil boom is all the more remarkable given that two of its traditional energy powerhouses, Venezuela and Mexico, have largely been left out, held in check by entrenched resource nationalism. Venezuela is now considered to have bigger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, putting it at the top of OPEC’s rankings. If it opened up more to foreign investment, it could tip the scales further in the hemisphere’s direction.

Exactly how the Americas’ growing oil clout might rebalance energy geopolitics remains an open question. The Middle East can still influence oil prices greatly, its oil fields are generally cheaper to develop, and some countries in the region are endowed with great reserves.

Moreover, the Americas still vie for investment with other oil-rich regions, like Russia’s portion of the Arctic Ocean and West African waters. Security concerns like the abduction of oil workers could, as they have in the past, prevent Colombia from continuing to raise output. And environmental and financing questions pose persistent challenges to the rapid growth of the hemisphere’s oil production.

Still, the new oil exploits in the Americas suggest that technology may be trumping geology, especially in the region’s two largest economies, the United States and Brazil. The rock formations in Texas and North Dakota were thought to be largely fruitless propositions before contentious exploration methods involving horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — the blasting of water, chemicals and sand through rock to free oil inside, known as fracking — gained momentum.

While the contamination of water supplies by fracking is a matter of fierce environmental debate, the technology is already reversing long-declining oil production in the United States, with overall output from locations where oil is contained in shale and other rocks projected to exceed two million barrels a day by 2020, according to some estimates. The United States already produces about half of its own oil needs, so the increase could help it further peel away dependence on foreign oil.

The challenges of tapping Brazil’s new offshore fields, located beneath 6,000 feet of water and salt beds formed by the evaporation of ancient oceans, are even greater. Petrobras, which has ambitions of surpassing ExxonMobil as the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, is investing more than $200 billion to meet its goals.

“Brazil will become an oil power by the end of the decade, with production in line with that of Iran,” said Pedro Cordeiro, an energy consultant here for Bain & Company, who sees the country’s oil production climbing to 5.5 million barrels a day by 2020.

Construction backlogs could slow Brazil’s offshore expansion. But resurgent industries related to the oil boom, like shipbuilding, and strategic efforts like nuclear submarine construction to defend oil wells, underscore Brazil’s plan of using its energy resources to project global power from this hemisphere.

“No other place on the planet is seeing this kind of investment,” said Márcio Mello, a former Petrobras geologist who is now the chief executive of HRT, a new oil company based here. “This decade is our chance to rise.”

africom embraces automated remote killing in a big way...,

WaPo | The Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, U.S. officials said.

One of the installations is being established in Ethi­o­pia, a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the Somali militant group that controls much of that country. Another base is in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where a small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned aircraft could effectively patrol Somalia from there.

Featured comment:

"As for the drones, I approve of their use against terrorist or anyone else, who presents a direct and credible threat to the United States. With the drones, potential targets have to be scared half out their wits wondering when and where the next strike will come and whether they will be the target."

The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in Djibouti, a tiny African nation at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In addition, the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula so it can deploy armed drones over Yemen.

The rapid expansion of the undeclared drone wars is a reflection of the growing alarm with which U.S. officials view the activities of al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, even as al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan has been weakened by U.S. counterterrorism operations.

The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The negotiations that preceded the establishment of the base in the Republic of Seychelles illustrate the efforts the United States is making to broaden the range of its drone weapons.

The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted a small fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the U.S. Navy and Air Force since September 2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have previously acknowledged the drones’ presence but have said that their primary mission was to track pirates in regional waters. But classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the unmanned aircraft have also conducted counterterrorism missions over Somalia, about 800 miles to the northwest.

The cables, obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, reveal that U.S. officials asked leaders in the Seychelles to keep the counterterrorism missions secret. The Reapers are described by the military as “hunter-killer” drones because they can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs.

To allay concerns among islanders, U.S. officials said they had no plans to arm the Reapers when the mission was announced two years ago. The cables show, however, that U.S. officials were thinking about weaponizing the drones.

our smartphones ourselves

The Atlantic | The United States is a diverse place. Across the nation, there is substantial variation in demographics, political views, and health. Add technology to the list of our differences. Cell-phone makers have not had the same level of success in every state. iPhones sell really well in Oregon and Louisiana, not as well in Idaho and Florida. Phones loaded with Google's Android operating system are doing great in California, but not as well in Michigan.

