the hunted and the hated...,

thenation | Exclusive audio obtained by The Nation of a stop-and-frisk carried out by the New York Police Department freshly reveals the discriminatory and unprofessional way in which this controversial policy is being implemented on the city’s streets. 

On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin and two of the officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action.

In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.” 

“He grabbed me by my bookbag and he started pushing me down. So I’m going backwards like down the hill and he just kept pushing me, pushing me, it looked like he we was going to hit me,” Alvin recounts. “I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back.”

Alvin’s treatment at the hands of the officers may be disturbing but it is not uncommon. According to their own stop-and-frisk data, the NYPD stops more than 1,800 New Yorkers a day. A New York Times analysis recently determined that more than 20 percent of those stops involve the use of force. And these are only the numbers that the Department records.  Anecdotal evidence suggests both figures are much higher.

In this video, exclusive to TheNation.com, Alvin describes his experience of the stop, and working NYPD officers come forward to explain the damage stop-and-frisk has done to their profession and their relationship to the communities they serve. The emphasis on racking up stops has also hindered what many officers consider to be the real work they should be doing on the streets. The video sheds unprecedented light on a practice, cheered on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, that has put the city’s young people of color in the department’s crosshairs.

Those who haven’t experienced the policy first-hand “have likened Stops to being stuck in an elevator, or in traffic,” says Darius Charney, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “This is not merely an inconvenience, as the Department likes to describe it. This is men with guns surrounding you in the street late at night when you’re by yourself. You ask why and they curse you out and rough you up.”

“The tape brings to light what so many New Yorkers have experienced in the shadows at the hands of the NYPD,” says Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP. “It is time for Mayor Bloomberg to come to grips with the scale of the damage his policies have inflicted on our children and their families. No child should have to grow up fearing both the cops and the robbers.”

“This audio confirms what we’ve been hearing from communities of color, again and again,” says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “They are repeatedly subjected to abusive and disrespectful treatment at the hands of the NYPD. This explains why so many young people don’t trust the police and won’t help the police,” she adds. “It’s not good for law enforcement and not good for the individuals who face this harassment.” Fist tap Dale.

why has the cia given the sinaloa cartel the dope franchise in chicago?

businessinsider | Leaked emails from the private U.S. security firm Stratfor cite a Mexican diplomat who says the U.S. government works with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs into the United States and has sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.

Many people have doubted the quality of Stratfor's intelligence, but the information from MX1—a Mexican foreign service officer who doubled as a confidential source for Stratfor—seems to corroborate recent claims about U.S. involvement in the drug war in Mexico.

Most notably, the reports from MX1 line up with assertions by a Sinaloa cartel insider that cartel boss Joaquin Guzman is a U.S. informant, the Sinaloa cartel was "given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago," and Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartelin exchange for information used to take down rival cartels. Fist tap Dale.

american moral degeneracy

paulcraigroberts | On May 31, 2010, the Israeli right-wing government sent armed military troops to illegally board in international waters Gaza aid ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. The Israelis murdered 8 Turkish citizens and one US citizen in cold blood. Many others were wounded by the forces of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Despite the murder of its citizen, Washington immediately took the side of the crazed Israeli government. The Turks had a different response. The prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, said that the next aid ships would be protected by the Turkish navy. But Washington got hold of its puppet and paid him to shut up. Once upon a time, the Turks were a fierce people. Today they are Washington’s puppets.

We have witnessed this during the past week. The Turkish government is permitting the Islamists from outside Syria, organized by the CIA and Israel, to attack Syria from Turkish territory. On several occasions a mortar shell has, according to news reports if you believe them, fallen just inside the Turkey border. The Turkish military has used the excuse to launch artillery barrages into Syria.

People who with good cause no longer believe the US and western media or the US and western governments think that the mortar shells were fired by US or Israeli operatives, or by the “rebels” they support, in order to give Turkey the excuse to start a NATO war with Syria. A UN sanctioned NATO invasion or air strikes, as in Libya, has been blocked by the Russians and Chinese. But if Syria and Turkey get into a war, NATO must come to the aid of its NATO member, Turkey.

