Obama's Coming Hyper-Inflation: What Will You Use For Money To Feed and Shelter Yourself?

If you are a government employee, with wage increases tied to inflation, you will do better than most. But unless you are paid increased wage paychecks every day, it will be easy to fall behind Obama's coming hyperinflationary expansion. Anyone living on a fixed income, or on savings, will have a very hard time of it.

The hyperinflation meme is rising on the Media-Attention-Meter. A lot of commenters treat hyperinflation as an event horizon, beyond which no information is available. That's not exactly true.

There is a pattern to hyperinflation, and while it can be really nasty, it is not the end of the world.

It could, however, be the end of your retirement account, assuming it consists of treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, or other abstract financial instruments that are not based on anything real. U.S. Dollars fall squarely under that category.

And I've been meaning to post something at least a little positive for once: On the plus side, if you can maintain income increases through the hyperinflation phase, you could possibly pay off your debts really quickly. _Hyperinflation-Watch_via_PowerandControl

If you have a large debt, and have an income linked to inflation rates, you may be able to pay a huge debt off very rapidly, as Zendraken mentions above. Otherwise, you may be in a heap of trouble. What will you use for money when Obama hits the fan?

It is neither too late nor too early to think about items of barter and exchange that might be widely in demand under an Obama hyper-inflationary reich. Old-fashioned barter markets are likely to spring up in towns, cities, and neighborhoods of all sizes. What could you offer in such a market to keep your children and yourself clean, dry, warm, safe, and well-fed?

This is not a theoretical discussion. Obama is doing his part to bring on this scenario. Now you must think about what you need to do about it.

More interesting thoughts here and here. Update: A look at Obama's tax pains.

A Brave New World of Custom Brain Augments

How do you want your brain customised? With a brain-machine interface? With genetic treatments? With smart drugs? With implanted nano-circuits? Or with stem cell colony implants ready to repair any damage or deficit?

All of those modifications are on the doorstep, ringing the front bell. The world's neuroscientists and philosophers are finally taking this reality seriously. A group of interested persons met in Berlin recently to discuss the implications of the brave new brain technologies.

The next stage of brainpower enhancement could be technological - through genetic engineering or brain prostheses. Because the gene variants pivotal to intellectual brilliance have yet to be discovered, boosting brainpower by altering genes may still be some way off, or even impossible. Prostheses are much closer, especially as the technology for wiring brains into computers is already being tested (see "Dawn of the cyborgs"). Indeed, futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil believes the time when humans merge with machines will arrive as early as 2045 (New Scientist, 9 May, p 26).

It won't be long before "clip-on" computer aids become available for everybody, says Andy Clark, a pro-enhancement philosopher at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. These could be anything from memory aids to the ability to "search" for information stored in your brain. "We'll get a flowering of brain augmentations, some seeping through from the disabled community," he says. "I see them becoming fashion items, a bit like choosing clothing." Clark says that even today, devices such as head-up displays on spectacles or simply being adept at using computer programs like Photoshop come close to being physical extensions of people's minds.

...There are, however, simple alternatives to technological enhancement that would achieve many of the same goals, says Dupré: education and child-rearing. Moreover, he thinks such changes can be heritable via epigenetics - the reprogramming of gene expression in offspring by exposure to cultural, maternal and environmental influences. Dupré points to a study in rats showing that good maternal care was passed on largely because it permanently altered gene activity in the brains of the pups. _NewScientist

There is a wide range of potential brain mod even without using invasive implants, stimulators, and genetic alterations. Humans have always had access to meditation techniques (including laughter) which may well build useful brain circuits. More recent developments such as neurofeedback expand the options for creative brain modification immensely. Combining brain machine interfaces with nano-implants, crafted meditative techniques, and neurofeedback offers some quite sophisticated possibilities for supercharging specific brain circuits.

Genetic modification (combined with creative stem cell therapies) is the long term goal, once the techniques are improved. The mainstream intent will be to provide a level playing field for all the world's people -- including those populations that seem stuck at average IQs around 70 to 80 points. These people have no hope of developing or maintaining a technological civilisation, and depend upon outsiders and market dominant minorities for their advanced goods and services.

