higher knowledge or "flowers of evil"

orageanvision | That which exists independently of both the carrier and the shaped charge within itself. This is a metaphor relating to a specialized language referring to instruments and processes which are employed in the fracking and perforating of deep wells, the profession of wireline operations, in which Chivo (one of Swarts' 'I's) plays a role.

The carrier is the "gun", oftentimes a simple pipe of various diameters and lengths. If law enforcement were to run across one of these devices lying loose in the street, media would report that a "pipe bomb was found" at such and such a place, and a specialized team was deployed, a robot was sent in, and the device was later "harmlessly destroyed" at an unspecified location. Amongst those who work in this field of wireline including Chivo, there is a common lingua of the hands, but these same hands are taught never to refer to these devices as "guns" when dealing with the uninitiated, because when they (the uninitiated) hear the word "guns" they tend to get a little froggy. So the hands are taught to speak only about "perforating devices" - mystify them with a few extra syllables, works like a charm btw.

A "shaped charge" is the same explosive device used to kill our American soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere, where it is referred to as a "roadside bomb" or IED (improvised explosive device). The higher knowledge in wireline is the same higher knowledge necessary to arm one of these IED's in Afghanistan. The only difference is that one is placed near to the surface of the earth and is intended to perforate the human body, releasing the flow of the body fluids in our soldiers; and the other is sent deep within the Earth, is intended to perforate the casing of the wells and release the aged and fermented body fluids of dinosaurs. They even call some of the shaped charges by their trade name - "dinosaur hunters".

Now we have to talk about the role of the engineers. High above the ground, perhaps in some ivory tower someplace, these engineers envisioned all that might occur, might need to occur and, and what could go both right and wrong deep within the earth. It was these engineers that constructed the plans for the every single detail of the rigging, drilling, perforating, steam injection, wireline, and all the other operations of the 'fields. As it was created in minds before constructed in matter, there were many false steps and blind alleys to go down, because everything is a blind alley deep within the earth, isn't it?

Then another group of engineers constructed a whole seperate class of instruments and devices that allowed them to "see" at least partially, deep within the Earth, where no human eye has gone before or since, but the instruments made by these engineers utilizing science was so advanced as to make the sound of the doppler effect like hands passing rapidly over the heads of the common man.

It always astounds Chivo when hillbillies and barmaids want to argue with Pi or Einstein or these engineers of science. Chivo says, 'God bless Pi and Einstein and Science and these engineers'. Raise a glass and let the dinosaur blood flow like rain. Drink up, you bloody children of Chivo's loins, for tomorrow you die!

Ha Ha Ha Steve Swarts

the drums of war

market-ticker | I've received a few lovely pieces of "hate email" over my missives of late related to Muslim extremists and our foreign policy.

Perhaps we should take this morning and reflect a bit on where we are, where we're headed in this regard, and why the policies and positions taken by our current administration, along with the ham-handed garbage coming from the Romney campaign, are so dangerous both to us and on a global scale.

I presume that we all know that we were "sponsors" of the "Arab Spring", right?  After years of funding and protecting the murderous bastard Hosni Mubarak we suddenly "decided" that we'd go along with a civilian uprising protesting (and reasonably so!) his behavior.

Ordinarily this would be an easy sale; after all, freedom is a good thing, right?

There's only one problem -- we had been funding and arming this thug for decades.  When the crowd got a bit rowdy, as a consequence, the tear gas cannisters that started flying had Made In The USA emblazoned on their sides.  This didn't do anything for our international standing among these people, as you might imagine.

Mubarak, for his part, didn't exactly go quietly.  And who would blame him?  Up-armed and up-armored with American funds he used them -- on his own people.  It was illegal for civilians to own a rifle in Egypt, but pistols were lawful.  Soon rifle shots could be heard into the crowd; they were coming from the police shooting from the roofs, not the citizens.

Eventually Mubarak left, but not before the people basically shut down the country.

What wasn't paid attention to was where the tinder came from to get the fire burning nice and hot -- our own Fed and monetary policy were largely responsible by nearly doubling the cost of food commodities in a land linked to our dollar.

