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23 posters

    Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

    giovonni
    giovonni


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    Post  giovonni Tue Feb 15, 2011 3:28 pm

    The food crisis arising largely from climate issues -- drought, principally -- is gathering momentum faster than I had thought possible. And its implications are very grave. Yet there is almost nothing about it in the political conversation.

    Wheat prices
    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 20110212_fnp002
    Not just China’s problem

    Feb 10th 2011

    FEW commodities are impervious to the “China effect”—the upward pressure on prices from rampant demand in the world’s bounciest big economy. Coffee is one: few Chinese drink the stuff. Wheat has been another. China is the world’s biggest producer, remaining largely self-sufficient by growing some 18% of the global harvest. Higher prices have been caused by growing appetites and supply disruptions elsewhere.

    Things could be about to change. On February 8th the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned that a drought in China’s wheat belt could devastate harvests in June. So the country may buy large amounts on global markets. This could be a “game changer” for wheat, says Sudakshina Unnikrishnan of Barclays Capital.

    The FAO reported that rain and snowfalls were well below average in eight wheat-growing regions. The local weather bureau claims, a bit implausibly, that if there are no showers soon in Shandong province the drought will be the worst for 200 years. The parching threatens a quarter of the country’s crop.

    The worst may not happen. As Kisan Gunjal of the FAO points out, the heavens may yet open in the coming months. China’s government has pledged to divert water to the stricken areas and provide cash for wells. “Weather modification” teams, which apparently helped to keep the Beijing Olympics rain-free, are turning their hand to seeding clouds with chemical-filled artillery shells to encourage downpours.

    China has also built up sizeable wheat stocks—60m tonnes, according to America’s Department of Agriculture—since the 2008 food crisis. But it is likely to want to keep these buffers high, particularly after a series of recent disruptions to supply. Drought in Russia, a big supplier, led to an export ban last year. Floods in Australia—linked to the broader La Niña phenomenon, an occasional wobble in the climate which may also be playing a role in China’s drought—have hit the quality of wheat for export.

    The International Grains Council estimates world wheat production in 2011 will be 647m tonnes, much lower than in the two years before. If China starts buying, importers may step up efforts to secure wheat and exporters may impose more bans. Dark clouds are gathering, but not the right sort.

    Source;
    http://www.economist.com/node/18118817
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    Post  giovonni Fri Feb 18, 2011 3:33 am

    There is a blessing in this for all humanity...

    Japan ends Antarctic whaling season early
    17 February 2011 Last updated at 22:11 ET
    [img]Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 _51318068_51318067[/img]

    Video/Story here;
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12502006

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    Post  giovonni Sat Feb 19, 2011 2:35 pm

    We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on "intelligence" and "security" and this is what we bought. It has proven useless at identifying and warning in advance about things like the Egyptian revolution. But is it excellent at violating your ever diminishing civil rights, and groping you at the air port. Increasingly I feel like I am living in an Orwell novel.

    ***********

    Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people


    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Internet-afp


    By Stephen C. Webster
    Friday, February 18th, 2011

    These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your "friends" are.

    But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my "friends" even real people?

    In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online "personas," allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they'd like.

    The revelation was among those contained in the company's emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group "Anonymous" broke into their systems.

    In another document unearthed by "Anonymous," one of HBGary's employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.

    "There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas," it said.

    Government involvement

    Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of "persona management software."

    While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple "official" social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.

    Unfortunately, the Air Force's contract description doesn't help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent."

    It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator's Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it's a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

    The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that server's "geosite" to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.

    The Air Force added that the "place of performance" for the contract would be at MacDill Air Force Base, along with Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad. The contract was offered on June 22, 2010.

    It was not clear exactly what the Air Force was doing with this software, or even if it had been procured.

    Manufacturing consent

    Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. "Persona management software" can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual "people" could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.

    You could call it a virtual flash mob, or a digital "Brooks Brothers Riot," so to speak: compelling, but not nearly as spontaneous as it appears.

    That's precisely what got DailyKos blogger Happy Rockefeller in a snit: the potential for military-run armies of fake people manipulating and, in some cases, even manufacturing the appearance of public opinion.

    "I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think," the blogger wrote. "I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.

    "That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective."

    It was Rockefeller who was first to highlight the Air Force's "persona" contract, which was available on a public website.

    A call to MacDill Air Force Base, requesting an explanation of the contract and what this software might be used for, was answered by a public affairs officer who promised a call-back. No reply was received at time of this story's publication.

    Other e-mails circulated by HBGary's CEO illuminate highly personal data about critics of the US Chamber of Commerce, including detailed information about their spouses and children, as well as their locations and professional links. The firm, it was revealed, was just one part of a group called "Team Themis," tasked by the Chamber to come up with strategies for responding to progressive bloggers and others.

    "Team Themis" also included a proposal to use malware hacks against progressive organizations, and the submission of fake documents in an effort to discredit established groups.

    HBGary was also behind a plot by Bank of America to destroy WikiLeaks' technology platform, other emails revealed. The company was humiliated by members of "Anonymous" after CEO Aaron Barr bragged that he'd "infiltrated" the group.

    A request for comment emailed to HBGary did not receive a reply.

    Update: HBGary Federal among bidders

    A list of interested vendors responding to the Air Force contract for "persona management software" included HBGary subsideary HBGary Federal, further analysis of a government website has revealed.

    Other companies that offered their services included Global Business Solutions and Associates LLC, Uk Plus Logistics, Ltd., NevinTelecom, Bunker Communications and Planmatrix LLC.

    Source;
    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ordered-software-to-manage-army-of-fake-virtual-people/
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    Post  giovonni Sun Feb 20, 2011 1:11 pm

    i realize this report, is in regards to only the United States, but this is a very good indicator that fresh food production and prices will continue to rise...
    Very soon water supply forecasts are going to be a regular staple of weather reports. While the deniers chant their mantras the world is changing before our eyes.



    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Sdohomeweb


    U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook for March to May 2011

    By Terry Barrett - Feb 17, 2011

    Following is the text of the U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook as released by the National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Maryland:

    Latest Seasonal Assessment - The drought outlook for Spring (March-May) 2011, made on February 17, was based largely upon climate anomalies associated with an ongoing, mature La Ni? that has begun to weaken, with ENSO-neutral or La Nina conditions equally likely by May-June. The CPC monthly and seasonal outlooks indicate enhanced odds for below median precipitation and above median temperatures across the southern tier of the Nation and in the central Plains which favors drought persistence from southern Arizona eastward into the southern and central Plains, along the Gulf Coast States, and northward into the Carolina Piedmont. Similarly, drought development is forecast across much of the rest of the southern U.S., from southwestern Arizona eastward into the southern and central Plains, northern and southeastern Texas, and along parts of the Gulf and southern and middle Atlantic Coasts. Although there were some concerns in the Northwest that spring drought development was possible after a mild and very dry January, a good start to their wet season plus ongoing storms and enhanced odds of above median March precipitation suppresses any notion of spring drought development. Prospects for improvement are indicated for the lower Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio Valleys, with some improvement predicted for the AR-LA-TX region, the northern Alabama and Georgia border, and in the central Appalachians. This is based upon enhanced odds for above normal monthly precipitation in this area, plus some hints of wetness in the La Nina MAM composite and trend, although the frequency of occurrence is low. Drought relief has occurred in Hawaii this winter, courtesy of heavy rainfall associated with La Nina, and continued improvement is forecast for the islands remaining in drought.

    A very dry and cold December and January, along with spotty early February precipitation, has resulted in expanding drought across most of the middle and southern Atlantic States. Many USGS stream flows from western South Carolina northward into central Virginia have fallen below the 10th percentile (much below normal). An exception to this was in northern Florida and southern Georgia where late January and early February moderate to heavy rains improved drought conditions and increased stream flows to above-normal values. In contrast, USGS river flows in north-central Florida, still suffering from long-term drought deficiencies, remained at or below the 25th percentile. Since La Niña MAM precipitation composites and the CPC monthly and seasonal outlooks strongly favor enhanced odds for below median precipitation in the southern Atlantic States, drought is expected to persist or develop across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. In the mid-Atlantic North Carolina to southern New Jersey), the odds for subnormal monthly and seasonal precipitation gradually decrease in the outlooks as one heads north (e.g. become equal chances), and actually tilt toward above median monthly precipitation further to the west (e.g. central Appalachians). However, the La Niña MAM precipitation composites hint at dryness along the coast while lingering effects from last summer’s drought point toward persistence and development. Forecast confidence for southern Atlantic States are high; Forecast confidence for middle Atlantic States are moderate.

    Across the Southeast, La Niña MAM composites indicate the highest negative precipitation anomalies along the central and eastern Gulf Coast, from southern Louisiana eastward to northeast Florida. The CPC monthly and seasonal outlooks indicate the highest odds for below median precipitation along the eastern two-thirds of the Gulf Coast, and lower odds along the western Gulf. Subnormal precipitation odds in both the monthly and seasonal outlooks quickly decrease to equal chances as one heads north, and actually transition to above median precipitation for March in Tennessee and areas northward. Therefore, drought is expected to persist or develop across most of the Southeast, except in northern sections of Mississippi and Alabama where initial conditions are wetter and the monthly outlook favors near to above median precipitation. Due to the weak and mixed signals among the precipitation tools beyond mid- February, some improvement is forecast in western Mississippi and the northern border of Georgia and Alabama. Forecast confidence for the immediate Gulf Coast States are high; Forecast confidence for the remainder of the Southeast is moderate.

    From mid-November into late January, northwesterly flow, attributed to a strong and persistent negative Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation (upper-air blocking pattern), resulted in abnormally cold and dry conditions across the lower Ohio, Tennessee, and middle Mississippi Valleys. This in turn caused a slight expansion of moderate drought and abnormal dryness in northern Arkansas, southern Missouri, and southern Illinois. Furthermore, the persistent and strong AO/NOA suppressed the expected winter surplus precipitation that normally occurs in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys during a La Niña. Currently, with the AO/NAO a non-factor and less influential during spring, the CPC monthly outlook favors a tendency for above median precipitation across the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys. In the lower Mississippi Valley, the seasonal La Niña MAM composites also point toward above normal precipitation although the frequency is rather low. In addition, the seasonal CPC outlook has equal chances. And as already mentioned, most forecast tools and the CPC outlooks favor enhanced odds of below normal precipitation as one nears the Gulf Coast. Accordingly, improvement is forecast in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and into northern Arkansas, while some improvement is expected for the rest of Arkansas. Forecast confidence for the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys are moderate to high; Forecast confidence for Arkansas is moderate.