It's not always clear what's driving regional preferences, but this interactive map lets you see how your state stacks up.

For best results, select one phone operating system at a time and any pair of variables.

A guide to the map:

Phone operating-system data comes from Jumptap. They show which operating system exceeded the national average by the most in each state. There are several uncoded states for which data was not available.

For the demographic data, we show 15 to 20 states at each end of the distribution for each variable. For the curious, here are the cut-off points we used:

Race (source: US Census):

Caucasian states are those with populations that are more than 80 percent white non-hispanic.

Minority states are those with populations that are less than 64 percent white non-hispanic.  

Income (source: US Census):

Wealthiest states are those where median income is more than $55,000 per household.

Poorest states are those where median income is less than $45,000 per household.

Age (source: US Census):

Youngest states are those where the median age is 36.6 or younger.

Oldest states are those where the median age is 38.8 or older.

Weight (source: CDC):

Obese states are those where more than 30 percent of the population is obese.

Thin states are those where less than 25 percent of the population is obese.

Population density (source: US Census):

Dense states are those with more than 190 people per square mile.

Sparse states are those with fewer than 55 people per square mile.

The political breakdown shows the 2008 presidential elections results.

rotflmbao, uh, it really takes one to know one....,

Video - Methods of a peeper 5


Video - Methods of a peeper 6

what big don and his peeps are worried about....,

The problem with public housing is that the residents are not the owners.
The people that live in the house did not earn the house, but were loaned the property from the true owners, the taxpayers.
Because of this, the residents do not have the "pride of ownership" that comes with the hard work necessary.
In fact, the opposite happens and the residents resent their benefactors because the very house is a constant reminder that they themselves did not earn the right to live in the house.
They do not appreciate the value of the property and see no need to maintain or respect it in any way.
The result is the same whether you are talking about a studio apartment or a magnificent mansion full of priceless antiques.
If the people who live there do not feel they earned the privilege, they will make this known through their actions.
What do all these pics have in common?

They all show a basic disrespect for The White House and its furnishings!
The Resolute Desk was built from the timbers of the HMS Resolute and was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes.
It is considered a national treasure and icon of the presidency.
The White House belongs to the People of America and should be more revered than to use anything and everything for a foot rest! What all these shots have in common is that they continue to prove that this man has no class!
SO HERE'S A MESSAGE FROM THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA :
Mr. Obama, you are not in a hut in Kenya or Indonesia, or public housing in Chicago.
With all due respect, get your ------- feet off our desk!

WSJ embraced peak-oil denialism...,

The Grist | Daniel Yergin is to peak oil and limits to growth what Richard Lindzen, Anthony Watts, Christopher Monckton, the Heartland Institute and Exxon Mobil are to climate change. That is, Yergin's entire reason for being in the public eye is his rejection of the possible arrival of this calamity.

So of course it's perfectly logical that the Wall Street Journal, long a bastion of climate change denial, would give Yergin a stage on which to spew his unique brand of half-truths. The simple fact is that people who are invested in the status quo like hearing that everything is hunky dory and that nothing out there will ever threaten their privilege, so there will always be an audience for the Yergins of the world.

Despite all evidence to the contrary -- namely, that world supplies of oil have not budged for some time even as prices have skyrocketed -- Yergin argues in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that more and more oil will be available until "perhaps sometime around midcentury" at which point supply will hit a "plateau."

The thing is, Yergin has been demonstrably getting it wrong about oil for years. There are countless examples, well chronicled here, but he is so wrong, so often, that it only takes about 5 minutes with Google to find an egregious example.

Here's Yergin in 2005, when oil was $60 a barrel, predicting that world oil production would grow from 85 million barrels a day to 101 million by 2010, "reliev[ing] the current pressure on supply and demand." It's 2011, and we're still only producing 89.1 million barrels a day. Meanwhile the cost of a barrel of oil is hovering around $90, and that's with a depressed world economy keeping prices in check.

So why does the WSJ publish the rantings of a repeatedly-discredited crank? Well, he runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which does a fine job of promoting itself, running a conference on energy, and just generally telling people what they want to hear. They peddle the exact same variety of denialism on peak oil that others peddle on climate change, and to the exact same customers -- namely, Exxon Mobil and its ilk.

inside the trillion dollar underground economy

One of my favorite spots in the whole world!!!