Eventually, advanced germ cell line genetic brain augmentation techniques will be applied to persons who are already above average intelligence. Soon afterward, clear separations in group proficiencies will develop and begin to widen.

It is not likely that such separation will begin along racial lines, but rather along other affiliative lines such as professions or special interest groups. Societies whose more functional and accomplished members work well together regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion etc will probably be the most creative in terms of applying the new technologies.

If such quasi-elites -- by competencies -- have experienced enough societal shocks they are likely to jump beyond today's ethically queasy resistance to brain augmentation in the interest of survival. The threat of a new dark age brought on by incompetent world governments would be enough to focus even the most bleeding heart.

The horses are already out, and they are just now talking about closing the barn door. Someone take them some coffee.

More Vertical Farms

Cities have always been at the mercy of the countryside for food and raw materials. But what if cities could grow their own food, their own livestock, their own biomass, fuels, and fibres? Such a city-state might be a bit more sustainable through times of scarcity.

The City of Vancouver has ambitious plans to become the most sustainable city in the world. This spring they held the FormShift Vancouver Competition to develop and improve the city’s livability through greener, denser developments. The Harvest Green Tower received an honorable mention in the Primary category for a mixed use primary (arterial) site along a major Vancouver street that includes a rapid transit station. Their vertical farm concept is centered around sustainable food production as well as the creation of a multi-purpose space that can house, transport, feed and entertain people.

The tower consists of interlocking tubes that grow various fruits and vegetables, house chickens and contain an aquaponic fish farm. On top of the vertical growing tower is a rainwater cistern to collect and help water all the plants and animals. At the base of the tower is a livestock grazing plain, as well as a bird habitat and boutique sheep and goat dairy facility. Underneath that is a grocery store, farmer’s market and Harvest Tower Restaurant. Renewable energy is produced from rooftop mounted wind turbines and photovoltaic glazing on the building with the additional help of geothermal heat pumps and methane generation from composting. _ImpactLab

Eventually, a design team along with an innovative builder will get it right. Crops need sun, water, and nutrients to grow optimally. They must be protected from frost and other harsh conditions. But given the proper environment, even high latitude cities should be able to grow abundant crops year round. Energy costs will be higher than on a rural farm, but transportation and storage costs should be less.

Our B.O. In the White House -- What a Comfort

Image SourceObama required just one year's budget to out-deficit his predecessor's entire eight years of deficits. Looking into the future, we see deficit spending into the trillions as far as the eye can see.

As Social Security, Medicare, and other perpetually escalating systems of entitlements and government pensions suck the US taxpayer dry and deplete the credit system of the US and the world, Obama's promises to do anything but destroy the US economy are looking completely incredible.

Focus and Drift: A Secret Path to Brain Power?

Image Source: Magic Trance
"Generate and test" is the secret to prolific creativity for both humans and nature (natural selection). Another powerful pairing may be "focus and drift", for building mental facility -- perhaps even brain matter. First, focus:

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.

The [UCLA] researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.

....The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators. _PO

The discipline of meditation provides the brain with more "staying power" when confronting a problem, situation, or challenge. That is focus. Now, drift:

“Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness. But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks,” Christoff, who has also been the lead author of the study, says. The experts used an observation technique known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for their study. This machine has the ability to show brain areas basically “lighting up” or “turning off,” depending on whether they are active or dormant. In addition, it allows for almost real-time observations on a test subject's brain.

As a reference point, the researchers employed readings recorded while the patients sat in the fMRI machine, and pushed a button when numbers appeared on a screen. Their brain activities were monitored second after second, and stored for comparison.....Christoff says that daydreaming, a contemplative state in which the brain wonders, occupies about one third of every individual's life, and, as such, merits more investigation.