Hungry people are pretty easy to gin up into a riotous mob.

You might have thought these pressures had decreased and improved over the last year and change.  You'd be wrong.  Over the last week or so an emboldened Taliban and Al-Qaeda decided to "commemorate" the terrorist acts of 9/11 with a bit of trouble over in the Middle East and Afghanistan, what has been come to be known as "The Suck."  You've probably all heard of the sackings of our diplomatic missions in various countries around the Middle East, including the forcible sodomy and murder of one of our ambassadors.  But you may have not heard much about an audacious raid on a NATO base in Southern Afghanistan.

We killed the attackers in the latter case, but not before they damaged or destroyed eight Harriers, causing $200 million in damage to material and killing two marines.  This was a sophisticated assault, not the act of a "riotous mob."  Likewise, the attacks in Libya and elsewhere showed evidence of significant planning, command and control.  None of these assaults were simple acts of an angry mob of people*****ed off about some video; these were military operations taken against United States soil, men and material and they were coordinated by the parties undertaking them.

Sinkhole: H-Bomb explosion equivalent in Bayou Corne possible

examiner | A possible breach of a butane-filled well 1500 feet from Bayou Corne's sinkhole, the size of three football fields, is so "very serious," it has Assumption Parish sheriff and local residents ordered to evacuate worried about a catastrophic explosion, one according to scientists in an Examiner investigation, would be in the range of one and a half B83 thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs, the most powerful United States weapons in active service.

“The disaster is made all the more worrisome because the hole is believed to be close to a well containing 1.5 million barrels of liquid butane, a highly volatile liquid that turns into a highly flammable vapor upon release,” CNN reported Friday about Louisiana's declared State of Emergency.

Earlier it was reported the butane-filled well is only 1500 feet from the sinkhole and it will not be emptied.

A breach of that well, Assumption Parish Sheriff Mike Waguespack said, could be "catastrophic,” CNN reports.

If ignited, the butane well would release as much explosive energy as 100 Hiroshima bombs, Deborah Dupré's scientist sources told her Sunday.

Friday, officials went door-to-door in the Bayou Corn area to complete questionnaires, including next of kin contact details of locals at home after the mandatory evacuation orders, as Fox News reported, while ABC reported, “If any of the dangers seem to become more imminent,” the present mandatory order will be “escalated to a forced evacuation.”

Some residents of Louisiana's cultural gumbo of Assumption Parish think dangers are more imminent now, despite state Department of Health & Hospitals Office of Public Health officials' letter to parish officials about air and water testing data.

“Based on their testing, it doesn’t appear that chemical exposure of site-related contaminants pose a public health risk in the immediate area of Bayou Corne,” parish officials said.

Since Saturday, disaster workers are required to wear respirators, although the public within the disaster area is not.

Government cover up continues angering residents and elected leaders

"You can give us a straight answer because that's all we want," a woman said at the community meeting Tuesday. "We want to know when we can come home and be safe. Because you all go home after a days work. You're safe, but we're not," she said, expressing sentiments of other locals with whom Dupré has spoken.

in limboland...,

usatoday | Ecuador said Friday it would consider asking Britain to authorize the transfer of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to its embassy in Sweden so that he can respond to sex crimes allegations there.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters that there are several possibilities to resolve the standoff with Britain over Assange, including "that his statement be taken in our embassy in London or that Ecuador get authorization to transfer him, if necessary, to our embassy in Sweden so that the case can proceed there with the protection of Ecuador and meeting the needs of Swedish justice."

There was no immediate reaction from British officials.

Assange has been holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London since June 19, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over sex crimes allegations.

Assange claims the Swedish sex case is part of plot to make him stand trial in the United States over his work with WikiLeaks, which has published large troves of secret U.S. documents. Sweden and Washington reject the claim.

Ecuador granted the Wikileaks founder political asylum on Aug. 15, but British authorities will arrest him if he steps foot outside the diplomatic mission.

nothing just happens, everything is planned..,

how to confuse a moral compass?

Nature | People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions, researchers report today in PLoS ONE¹.