Alternet | The United States continues to suffer from mass unemployment. People have had to adjust their lifestyles to the new reality—fewer jobs, lower wages, mortgages to pay that are now more than their homes are worth. Millions have dropped out of the job hunt and are trying to find other ways to sustain their families.

That's where the underground economy comes in. Also called the shadow or informal economy, it's not just illegal activity like selling drugs or doing sex work. It's all sorts of work that doesn't get regulated by the government or reported to the IRS, and it's a far bigger part of the economy than most of us are aware—in 2009, economics professor Friedrich Schneider estimated that it was nearly 8 percent of the US GDP, somewhere around $1 trillion. (That makes the shadow GDP bigger than the entire GDP of Turkey or Austria.) Schneider doesn’t include illegal activities in his count-- he studies legal production of goods and services that are outside of tax and labor laws. And that shadow economy is growing as regular jobs continue to be hard to come by—Schneider estimated 5 percent in '09 alone.

The Young Women's Empowerment Project [PDF] describes the “street economy” as “... any way that girls make cash money without paying taxes or having to show identification. Sometimes this means the sex trade. But other times it means braiding hair, babysitting, selling CDs/DVDs, drugs or other skills like sewing and laundry.”

D.A. Barber explained:

“This underground economy goes beyond the homeless collecting aluminum cans or clogging day labor halls. It includes the working poor getting cash for all forms of recycling: giving plasma, selling homemade tamales outside shopping plazas, holding yard sales, doing under-the-table work for friends and family, selling stuff at pawnshops, CD, book and used clothing stores, and even getting tips from restaurants and bars--to name a few.”

That means nearly all of us have participated in some way in the underground economy.

Yet little is known or discussed about this area of our lives, even though it touches many of us as we try to make ends meet.

yergin's WSJ peak-oil propaganda rebutted...,

Video - Pootie Tang chastisement

EnergyBulletin | Contrary to Mr. Yergin’s assertion that advocates of Peak Oil have been wrong at every turn, six years of annual global production data show flat to declining crude oil and total petroleum liquids production data.

The EIA shows that global annual crude + condensate production (C+C) has been between 73 and 74 mbpd (million barrels per day) since 2005, except for 2009, and BP shows that global annual total petroleum liquids production has been between 81 and 82 mbpd since 2005, except for 2009. In both cases, this was in marked contrast to the rapid increase in production that we saw from 2002 to 2005. Some people might call this "Peak Oil,” and we appear to have hit the plateau in 2005, not some time around mid-century.

Only if we include biofuels have seen a material increase in global total liquids production.

In the US, there are some good stories about rising Mid-continent production, and US (C+C) production has rebounded from the hurricane related decline that started in 2005, but 2010 production was only very slightly above the pre-hurricane level that we saw in 2004, and monthly US production has been between 5.4 and 5.6 mbpd since the fourth quarter of 2009, versus the 1970 peak of 9.6 mbpd. Incidentally, US net oil imports of crude oil plus products have fallen since 2005, primarily as a result of a large reduction in demand, because of rising oil prices (which Mr. Yergin predicted would not happen), but EIA data show that the US is still reliant on crude oil imports for two out of every three barrels of oil that we process in US refineries.

However, the real story is Global Net Oil Exports (GNE), which have shown a measurable multimillion barrel per day decline since 2005, and which are measured in terms of total petroleum liquids, with 21 of the top 33 net oil exporters showing lower net oil exports in 2010, versus 2005. An additional metric is Available Net Exports (ANE), which we define as GNE less Chindia's (China + India’s) combined net oil imports. ANE have fallen at an average volumetric rate of about one mbpd per year from 2005 to 2010, from about 40 mbpd in 2005 to about 35 mbpd in 2010 (BP + Minor EIA data, total petroleum liquids).

At the current rate of increase in the ratio of Chindia's net imports to GNE, Chindia would consume 100% of GNE in about 20 years. Contrary to Mr. Yergin’s sunny pronouncements, what the data show is that developed countries like the US are being forced to take a declining share of a falling volume of GNE. In fact, our work suggests that the US is well on its way to “freedom” from its reliance on foreign sources of oil, just not in the way that most people hoped.