For example, the study has revealed that the “executive network” in our brains, usually dealing with high-level, complex problem-solving, is also highly active in daydreaming. This network consists of the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. In addition to these regions, the wondering mind also activates the “default network,” which is made up of the medial PFC, the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction. The later network has been thus far believed to be the only segment of the brain active during daydreaming. _Softpedia

Competence in using the "focus and drift" cycle can provide a greater potential for problem-solving and creativity, in addition to a better ability to cope with routine challenges. There are many useful approaches to meditative focus. And quite a few methods have been developed to facilitate highly productive daydreaming "drift." Combinatorial sorting suggests an enormous range of potential "systems" for using focus and drift in a highly personal manner.

Be sure to remember to throw in a generous mix of exercise, creative play, good nutrition, and stimulating social interaction.

It may not be long before we develop "smart drugs" and smart therapies that are capable of building intelligence and executive powers to amazing levels. The humans who are already familiar with their mental and emotional powers will be best able to take advantage of an artificial boosting of intelligence and EF. Most people -- the academically lobotomised psychological neotenous narcissistic zomboids of our day -- will only grow more warped and dysfunctional. Technology can only accomplish so much, if humans lack wisdom in applying it.

Soothing A Distressed Brain: FGF2

Anxiety (40 million American adults) and depression (15 million American adults) are among the most common causes of disability and academic failure / underachievement worldwide. If one were to develop an effective, safe, and non-addictive treatment for anxiety and depression, the positive impact on the human world would be immense. University of Michigan researchers have studied the impact of FGF2 -- fibroblast growth factor 2 -- in 19 generations of rats that were bred selectively for high or low anxiety levels.

"We have discovered that FGF2 has two important new roles: it's a genetic vulnerability factor for anxiety and a mediator for how the environment affects different individuals. This is surprising, as FGF2 and related molecules are known primarily for organizing the brain during development and repairing it after injury," Perez said.

Finally, the findings suggest that part of FGF2's role in reducing anxiety may be due to its ability to increase the survival of new cells in a brain region called the hippocampus. Previous research has suggested that depression decreases the production and incorporation of new brain cells, a process called neurogenesis. Although the researchers found that high-anxiety rats produced the same number of new brain cells as low-anxiety rats, they found decreased survival of new brain cells in high-anxiety rats compared to low-anxiety rats. However, FGF2 treatment and environmental enrichment each restored brain cell survival. _Genengnews

Persons with chronic anxiety and depression may also have significant memory problems, perhaps due to reduced neurogenesis and reduced survival of new brain cells. Treatments that allow new cells to survive and function normally in the brain would logically help to normalise the life experience of persons with chronic anxiety and clinical depression, and reduce the enormous societal expense of these mental health disorders.

Biohacking In Every High School Curriculum

Biohacking is growing in popularity among amateur bio-hobbyists, but government overseers of biological threats are concerned. The government is worried about dangerous organisms being created in basements, garages, and walk-in closets in ordinary neighborhoods -- perhaps your own. But should the same government efficiency that makes air travel such a pleasure, has totally eliminated drug and human smuggling across the border, and is currently destroying the private sector of the economy be applied to the close oversight of every closet, garage, and basement in America?

These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.

But are biohackers a threat to national security? ... biohackers argue that Mother Nature is more likely than any home hobbyist to create dangerous new pathogens. They cite the current A/H1N1 "swine flu" virus, which is a made-in-the-wild brew of human, bird and pig influenzas. Mackenzie Cowell, a founder of DIY Bio, says members aim to do good and are committed to working safely.

The movement has made big strides recently thanks to the commercial availability of synthetic DNA. This genetic material, normally found inside the nucleus of cells, can now easily be purchased online. That provides any amateur with the ingredients for constructing an organism....So far, most garage biologists playing around with synthetic DNA are simply adding a gene or two to an existing organism, a fairly standard scientific practice involving some test-tube mixing, and not something biosecurity experts are very worried about. But technology promises to allow the creation of entire organisms from scratch -- something academics are aiming to do in university labs -- and that has some experts worried. _WSJ

The government's instinct is to shut everything down that it conceives as the least threat. Far more rational, would be to train students from the earliest age in the science and safety of bio-research of all types.