The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one lightly glued on top of the other. Each survey was given on a clipboard, on the back of which the researchers had added a patch of glue. When participants turned the first page over to complete the second, the top set of statements would stick to the glue, exposing the hidden set but leaving the responses unchanged.

Two statements in every hidden set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,” the word ‘forbidden’ was replaced with ‘permitted’ in the hidden statement.

Participants were then asked to read aloud three of the statements, including the two that had been altered, and discuss their responses.

About half of the participants did not detect the changes, and 69% accepted at least one of the altered statements.

People were even willing to argue in favour of the reversed statements: A full 53% of participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitude in at least one of the manipulated statements, the authors write. Hall and his colleagues have previously reported this effect, called 'choice blindness', in other areas, including taste and smell² and aesthetic choice³.

“I don't feel we have exposed people or fooled them,” says Hall. “Rather this shows something otherwise very difficult to show, [which is] how open and flexible people can actually be.” Fist tap Dale and Arnach.

collapse takes no prisoners...,

NYTimes | For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

 The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks. “We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study. The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London. Fist tap Dale.

world food situation

FAO | » The FAO Food Price Index averaged 213 points in August 2012, unchanged from the previous month. Although still high, the Index value is 25 points below the peak (238 points) reached in February 2011 and 18 points less than in August last year. International prices of cereals and oils/fats changed little but sugar prices fell sharply, compensating for rising meat and dairy prices. 

» The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 260 points in August, the same as in July, with some increases in wheat and rice offsetting a slight weakening in maize. Deteriorating crop prospects for maize in the United States and wheat in the Russian Federation initially underpinned export quotations, but prices eased towards the end of the month, following heavy rains in areas hardest hit by drought in the United States and the announcement that the Russian Federation would not impose export restrictions. Renewed import demand sustained international rice quotations.

 » The FAO Oils/Fats Price Index averaged 226 points in August, unchanged from July, thus staying above the ten year trend, although still below 2008 and 2011 highs. Similar to last month, additional gains in soybean oil prices and strengthening quotations for sunflower and rapeseed oils have been offset by persistent weakness in palm oil values.

» The FAO Meat Price Index averaged 170 points in August, up 4 points (2.2 percent) from July. All meat prices rose but most of the momentum came from the grain-intensive pig and poultry sectors, which saw their quotations firming by 4 and 6 percent respectively. The August price increase follows three consecutive months of declines.

» The FAO Dairy Price Index averaged 176 points in August, up 3 points (1.6 percent) from July, sustained by increases in the prices of skim milk powder, casein, butter and whole milk powder, while cheese prices remained stable. Much of the recent strength stems from a firming demand combined with production constraints in those areas affected by drought and rising feed costs. 

» The FAO Sugar Price Index averaged 297 points in August, down 27.7 points (8.5 percent) from July, and 97 points (25 percent ) from August last year. This month’s sharp fall in sugar prices reflects improved production outlook amid more favourable weather conditions in Brazil, the world’s largest sugar exporter, which was supportive to sugarcane harvesting, and recovering monsoon rains in India. 

what to expect when you're expecting war...,

lewrockwell | It looks like war is is coming upon us once again. Aside from the recent eruptions in the Far East and Middle East, I say this because of three basic observations:

1. The financial problems of the major governments are not going away; rather, they are getting worse. That leaves the operators of these systems with a choice: They can either find a foreign devil to blame, or they can take the blame themselves.


2. The people of the modern world have no real purpose in their lives. They live according to scripts promulgated by others and get all their thrills vicariously. War will fill a huge gap in their lives by giving them a 'noble' cause.


3. Big media in the West is the obedient hand-maiden of the state. This has been true for a long time (look up Operation Mockingbird), but never so much as now. Real news is available on the Internet, but the large mass of people still get their news from controlled sources.

These last two points suggest that the rulers can go to war with majority support, provided that the events are scripted well. And since big media is under their control, they can create and insert whatever narratives they like.

And perhaps I should add a fourth point: Lots of people make big money on war... people who are in the habit of employing politicians to secure and increase their profits.