    In most of Texas, near to above normal precipitation has fallen since late December, resulting in a reduction of drought coverage and severity across southern, southeastern, and eastern sections of the state. Surplus fall precipitation had carried the Panhandle into the winter without any drought impacts. However, forecasts favor drier and warmer than normal conditions during March which continue through the spring, although subnormal seasonal precipitation odds are less than the monthly outlook. Due to these relatively dry and warm forecasts, drought is expected to continue (or worsen), and return to northern and southern Texas. Forecast confidence for Texas is moderate to high.

    Following a very dry January, two heavy snow storms blanketed parts of the south-central Plains in early February, but missed most of the main drought areas. Some improvement is forecast in eastern Oklahoma where heavy snow occurred and the La Niña MAM composites indicate some wetness (but with a low frequency of occurrence). Elsewhere in the central Plains, precipitation tools at most time ranges indicate an elevated chance for below median precipitation, especially the La Niña MAM composite which has a high frequency occurrence. Just to the north, however, forecast tools point toward wetness, plus soil moistures are extremely high (above 90th percentile). This limits any northward drought expansion due to existing moisture conditions. Accordingly, the persistence area in eastern Colorado and western Kansas was kept from the previous outlook issued on February 3, while the area of development in the central Great Plains slightly expanded northward and eastward in line with the monthly and seasonal outlooks, but confined by the very wet soil moisture conditions in the northern Plains and upper Midwest. Forecast confidence for the south-central and central Plains are moderate to high.

    Since mid-December, drier than normal conditions have affected much of Arizona and New Mexico. As of February 15, SNOTEL average river basin snow water content values are 30 to 70 percent of normal in southern and central Arizona and New Mexico, with basin average precipitation since October 1 running at about the same values (32 to 75 percent of normal). Precipitation tools at all time ranges indicate enhanced odds of below median precipitation and above normal temperatures. Due to a lack of adequate precipitation this winter, a tendency for dryness during La Niña, forecasts of below median precipitation and above normal temperatures, and decreasing precipitation climatologies for areas already in drought, drought persistence and development can be expected across much of Arizona and New Mexico, and into southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado. However, expansion is not forecast for southern California as many locations have already exceeded their normal winter precipitation and approached their normal ANNUAL totals from December’s excessive precipitation. Forecast confidence for the Southwest is high.

    During the 2010-11 winter, heavy rainfall alleviated drought and dryness on Kauai and Oahu and diminished drought conditions across the rest of the central and western Hawaiian Islands which is typical for a La Niña winter. Enhanced rainfall during early-to-mid February and the ongoing La Niña favor additional improvement in Hawaii. Forecast confidence for Hawaii is high.

    SOURCE: National Weather Service
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-17/u-s-seasonal-drought-outlook-for-march-to-may-2011-text-.html
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    Post  giovonni Tue Feb 22, 2011 3:19 pm

    This was as predictable as spring following winter. We have financed two wars on borrowed money, and now the country that holds our markers, wants what it wants, and we can hardly say no.

    Cables show China used debt holdings to press US Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Photo_1298324647194-1-1

    Feb 21 04:45 PM US/Eastern

    Leaked diplomatic cables vividly show China's willingness to translate its massive holdings of US debt into political influence on issues ranging from Taiwan's sovereignty to Washington's financial policy.

    China's clout -- gleaned from its nearly $900 billion stack of US debt -- has been widely commented on in the United States, but sensitive cables show just how much influence Beijing has and how keen Washington is to address its rival's concerns.

    An October 2008 cable, released by WikiLeaks, showed a senior Chinese official linking questions about much-needed Chinese investment to sensitive military sales to Taiwan.

    Amid the panic of Lehman Brothers' collapse and the ensuing liquidity crunch, Liu Jiahua, an official who then helped manage China's foreign reserves, was "non-committal on the possible resumption of lending."

    Instead, "Liu -- citing an Internet discussion forum -- said that as in the United States, the Chinese leadership must pay close attention to public opinion in forming policies," according to the memo.

    "In that regard, the recent announcement that the United States intends to sell another arms package to Taiwan increases the difficulty the Chinese government faces in explaining any supporting policies to the Chinese public."

    His comments came days after the Pentagon notified Congress it was poised to sell $6.5 billion worth of arms to China's arch rival Taiwan.

    The much-delayed package was eventually sold, but did not include requested F-16 jets.

    Taiwan and the mainland have been governed separately since they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, but Beijing sees the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.

    In the same meeting, Liu -- wary about Chinese losses -- also pressed US officials for a government guarantee that any investments in US financial institutions would be back-stopped.

    "Liu remained non-committal on the possible resumption of lending, but agreed that (China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange) had sufficient confidence in those institutions and would consider a system whereby the Federal Reserve or other US government agency would act as a guarantor," according to the cable.

    Trying to allay his concerns, Liu's US interlocutors pointed to the government's ability to "guarantee bank liabilities to support the banking system and address the systemic financial risk that could be caused by a potential bank failure."

    Another cable, dating from March 2009, showed US sensitivities about possible changes in the composition or level of those holdings, which could have major repercussions for US finance.

    China is the largest holder of US debt, underpinning US government spending. Its holdings of US Treasuries have more than doubled since 2007.

    A week after Premier Wen Jiabao stated publicly that he was "'concerned" regarding the security of its US Treasury holdings," the US embassy in Beijing sent a cable to Washington hoping to answer the question: "What Did Wen Mean?"

    "Wen's remarks immediately generated intense speculation that China might be contemplating some adjustment in its foreign reserve management policy," the note said, reporting that a senior Treasury official had also sought clarification.

    The writer pointed to China's concern about US inflation -- which could reduce the value of Chinese dollar holdings -- stemming from the Federal Reserves' ultra-easy monetary policies.

    Source;
    http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.ae2d2f54b4997246bb7b180d2736bac1.e1&show_article=1
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    Post  giovonni Wed Feb 23, 2011 12:46 am

    Sounds familiar... Just another corrupt dysfunctional governmental system...

    ***********
    Mikhail Gorbachev lambasts Vladimir Putin's 'sham' democracy

    Former Soviet leader launches harshest criticism yet of Russia's ruling regime ahead of 80th-birthday celebrations

    from; Miriam Elder in Moscow
    Monday 21 February 2011

    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Mikhail-Gorbachev-007
    Mikhail Gorbachev accuses Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin of arrogance over
    their plan to jointly decide who should run in next year's presidential elections.

    Russia under prime minister Vladimir Putin is a sham democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev has said in his harshest criticism yet of the ruling regime.

    "We have everything – a parliament, courts, a president, a prime minister and so on. But it's more of an imitation," the last president of the Soviet Union said.

    Gorbachev, who oversaw the softening of the communist system and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, has become increasingly critical of the modern Russian state, accusing its leaders of rolling back the democratic reforms of the 1990s.

    Speaking at a press conference ahead of his 80th birthday, Gorbachev criticised Putin for manipulating elections.

    In response to the prime minister and former president's comments that he and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, would decide between them who would run for office in March 2012, Gorbachev said: "It's not Putin's business. It must be decided by the nation in elections."

    He called Putin's statements a sign of "incredible conceit".

    Asked how he thought the regime approached human rights, Gorbachev said: "There's a problem there. It's a sign of the state of our democracy." He was echoing statements made by Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, during a visit to Russia last week.

    Gorbachev said United Russia, the ruling party founded with the sole goal of supporting Putin's leadership, was a throwback.

    "United Russia reminds me of the worst copy of the Communist party," he said. "We have institutions but they don't work. We have laws but they must be enforced."

    Its stranglehold over political life would eventually backfire. "The monopoly ends in rotting and hampers the development of democratic processes."

    Gobachev said he did not like how Putin and Medvedev were behaving. "It's a shame that our modern leaders aren't very modern," he said.

    Gorbachev now runs a charity foundation that will hold a gala at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 30 March to mark his birthday. He co-owns the country's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

    Held up in the west as a hero for his softening of the Soviet system and eventual acceptance of its fall, Gorbachev remains widely despised inside Russia, where he is seen as a traitor who allowed the empire to crumble and ushered in a period of great uncertainty. Over the years he has aligned himself with the cause of Russia's sidelined liberals.

    On Monday, Gorbachev called the regime's campaign against jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky politically motivated. "Politics shouldn't have been involved in [the case], but they were," he said.

    He noted the case of Natalya Vasilieva, a court clerk who worked on the Khodorkovsky trial and broke ranks to publicly announce that the judge had been pressured throughout and had a verdict and sentence pushed on him.

    "I fully believe her," Gorbachev said. "People can't stand it anymore – she saw what was happening with her own eyes."

    • This article was amended on 22 February 2011 to restore missing text in the third paragraph.

    Source;
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/21/gorbachev-birthday-putin-democracy-russia
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    Post  giovonni Thu Feb 24, 2011 12:45 pm

    Power...Control...Profits...
    This, of course, is just what it looks like: an attempt by Pharma to take control of what -- thanks to the medical marijuana initiatives -- it realizes is a hugely profitable market. It is a completely cynical move.
    Big Pharma wins, and the DEA wins because this assures their budget will continue. I predict it isn't going to work.


    DEA to legalize marijuana only for ‘Big Pharma,’ NORML claims Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Rx-Marijuana2-150x150

    By Eric W. Dolan
    Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 -- 8:33 pm

    A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposal to reclassify the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana as a Schedule III substance would allow pharmaceutical companies to market the drug while still penalizing common recreational use, according to marijuana law reform advocates.

    The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is currently a Schedule I substance within the US Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive schedule with the greatest criminal penalties.

    In November 2010, the DEA proposed reclassifying dronabinol, a synthetic THC, as a Schedule III substance, which would place it among substances such as hydrocodone and allow it to be dispensed with a written or oral prescription.

    "The DEA's intent is to expand the federal government's schedule III listing to include pharmaceutical products containing naturally derived formations of THC while simultaneously maintain existing criminal prohibitions on the plant itself," Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), wrote at AlterNet.