Once again we see that Muslims are easily dominated and slaughtered by Western countries, because Muslim countries are incapable of supporting one another. Instead of supporting one another, Muslim governments accept payoffs to support instead the Christian/Zionist forces of the Western bloc.

Washington knows this, which is one reason why Washington began its assertion of world hegemony in the Muslim Middle East.

In the West, the Ministry of Propaganda continues to talk about the “Syrian revolt.” There is no revolt. What has happened is that the US and Israel have equipped with weapons and sent into Syria Islamists who wish to overthrow the secular Syrian government. Washington knows that if the Syrian government can be destroyed, the country will dissolve into warring factions like Iraq and Libya.

America’s European and Japanese puppet states are, of course, part of Washington’s operation. There will be no complaints from them. But why is the rest of the world content for Washington to interfere in the sovereign affairs of nations to the point of invading, sending in drones and assassination teams, and murdering vast numbers of citizens in seven countries?

Does this acquiescence mean that the world has accepted Washington’s claim that it is the indispensable country with the right to rule the world?

why IS Newsweek indulging make-believe?

gawker | For millennia, humans have wondered what happens after we die. Finally, we have a definitive answer: this week, in an exclusive cover story, Newsweek reveals that "Heaven Is Real." And it sounds suspiciously like a DMT trip as described on internet drug forums.

For nearly as long as humans have been thinking about the possibility of an afterlife, they've also been reading the "Experiences" essays on Erowid.org — accounts of trips and experimentations written by conscientious drug users. Finally, the two pastimes converge, in "Heaven Is Real: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife," possibly the most embarrassing cover story Newsweek has ever run, in which Dr. Eben Alexander falls into a coma and apparently, uh, goes to heaven.

Alexander's account of his experience is exactly as well-written, exactly as scientific, and exactly as interesting as most of the stories in Erowid's "Experience Vault." And that's not the only similarity! Below, take our test: Newsweek cover story or message-board post about drugs? Winners get to go to heaven.

 1) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or Ayahuasca Experience "The Din of Celestial Birds"?

"Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms."

2) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Experience "Rebirth and Translucent Beings"? "A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. [... T]he joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise — that if the joy didn't come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it."

3) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or DMT Experience "The People Behind the Curtain"? "As I walked deeper, I could see, standing in the middle of the room, [...] an object similar to an hour glass. It was slowly turning over. I became aware that this vessel, as it tipped over, transferring its contents from the small red end to the larger blue end, was transforming me."

4) Newsweek Cover Story "Heaven Is Real" or LSD, DXM, Dimenhydinate & Cannabis Experience "In Search of a Meaningful... Something"? "If the head is the center of vision, what I saw encompassed a field extending to behind the ears. A fury of colors came into focus throughout this field, and out of the overwhelming mass of color a being emerged. Although the origin and nature of this being were not known to me, I was in awe of it, and I knew that I was powerless in its presence. It both hated and adored me and communicated through ambient noise which held my undivided attention."

why DOES the History Channel show Ancient Aliens?

9 million elderly at risk of an empty pantry...,

usatoday | About twice a week, when the arthritis in her legs allows it, Judy Slover rises in her one-bedroom apartment at the Rug Mill Towers in Freehold and makes the six-block trek on foot to the food pantry here, Freehold Area Open Door.Sometimes the walk takes a half-hour, sometimes more, all depending on how much pain she feels, she says.

At Open Door, she picks up bread and pasta, apples and oranges, onions and potatoes, maybe some frozen chicken and hamburger; thanks the volunteers; then journeys home. Some days, she can't make the trip at all, says Slover, 60, who also copes with diabetes and depression.

"I've been homeless," she said. "I have no support team. They call me the bag lady, but I gotta do what I gotta do, you know? Nobody's been there for me but Open Door."