It certainly looks like motive, means and opportunity are all coming together.

conformity

newspaper advertising revenue back to 1950 level...,

businessinsider | Over the past decade, lots of big newspaper companies have gone bust. But when you take a look at what's happened to newspaper advertising over that period, it's a wonder they all haven't. Below, via Mark J. Perry and Bill Gross, is a chart we've run before. It shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years. Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue. Journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU observes that the peak year was the one in which blogging software first appeared.

nobody's coming...,

lesterspence | We place too much stock in our leaders. We place too much emphasis on the civil rights movement. We believe too much in the concept of unity. We've increasingly swallowed the koolaid in believing our biggest problem is black culture. We increasingly think that business development, that business logic should be the backbone of any solution we have.

These ideas are politically destructive.

They reduce our capacity for political action. More to the point, these tendencies reduce our ability to take moral responsibility for the practice of democracy. Taking personal responsibility for democracy means making the time and the effort to be aware of current political events. However it also means doing the hard work to figure out contemporary, novel, humane solutions to contemporary problems.

We need to embrace a different set of political ideas in order to devise a new set of political institutions.

The first idea we need to embrace I’ve used as the title of this book—nobody’s coming. We’ve only got ourselves to turn to. Both MLK and Malcolm X are dead and are not coming back to life. There will be no twitter version of the Civil Rights or Black Power Movements.7

The second idea we’ve got to embrace is that while having a black President is something many of us waited our entire lives for, the reality is that whatever responsibility the President has a right to expect from us should be returned. I don’t support the President as much as I support the populations he purports to support. Perhaps we should take responsibility for defending the President against racist attacks, if for no other reason than establishing the legitimacy of non-white citizens to run the country. But as Obama may very well be the closest thing to “our” President that we’ve ever had, his responsibility is to us…not the other way around. Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and a number of other black critics have caught a lot of flack from black elites—Tom Joyner disassociated himself from both West and Smiley after he felt they criticized the President too much—for their critiques. Critique is an important part of democratic practice. Particularly given our love of the dozens we should be much more attentive to the positive power of political critique.

The third idea we’ve got to embrace is the idea that in calling for solutions we need to do more than simply call for “more jobs”. In fact, our entire approach to black labor needs to be rethought given the economy. Similarly we need to rethink the way we talk about, analyze, and prescribe solutions for black families. And we've got to be innovative and creative.

And fourth we’ve got to understand that our attempts to take responsibility have to begin where we are, in our neighborhoods, in our cities and towns, in our states.

In the following pages I dig into various aspects of black politics, as an attempt to begin an honest conversation about what a 21st Century black politics should look like. How should we deal with the fact that an increasing number of black families are headed by single mothers? How can we use tragic events like the Trayvon Martin case to spur our political imagination? Given our high rates of unemployment, is there a way to rethink the role labor should play in our communities? What are we to do with the nigga? And because I not only approach this condition from the standpoint of a social scientist, but also from the standpoint of a victim (I’ve been foreclosed on, I’ve had my car repossessed, I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety), I combine my skills as a social scientist with my experience living in the world. In these pages you will most definitely not read me blame our circumstances on our lack of culture, on the fact that we’re not like [INSERT ETHNIC GROUP HERE], and on the fact that we don’t have enough black businesses. What instead you’ll find is a love of black people, and a deep appreciation for politics, for political action, and for the political imagination.

The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment, and Recession

ourfiniteworld | Since 1982, the number of people employed in the United States has tended to move in a similar pattern to the amount of energy consumed. When one increases (or decreases), the other tends to increase (or decrease). In numerical terms, R2 = .98.

I have written recently about the close long-term relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. We know that economic growth is tied to job creation, so it stands to reason that energy consumption would be tied to job growth¹. But I will have to admit that I was surprised by the closeness of the relationship for the period shown.

This close relationship is concerning, because if it holds in the future, it suggests that it will be very difficult to reduce energy consumption without a lot of unemployment. It also would seem to suggest that a shortage of energy supplies (as reflected by high prices) can lead to unemployment.