    With its proposal, the DEA is responding to the demands of large pharmaceutical companies, he claimed.

    Marijuana plants and THC extracts would remain illegal under the proposal, but companies would be able to purchase THC from a government-licensed provider to develop pharmaceutical products.

    "While the DEA's forthcoming regulatory change promises to stimulate the advent of legally available, natural THC therapeutic products... the change will offer no legal relief for those hundreds of thousands of Americans who believe that therapeutic relief is best obtained by use of the whole plant itself," Armentano added.

    "Rather the DEA appears content to try to walk a political and semantic tightrope that alleges: 'pot is bad,' but 'pot-derived pharmaceuticals are good.'"

    THC can help cancer patients regain their appetites and sense of taste, according to a study published on Wednesday.

    "This is the first randomized controlled trial to show that THC makes food taste better and improves appetites for patients with advanced cancer, as well as helping them to sleep and to relax better," Dr. Wendy Wismer, associate professor at the University of Alberta, said. "Our findings are important, as there is no accepted treatment for chemosensory alterations experienced by cancer patients."

    Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation to legalize the medical use of marijuana.

    Source;
    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/23/dea-to-legalize-marijuana-only-for-big-pharma-group-claims/
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    Post  giovonni Thu Feb 24, 2011 1:11 pm

    Has any nation ever successfully invaded Russia...And why would they ever want to??
    The imperial insanity continues...Forget about feeding your people and repairing your failing infrastructures...


    Russia plans $650bn defence spend up to 2020 Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 _51405039_jet

    Eight nuclear submarines, 600 jets and 1,000 helicopters feature in plans to renew Russia's military by 2020, priced at 19tn roubles (£400bn; $650bn.

    One hundred warships are also due to be bought in, including two helicopter carriers, in addition to two already being purchased from France.

    The submarines will carry the Bulava missile, despite recent test failures.

    Analysts say the ambitious programme only makes sense if the military upgrades its training and recruitment.

    A painful drive to streamline the armed forces is already under way, with up to 200,000 officers losing their jobs and nine out of every 10 army units disbanded, the Associated Press news agency notes.

    If the renewal is a success, it will leave Russia less reliant on the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the USSR.

    "Russia needs a professional non-commissioned officer corps to train specialists who can really put these arms to effective use," Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst, told AP.

    "This spending necessitates a whole new kind of military."
    Missile defence boost

    Last week, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin announced that spending on defence development would triple from 0.5% of GDP to 1.5% from next year.

    The defence spending was detailed in Moscow on Thursday by First Deputy Defence Minister Vladimir Popovkin.

    "The main task is the modernisation of our armed forces," he said.

    Much of the new spending will go on Russia's long under-funded navy. Apart from the submarines, 35 corvettes and 15 frigates will be ordered.

    Russia has already ordered two French-built Mistral helicopter carriers, allowing it to rapidly deploy hundreds of troops and dozens of armoured vehicles on foreign soil.

    Ten divisions equipped with the new S-500 anti-missile system are set to become the backbone of the country's missile defences.

    New aircraft will include Su-34 and Su-35 fighters, and Mi-26 transport and Mi-8 gunship helicopters, AP adds.

    Repeated failures of the Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile caused embarrassment for Russia, though two successful tests were reportedly conducted last year.

    Source;
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12567043













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    Post  giovonni Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:19 pm

    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Images-westernshugdensociety-org-global-dalai-lama-Reting_lama-268x400
    Reting Lama - The person responsible for choosing the false Dalai Lama

    This may seem a very esoteric issue from our cultural view. But Asia sees it differently, and this has large consequences. The death of the current Dali Lama will change the game utterly and the Chinese, thanks to thousands of years of culture, can commit to and carry out a long game. Note particularly the statute outlawing the Dali Lama's reincarnation outside of China.

    Thanks to Jim Baraff.


    The Politics of Reincarnation

    It’s probably best not to even try making sense of Beijing’s pronouncements on the 14th Dalai Lama and other Tibetan spiritual leaders: you’ll only make your head hurt. Last week the officially atheist Chinese government’s State Administration for Religious Affairs disclosed plans to enact a new law forbidding the 75-year-old Buddhist deity to be reborn anywhere but on Chinese-controlled soil, and giving final say to Chinese authorities when the time comes to identify his 15th incarnation.

    That might seem to pose a dilemma, given the exiled leader’s earlier promise that he will never again be reincarnated in Tibet as long as his homeland remains under China’s heel. Still, no one seems too concerned just now about the Dalai Lama’s next life. Instead, attention has focused on an all-too-worldly fracas over the finances of the 25-year-old Tibetan-born holy man who seems most likely to assume leadership of the exile community after the current Dalai Lama’s death: the 17th Karmapa Lama.

    It began in late January when a random police check found a car in northern India hauling roughly $200,000 in Indian currency. Investigators followed the trail to the Karmapa’s monastery in the Indian town of Dharamsala, where they confiscated trunkloads of cash, reportedly amounting to $1.6 million, including more than $100,000 in Chinese currency—a discovery that immediately revived old suspicions in India’s intelligence community that the Karmapa is a Chinese spy. Beijing didn’t help calm the situation when it quickly issued a denial that the Karmapa was any such thing.

    Indian authorities have kept a close eye on the Karmapa ever since he fled Chinese-occupied Tibet in the winter of 1999–2000. Born to a nomadic Tibetan family in 1985, Ogyen Trinley Dorje was identified at the age of 7 as the reincarnation of the 16th Karmapa and taken to a monastery to be raised under constant surveillance by Chinese security forces, forbidden to leave the country even briefly. When his India-based religious tutor was barred from Tibet, the boy staged a harrowing escape via SUV, horseback, and helicopter, arriving in Dharamsala by taxi in early January 2000.

    In the years since, the Karmapa has refrained from criticizing the Chinese government—in sharp contrast to the Dalai Lama’s blunt denunciations since his escape from occupied Tibet in 1959—and Beijing has never admitted that the Karmapa has left for good. The Chinese say he’s merely on a quest to retrieve a black hat said to have magical powers and other artifacts currently housed at a monastery in the eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim. The lack of recrimination has only heightened suspicions among some Indian intelligence operatives who still seem unable to accept that a mere 14-year-old could elude Chinese security forces and survive such a trek across snow-choked Himalayan passes. “There are people in the shadows who are suspicious of China and deeply uncomfortable with the Tibetan exiles’ perceived long-term drift towards accommodation with Beijing,” says Robert Barnett, a Tibetologist at Columbia University.

    The politics of reincarnation has always been a treacherous area in Tibet. In past centuries, rival claimants were often in danger of assassination, and after the Dalai Lama gave his blessing to a Tibetan boy as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, the child disappeared and Chinese authorities installed another youngster in his place. The man generally recognized as the 17th Karmapa himself has at least two rivals for the title, although his claim is supported by both the Dalai Lama and Beijing—and most ordinary Tibetans. Still, to prevent possible unrest, Indian authorities have barred all claimants from the monastery where the black hat is kept. Followers of the two rivals have clashed violently in the past.

    As for the mysterious trunkfuls of cash, the Karmapa’s financial representatives stuck to their story that the money had all been donated by his devout followers—including many inside China. And by last week Indian investigators at last conceded that they were telling the truth. “I’ve seen Chinese society ladies swooning all over him,” says Jamyang Norbu, a U.S.-based author and blogger. “This translates into big money.” (Any inclination to celebrate the Karmapa’s exoneration was dampened by news that the Dalai Lama’s 45-year-old nephew had been struck and killed by an SUV while engaged in a 300-mile “Free Tibet” hike in Florida.)

    Nevertheless, the uproar was no more than a tame affair compared with what’s sure to ensue when the 14th Dalai Lama finally moves on. He’s said he might come back as a woman, or he might not come back at all. The one certainty is that he won’t go quietly.

    With Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi

    Source;
    http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/20/the-politics-of-reincarnation.html

    more here;
    http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/dalai-lama/the-false-dalai-lama/
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    Post  giovonni Sat Feb 26, 2011 1:36 pm

    Monsantos continuing genocide...The Great Seed Wars
    There is no such thing as real freedom...if you can not grow your own food.

    ***********

    This story has gone unreported in the U.S. to the American media's great shame. Monsanto has become like a large devouring monster but, having bought the U.S. Congress there is no one to take them on.

    Thanks to Chris Jordan.

    India's hidden climate change catastrophe

    Over the past decade, as crops have failed year after year, 200,000 farmers have killed themselves


    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 India1_526973t
    Sugali Nagamma holds a portrait of her husband, who killed himself by swallowing pesticide in front of her


    By Alex Renton

    Naryamaswamy Naik went to the cupboard and took out a tin of pesticide. Then he stood before his wife and children and drank it. "I don't know how much he had borrowed. I asked him, but he wouldn't say," Sugali Nagamma said, her tiny grandson playing at her feet. "I'd tell him: don't worry, we can sell the salt from our table."

    Ms Nagamma, 41, showed us a picture of her husband – good-looking with an Elvis-style hairdo – on the day they married a quarter of a century ago. "He'd been unhappy for a month, but that day he was in a heavy depression. I tried to take the tin away from him but I couldn't. He died in front of us. The head of the family died in front of his wife and children – can you imagine?"

    The death of Mr Naik, a smallholder in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in July 2009, is just another mark on an astonishingly long roll. Nearly 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the past decade. Like Mr Naik, a third of them choose pesticide to do it: an agonising, drawn-out death with vomiting and convulsions.

    The death toll is extrapolated from the Indian authorities' figures. But the journalist Palagummi Sainath is certain the scale of the epidemic of rural suicides is underestimated and that it is getting worse. "Wave upon wave," he says, from his investigative trips in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. "One farmer every 30 minutes in India now, and sometimes three in one family." Because standards of record-keeping vary across the nation, many suicides go unnoticed. In some Indian states, the significant numbers of women who kill themselves are not listed as "farmers", even if that is how they make their living.

    Mr Sainath is an award-winning expert on rural poverty in India, a famous figure across India through his writing for The Hindu newspaper. I spoke to him at a screening of Nero's Guests, a documentary film about the suicide epidemic and some of the more eye-popping inequalities of modern India.

    "Poverty has assaulted rural India," he said. "Farmers who used to be able to send their children to college now can't send them to school. For all that India has more dollar billionaires than the UK, we have 600 million poor. The wealth has not trickled down." Almost all the bereaved families report that debts and land loss because of unsuccessful crops were among their biggest problems.