In a November, 2004 interview in Forbes, Mr. Yergin asserted that oil prices would be back to a long term price ceiling of $38 by late 2005--because of a steady increase in global crude oil production. It turned out that Mr. Yergin’s predicted price ceiling has so far been the price floor. The lowest monthly spot crude oil price that the EIA shows for post-November, 2004 is $39.

I suspect that just as Mr. Yergin was perfectly wrong about oil prices, he may be confidently calling for decades of rising production, just as we come off the current production plateau and just as an accelerating decline in Global Net Exports kicks in.

nanoscience and nanotechnology

MIT | Nanotechnology’s impact will one day rival that of electricity, transistors, antibiotics, and the Internet — thanks in part to MIT research.

“There is increasing recognition that we can apply our knowledge of the very small to solve some of the world’s very big problems,” says Ian Waitz, Dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. “Very important engineering challenges and domains — such as energy, the environment, and health care — will benefit from nano-science and -technology.”

Nanotechnology is enabling MIT researchers to develop, for example, substantially more effective and inexpensive solar cells; greener, more sustainable materials for infrastructure; tiny biomedical sensors that can monitor health in real time; and electronic devices that could greatly increase computing power using minimal energy. And a great adventure is now under way at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT as the science of cancer is joined with the engineering of nanoparticles and new materials to help create new knowledge about cancer and new treatments.

Since it emerged as a field roughly 25 years ago, nanotechnology — which harnesses the remarkable properties of matter at the scale of billionths of a meter — has been heralded for its potential to revolutionize materials, manufacturing, energy, security, and health care. Nano-enhanced materials are already used in hundreds of products — sunscreen, sports equipment, and surface coatings for vehicles, among others. And semiconductor manufacturers have fabricated nanoscale components to push the boundaries of chip efficiency for over a decade.

But the truly transformative advances that nanotechnology promises — from large-scale storage and conversion of renewable energy, to staggeringly powerful quantum computers, to sophisticated biomedical implants that monitor and treat disease — are still years if not decades away.

Those types of advances require the ability to precisely assemble and manipulate matter at the atomic level — in other words, “from the bottom up. And that remains very difficult,” says Marc Kastner, Dean of MIT’s School of Science. To grasp the challenges posed by the nanoscale, consider that the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as that of a marble to the size of Earth. The researchers profiled in this issue are leading science’s effort to overcome those challenges.

“To do anything outstanding in this field, you need people who really understand chemistry, physics, and engineering,” says Kastner. “There are very few institutions in the world that have the breadth and depth of expertise that MIT has in these areas.”

Kastner and Waitz say that nanotechnology will be key to a new era in manufacturing that could fuel a 21st-century industrial revolution. With MIT President Susan Hockfield, whom the Obama administration recently appointed co-chair of its Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, they are positioning MIT to lead this new era.

Waitz says he is awed by the pace of nanotechnological innovation at MIT. “I find it amazing that we’re engineering things at that scale, and then using them to solve very challenging problems. I’m excited about the prospects for the ‘world of the small.’”

distributed couch potato computing

Video - Jane McGonigal - gaming CAN make a better world

TheScientist | A small group of diverse individuals living on at least three continents, who call themselves The Contenders, have solved the structure of a protein that has stumped scientists for more than 10 years. And they did so from the comfort of their own homes, playing on online protein folding game called Foldit.

The Contenders’ solution and its validation were published today (September 18) in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

“This is the real deal,” said biophysicist Rhiju Das of Stanford University, who was not involved in the work. “I think this paper really shows how this is a new way of doing science that is more powerful than what a handful of experts could do.”

The protein in question was a retroviral protease of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, which causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys. Over the last decade, many researchers had tried a variety of techniques to determine the protein’s structure, but kept coming up empty handed. “This viral protein…has really evaded the efforts of expert crystallographers and the very best automated tools,” Das said.

So one frustrated scientist, Mariusz Jaskolski of A. Mickiewicz University in Poland and the Polish Academy of Sciences, turned to an online game called Foldit. The program was designed by computation biologist David Baker of the University of Washington as an extension to his Rosetta@home program, which allows Baker to use home computers around the world to do complex calculations on protein structures. While the program ran, users would see a screen saver of the computations, Baker said, and before long, he began to get some emails about how the program wasn’t always accurate. “The protein, when it’s folding up its helix, is going left when should be going right,” users reported.

So Baker designed Foldit to allow users to alter the course of Rosetta calculations, and try to solve protein structures on their own. The goal: fold up the protein so it has the lowest energy, just as molecules tend to do in real life.