The best answer to any kind of serious threat is an educated and informed public that has learned the competencies to respond effectively. Currently, government schools produce helpless incompetent sheep that must be protected and cared for at every turn. The pampering and coddling continues at every stage, so that instead of an informed and effective citizenry, the end result is a horde of confused, milling zombies capable of electing a government of smoothly deceptive clowns in hopes of being well taken care of.

Sorry, zombies, it doesn't work that way. Once the clowns are elected, they are obligated to do favours for their big money supporters. Trial lawyers, labour unions, billionaire bankers and speculators, eco-extremists.... And so it goes until it can't go any longer.

Al Fin is going on record in support of the training of children and youth to be truly competent across a wide range of skills -- some of them quite deadly. Make them smart, strong, and formidable. The ongoing experiment of turning children into lifelong pets isn't working out very well.

The Economic Recovery That Wasn't

The continuing contraction in the world's two biggest markets, the United States and the European Union, does not promise well for emergent countries hoping for export-led growth. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said the GDP of Japan will shrink by 6.3 percent this year. It said GDP in Germany will contract by 5.3 percent and in United Kingdom by 3.7 percent while GDP in the United States drops by 4 percent._Walker

Obama is presiding over a job-loss rate of 8 million per year. Unemployment is growing across Europe and large regions of North America. The US government is pumping deficit spending into the economy faster than it can be reasonably incorporated, and still there are few credible signs of a sustainable recovery. Part of the problem is that the toxic debt that triggered the problem is still out there -- and Obama / Pelosi are determined to generate as much toxic debt as they can.

The first fear is that the economy will slide again next year when the deficit spending runs out. The question is whether the world's governments have the political will to continue the deficit spending and whether the world's bond markets will buy the flood of government debt that is being auctioned -- and at what price. Last week, the U.S. Treasury had to boost its interest rate to 3.3 percent to sell $14 billion of 10-year bonds.

The second reason to question whether the recovery will last is China, where the official figures showing growth at a rate of 6.1 percent in the first three months of this year are looking more and more suspect. Electricity output declined in the same period by almost 6 percent, so analysts question how China can grow without power, particularly when government spending is going into the power-hungry construction industry.

But the biggest reason to fear that this recovery may not be sustainable is that the world's financial system has not yet been fixed. The banks are still in deep trouble. The International Monetary Fund reported this month that a total of $4.1 trillion will have to be written off by the world's banks, and so far they have written off barely a quarter of that. The United States is in slightly better shape. Its banks have written off half of their losses, but Europe's banks have so far written off less than 20 percent of theirs. _Walker

Obama and his zombie government army of sycophants are behaving much like Louis and Marie, shortly before the guillotine was put to use. Although "the divine right of kings" was never meant to apply to US presidents, a lot of things have grown rather twisted under the short -- and so far tragically suicidal -- Obama reich.

Things could have never grown so bad without media complicity. When the day of accounting comes for the rampant incompetence and destructiveness, the media deserves its full share of scrutiny and judgment.

Limits to Growth

Brian Wang points to a J Storrs Hall piece on the new popularity of the failed 1970s computer predictions in The Limits to Growth PDF.

The 1970s were rife with leftist eco-doomseekers, predicting the imminent downfall of civilisation from DDT, pollution, the depletion of oil and mineral resources, and so forth. Sound familiar? We are being treated to tired old re-runs of the same old ecopocalypse. Peak oil, climate catastrophe, the collapse of a global economy that can only be saved by extreme socialist measures. We've heard it all before, but perhaps never in such strident voices from every direction.

The leftist apoca-cacophony, full of sound and fury but without signifier, is important for one reason: it is the propaganda vehicle for the takeover of the private economy by governments. What is yours is now theirs. To protest the new order is to be levied with fines and soon jail terms. All power (and capital) to the government now.

Limits to growth is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if the message of eco-doom is believed. But only private, personal growth is limited. Government growth is essentially unlimited, as long as the host citizenry remains placid and compliant. It is up to the propaganda apparatus to keep the people compliant, ignorant to the true state of affairs.