    The causes of that poverty are complex. Mr Sainath points to the long-term collapse of markets for farmers' produce. About half of all the suicides occur in the four states of India's cotton belt; the price of cotton in real terms, he says, is a twelfth of what it was 30 years ago. Vandana Shiva, a scientist-turned-campaigner, also links failures of cotton farming with the farmer suicides: she says the phenomenon was born in 1997 when the Indian government removed subsidies from cotton farming. This was also when genetically modified seed was widely introduced.

    "Every suicide can be linked to Monsanto," says Ms Shiva, claiming that the biotech firm's modified Bt Cotton caused crop failure and poverty because it needed to be used with pesticide and fertilisers. The Prince of Wales has made the same accusation. Monsanto denies that its activities are to blame, saying that Indian rural poverty has many causes.

    Beyond any argument – though no less politically charged – is the role of the weather in this story. India's climate, always complicated by the Himalayas on one side and turbulent oceans on the two others, has been particularly unreliable in recent years. In Rajasthan, in the north-west, a 10-year drought ended only this summer, while across much of India the annual monsoons have failed three times in the past decade.

    India's 600 million farmers and the nation's poor are often the same people: a single failed crop tends to wipe out their savings and may lead to them losing their land. After that, there are few ways back. The drought, following a failed monsoon, that I saw in Andhra Pradesh in 2009 was the tipping point that drove Mr Naik to suicide.

    Such tragedies and even the selling of children for marriage or as bonded labour – a common shock-horror news story in India – are the most dramatic results. But far more common is the story of rural families migrating, in tens of millions, to India's cities, swelling the ranks of the urban poor and leaving holes in the farming infrastructure that keeps India fed.

    I visited an idyllic village, Surah na Kheda, last month in the limerick-worthy district of Tonk, Rajasthan. We arrived to find the rows of whitewashed mud-walled houses gleaming in the rising sun, while inside the courtyards women in bright saris were stirring milk to make yogurt and butter for the day's meals. Their daughters kneaded dough for the breakfast chapattis.

    But there was an odd thing: a distinct lack of people. There were the old and the very young – but virtually no one of working age. Half the village, some 60 adults and many children, had gone to Jaipur, the state capital, to look for work. Even though the Diwali holiday fell the following week, no one expected their neighbours and relatives back. Times were too hard.

    Prabhati Devi, 50, said four of her seven children had joined the exodus. "They had to go," she said. "Twenty years ago, we could grow all we needed, and sell things too. Now we can't grow wheat, we can't grow pulses, we can't even grow carrots, because there is not enough rain. So we go to the cities, looking for money."

    She looked bereaved as she talked of the damage the 10-year drought had done. "It crushes people," she said. "Before, we were able to deal with drought. It would come every four years, and you could prepare. We would store grain and people could share it. In the past, when your buffalo wasn't giving milk, neighbours would share theirs. But now kindness is no longer possible."

    I found the other end of Surah na Kheda's story under a flyover in Jaipur. Here, in the early morning, hundreds of men and boys, farmers from all over northern India, gather looking for work as labourers on the city's building sites. Many of them sleep under the flyover, and their clothes were stiff with dirt. The air was tense, and smelled of drugs and cheap alcohol.

    Shankar Lal, one of the Surah na Kheda émigrés, was sipping tea at a stall under the flyover with half a dozen other young men from the village, waiting for a contractor to give them a lift. "If the rains came back we would be farmers again. But will they?" He did not think so: "In 10 years' time, there will be no village. Everyone will be here in the city. Or they will be dead."

    The men were working for 150 rupees (£2.15) a day, decorating a house in one of Jaipur's posh suburbs. This is relatively good work, and they had all found a floor to sleep on. In another building site, we found a seven-strong rural family who slept in the cement store. The mother and grandmother were working for less than £1 a day, carrying cement and bricks on their heads up precarious bamboo scaffolding. In one half-built block of flats a baby slept in the dust next to the cement mixer. None of these people were happy to be in the city. "If we could survive at home we would go straight back," I was told.

    Many of the labourers on the sites were children, some as young as 12: an interrupted education is another part of the social fallout of rural collapse. In Rajasthan, most older people in the villages told me they had not gone to school, but they were proud that their children had. However, the new poverty brought about by the "chaos in the weather" was keeping their grandchildren out of school.

    According to the World Food Programme, 20 million more people joined the ranks of India's hungry in the past decade, and half of all the country's children are underweight. Some analyses say that fast-developing India is performing worse than some of the poorest countries, such as Liberia and Haiti, in addressing the basic issue of hunger. With so many farmers giving up, the question is how India will feed the entire country, not just its poor.

    It is widely agreed that there have been radical shifts in the weather patterns in India in the past two decades; what is less certain are the causes. Is the change in the weather "climate change"? For many development workers, the question needs answering, because the collapse of India's rural economy – if it continues – will bring about a catastrophe that will affect people far beyond India's borders: even rumours of a poor monsoon or bad harvest in India tends to send food prices on the world commodity markets soaring, as they did again this spring.

    Alka Awasthi, of Cecoedecon, a Rajasthani rural poverty organisation part-funded by Oxfam, asks: "When is the data going to catch up with the stories? Why don't the scientists come and listen to people who actually work with the rain? They don't know what a woman like Prabhati Devi is dealing with."

    But at Rajasthan's Institute of Development Studies, Surjit Singh believes the calamitous weather shifts are as much to do with changing patterns of farming, growing population and failed government policies as any greater human-induced change to the climate. "The state has failed the rural poor, and so has the private sector. Economic liberalisation has clearly failed. How long can the boom go on? The economy may be growing at 9 per cent but food-price inflation is running at 16 to 18 per cent."

    Dr Singh is in no doubt, though, that the changes in weather have increased poverty in rural India – and that there lies a huge injustice. "Climate change puts the onus on the poor to adapt – but that's wrong. Who is using the planes, the cars and the plastic bottles? Not the poor man with no drinking water."

    For Mrs Devi and Sugali Nagamma, though, such debates are meaningless. I asked Mrs Devi if she had a question to ask me. "If these industries and factories stop burning petrol and sending poison into the atmosphere will it bring our rains back?" I had to tell her I did not know.

    For more on Oxfam's work in India visit: www.oxfam.org.uk/climate

    Source;
    http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/indias-hidden-climate-change-catastrophe-2173995.html



    Carol
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    Post  Carol Sat Feb 26, 2011 2:54 pm

    I really appreciate you putting all o this data together gio. Mahalo :heart2:


    _________________
    What is life?
    It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

    With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
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    Post  giovonni Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:45 pm

    i guess we could thank China for this...scratch


    An Armada of Lost Plastic Ducks Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Ducks


    The fate of a shipment of bath toys missing since 1992 has led to greater knowledge of the world's oceans


    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Draft_lens3560232module23044322photo_1237995775world-wide-map-of-lost-plastic-ducks


    Lost at sea: On the trail of Moby-Duck

    By Guy Adams

    Sunday, 27 February 2011

    They are small, yellow and designed to endure nothing more stressful than a quick journey around a bathtub. But after almost 20 years lost at sea, a flotilla of plastic ducks has been hailed for revolutionising mankind's knowledge of ocean science.

    The humble toys are part of a shipment of 29,000 packaged ducks, frogs, turtles and beavers made in China for a US firm called First Years Inc. They were in a crate that fell off the deck of a container ship during a journey across the Pacific from Hong Kong in January 1992.

    Since that moment, they have bobbed tens of thousands of miles. Some washed up on the shores of Hawaii and Alaska; others have been stuck in Arctic ice. A few crossed the site near Newfoundland where the Titanic sank, and at least one is believed to have been found on a beach in Scotland.

    Now the creatures, nicknamed the "Friendly Floatees" by various broadcasters who have followed their progress over the years, have been immortalised in a book titled Moby-Duck. It not only chronicles their extraordinary odyssey, and what it has taught us about currents, but also lays bare a largely ignored threat to the marine environment: the vast numbers of containers that fall off the world's cargo ships.

    No one knows exactly how often containers are lost at sea, due to the secretive nature of the international shipping industry. But Donovan Hohn, the book's author, says that oceanographers put the figure at anything from several hundred to 10,000 a year. While some sink, others burst open, throwing their contents into the upper layer of the ocean where they often pose a threat to wildlife. Plastic debris can be particularly hazardous, since it eventually breaks into small particles, which are eaten by fish and mammals.

    "I've heard tales of containers getting lost that are full of those big plastic bags that dry cleaners use," says Mr Hohn. "I've also heard of crates full of cigarettes going overboard, which of course end up having their butts ingested by marine animals. In fact, one of the endnotes in my book lists the contents of a dead whale's belly: it was full of trash. Plastic pollution is a real problem. It's far from the greatest environmental danger to the ocean, but it is one of the most visible, and that means it can be important as a symbol of less visible damage, such as overfishing, agricultural run-off and the warming of the oceans."

    The fate of the ducks has been studied by a small but devoted band of enthusiasts since roughly six months after the accident, when the ducks began to wash up in large numbers on the beaches of Alaska, Canada, and America's Pacific north-west.

    Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer and enthusiastic beachcomber who lives in Seattle, used records held by First Years Inc to trace the ship they had been carried on. By interviewing its captain, he was able to locate the exact point at which their journey began. He was able to track their rate of progress on the constantly circulating current, or "gyre", which runs between Japan, south-east Alaska, Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands.

    "We always knew that this gyre existed. But until the ducks came along, we didn't know how long it took to complete a circuit," he says. "It was like knowing that a planet is in the solar system but not being able to say how long it takes to orbit. Well, now we know exactly how long it takes: about three years."

    Mr Ebbesmeyer estimates that a couple of thousand of the ducks are still in the gyre, and have completed half a dozen circuits. Others went south towards Hawaii or north to the Bering Sea, through which they are thought to have reached Europe. "I have a website that people use to send me pictures of the ducks they find on beaches all over the world," he says. "I'm able to tell quickly if they are from this batch. I've had one from the UK which I believe is genuine. A photograph of it was sent to me by a woman judge in Scotland."

    Understanding the 11 major gyres that move water around the world's oceans is thought to be highly important, says Mr Ebbesmeyer, who has also tracked lost shipments of 51,000 Nike shoes. It will help climatologists to predict the effects of climate change on the marine environment.