A Foldit screenshot of a protein puzzle posed to Foldit players.Center for Game Science, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Univ. of Washington

In the past year and a half, users of the program had demonstrated their potential to solve real protein-folding problems, Baker said, so when Jaskolski came to him with this enigmatic viral protease, they decided to put the gamers to the test. Baker posed the problem to the Foldit players, and watched the responses flood in.

About 600 players from 41 teams submitted more than 1.25 million solutions. Narrowing those down to 5,000, Jaskolski and colleagues subjected them to a computational technique called molecular replacement (MR), which tests the models against X-ray crystallography data. For MR to work, the proposed structure has to be very close to accurate, in which case the MR calculations can help perfect the details. But previous attempts at MR for this protein had failed because the protein models were too far off the mark.

But The Contender’s proposed protein structure was a winner. “When we took [their] model, it was a beautiful fit to the X-ray data so we knew [they] had solved it,” Baker said. “We were just totally blown away. This is the first time that a long-standing scientific problem has been solved by Foldit players, or to my knowledge, any scientific gaming participants.”

The final breakthrough came from Foldit user mimi, a member of The Contenders and a science technician at a high school near Manchester, UK, who has been playing Foldit for about 3 years. She “tucked in a flap” of the protein that was sticking out, she explains, to make the protein more “globular.” But she emphasizes that “the achievement was very much a group effort,” noting that it wasn’t possible for her to tuck in the flap until others in the group had made their key adjustments to the protein’s structure.

“It’s kind of an unprecedented case of using computing non-specialists to solve a longstanding scientific problem,” said Alexander Wlodawer, chief of the Macromolecular Crystallography Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.

what is entosis?

TheScientist | Though the mechanisms of engulfment may differ among cell and cancer types, the end result is nearly indistinguishable—a whole, living cell is housed within a large vacuole inside a tumor cell. Internalized cells usually follow one of three paths. They can continue living, at least temporarily, within the host cell, even dividing within their vacuole homes. Occasionally, they escape from the host cell to once again become a single, individual cell in the extracellular space. By and large, however, death is the most common fate for cells engulfed by tumor cells. Wang and colleagues demonstrated evidence of the apoptotic death of NK cells following their uptake by tumor cells. Nearly 90 percent of the internalized lymphocytes underwent traditional, programmed cell death, as evidenced by the activation of caspase 3. Work by Overholtzer’s group, on the other hand, suggests that cell engulfment between tumor cells represents a different type of cell death altogether—one mediated by lysosomes. The vacuoles housing the internalized tumor cells, his group observed, became acidic and surrounded by lysosomal membranes, indicative of fusion with lysosomes. Furthermore, when the researchers overexpressed B-cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) to inhibit apoptosis, it had little effect on the death of internalized cells. On the other hand, inhibiting lysosomal acidification of the vacuoles could rescue the captured cells, when it was combined with apoptotic inhibitors. Interestingly, when only the lysosomal inhibitors were introduced, more cells appeared to undergo an apoptotic death, suggesting that apoptosis serves as a backup mechanism to the more common lysosomal death of the internalized cells.

Fais suggests it is simply the acidic environment of the tumor-cell vacuoles in metastatic melanoma cells that kills the internalized lymphocytes, though lytic enzymes may help to further digest the cell, he says. He argues that the engulfment and subsequent killing of cells such as lymphocytes is cell cannibalism in the most literal sense—one cell eating another. Once the victim is digested, the tumor cell can theoretically derive nutrients from it, promoting cancer survival and growth.

“We know that nutritional stress is a common feature of tumors,” says Eileen White, a cancer biologist at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Rutgers University. “We know they’ll undergo this process of autophagy where they’ll eat themselves. If they have the capability of eating each other or other cells—that would open a whole new door for tumors to sustain themselves.”

As evidence for this hypothesis, Fais showed in vitro that cell cannibalism increased under starvation conditions, and that the ingestion of T cells promoted the survival of melanoma cells. “The T cell is great because it has all these wonderful complex carbohydrates on the surface,” says cancer biologist Thomas Seyfried of Boston College. “They can all be degraded to glucose and other fuels [that tumor cells] could be using.”