You cannot ride this wave in an ignorant state. You must inform yourself, and make yourself competent in ever way you can. You are being teamed by the most sophisticated mind-focque apparatus ever seen -- more sophisticated than the USSR's propaganda machine by far. Because this assemblage of mind twisters evolved in a semi-regulated environment it had to be tough and somewhat comprehensive.

Most of the people you know were academically lobotomised, psychologically neotenised, and otherwise made incompetent to distinguish fact from fiction, logic from fallacy. You cannot afford that mental flabbiness any longer. Wake up, or go back to sleep and fuggedaboudet.

A Time for Rape: Blonde Swedish Vixens Seduce Innocent Gangs of Muslim Youth To Rape

“It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl,” says Hamid, in an interview about a gang rape involving a Swedish girl and immigrant perps. “The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably f**ked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity… It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore… girl, I mean;” says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get f**ked to pieces.” _GOV

It is difficult being a young Muslim male, growing up in a pagan society such as Sweden.The blonde girls, they are just asking for it with the way they dress and the way their blonde hair blows in the wind.

In March 2007 during a rally supported by SSU, the Social Democratic Youth League, a man carried a sign reading, “While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism.” He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine because he “expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background.” The local court rejected the man’s free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in a too provocative manner.
_Fjordman

It is a shame that some people use the high incidence of rape in Sweden to attack innocent gangs of immigrants. How fortunate that the SSU is their, to protect the rights of young Muslim males against the forces of pagan strangeness and immorality.

What Trillions? It Ain't Money, It's Just Paper

Obama is rejecting the failed policies of the past in order to ..... accelerate the failed policies of the past even more. If one bubble burst, clearly what is needed is a bigger bubble that takes even longer to burst. We obviously need to invest -- in a bigger printing press!

As usual, the politicians have other ideas: bail everyone out, try to reinflate the bubble, squander more resources on arbitrary projects, reward borrowing and debt, and create lots of new money. Every one of these measures props up bubble activities and undermines genuine wealth-generating activities. The bailouts allocate capital away from the prudent and competent and toward the imprudent and incompetent, from the wealth creators to the wealth destroyers. The "fiscal stimulus" fritters away scarce resources on money-losing (that is, value-destroying) projects. Making debt more attractive encourages more of the behavior that brought us to this unhappy impasse, thereby guaranteeing a worse bust in the future. Printing up new money does not magically create new real resources in the economy. It merely redistributes the existing pool of resources into a configuration that does not correspond to real consumer demand. It diverts resources into artificial activities with which genuinely wealth-generating activities are then forced to compete. _Source

(Virtual) Schools for Learning (for a Change)

Something exciting is happening in education. Virtual schools, home school coops, virtual charters, and other ingenious ideas have cropped up to sneak learning back into education.

Last fall, more than 140 of the state’s 426 school districts used Wisconsin’s Web Academy to provide online learning to more than 800 students in grades six through 12, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.

The Madison School District offers about 100 high school level online courses, and its Madison Virtual Campus started in 2005. Most students use the courses to supplement the regular school day, said Kelly Pochop, Madison’s online learning facilitator.

Some states, such as Michigan, even mandate students take an online course before graduating high school. “If districts aren’t currently offering online courses, they’re studying ways to provide (them),” said Brian Busler, Oregon’s superintendent. Online classes, whether at the university or elementary level “have just exploded over the last several years.”

....Officials say one reason Oregon is moving toward online classes is to compete with a virtual charter school opening as part of the McFarland School District, about 12 miles away.....

....While the physical location of an online school often doesn’t matter, having one nearby makes it easier for students to travel to take standardized tests, attend field trips or interact with teachers. _WisconsinStateJournal_via_News Alert

Over more than a century, Americans have been sold a factory model of education. Mass production, mass indoctrination "education" tries to engineer minds in the grand blank slate tradition of BF Skinner. The end result is students who are not ready for college or the workplace -- the slow motion collapse of a nation's human capital infrastructure. Psychologically neotenised, academicall lobotomised narcissistic incompetents, who have finally taken over the highest levels of the US government.