    The fate of the ducks also tells us about the longevity of plastic, he adds. "The ones washing up in Alaska after 19 years are still in pretty good shape."

    Source;
    http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/lost-at-sea-on-the-trail-of-mobyduck-2226788.html
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    Post  giovonni Wed Mar 02, 2011 2:44 pm

    I went to Saudi back in the 70s and was struck with the utter artificiality of the culture. It was like a nation of drug dealers, some of whom happened to be not only completely corrupt by intensely religious. The palaces along one road were like a series of hotels. Men in burnooses with gold chains, fast cars, and blonde women. The high ranking men, who were my hosts, lived in an opulence that was like a Hunter Thompson Las Vegas hallucination on steroids. They were oddly feminine. I never got past the public rooms, and one never saw the Arab women, except as black bags passing like wraths in the malls. Gold was everywhere. And beneath it was a monstrous system of what amounted to indentured labor. It is the strangest and most disturbing country I have ever been in, and it could only exist because of our addiction to oil.


    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSKOGO9s63lqnGmMZ8jusLQTpPNE7Bu4Pq4bYuuL2Z8nCVRXmjO&t=1

    WikiLeaks: Saudi Royal Welfare Program Revealed

    LONDON (Reuters) - When Saudi King Abdullah arrived home last week, he came bearing gifts: handouts worth $37 billion, apparently intended to placate Saudis of modest means and insulate the world's biggest oil exporter from the wave of protest sweeping the Arab world.

    But some of the biggest handouts over the past two decades have gone to his own extended family, according to unpublished American diplomatic cables dating back to 1996.
    The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Reuters, provide remarkable insight into how much the vast royal welfare program has cost the country -- not just financially but in terms of undermining social cohesion.

    Besides the huge monthly stipends that every Saudi royal receives, the cables detail various money-making schemes some royals have used to finance their lavish lifestyles over the years. Among them: siphoning off money from "off-budget" programs controlled by senior princes, sponsoring expatriate workers who then pay a small monthly fee to their royal patron and, simply, "borrowing from the banks, and not paying them back."

    As long ago as 1996, U.S. officials noted that such unrestrained behavior could fuel a backlash against the Saudi elite. In the assessment of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh in a cable from that year, "of the priority issues the country faces, getting a grip on royal family excesses is at the top."

    A 2007 cable showed that King Abdullah has made changes since taking the throne six years ago, but recent turmoil in the Middle East underlines the deep-seated resentment about economic disparities and corruption in the region.

    A Saudi government spokesman contacted by Reuters declined to comment.

    MONTHLY CHEQUES

    The November 1996 cable -- entitled "Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?" -- provides an extraordinarily detailed picture of how the royal patronage system works. It's the sort of overview that would have been useful required reading for years in the U.S. State department.

    It begins with a line that could come from a fairytale: "Saudi princes and princesses, of whom there are thousands, are known for the stories of their fabulous wealth -- and tendency to squander it."

    The most common mechanism for distributing Saudi Arabia's wealth to the royal family is the formal, budgeted system of monthly stipends that members of the Al Saud family receive, according to the cable. Managed by the Ministry of Finance's "Office of Decisions and Rules," which acts like a kind of welfare office for Saudi royalty, the royal stipends in the mid-1990s ran from about $800 a month for "the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family" to $200,000-$270,000 a month for one of the surviving sons of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.

    Grandchildren received around $27,000 a month, "according to one contact familiar with the stipends" system, the cable says. Great-grandchildren received about $13,000 and great-great- grandchildren $8,000 a month.

    "Bonus payments are available for marriage and palace building," according to the cable, which estimates that the system cost the country, which had an annual budget of $40 billion at the time, some $2 billion a year.

    "The stipends also provide a substantial incentive for royals to procreate since the stipends begin at birth."

    After a visit to the Office of Decisions and Rules, which was in an old building in Riyadh's banking district, the U.S. embassy's economics officer described a place "bustling with servants picking up cash for their masters." The office distributed the monthly stipends -- not just to royals but to "other families and individuals granted monthly stipends in perpetuity." It also fulfilled "financial promises made by senior princes."

    The head of the office at the time, Abdul-Aziz al-Shubayli, told the economics officer that an important part of his job "at least in today's more fiscally disciplined environment, is to play the role of bad cop." He "rudely grilled a nearly blind old man about why an eye operation promised by a prince and confirmed by royal Diwan note had to be conducted overseas and not for free in one of the first-class eye hospitals in the kingdom." After finally signing off on a trip, Shubayli noted that he himself had been in the United States twice for medical treatment, once for a chronic ulcer and once for carpal tunnel syndrome. "He chuckled, suggesting that both were probably job-induced."

    FOLLOWING THE MONEY

    But the stipend system was clearly not enough for many royals, who used a range of other ways to make money, "not counting business activities."

    "By far the largest is likely royal skimming from the approximately $10 billion in annual off-budget spending controlled by a few key princes," the 1996 cable states. Two of those projects -- the Two Holy Mosques Project and the Ministry of Defense's Strategic Storage Project -- are "highly secretive, subject to no Ministry of Finance oversight or controls, transacted through the National Commercial Bank, and widely believed to be a source of substantial revenues" for the then-King and a few of his full brothers, according to the authors of the cable.

    In a meeting with the U.S. ambassador at the time, one Saudi prince, alluding to the off-budget programs, "lamented the travesty that revenues from 'one million barrels of oil per day' go entirely to 'five or six princes,'" according to the cable, which quoted the prince.
    Then there was the apparently common practice for royals to borrow money from commercial banks and simply not repay their loans. As a result, the 12 commercial banks in the country were "generally leary of lending to royals."

    The managing director of another bank in the kingdom told the ambassador that he divided royals into four tiers, according to the cable. The top tier was the most senior princes who, perhaps because they were so wealthy, never asked for loans. The second tier included senior princes who regularly asked for loans. "The bank insists that such loans be 100 percent collateralized by deposits in other accounts at the bank," the cable reports. The third tier included thousands of princes the bank refused to lend to. The fourth tier, "not really royals, are what this banker calls the 'hangers on'."

    Another popular money-making scheme saw some "greedy princes" expropriate land from commoners. "Generally, the intent is to resell quickly at huge markup to the government for an upcoming project." By the mid-1990s, a government program to grant land to commoners had dwindled. "Against this backdrop, royal land scams increasingly have become a point of public contention."

    The cable cites a banker who claimed to have a copy of "written instructions" from one powerful royal that ordered local authorities in the Mecca area to transfer to his name a "Waqf" -- religious endowment -- of a small parcel of land that had been in the hands of one family for centuries. "The banker noted that it was the brazenness of the letter ... that was particularly egregious."

    Another senior royal was famous for "throwing fences up around vast stretches of government land."

    The confiscation of land extends to businesses as well, the cable notes. A prominent and wealthy Saudi businessman told the embassy that one reason rich Saudis keep so much money outside the country was to lessen the risk of 'royal expropriation.'"

    Finally, royals kept the money flowing by sponsoring the residence permits of foreign workers and then requiring them to pay a monthly "fee" of between $30 and $150. "It is common for a prince to sponsor a hundred or more foreigners," the 1996 cable says.

    BIG SPENDERS

    The U.S. diplomats behind the cable note wryly that despite all the money that has been given to Saudi royals over the years there is not "a significant number of super-rich princes ... In the end," the cable states, Saudi's "royals still seem more adept at squandering than accumulating wealth."

    But the authors of the cable also warned that all that money and excess was undermining the legitimacy of the ruling family. By 1996, there was "broad sentiment that royal greed has gone beyond the bounds of reason". Still, as long as the "royal family views this country as 'Al Saud Inc.' ever increasing numbers of princes and princesses will see it as their birthright to receive lavish dividend payments, and dip into the till from time to time, by sheer virtue of company ownership."

    In the years that followed that remarkable assessment of Saudi royalty, there were some official efforts toward reform -- driven in the late 1990s and early 2000s in particular by an oil price between $10-20 a barrel. But the real push for reform began in 2005, when King Abdullah succeeded to the throne, and even then change came slowly.

    By February 2007, according to a second cable entitled "Crown Prince Sultan backs the King in family disputes", the reforms were beginning to bite. "By far the most widespread source of discontent in the ruling family is the King's curtailment of their privileges," the cable says. "King Abdullah has reportedly told his brothers that he is over 80 years old and does not wish to approach his judgment day with the 'burden of corruption on my shoulder.'"

    The King, the cable states, had disconnected the cellphone service for "thousands of princes and princesses." Year-round government-paid hotel suites in Jeddah had been canceled, as was the right of royals to request unlimited free tickets from the state airline. "We have a first-hand account that a wife of Interior minister Prince Naif attempted to board a Saudia flight with 12 companions, all expecting to travel for free," the authors of the cables write, only to be told "to her outrage" that the new rules meant she could only take two free guests.

    Others were also angered by the rules. Prince Mishal bin Majid bin Abdulaziz had taken to driving between Jeddah and Riyadh "to show his annoyance" at the reforms, according to the cable.

    Abdullah had also reigned in the practice of issuing "block visas" to foreign workers "and thus cut the income of many junior princes" as well as dramatically reducing "the practice of transferring public lands to favored individuals."

    The U.S. cable reports that all those reforms had fueled tensions within the ruling family to the point where Interior Minister Prince Naif and Riyadh Governor Prince Salman had "sought to openly confront the King over reducing royal entitlements."

    But according to "well established sources with first hand access to this information," Crown Prince Sultan stood by Abdullah and told his brothers "that challenging the King was a 'red line' that he would not cross." Sultan, the cable says, has also followed the King's lead and turned down requests for land transfers.

    The cable comments that Sultan, longtime defense minister and now also Crown Prince, seemed to value family unity and stability above all.

    (Editing by Jim Impoco, Claudia Parsons and Sara Ledwith)

    Copyright 2010 Thomson Reuters.

    Source;
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/wikileaks-saudi-royal-wel_n_829097.html
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    Post  giovonni Fri Mar 04, 2011 1:00 pm

    This is worthy of noting... and quite OK with me Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Vitamin_d_main

    ***********

    Scientists say higher vitamin D intake will slash cancer, MS, and diabetes risk by half

    Wednesday, March 02, 2011 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

    (NaturalNews) In findings just published in the journal Anticancer Research, scientists at the University of California (UC) San Diego School of Medicine and Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha have reported that most people need a much higher intake of vitamin D. And that simple step added to your life could slash your risk of developing serious diseases -- including cancer -- by about 50 percent.