Slover is among about 9 million people 50 and older living at risk of going hungry every day, a 79% increase in a decade, according to the AARP.

As they desperately fall behind even more in the wake of job losses and obliterated retirement investments and savings, advocates say it will take more aggressive and creative approaches to help the nation's eldest citizens get food on the table.

Carlos Rodriguez, executive director of the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, says there are multiple reasons for the rise in seniors' food insecurity: unexpected expenses and investment losses can bring those on fixed incomes to the brink of financial disaster, he said.

"So many households have to make choices between paying for utilities, paying for housing or putting food on the table," Rodriguez said. "Seniors have perhaps the added expense — 'Do I take care of my prescription drug or health needs?'"

As a result of the escalating problems, senior health and social services agencies have turned their sights to supplying food; likewise, anti-hunger organizations have turned their sights to seniors. But obstacles to those efforts range from budget cuts to seniors' own reluctance to accept help, organizers say.

The Meals on Wheels Association of America delivered 241 million meals nationwide in 2010 with the support of federal funds, but proposed budget cuts to the Older Americans Act could bring that figure down to about 219 million for senior nutrition programs — a reduction of 22 million meals from 2010, said Meals on Wheels spokeswoman Mary McNamara. That's before a proposed 8.2% across-the-board cut via sequestration that organizers estimate could result in the loss of an extra 17 million meals served nationwide.

And last year, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — also known as the food stamp program — in the United States spent $7.4 billion more than it did the year before. A House vote on a farm bill that would cut $16 billion from the program is awaiting a vote after the November elections, legislators say.

the largest economy in the world is imploding right before our eyes....,

economicollapseblog | A devastating economic depression is rapidly spreading across the largest economy in the world.  Unemployment is skyrocketing, money is being pulled out of the banks at an astounding rate, bad debts are everywhere and economic activity is slowing down month after month.  So who am I talking about?  Not the United States - the economy that I am talking about has a GDP that is more than two trillion dollars larger.  It is not China either - the economy that I am talking about is more than twice the size of China.  You have probably guessed it by now - the largest economy in the world is the EU economy.  Things in Europe continue to get even worse.  Greece and Spain are already experiencing full-blown economic depressions that continue to deepen, and Italy and France are headed down the exact same path that Greece and Spain have gone.  Headlines about violent protests and economic despair dominate European newspapers day after day after day.  European leaders hold summit meeting after summit meeting, but all of the "solutions" that get announced never seem to fix anything.  In fact, the largest economy on the planet continues to implode right in front of our eyes, and the economic shockwave from this implosion is going to be felt to the four corners of the earth.

who destroyed the economy: the case against the baby boomers

theatlantic | My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

 This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max, splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but there weren't a lot of jobs."

I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.

Ultimately, members of my father's generation--generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964--are reaping more than they sowed. They graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids. One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the first boomers began working until last year, when they began to cash out their retirement. (The growth trend over the 12 years since I entered the workforce suggests that the Dow will double exactly once before I retire.) They will leave the workforce far wealthier than their parents did, with even more government promises awaiting them. Boomers will be the first generation of retirees to fully enjoy the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; because Social Security payouts rise faster than price inflation, they will draw more-generous retirement benefits than their parents did, in real terms--at their children's expense. The Urban Institute estimated last year that a couple retiring in 2011, having both earned average wages, will accrue about $200,000 more in Medicare and Social Security benefits over their lifetimes than they paid in taxes to support those programs.