Will it be possible to work around the "lost generations", and work to help children learn for themselves, to think for themselves, to become competent, thoughtful, responsible and effective humans? A novel idea. Let's form a committee to study it. Put the best minds at the university schools of education to work on it. Float the concept at the next union meeting. Best of all, get the government working on it. Yep, that ought to do it.

Is Climate Change "Consensus" A Soiled Diaper?

Source: WattsUpWithThat?The climate change "consensus" is beginning to stink like a rotten corpse or a days-soiled diaper. As world-respected climate scientist Mike Hulme states:

"If, say, Jim Hansen or Fred Singer and I sat down and looked at the same scientific evidence, we would come up with a very different set of proscriptions. Now, why is that? Is it because our scientific training is deficient, and he's seeing more than I'm seeing, or I'm seeing more than he's seeing? I don't think it is. I think actually there's a lot of stuff that's going on here. And that's actually what we have to get down to - to root out, and expose, accept, and work within these broader, deeper sources of disagreement."

"To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgements is undermining both politics and science", says Hulme.

...It’s not hard to get labelled a climate change “denier”. You don’t even have to deny that climate change is real, man-made and a problem. As Bjørn Lomborg, climatologist Patrick Michaels and political scientist Professor Roger Pielke Jr (http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/) have discovered, you merely have to challenge the orthodox political policy responses.Or, like Climate Audit (http://www.climateaudit.org/)’s Steve McIntyre, dare to scrutinise the statistical workings behind influential climate research papers. If you stray from agreeing with the political prescription, you're an immoral person. _Register

The climate change political movement has become a religious orthodoxy -- a religion substitute and opiate for the masses. The climate religion has its own demon: "man-made carbon dioxide". It has its own prophets: Jimmy Hansen, Al Gore, Barakie come lately Obama . . . And it has its own grand inquisition gallery of knaves and excommunicators.

But the "consensus" is already past its prime, and growing more rotted by the day. The graph above shows the eerie resemblance between our current solar minimum, and the Maunder et Dalton minimums of the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Climate models failed dismally to anticipate that development.

The graph below illustrates recent global cooling -- as manifested by the best monitor of Earth's heat content, the oceans.Source: WattsupWithThat?If the oceans are losing heat, there is no way in hell that the Earth is warming.

Modern academically lobotomised psychological neotenates either never learned to use their own brains, or were programmed in schools and university to defer judgment to someone else. Every generation of indoctrination leads them to be less like humans, and more like sheepish naked monkeys. The foul and reeking climate change "consensus" religion is only one of the many syndromes afflicting humans who refuse to think for themselves. The current suicidal US government is another. American voters rather slouched and shucked their way into the abyss. In that sense, they earned their misery.

Sadly, those who didn't join the lemmings' rush find themselves in the same sinkhole.

What will it take to grow a quorum of humans capable of thinking for themselves, who can reasonable plot a workable course to a better future? The longer the Obama / Pelosi reich continues its destructive reign, the farther into the future the goal would seem to recede.

Blame Bush for Housing Bubble? Not Smart

Blaming Bush for everything that is wrong with the world is becoming an entertaining habit for those with nothing important to do. The rest of us are starting to understand that many of the critical problems we are forced to deal with had their origins long before Bush. By focusing on Bush, people are distracted from the far greater destruction being committed right under their noses.

In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration’s housing policies had “stoked” the foreclosure crisis—and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans—using “the mighty muscle of the federal government,” as the president himself put it—Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn’t afford, the Times said.

Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results. The Times’s analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington’s repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they’ve caused. The ideal of homeownership has become so sacrosanct, it seems, that we never learn from these disasters. Instead, we clean them up and then—as if under some strange compulsion—set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing once again. As Washington grapples with the current mortgage crisis, advocates from both parties are already warning the feds not to relax their commitment to expanding homeownership—even if that means reviving the very kinds of programs and institutions that got us into trouble. Not even the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression can cure us of our obsessive housing disorder. _CityJournal

Unlikely bedfellows from Krugman to Sailer to Kos push at their restraints to blame Bush for long lists of mis-steps and contretemps of which other presidents -- including the current one -- are far more guilty. And the Democratic Congress? The Congressional wrecking ball gets a free pass from the chattering class. People are distracted by the blame game, and don't notice that the Obama /Pelosi reich is pumping up the bubble once again.