But even if cells are deriving nourishment from their cannibalistic activities, it’s likely not the only benefit of the behavior, says immunologist Yufang Shi, who studies apoptosis at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Child Health Institute of New Jersey. “For one cell to digest another cell and to get energy . . . this is very uneconomical,” Shi explains. “You have to really make the cell into amino acids and polysaccharides. It’s very hard to use that as energy.” The fact that cell cannibalism increased when the cells were starving may simply be due to the fact that nutrient deprivation can cause cells to become detached from the extracellular matrix, Shi added—an event that Overholtzer’s group suggests could promote cell engulfment as a result of imbalanced cell-cell adhesion forces.

Another possibility is that the engulfed cells are driving the process. Internalized immune cells, for example, may have the potential to suppress tumor growth. During his initial graduate studies in the 1980s and again when he resumed this work more recently, Wang observed that some NK cells internalized by tumor cells can actually kill their host cells from the inside out. “After they enter into the tumor cells, they make the tumor cells erupt,” Wang says. “When [these NK cells] die, they also release a lot of enzymes,” Shi explains. “They are cytotoxic cells, so they can kill by releasing directly into the target cell, like the suicide bombers.”

But whether the internalized NK cells are initiating the engulfment is still unclear. If, on the other hand, the tumor cells are actively consuming the lymphocytes, it could provide a way for cancer to evade attack by the immune system. “I have a suspicion that maybe tumor [cells] in some conditions can kill the NK cells as a way to escape the surveillance of the immune system,” Wang says. This may become particularly important as the cancer metastasizes, Yao adds. “One of the physical challenges for those tumor cells will be how to survive in the new sites. One way is by taking [up] those NK cells and other immune cells to damage the immune response of cancer [patients].”

The bizarre phenomenon may also contribute to the genetic instability of cells, perhaps contributing to the formation of cancer early on. This March, Overholtzer and colleagues published the finding that cell-in-cell structures can act as cleavage barriers that disrupt cell division, leading to changes in ploidy—the number of sets of chromosomes in the cell—which are known to drive tumor progression.5 Conversely, cell engulfment may act to suppress tumor growth, such as when tumor cells eat other tumor cells. “Entosis has a dual nature,” says Overholtzer. “It clearly can kill [tumor] cells, but also, it can disrupt ploidy—one is predicted to be tumor suppressive, one is tumor promoting.”

For now, the question of function remains “a puzzle,” Fais says, and “I don’t have all the pieces.” But with evidence growing for significance of cell engulfment in tumor pathogenesis, researchers are now considering whether the phenomenon could serve to aid in diagnosis or in the development of new cancer treatments. “I think in the next few years this will be a very active field,” Shi says.

why no credit crisis perpetrator is going to go to jail...,

financialsense | Jim welcomes Professor of Economics and Law William Black to Financial Sense Newshour. He explains to Jim why no one has gone to jail four years after the beginning of the historic Credit Crisis. Professor Black believes that the level of corruption and fraud is so pervasive that very few of the guilty will ever be brought to justice.

Bill Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Transcript

Jim Puplava: Joining me on the program is Professor William Black. He is a Lawyer and an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He was a Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005 to 2007. He taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He was also a Litigation Director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. He is also author of the book “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.”

And Professor, you played a critical role during the S&L crisis in exposing congressional corruption. During that period of time, a lot of corruption was exposed; a lot of people in the financial sector went to jail, including Charles Keating. I wonder if you would contrast that to the last credit crisis, let us say from 2007 to 2009 where a lot of money was lost, a lot of things went wrong, but nobody went to jail. Instead of going to jail, they walked out instead with multi-million dollar bonuses. What was the difference, what was behind this in your opinion?

William Black: Well, I say the both of them were driven by fraud. The Savings & Loan crisis was a tragedy in two parts. First part was not fraud, it was interest rate risk. But the second phase, which was vastly more expensive, was to defraud and the National Commission that looked into the causes of the crisis said that the typical large failure fraud was invariably present. And there were real regulators then. Our agency filed well over 10,000 criminal referrals that resulted in over 1,000 felony convictions and cases designated as nature. And even that understates the grade in which we went after the elite. Because we worked very closely with the FBI and the Justice Department, to prioritize cases—creating the top 100 list of the 100 worst institutions which translated into about 600 or 700 executives—and so the bulk of those thousand felony convictions were the worst fraud, the most elite frauds.