    The new study involved a survey of several thousand volunteers who took supplements containing 1000 to 10,000 IU per day. The researchers ran blood tests to measure the level of 25-vitamin D, which is the form of almost all vitamin D circulating in the bloodstream.

    "We found that daily intakes of vitamin D by adults in the range of 4000 to 8000 IU are needed to maintain blood levels of vitamin D metabolites in the range needed to reduce by about half the risk of several diseases -- breast cancer, colon cancer, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes," Dr. Cedric Garland, professor of family and preventive medicine at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, said in a statement to media.

    He added that the amount of vitamin D needed for disease prevention is far higher than the minimal dosage of 400 IU per day that was originally prescribed in the 20th century to treat and prevent rickets. However, upping vitamin D intake into the 4000 IU daily range and higher appears to be safe, according to a December 2010 report from the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine.

    "Most scientists who are actively working with vitamin D now believe that 40 to 60 ng/ml is the appropriate target concentration of 25-vitamin D in the blood for preventing the major vitamin D-deficiency related diseases, and have joined in a letter on this topic," Dr. Garland stated. "Unfortunately, according to a recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, only 10 percent of the US population has levels in this range, mainly people who work outdoors."

    Robert P. Heaney, MD, of Creighton University, a distinguished biomedical scientist, said he was not surprised by the new study's results based on his decades of research into the health benefits of vitamin D. "Now is the time for virtually everyone to take more vitamin D to help prevent some major types of cancer, several other serious illnesses, and fractures," Dr. Heaney said a statement to the press.

    Source;
    http://www.naturalnews.com/031560_vitamin_D_cancer.html
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    Post  Mercuriel Fri Mar 04, 2011 1:50 pm

    Yep - Hadriel and I take 2000IUs of Vitamin D3 every day plus 1000IUs of Vitamin A and a Multivitamin too (Centrum - One a Day)...

    I also take a Tablespoon of Colloidal Silver every day as well and wash the Vitamins above down with an Apple Cider (Which has alot of Apple Pechtin in It).

    Wink


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    Post  giovonni Sat Mar 05, 2011 4:45 am

    Mercuriel wrote:Yep - Hadriel and I take 2000IUs of Vitamin D3 every day plus 1000IUs of Vitamin A and a Multivitamin too (Centrum - One a Day)...

    I also take a Tablespoon of Colloidal Silver every day as well and wash the Vitamins above down with an Apple Cider (Which has alot of Apple Pechtin in It).

    Wink

    Thanks my Friend
    that's good to hear Double Thumbs Up


    Last edited by giovonni on Sat Mar 05, 2011 5:03 am; edited 1 time in total
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    Post  giovonni Sat Mar 05, 2011 5:00 am

    Here is a responsible assessment of what our insanity is costing us. This should stun you. With everything calculated we spend on security twice what all the rest of the world spends combined. Yet, I can tell you, and anyone who has travelled abroad knows I am right and will confirm this, America is the most fearful nation on the planet -- absent countries with active wars like Libya. It is so notable coming to the United States that it is like a change in the air. This is all being done so that a small group of corporations can prosper. It is only rational when seen through the prism of profit.

    Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues.



    $1.2 Trillion: The Real U.S. National Security Budget No One Wants You to Know About

    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Storyteaser_ordm3240mmlg

    By Chris Hellman, Tomdispatch.com
    Posted on March 1, 2011, Printed on March 5, 2011
    http://www.alternet.org/story/150086/

    To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

    What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

    Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

    Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.

    So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

    Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn’t been passed by Congress -- even the 2011 budget hasn’t made it through that august body yet -- but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.

    For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.

    To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.

    Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.

    So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:

    $703.1 billion dollars.

    Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.

    For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what’s called "International Affairs" in two: that is, into an annual "base" budget as well as funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations" related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department’s contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to:

    $711.8 billion.

    The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security” -- of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to:

    $765.3 billion.

    The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).

    This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of “covert operations” such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won’t have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There’s little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let’s be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on “intelligence.” Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon’s 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don’t know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we’re at:

    $818.4 billion.

    Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans’ hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we’ve reached:

    $947.7 billion.

    If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:

    $965.7 billion.

    As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:

    $1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)

    When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.

    Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:

    $1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)

    A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don’t for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world’s “known unknowns.” Explaining the phrase this way: “That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know.” It’s a concept that couldn’t apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can’t calculate them.

    To take one example, how much of NASA’s proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force’s facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don’t know.

    Other “known unknowns” would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans’ benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.

    There’s a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.

    Source;
    http://www.alternet.org/world/150086/%241.2_trillion%3A_the_real_u.s._national_security_budget_no_one_wants_you_to_know_about/
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    Post  JesterTerrestrial Sat Mar 05, 2011 6:14 am

    $1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)

    THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE DISGRACE TO HUMANITY!!! AND THIS IS ONLY ONE NATION!!!

    THE WARS STILL RAGE ON AROUND THIS PLANET WHILE THEY HAD OUT PEACE PRIZES!!!

    WE HAVE NATIONS THAT CANT FEED THEMSELVES!!! PEOPLE ARE STARVING TO DEATH!!!

    AND AMERICANS SPEND 1.2 TRILLION ON MURDER AND MAYHEM AND FALSE FLAG WARS!!!

    NOT TO MENTION THE MEGA BILLIONS WASTED ON GARBAGE MEDIA AND MIND CONTROL!!!

    AND TOXIC HEALTH CARE AND BIG PHARMA POISON!!! HOW MANY BILLIONS IS THAT!!!

    HOW MANY OTHER INDUSTRIES CAN BE ADDED TO THE LIST OF YOUR WASTED SOCIETY!!!

    ALL THE MONEY AND RESOURCES IN THE WORLD AND THIS IS WHAT IS DONE!!! SAD!!!

    THANK GOD THE SHIFT IS COMING!!! BECAUSE THIS IS MADNESS!!! O.M.G.!!!

    RIGHT ON GIO...WE'LL GET THIS PLANET TURNED AROUND YET!!! PEACE JT!



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    Post  Mercuriel Sat Mar 05, 2011 11:26 am

    I just thought of this last Night but I will be using it regularly now...

    Vitamin D3 = Vitamin Dad or Vitamin Dad with the Cubed 3 Signifying the Trinity - Father - Mother - All That Is...

    cheers


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    Post  Jenetta Sun Mar 06, 2011 3:18 am