Will you stop blaming Bush long enough to notice that you are being set up for yet another round of "you've just been had?" Probably not, as long as the chatterers and wankers keep the blame game going at full volume. But watch your back. While being entertained by the wanksters, you are about to be buggered from behind without even the courtesy of KY jelly.

Home Ownership Bubble Timeline

Image SourceThe Community Reinvestment Act was instituted under President Carter in the 1970s, but it was not until President Clinton in the 1990s that it was put on steroids. The drive under Clinton and the Democrats in Congress to push unqualified borrowers into home mortgages they couldn't afford was the rotten seed.

By the time President Bush realised that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were out of control, powerful Democratic Party controlled interest in the Congress -- including Barnie Frank and Maxine Waters -- blocked meaningful reform. By the time the toxic debt had leveraged itself into a gigantic snowballing avalanche in late 2007 and early 2008, it was too late for anyone to save the financial markets -- not that anyone in government was trying very hard. A slow motion disaster, courtesy of certain politicians whose names must not be spoken.

Geopolitical Miscellany

China's central bank, The People's Bank of China, is warning that the country's economic recovery is not yet on a solid foundation.

Meanwhile, China continues to poison the world through contamination of the atmospheres and the oceans.

Russia's corrupt state-run energy company Gazprom is being forced to raise domestic energy rates. The Russian people are already unhappy over their economic nightmare, and may not take kindly to these rate hikes.

Hugo Chavez is back to his old tricks of stealing private assets to finance his failing revolution in Venezuela. No doubt you will pay "fair market value" for these private assets, at least as you see it -- eh, Hugo, mi amigo?

Too Stupid to Know That Someone Is Trying to Kill You

Just like the Carr brothers in the Wichita massacre, the May 4 2009 home invaders of College Park near Atlanta planned to kill everyone in the apartment at the birthday party -- after raping the women.

Bailey said he thought it was the end of his life and the lives of the 10 people inside his apartment for a birthday party after two masked men with guns burst in through a patio door.

“They just came in and separated the men from the women and said, ‘Give me your wallets and cell phones,’” said George Williams of the College Park Police Department.

Bailey said the gunmen started counting bullets. “The other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said Bailey.

That’s when one student grabbed a gun out of a backpack and shot at the invader who was watching the men. The gunman ran out of the apartment.

The student then ran to the room where the second gunman, identified by police as 23-year-old Calvin Lavant, was holding the women.

“Apparently the guy was getting ready to rape his girlfriend. So he told the girls to get down and he started shooting. The guy jumped out of the window,” said Bailey. _WSBTV

All ten of the party-goers would likely be dead now, and police would have few leads to the killings which might never have been solved. Instead, a citizen took his own self-defense seriously, and acted for himself and his friends.

More here

More on the Wichita Massacre and a similar Knoxville Horror

Brain Implants a Gentler Form of Electroshock

Results of a recent Harvard study using brain implants to treat medication resistant depression were reported to a conference of American neurosurgeons in San Diego yesterday.

"Imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have demonstrated that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) area of the brain plays a critical role in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). These findings prompted research in which we used an investigational epidural cortical stimulation system to deliver targeted stimulation to the left DLPFC in 12 patients with MDD," stated Dr. Eskandar.

The 12 patients were randomized to single blind active or sham stimulation for 8 weeks, and then all subjects received active stimulation. One patient was excluded from analysis due to a protocol deviation. During the procedure, the electrodes were placed epidurally, outside the dura, through a small craniotomy. Outcome assessments included the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), and the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF). _MNT

This form of brain stimulation is more invasive than strong external electroshock (electroconvulsive ECT), but involves a much gentler electrical stimulation. Results from the study are encouraging:

-- In all patients, continued improvement was seen at 6 months (average HDRS: 20 percent) and 12 months (average HDRS: 33 percent).