Those retirees and near-retirees bequeath a shambles to their offspring. Young people are unemployed at historically high levels. Global competition is stronger than ever, but American institutions have not adapted to prepare new workers for its challenges. Boomers have run up incomes for the very wealthiest Americans, shrunk the middle class, and, via careless borrowing and reckless financial engineering, driven the economy into the worst recession in 80 years. The Pew Research Center reports that middle-class families today are 5 percent less wealthy than their parents were at the same point in their lives, after adjusting for inflation, even though families today are far more likely to include two wage earners. Another Pew report shows that those ages 55 to 64 are 10 percent wealthier today, even after the Great Recession, than Americans of that age bracket were in 1984. Those younger than 35 are 68 percent less wealthy than the same bracket was in 1984.

stop using the unemployment rate!

esoltas | The standard unemployment rate is a deeply flawed measurement of macroeconomic conditions. It is so flawed that a decline in the unemployment rate as we measure it is not necessarily good news, nor is an increase in the unemployment rate surely bad news. Movements in the unemployment rate are -- or perhaps have become -- ambiguous signals of economic improvement or worsening.

What's wrong with the unemployment rate? The problem comes down to definitions. We know that the unemployment rate is the fraction of unemployed workers in the labor force. To be counted as "unemployed" by the surveyors of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you must "have actively looked for work in the past 4 weeks," and to be in the labor force, you must either match that definition of unemployment or have a job.

Normally these definitions work well. A stay-at-home mother or father who is not looking for work, for a simple instance, should not be counted as "unemployed" in a way which is relevant for public policy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' definitions of unemployment and labor force participation, however, become deeply problematic when economic conditions are so poor that they mischaracterize unemployed workers as having left the labor force, or people who should have joined the labor force as non-participants.

This is breaking the unemployment rate today. As I've pointed out in prior posts on this blog, the labor force stopped growing in 2008. That is largely the result of unemployed workers giving up and dropping out of the labor force, as well as would-be entrants to the labor force not doing so. Only a small fraction of this can be explained by changes in population or workforce, such as the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. These individuals who are not being counted as members of the labor force are, in every sense which is meaningful for public policy, unemployed. They number roughly 5.6 million as of July 2012.

This is why the numbers are so misleading, and why I think we cannot keep talking about falling unemployment as good news. We're saying, in effect, this: Good news, America! Another million workers gave up hope this morning! Don't you feel better about the labor market now!

since the end of world war II, the economy has not been faced with such a large employment slack

seekingalpha | the USA economy is screwed up because 8% of the pre-recession workforce has been vaporized (the red line on the above graph is currently at 92% of the pre-recession peak).

If one is on social security, in some other social safety net, employed, or the 0.001% - the new normal may not be that bad. You may pity the jobless, but you may be missing the reality that 8% loss of jobs caused the economy to lose 8% of its prime driver - Joe "the consumer" Sixpack. With over 2/3rds of the economy consumer driven, the solution is obvious - create 24 million jobs.

Since the end of World War II, the economy has not been faced with such a large employment slack.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke sees this as the economic headwind which is causing terrible growth, and the stated reason for QE3. This author doubts that quantitative easing on top of a zero interest rate policy can have any effect on employment. It seems like a "hail Mary" play stemming from a lack of fiscal policy stimulus from Congress - and even a Hail Mary pass with no receivers downfield, if you will.

Any solution to stimulate employment is in fiscal policy and regulation - and possibly a revisit to policy utilized post WWII to create jobs for the returning soldiers.

watch, read, google - "after next-gen technology" - and other fascinating breadcrumbs....,

VeteransToday | Mombasa (WNT) The Adamus Group announces an 18 month project in partnership with governments of Africa, the USAID and the International Wildlife Foundation to operate two Skyships on their first “peaceful” mission.

The advanced LTA (lighter than air) defense platforms have been used in counter-terrorism and drug interdiction efforts in the past. This is the first application of “blimps,” each supplied with the most powerful sensor arrays ever to have been used for a non-military mission. The platforms, capable of continent wide missions are equipped with advanced sensor packages, synthetic aperture radar, low light high definition streaming video and “next generation” FLIR (infared) optics. 

Communication is through direct microwave and satellite up-link.

Several television networks have shown an interest in participation as the platform capabilities, previously “military only” technology have, not only the ability to aid in the understanding of wildlife, climate and agricultural development and coastal marine environments but have wide geological and even archaeological capabilities as well.