I tried to consolidate a number of employment-related issues into one post, so in this post I also show that employment is shifting to Asia and other less developed countries, as energy costs (and total costs) are lower there. I also show that the US appears to have reached “peak employment” as a percentage of population in 2000, likely as a result of this shift in employment to Asia. The Kyoto Protocol may indirectly have helped enable a shift in production to Asia, through its emphasis on local production of carbon dioxide, without considering the indirect impact on world markets².

unless you're poor, in which case education is everything...,

NYTimes | How different would the nation’s politics be if either party, or at least the Democrats, added the concept of economic exploitation to its repertoire?

Not only would doing so risk inflaming the issue of race, but it would put at risk existing sources of campaign finance on which both parties are dependent. The finance-insurance-real estate sector is the single largest source of cash for the Democratic Party, $46.3 million in the current election cycle, and for the Republican Party too, at $67.7 million.

This dependence on moneyed interests effectively precludes exploitation as a theme for either major party to develop. These sources of campaign cash would dry up if they became the target of policies or positions they found threatening.

Even as polarization poses more sharply defined choices to the voter, pressing issues remain off limits. Poverty and hunger have been dropped from the agenda. The range of policy and electoral choices remains confined to what fits comfortably into a world of muted ethical concern, a world in which moral relativism has permeated society not so much from the bottom up, as from the top down.

The unshackling of moneyed interests — in the name of first amendment rights — from restraints on campaign contributions has, in fact, constrained the free speech of the disadvantaged. It empowers those whose goal is to hinder consumer-protection legislation, to forestall more progressive tax rates and to quash populist insurgencies.

This skewing of the odds in favor of the rich comes at a time when the Democratic Party is already inhibited by accusations that it likes to foment “class warfare” and to play “the race card.” The result has been a relentless shift of the political center from left to right. The two most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have pursued agendas well within this limited terrain. There is little reason to believe that Obama, if he wins in November, will feel empowered to push out much further into territory the Democrats have virtually abandoned. Fist tap Chauncy de Vega.

why it's never mattered that america's schools lag behind other countries

techcrunch | It’s easier to know what doesn’t work than what does. We know schooling can’t broadly impact innovation much, because we can track learning step-by-step through the life of a student. Tracking the countless variables that go into creating an innovation superpower is more daunting. But, we can make a few educated guesses.

Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”

The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world. Whether the abundance of smart students is a product of U.S. culture, an artifact of the genetic lottery, or some unknown factor hidden in our education system is anyone’s guess.

We do know where some of our best talent comes from: other countries. In some ways, the United States steals its way to economic superiority: it rangles the world’s brightest minds to immigrate. The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).

A quarter of CEOs in technology and science are foreign born and 76 percent hold key positions in engineering, technology, and management, according to Stanford researcher and TechCrunch contributor, Vivek Wadhwa.

“More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder,” wrote Aol founder Steve Case (Aol is the parent company of TechCrunch).

And, our brightest native and immigrant minds are greeted with extraordinary research and economic opportunity. After World War II, the United States emerged as an economic superpower. Massive investment poured into universities and scientific research, which became the genesis for the Internet, itself.

While it’s difficult to speculate why the U.S. persists as a titan of innovation, we need not be scared into trying to be like other countries. America has been at the top in spite of a lack-luster education system. Fist tap Dale.

We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say

motherboard | What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.”

Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.

But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.

Today, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months—just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. Low corn yield in the U.S., the world’s most important producer, has helped keep prices high.

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

china and japan heading toward war....,

theaustralian | CHINA and other Asian countries could end up at war over territorial disputes if governments keep up their "provocative behaviour", US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has said.

Speaking to reporters before arriving in Tokyo on a trip to Asia, Mr Panetta appealed for restraint amid mounting tensions over territorial rights in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

"I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands, that it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence, and could result in conflict," Mr Panetta said, when asked about a clash between Japan and China.

"And that conflict would then have the potential of expanding."

The Pentagon chief's trip coincides with an escalating row between Asia's two largest economies over an archipelago in the East China Sea administered by Tokyo under the name Senkaku and claimed by China under the name Diaoyu.
FREE 28 Day Trial last Chance

Tensions have steadily mounted since pro-Beijing activists were arrested and deported after landing on one of the islands in August. Japanese nationalists then followed, raising their flag on the same island days later.