    PEOPLE OF EARTH: PREPARE FOR ECONOMIC DISASTER
    March 4, 2011

    It is not just the United States that is headed for an economic collapse. The truth is that the entire world is heading for a massive economic meltdown and the people of earth need to be warned about the coming economic disaster that is going to sweep the globe. The current world financial system is based on debt, and there are alarming signs that the gigantic global debt bubble is getting ready to burst. In addition, global prices for the key resources that the major economies of the planet depend on are rising very rapidly. Despite all of our advanced technology, the truth is that human civilization simply cannot function without oil and food. But now the price of oil and the price of food are both increasing dramatically. So how is the current global economy supposed to keep functioning properly if it soon costs much more to ship products between continents? How are the billions of people that are just barely surviving today supposed to feed themselves if the price of food goes up another 30 or 40 percent? For decades, most of the major economies around the globe have been able to take for granted that massive amounts of cheap oil and massive amounts of cheap food will always be there. So what happens when that paradigm changes?
    At last check, the price of U.S. crude was over 104 dollars a barrel and the price of Brent crude was over 115 dollars a barrel. Many analysts fear that if the crisis in Libya escalates or if the chaos in the Middle East spreads that we could see the all-time record of 147 dollars a barrel broken by the end of the year. That would be absolutely disastrous for the global economy.
    But it isn't just the chaos in the Middle East that is driving oil prices. The truth is that oil prices have been moving upwards for months. The recent revolutions in the Middle East have only accelerated the trend.
    Let's just hope that the "day of rage" being called for in Saudi Arabia later this month does not turn into a full-blown revolution like we have seen in other Middle Eastern countries. The Saudis keep a pretty tight grip on their people, but at this point anything is possible. A true revolution in Saudi Arabia would send oil prices into unprecedented territory very quickly.
    But even without all of the trouble in the Middle East the world was already heading for an oil crunch. The global demand for oil is rising at a very vigorous pace. For example, last year Chinese demand for oil increased by almost 1 million barrels per day. That is absolutely staggering. The Chinese are now buying more new cars every year than Americans are, and so Chinese demand for oil is only going to continue to increase.
    Much could be done to increase the global supply of oil, but so far our politicians and the major oil company executives are sitting on their hands. They seem to like the increasing oil prices.
    So for now it looks like oil prices will continue to rise and this is going to result in much higher prices at the gas pump.
    Already, ABC News is reporting that regular unleaded gasoline is going for $5.29 a gallon at one gas station in Orlando, Florida.
    The U.S. economy in particular is vulnerable to rising oil prices because our entire economic system is designed around cheap gasoline. If the price of gas goes up to 5 or 6 dollars a gallon and it stays there it is going to have a catastrophic effect on the U.S. economy.
    Just remember what happened back in 2008. The price of oil hit an all-time high of $147 a barrel and then a few months later the entire financial system had a major meltdown.
    Well, as the price of oil rises it is going to create a whole lot of imbalances in the global financial system once again.
    This is definitely a situation that we should all be watching.
    But it is not just the price of oil that could cause a global economic disaster.
    The global price of food could potentially be even more concerning. As you read this, there are about 3 billion people around the globe that live on the equivalent of 2 dollars a day or less. Those people cannot afford for food prices to go up much.
    But global food prices are rising. According to the United Nations, the global price of food has risen for 8 consecutive months. Last month, the global price of food set a brand new all-time record high. Many are starting to fear that we could actually be in the early stages of a major global food crisis.
    The price of just about every major agricultural commodity has been absolutely soaring during the past year....
    *The price of corn has doubled over the last six months.
    *The price of wheat has more than doubled over the past year.
    *The price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.
    *The price of cotton has more than doubled over the past year.
    *The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.
    *The price of sugar is the highest it has been in 30 years.
    Unfortunately, the production of food in most countries around the world is very highly dependent on oil, so as oil goes up in price this is going to make the food crisis even worse.
    Hold on to your hats folks.
    Also, as I have written about previously, the world is facing some very serious problems when it comes to water. Due to the greed of the global elite, there is not nearly enough fresh water to go around. The following are some very disturbing facts about the global water situation....
    *Worldwide demand for fresh water tripled during the last century, and is now doubling every 21 years.
    *According to USAID, one-third of all humans will face severe or chronic water shortages by the year 2025.
    *Of the 60 million people added to the world’s cities every year, the vast majority of them live in impoverished slums and shanty-towns with no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
    *It is estimated that 75 percent of India's surface water is now contaminated by human and agricultural waste.
    *Not only that, but according to a UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet.
    *In northern China, the water table is dropping one meter per year due to overpumping.
    These days, one of the trendy things to do is to call water "the oil of the 21st century", but unfortunately that is not a completely inaccurate statement. Fresh, clean water is something that we all need, but right now world supplies are getting tight.
    Our politicians and the global elite could be doing something about this if they really wanted to, but right now they seem perfectly fine with what is happening.
    On top of everything else, the sovereign debt crisis is worse than it has ever been before.
    All of the major global central banks have been feverishly printing money in an attempt to "paper over" this crisis, but it is not going to work.
    Most Americans don't realize it, but right now the continent of Europe is a financial basket case. Greece and Ireland would have imploded already if they had not been bailed out, and now Portugal is on the verge of collapse. The interest rate on Portugal's 10-year notes has now been above 7% for about 3 weeks, and most analysts believe that it is only a matter of time before they are forced to accept a bailout.
    Sadly, if the entire global economy experiences a slowdown because of rising oil prices, we could see half a dozen European nations default on their debts if they are not bailed out.
    For now the Germans seem fine with bailing out the weak sisters that are all around them, but that isn't going to last forever.
    A day or reckoning is coming for Europe, and when it arrives the reverberations are going to be felt all across the face of the earth. The euro is on very shaky ground already, and whether or not it can survive the coming crisis is an open question.
    Of course there are some very serious concerns about Asia as well. The national debt of Japan is now well over 200% of GDP and nobody seems to have a solution for their problems. Up to this point, Japan has been able to borrow massive amounts of money at extremely low interest rates from their own people, but that isn't going to last forever either.
    As I have written about so many times before, the biggest debt problem of all is the United States. Barack Obama is projecting that the federal budget deficit for this fiscal year will be a new all-time record 1.65 trillion dollars. It is expected that the total U.S. national debt will surpass the 15 trillion dollar mark by the end of the fiscal year.
    Shouldn't we have some sort of celebration when that happens?
    15 trillion dollars is quite an achievement.
    Most Americans cannot even conceive of a debt that large. If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
    But the United States is not alone. The truth is that wherever you look, there is a sea of red ink covering the planet.
    The current global financial system is entirely based on debt. If the total amount of debt does not continually expand, the system will crash. If somehow a way was found to keep this system going perpetually (which is impossible), the size of global debt would keep on increasing infinitely.
    Now the World Economic Forum says that we need to grow the total amount of debt by another 100 trillion dollars over the next ten years to "support" the anticipated amount of "economic growth" around the world that they expect to see.
    The entire global financial system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme. It is designed to keep everyone enslaved to perpetual debt. If at some point the debt spiral gets interrupted in some significant way, we are going to witness an economic disaster that is going to make what happened in 2008 look like a Sunday picnic.
    The more research that one does on the current global economic situation, the more clear it becomes that we are absolutely doomed.
    So people of earth you had better get ready.
    An economic disaster is coming.

    www.theeconomiccollapseblog.com

    study study study
    giovonni
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    Post  giovonni Sun Mar 06, 2011 1:37 pm

    Thank Mercuriel ~ JT and Jenetta ~ for your post and comments cheers


    Last edited by giovonni on Sun Mar 06, 2011 1:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
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    Post  giovonni Sun Mar 06, 2011 1:38 pm

    Are you one of these people? Do you think it is worth asking why one-third of Americans don't sleep the needed seven hours a night?

    Just consider this:
    "About 46 percent of those currently unable to find work said they got fewer than seven hours of sleep, compared with 37 percent of employed people."


    So tired. More than a third of adults don't sleep 7 hours Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Cant-sleep
    Two government reports reveal the sleep habits of adults in the U.S.



    short news video report here;
    http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41890033/ns/health-health_care/

    By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff
    MyHealthNewsDaily
    updated 3/3/2011

    Two reports released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thursday reveal the sleep habits of adults in the United States, including their increasing tendency to get fewer than seven hours a night, hurting their ability to concentrate and raising the risk of driving.

    Residents of Hawaii have particular trouble sleeping well, according to the responses to one survey, and the CDC said more research on the matter is needed.

    In one report, based on a survey of nearly 75,000 people in 2009, CDC researchers examined four unhealthy sleep behaviors: inadequate sleep, snoring, nodding off during the day and nodding off while driving.

    Thirty-five percent reported getting fewer than seven hours of sleep on an average night, 48 percent reported snoring, 38 percent reported unintentionally falling asleep during the day sometime in the previous month, and nearly 5 percent said they'd nodded off while driving in the previous month.

    The number of U.S. adults reporting that they get fewer than seven hours of sleep rose from 1985 to 2004, and that increase could be attributed to trends such as the increased use of technology and more people working night shifts, the CDC said.

    Among people ages 25 to 54, nearly 40 percent reported getting fewer than seven hours of sleep. People over 65 were the least likely to say they got fewer than seven hours of sleep — about 25 percent of them reported this.

    About 46 percent of those currently unable to find work said they got fewer than seven hours of sleep, compared with 37 percent of employed people. And, of the 12 states in which adults were surveyed, Minnesota had the lowest rate (27 percent) of residents who got fewer than seven hours of sleep, while 45 percent of Hawaiians said the same.

    In fact, Hawaiians had the highest prevalence of all of the unhealthy sleep behaviors.

    The National Sleep Foundation suggests seven to nine hours of sleep per night for adults. Both shorter and longer durations can be worse for your health, the CDC said.

    More than 56 percent of men reported snoring, while 40 percent of women did.

    People ages 18 to 24 and those over 65 were the most likely to unintentionally fall asleep during the day — about 44 percent of these groups reported nodding off.

    And people ages 25 to 34 were the most likely to say they'd fallen asleep while driving sometime during the last month. Seven percent of them did, compared with just 2 percent of seniors, who were least likely to report this behavior. Nearly 6 percent of men said they'd done this, while 3½ percent of women had.

    Drowsy driving is one of the most lethal consequences of inadequate sleep, the CDC noted. According to the Department of Transportation, it's responsible for an estimated 1,550 deaths and 40,000 injuries each year in the United States.

    Sleep difficulties are associated with mental disorders, limited daily functioning, injury and mortality rates, the CDC said.

    To promote healthy sleep behaviors, increased public health awareness of sleep quality, behaviors and disorders is needed, as well as training in sleep medicine for healthcare professionals.

    The second report examined the effects of getting too little sleep on daily activities. That report was based on data from two surveys, conducted between 2005 and 2008, including almost 11,000 respondents.

    Among the six daily activities included in the survey, the ability to concentrate was the most commonly reported difficulty associated with too little sleep. About 29 percent of adults who got fewer than 7 hours of sleep a night said they had a hard time concentrating, while just 19 percent of those getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night reported this.

    Those who reported sleeping less than seven hours also had greater difficulties remembering things, participating in hobbies, driving or taking public transportation, taking care of financial affairs and working than did those who reported getting 7-9 hours a night.

    And overall, women were more likely than men to report sleep-related difficulties in their daily activities, the report said.

    There are several limitations in interpreting the reports' results, the CDC said. For example, the first included only households with telephone landlines in 12 states, and both studies were based on self-reported data.

    Source;
    http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41890033/ns/health-health_care/
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    Post  giovonni Mon Mar 07, 2011 7:06 am

    The idea that early humans were stupid or primitive is just simply wrong. Most of what you learned about early man in school has been shown to be nonsense.

    Earliest humans not so different from us, research suggests Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 Cromagf

    Kevin Stacey - University of Chicago


    That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species. This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen speaking in grunts and monosyllables (the GEICO Cavemen being a notable exception). But is this assumption correct? Were the earliest humans significantly different from us?

    In a paper published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, archaeologist John Shea (Stony Brook University) shows they were not.

    The problem, Shea argues, is that archaeologists have been focusing on the wrong measurement of early human behavior. Archaeologists have been searching for evidence of "behavioral modernity", a quality supposedly unique to Homo sapiens, when they ought to have been investigating "behavioral variability," a quantitative dimension to the behavior of all living things.

    Human origins research began in Europe, and the European Upper Paleolithic archaeological record has long been the standard against which the behavior of earlier and non-European humans is compared. During the Upper Paleolithic (45,000-12,000 years ago), Homo sapiens fossils first appear in Europe together with complex stone tool technology, carved bone tools, complex projectile weapons, advanced techniques for using fire, cave art, beads and other personal adornments. Similar behaviors are either universal or very nearly so among recent humans, and thus, archaeologists cite evidence for these behaviors as proof of human behavioral modernity.

    Yet, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils occur between 100,000-200,000 years ago in Africa and southern Asia and in contexts lacking clear and consistent evidence for such behavioral modernity. For decades anthropologists contrasted these earlier "archaic" African and Asian humans with their "behaviorally-modern" Upper Paleolithic counterparts, explaining the differences between them in terms of a single "Human Revolution" that fundamentally changed human biology and behavior. Archaeologists disagree about the causes, timing, pace, and characteristics of this revolution, but there is a consensus that the behavior of the earliest Homo sapiens was significantly that that of more-recent "modern" humans.

    Shea tested the hypothesis that there were differences in behavioral variability between earlier and later Homo sapiens using stone tool evidence dating to between 250,000- 6000 years ago in eastern Africa. This region features the longest continuous archaeological record of Homo sapiens behavior. A systematic comparison of variability in stone tool making strategies over the last quarter-million years shows no single behavioral revolution in our species' evolutionary history. Instead, the evidence shows wide variability in Homo sapiens toolmaking strategies from the earliest times onwards. Particular changes in stone tool technology can be explained in terms of the varying costs and benefits of different toolmaking strategies, such as greater needs for cutting edge or more efficiently-transportable and functionally-versatile tools. One does not need to invoke a "human revolution" to account for these changes, they are explicable in terms of well-understood principles of behavioral ecology.