Project manager James Hanke of Adamus told reporters in Mombasa:

“We thank the US government and Department to of Homeland Security for making available these advanced capabilities.  It is our hope, in what we deep a “ploughshares” effort, to provide a bank of data that will inspire a generation of scientists of every discipline.

This project, we predict, will have an immediate impact on securing both wildlife resources and, at the same time, supply a wealth of previously unavailable data to ensure responsible and productive land management and resource development.
In many cases, we begin with a ‘blank slate,’ we have little idea what we will find but, for certain, our ‘after next generation’ imagery and sensor capability will open, not only new vistas for investment but tourism as well.”

The advanced airships are to begin operation in first quarter 2013.  A number of universities have indicated a desire to acquire data and a ”mission based’ tasking committee of scholars and scientists will be overseeing operations in concert with wildlife management and security officials.

voting for death

lindinh | America, you have become a nation of enablers and apologists for tyranny and mass murder. You condemn the Nazi and gulag guards of times past even as you celebrate your own mercenaries and torturers, even as you explain away, if not outright cheer, the unspeakable crimes committed by your sons and daughters. You don’t care who you kill, as long as your soldiers are paid, and your munitions, bomb and tank factories are humming.

Safely ensconced in academic luna parks, your leading intellectuals lean slightly right or left, but never enough to rock this blazing gunboat, lest they sour the cocktail parties or, god forbid, have their tenure revoked. Mouths stuffed with antipasti, they’re expert at sidestepping Israel’s prolific crimes, 9/11, Bin Laden’s faux death or the parasitic Federal Reserve, and as another joke election nears, they’re all gung ho about candidates who back illegal wars and banking frauds, since each is supposedly the lesser of two evils.

For the past five presidential elections, winning candidates have won 52.9%, 50.7%, 47.9%, 49.2% and 43% of the popular votes respectively, so there hasn’t been an overwhelming mandate for any of them, but with the runner ups from the other major party often close behind, and in 2000, actually ahead in the popular vote count, the two-party system has gotten a stranglehold on our public life and pocketbooks. As for our senators, only two are not Democrat or Republican. An American election, then, is basically a rigged referendum for this thoroughly corrupt and murderous system, and simply by voting, you will give it the green light to go on killing and looting. Every four years, we’re railroaded into sanctioning endless war and bottomless corruption. If disappointed, we’re then steered by our brainwashing and dumbing down media to a near clone of our current rapist.

The Good Old Party spooks the upper and middle classes by threatening, If you don’t vote for us, the Dems will take your hard-earned cash and give it to the freeloaders, crackheads and other miscellaneous losers, while the Democrats, in turn, scare the lower rungs by snarling, If you don’t vote for us, the Republicans will let your retired, diapered ass rot under a bridge, on a piece of cardboard, but lordy, lordy, lordy, it is already happening, but let us not sweat the details.

if this happened at the peak of american power and prosperity...,

not one word about poverty...,

aera-l | Lots of talk about the middle class. Tax cuts for the middle class. Saving the middle class. Doing more for the middle class.

Not one word about poverty.

No mention that nearly 25% of the children in the world's richest nation live in poverty. Not one word. The overriding influence of poverty on educational achievement has been noted in, e.g. (alphabetical order by author):

1. "Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform" [Berliner (2005)], at;http://bit.ly/ff8BV

 2. "Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success" [Berliner (2009)], http://bit.ly/fqiCUA

3. "Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances"   [Duncan & Murnane (2011a)] at;http://bit.ly/nCkmKv

4. "Economic inequality: The real cause of the urban school problem," [Duncan & Murnane (2011b)] at;http://bit.ly/rv3rMO

5. "To Improve Schools, Fight Poverty, Education Expert Says" [Gosier (2011)], online at; http://bit.ly/qyrBSL; - the expert is Stephen Krashen;http://bit.ly/Ui9xm