In the current crisis, of course they appointed anti-regulators. And this crisis goes back well before 2007 and of course it is continuing, it does not end at 2009. So the FBI warned in open testimony in the House of Representatives, in September 2004—we are now talking seven years ago—that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, their words, and they predicted that it would cause a financial crisis, crisis being their word, if it were not contained. Well no one thinks that it was contained.

All right so you have massive fraud driving this crisis, hyperinflating the bubble, an FBI warning and how many criminal referrals did the same agency do, in this crisis. Remember it did well over 10,000 in the prior crisis. Well the answer is zero. They completely shut down making criminal referrals and whichever administration you hate the most, you can hate because while most of this certainly occurred in the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration has obviously not changed it. Obviously did not see it as a priority to prosecute these elite criminals who caused this devastating injury.

huge jump in foreclosures coming up...,

Mish | Mortgage Default Notices Surge 33% Nationwide, 55% in California, 200% by Bank of America; Corresponding Jump in Foreclosures Will Follow. At long last, the robo-signing scandal may have finally played out. As evidence, please note the August Surge in Mortgage Default Warnings

The number of U.S. homes that received an initial default notice -- the first step in the foreclosure process -- jumped 33 percent in August from July, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.

The increase represents a nine-month high and the biggest monthly gain in four years. The spike signals banks are starting to take swifter action against homeowners, nearly a year after processing issues led to a sharp slowdown in foreclosures.

Foreclosure activity began to slow last fall after problems surfaced with the way many lenders were handling foreclosure paperwork, namely shoddy mortgage paperwork comprising several shortcuts known collectively as robo-signing.

Many of the nation's largest banks reacted by temporarily ceasing all foreclosures, re-filing previously filed foreclosure cases and revisiting pending cases to prevent errors.

Other factors have also worked to stall the pace of new foreclosures this year. The process has been held up by court delays in states where judges play a role in the foreclosure process, a possible settlement of government probes into the industry's mortgage-lending practices, and lenders' reluctance to take back properties amid slowing home sales.

In all, 78,880 properties received a default notice in August. Despite the sharp increase from July, last month's total was still down 18 percent versus August last year and 44 percent below the peak set in April 2009, RealtyTrac said.

Some states, however, saw a much larger increase.

California saw a 55 percent increase in homes receiving a default notice last month, while in Indiana they climbed 46 percent. In New Jersey, where last month a judged ruled that four major banks could resume uncontested foreclosure actions in the state under court monitoring, homes receiving a default notice increased 42 percent.

Huge Jump in Foreclosures Coming Up

Reality Check reports Huge Surge in Bank of America Foreclosures

america and oil declining together..,

Video - Frank Sinatra Love and Marriage mashup

commondreams | America and Oil. It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin. As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other. Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence. Now, it’s a guarantee of a trip to hell in a hand basket. The Chinese know it. Does Washington?

America’s rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world’s supply of oil. Oil powered the country’s first giant corporations, ensured success in World War II, and underlay the great economic boom of the postwar period. Even in an era of nuclear weapons, it was the global deployment of oil-powered ships, helicopters, planes, tanks, and missiles that sustained America’s superpower status during and after the Cold War. It should come as no surprise, then, that the country’s current economic and military decline coincides with the relative decline of oil as a major source of energy.

If you want proof of that economic decline, just check out the way America's share of the world's gross domestic product has been steadily dropping, while its once-powerhouse economy now appears incapable of generating forward momentum. In its place, robust upstarts like China and India are posting annual growth rates of 8% to 10%. When combined with the growing technological prowess of those countries, the present figures are surely just precursors to a continuing erosion of America’s global economic clout.

Militarily, the picture appears remarkably similar. Yes, a crack team of SEAL commandos did kill Osama bin Laden, but that single operation -- greeted in the United States with a jubilation more appropriate to the ending of a major war -- hardly made up for the military’s lackluster performance in two recent wars against ragtag insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. If anything, almost a decade after the Taliban was overthrown, it has experienced a remarkable resurgence even facing the full might of the U.S., while the assorted insurgent forces in Iraq appear to be holding their own. Meanwhile, Iran -- that bête noire of American power in the Middle East -- seem as powerful as ever. Al Qaeda may be on the run, but as recent developments in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and unstable Pakistan suggest, the United States wields far less clout and influence in the region now than it did before it invaded Iraq in 2003.