    This study has important implications for archaeological research on human origins. Shea argues that comparing the behavior of our most ancient ancestors to Upper Paleolithic Europeans holistically and ranking them in terms of their "behavioral modernity" is a waste of time. There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability. Whether this range is significantly different from that of earlier and other hominin species remains to be discovered. However, the best way to advance our understanding of human behavior is by researching the sources of behavioral variability in particular adaptive strategies.

    Source;
    http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/uocp-ehn021411.php


    ###

    John Shea, "Homo sapiens is as Homo sapiens was: Behavioral variability vs. 'behavioral modernity' in Paleolithic archaeology." Current Anthropology 54:1 (February 2011).
    giovonni
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    Post  giovonni Tue Mar 08, 2011 2:11 pm

    Study co-author Jarrett Byrnes, of the National Center for Ecological Analyses and Synthesis, says "Species extinction is happening now, and it's happening quickly. And unfortunately, our resources are limited. This means we're going to have to prioritize our conservation efforts, and to do that, scientists have to start providing concrete answers about the numbers and types of species that are needed to sustain human life. If we don't produce these estimates quickly, then we risk crossing a threshold that we can't come back from.”

    As long as profit is our only social priority we are never going to be able to make the decisions we need to. In the corporate financed fact-free world of the Right reports like this have little impact because there is a considerable effort to make them disappear by flooding them out with Denier misinformation. But as I have said before. Nature bats last, and doesn't care about polemics.

    ***********

    Loss of Plant Diversity Threatens Earth's Life-Support Systems Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 30288_rel

    Released: 3/7/2011 11:30 AM EST
    Source: Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS),College of William and Mary

    Newswise — An international team of researchers including professor Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has published a comprehensive new analysis showing that loss of plant biodiversity disrupts the fundamental services that ecosystems provide to humanity.

    Plant communities—threatened by development, invasive species, climate change, and other factors—provide humans with food, help purify water supplies, generate oxygen, and supply raw materials for building, clothing, paper, and other products.

    The 9-member research team, led by professor Brad Cardinale of the University of Michigan, analyzed the results of 574 field and laboratory studies—conducted across 5 continents during the last 2 decades—that measured the changes in productivity resulting from loss of plants species. This type of “meta-analysis” allows researchers to move beyond their own individual or collaborative studies to get a much more reliable global picture. Their study appears in the March issue of the American Journal of Botany.

    "The idea that declining diversity compromises the functioning of ecosystems was controversial for many years,” says Duffy, a marine ecologist who has studied the effects of biodiversity loss in seagrass beds. “This paper should be the final nail in the coffin of that controversy. It's the most rigorous and comprehensive analysis yet, and it clearly shows that extinction of plant species compromises the productivity that supports Earth's ecosystems."

    The team’s analysis shows that plant communities with many different species are nearly 1.5 times more productive than those with only one species (such as a cornfield or carefully tended lawn), and ongoing research finds even stronger benefits of diversity when the various other important natural services of ecosystems are considered. Diverse communities are also more efficient at capturing nutrients, light, and other limiting resources.

    The analysis also suggests, based on laboratory studies of algae, that diverse plant communities generate oxygen—and take-up carbon dioxide—more than twice as fast as plant monocultures.

    The team’s findings are consistent for plant communities both on land and in fresh- and saltwater, suggesting that plant biodiversity is of general and fundamental importance to the functioning of the Earth’s entire biosphere.

    Duffy, Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of Marine Science at VIMS, says the team’s findings are important locally because estuaries like Chesapeake Bay are naturally low in diversity, making them especially vulnerable to ecological surprises resulting from loss of species.

    “Salt marshes and seagrass beds depend largely on one or a few species of plants that create the habitat structure,” says Duffy. “When such species are lost, low diversity means there is often no one else to take their place and the effects can ripple out through the community of animals, potentially up to fishery species.”

    In addition to analyzing the general effects of biodiversity loss, the team also sought to determine the specific fraction of plant species needed to maintain the effective functioning of a particular ecosystem—important information for resource managers with limited human and financial resources to manage forests, marine reserves, and other protected areas on land and sea. The results of this effort were mixed, and the team’s ongoing research is tackling this question.

    Data from the study did suggest, however, that biodiversity loss may follow a “tipping-point” model wherein some fraction of species can be lost with minimal change to ecological processes, followed by a sharp drop in ecosystem function as species loss continues.

    Biodiversity loss in the real world
    Recognizing that their findings mostly rest on analysis of short-term experiments (generally a few days, weeks, or months) in relatively small settings, the researchers also attempted to determine how diversity effects “scale-up” to longer time scales, bigger areas, or both. The authors note that these are the real-world scales “at which species extinctions actually matter and at which conservation and management efforts take place.”

    The team’s findings suggest that scale does indeed matter, and that small laboratory and field experiments typically underestimate the effects of biodiversity loss. In the researchers’ own words, “Data are generally consistent with the idea that the strength of diversity effects are stronger in experiments that run longer, and in experiments performed at larger spatial scales.”

    Duffy is now further testing this scaling issue with a 3-year grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is using the grant to establish a global experimental network for studying how nutrient pollution and changes in biodiversity impact seagrass beds.

    The future of biodiversity studies
    The American Journal of Botany study also identifies the additional information needed to better understand biodiversity loss and its effects. Important frontiers include additional studies of how small-scale diversity experiments scale-up to real ecosystems; how biodiversity loss compares to and interacts with other environmental stressors such as climate change, invasive species, low-oxygen dead zones, ocean acidification, and water pollution; and how species-level diversity compares in importance with diversity at other levels such as genetic and functional (e.g., herbivore, grazer, or carnivore).

    Cardinale says information from these types of studies will put scientists "in a position to calculate the number of species needed to support the variety of processes required to sustain life in real ecosystems.” He adds, “And we don't mean ‘need’ in an ethical or an aesthetic way. We mean an actual concrete number of species required to sustain basic life-support processes."

    Study co-author Jarrett Byrnes, of the National Center for Ecological Analyses and Synthesis, says "Species extinction is happening now, and it's happening quickly. And unfortunately, our resources are limited. This means we're going to have to prioritize our conservation efforts, and to do that, scientists have to start providing concrete answers about the numbers and types of species that are needed to sustain human life. If we don't produce these estimates quickly, then we risk crossing a threshold that we can't come back from.”

    Source;
    http://www.newswise.com/articles/loss-of-plant-diversity-threatens-earth-s-life-support-systems
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    Post  giovonni Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:08 am

    Unlike this toddler, when i was younger, it was difficult for me to take naps ~ not anymore Sleep

    Trends That Will Affect Your Future … - Page 7 _nap_little_girl


    ***********

    Why Naps Make You Smarter

    by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
    Date: 08 March 2011

    A good night's sleep is crucial to storing knowledge learned earlier in the day — that much was known. Now, a new study finds that getting shut-eye before you learn is important, too.

    Volunteers who took a 100-minute nap before launching into an evening memorization task scored an average of 20 percentage points higher on the memory test compared with people who did the memorization without snoozing first.

    "It really seems to be the first evidence that we're aware of that indicates a proactive benefit of sleep," study co-author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.

    "It's not simply enough to sleep after learning," Walker said. "It turns out you also need to sleep before learning."

    Refreshing naps

    Earlier research has found that dreams boost learning, with one study suggesting a 90-minute nap may help lock in long-term memories. But Walker's research, published this week in the journal Current Biology, finds that another phase of sleep, called nonrapid eye movement (NREM) is most closely linked to the learning boost provided by a nap.

    Walker and his colleagues recruited 44 volunteers — 27 women and 17 men — to come to the sleep lab at noon. First, the volunteers were given a task in which they had to memorize 100 names and faces. Then they were tested for how well they recalled the face-name matches.

    Next, the researchers tucked half of the volunteers in for a nap between 2 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. The scientists measured the napping volunteers' brain waves as they slept. The other group of participants stayed awake and did daily activities as they normally would. At 6 p.m., both groups memorized another set of 100 faces and names and were tested on their memory. (The experiment was set up so nappers had more than an hour to shake off any remaining fuzziness before the test, Walker said.)

    The first major finding, Walker said, was that learning ability degrades as the day wears on. Volunteers who didn't nap did about 12 percent worse on the evening test than they did on the morning test. (Walker presented preliminary findings of this effect at a conference in February 2010.) But shut-eye not only reversed those effects, it provided a memory boost: Napping test-takers did about 10 percent better on the evening test than they did on the morning test. In all, the difference in scores between nappers and non-nappers was about 20 percent, Walker said.

    Secondly, the brain-wave monitoring turned up a likely culprit for the memory upgrade: a short, synchronized burst of electrical activity called a sleep spindle. These sleep spindles last about one second and can occur 1,000 times per night during NREM sleep. People who had more of these spindles, especially people who had more over a frontal area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, showed the most refreshment in learning capacity after their nap, Walker said.

    Uploading memories

    Walker and his colleagues suspect that the sleep spindles are working to transfer information from the hippocampus, a small area deep in your brain where memories are made, to the prefrontal cortex, which serves as long-term storage. That frees up the hippocampus to make new memories, Walker said.

    "It's almost like clearing out your informational inbox of your e-mail so you can start to receive new e-mails the next day," he said.

    NREM sleep and sleep spindle frequency change throughout a person's life span, Walker said. Older people, for example, have a decline in sleep spindles, suggesting that sleep disruption could be one reason for the memory loss prevalent in old age. The volunteers in the current study were young, but the researchers hope to investigate the effect of sleep spindles on learning in older adults, Walker said.

    The research also draws attention to the importance of sleep, Walker said. Sleep spindles happen more frequently later in the night, precisely the time people cut short when they rise early for work and school, Walker said.

    "Somewhere between infancy and early adulthood, we abandon the notion that sleep is useful," Walker said. That needs to change, he said: "Sleep is doing something very active for things like learning and memory. I think for us as a society to stop thinking of sleep as a luxury rather than a biological necessity is going to be wise."

    Source;
    http://www.livescience.com/13125-sleep-naps-boost-memory.html

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