6. "Re: Economic Inequality: The Real Cause of Urban School Problems #2" [Hake (2011a)] at;http://bit.ly/ozuZEn

7. "Is the 'Teacher Effect' the Dominant Factor in Students' Academic Gain?" [Hake (2011b)], online at;http://bit.ly/g6UWUZ

8. "Is the 'Teacher Effect' the Dominant Factor in Students' Academic Gain? #3" [Hake (2011c)], online at;http://bit.ly/jy61UB

9. "Class Matters. Why Won't We Admit It?" [Ladd & Fiske (2011)] at;http://nyti.ms/vx3nub

10. "Education and Poverty: Visualizations of World, US, and State-level Educational Data" [Marder (2011)] at;http://bit.ly/nYC6eF

11. "Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics" [Marder (2012)] at;http://bit.ly/KPitWM

12. "The hard bigotry of low expectations and low priorities" [Ravani (2011b)] at;http://bit.ly/sUZ17T

13. "Unaddressed Link Between Poverty & Education" [Schaffer (2011)] at;http://bit.ly/tbckql

paid pundits and ignant peasants pretend there was some kind of contest...,

I squinted and failed to see the air gap...,

real unemployment reaches 20% in colorado...,

thecoloradoobserver | The slowest economic recovery since World War II is going especially slow for sections of Colorado, according to a letter from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) obtained by The Colorado Observer.

 

In seven counties in Colorado unemployed individuals are close to or exceeding 20% of the population, a letter from the Chief Economist of CDLE to the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

The letter, obtained through the Colorado Open Records Act, was sent August 29 as required by federal law. According to the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act, the Colorado Labor Department is required to certify counties where the “Not Employed Rate” surpasses 19.5%.

The “Not Employed Rate” is defined as “the percentage of individuals over the age of 18 who reside within the community and who are ready, willing and able to be employed but are unable to find employment as determined by the State Department of Labor.”

Ranking highest was Costilla County at 23.56 percent. The list runs from larger counties like Pueblo (20.09%), Montrose (20.62%) and Fremont (19.66%) to smaller populations like Huerfano (21.78%), Archuleta (19.97%) and Dolores (19.85%).

Whereas the unemployment rate doesn’t include people who are out of work, but have given up looking for a job, the “Not Employed Rate” gives a fuller picture of the dire economic situation many Coloradans are currently facing.

Colorado has faced one of the slowest economic recoveries in the nation coming out of the recession.

Last month, Colorado’s official unemployment rate — 8.2% — surpassed the national unemployment rate for first time in nearly 7 years. While unemployment fell from 8.3% the previous month, Colorado’s unemployment rate rose for four consecutive months prior to that.

is all of japan radioactive?

fukushima-diary | Iodine 131 was measured from sewage sludge in Kumamoto city. Kumamoto city is about 1070 km from Fukushima plant.

7/24/2012   33 Bq/Kg, 31 Bq/Kg
7/25/2012   120 Bq/Kg
7/25/2012   150 Bq/Kg ,11 Bq/Kg

humanzee religion in action...,

strike point senkaku....,

newscientist | It all comes down to black gold. Anti-Japan protests erupted in at least 100 Chinese cities on Tuesday, as anger over a struggle for control of oil and gas in the East China Sea turned violent, and increased the tension between the countries.

The focal point is a dispute over a remote island chain known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, lying east of China and south-west of Japan (see map).

The US handed them to Japan after the second world war, but China says that it has a prior claim. Japan recently purchased several of the islands back from a private Japanese owner, and their nationalisation has ratcheted up anger in China.

"There is potential oil and gas," says Pui-Kwan Tse of the US Geological Survey. It's not clear how much is there, or whether it would be economical to drill for it.

However, the East China Sea is rich in oil and gas reserves, many of which have only been discovered in recent decades. China and Japan are both eager to stake a claim: China's energy demand is growing rapidly, and Japan's reserves are limited.