On Tuesday, Japan announced it had nationalised three of the islands in the chain, triggering protests in China. Tokyo already owns another and leases the fifth.

The uninhabited islands are in important sea lanes and the seabed nearby is thought to harbour valuable mineral resources.

Sometimes violent demonstrations have been held in China near diplomatic missions in the days since Tokyo's announcement, although there have been no reports of deaths or serious injuries.

Hong Kong broadcaster Cable TV showed footage of clashes on Sunday in Shenzhen between riot police and demonstrators, with some holding a banner calling for a "bloodbath" in Tokyo. Fist tap Dale.

china crash 2012: here's why it's finally happening..,

BusinessInsider | For decades, experts have been predicting a crash in China.

They warned that the centrally planned, export-dependent economy, could not sustain itself year after year.

But through multiple crises, China has motored along, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process.

But things appear to be different this time. Corporate profits are tanking, and the Shanghai Composite is at the same levels it was during the depths of the 2008-2009 crash. A hard landing has hit the corporate sector.

And many are questioning whether policymakers are really in control of the slowdown this time, or if the economy is in fact heading for a hard landing i.e. four straight quarters of below five percent growth.

Click here to see the story of the crash >

NBC "shaping" the occupy movement story...,

NBCNews | Occupy Wall Street took center stage last fall, galvanizing thousands of people across the country to protest against the abuses of what they called the “one percent.”

But one year after the movement began, it has been reduced to a shadow of its former self: Occupy’s makeshift camps have been shuttered, its membership has dwindled amid internal squabbling and what critics called a lack of direction and goals, and its hopes for social change so far have been unrealized.

Amid this backdrop, Occupy protesters have organized a sit-down protest around the New York Stock Exchange in Wall Street on Monday, their one-year anniversary, hoping to regain some momentum.

“Why are we going back to Wall Street? Because the one percent wants it all and they’re not giving any of them up without a struggle. Economic conditions are roughly as bad as they were a year ago and for many, many people they’re precarious,” said Bill Dobbs, of the Occupy Wall Street public relations team.

As Occupy struggled to find its footing after being booted out of its camps, the New York flagship, in particular, wrangled with internal conflicts over financial transparency, leadership and tactics.

Jon Reiner, a laid-off New York marketing executive who traveled to many Occupy camps last fall, is disheartened the movement didn't engage in electoral politics.

“I think there’s an opportunity that it has missed,” said the middle-aged husband and father of two. “I’m still meeting people my own age who are still being laid off. … so the issue has the same prominence in terms of its impact on people’s lives, and I think that the movement shouldn’t be quiet about any of this, and one way not to be quiet in an election cycle is to get yourself in the face of the … candidates."

“I still identify myself with the movement,” he added, “but I don’t feel like I have necessarily an outlet for my activism.”

Another point of contention was whether the movement should embrace violent tactics.

“These big arguments took up a lot of time and energy for months over whether the tactics should remain strictly nonviolent,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University who wrote a book on Occupy. “ … the turning inward of energy was not constructive."

ABC "shaping" the occupy movement story...,

ABCNews | A protest in New York City's financial district is planned for Monday to mark the 1-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a movement against corporate greed that spawned tent cities of protesters around the globe and became a rallying point for the "99 percent".

Twenty-five people were arrested for disorderly conduct on Saturday at the beginning of three days of festivities planned to re-energize the movement, which fell into disarray after countless arrests, in-fighting and an eviction from Zuccotti Park last November.

"This weekend we will mark the occasion of our anniversary by once again showing the powers that be that we see what they are doing, and that soon enough the whole world will again as well," said a message on the Occupy website.

The scene was celebratory today as members enjoyed a concert in Foley Square and attended workshops on civil disobedience in preparation for Monday's march.

At 7:30 a.m. on Monday, one year to the day the movement began, protesters plan to create "a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections" in the city's Financial District, which is home to the country's largest banks and the New York Stock Exchange.