-- At 12 months, patients whose electrodes were implanted >20 mm from the precentral sulcus averaged a 59 percent improvement in HDRS compared to a 12 percent improvement in patients (n=6) with electrodes <20mm _MNT

This study involves fairly timid electrode placement -- outside the dura, over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Such locations are quite safe, since by avoiding direct brain contact, neural scarring should be completely avoidable. In other words, the procedure should indeed be completely reversible -- unlike ECT and unlike many types of deep brain electrode placement.

An extension of this technique to allow simultaneous stimulation and inhibition of multiple areas of cortex should be the next step -- after confirming the result with larger numbers of medication-resistant depressed patients.

The extradural placement of the electrodes should also allow for creative "sheet-electrode" designs. This is where biocompatible materials and conductive polymers will earn their salt.

As Nation States Fall, and City States Rise , What of the Micro - Nation?

Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. _ForeignPolicy_via_LATNB

The new blog: "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" is dedicated to the idea of the micronation. One form of micronation that is already familiar to Al Fin readers is the seastead. But micronations could occur in other forms such as sea-floor habitats, polar colonies, artificial islands, orbiting colonies, perpetually floating or flying atmospheric colonies, and so on. Most of the desirable real estate on Earth may be taken, but imaginative and creative persons can often take the undesirable and make it desirable. But can they protect it once it is made valuable?

The current issue of the WFS Futurist magazine looks at the issue here and here (via LATNB). A more comprehensive look at the issue can be found at seasteading.org.

For several convergent reasons, many nation states are in danger of collapsing. Nation states within tribal lands were often poorly conceived at the start, and increasingly expensive to maintain. Without massive aid from the developed world, many third world quasi-tribal nations would have long since collapsed.

Other nations in the developed world are in danger of collapse from demographic implosion: the failure to breed. Nations such as Germany and Japan that were under such a compulsion in the 1930s to expand at the cost of world war, are now finding themselves shrinking every year. The same story can be told in Spain, Italy, Greece, Eastern Europe -- and especially Russia. Demographic collapse, at varying rates. The transformation from one type of world to the other is apt to be tumultuous.

The election of Barak Obama in the US may well prove to be the catalyst in this transformation. As the economic, military, and moral standing of the US steadily falls, the subsequent vacuum will be felt worldwide. The threads of the world fabric may unravel far more quickly than anyone believed possible, without the strong moderating presence of a world hegemon with America's pedigree. A world that has China as its hegemon would be a far different world than the one we know.

Power and importance will be relegated to the region and city-state, over the nation state, as central governments face the limits of government action head on.

It is important not to dwell on the incompetence of the Obamas and the Putins overly much, although they seem to have the talent for doing almost everything exactly wrong. The key focus should be on mitigation, and on laying the foundations for better prospects in the intermediate term. That can only be done with a realistic assessment of the current situation. Such an assessment must swing wide of most conventional wisdom, and consider the unthinkable.

Pin-Point Precision: Nano-Cell Biology

These new gold-plated boron nitride nanotube - nanoneedles from the University of Illinois are a good example of technology convergence. The ability to discover the intimate workings between cell and molecular biology have never been as strong, thanks to the use of these special nano-biotechnological devices. Here is how it works:

To create a nanoneedle, the researchers begin with a rigid but resilient boron-nitride nanotube. The nanotube is then attached to one end of a glass pipette for easy handling, and coated with a thin layer of gold. Molecular cargo is then attached to the gold surface via “linker” molecules. When placed in a cell’s cytoplasm or nucleus, the bonds with the linker molecules break, freeing the cargo.
With a diameter of approximately 50 nanometers, the nanoneedle introduces minimal intrusiveness in penetrating cell membranes and accessing the interiors of live cells.

The delivery process can be precisely controlled, monitored and recorded – goals that have not been achieved in prior studies. “The nanoneedle provides a mechanism by which we can quantitatively examine biological processes occurring within a cell’s nucleus or cytoplasm,” said Yang Xiang, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology and a co-author of the paper. “By studying how individual proteins and molecules of DNA or RNA mobilize, we can better understand how the system functions as a whole.” _Nanowerk

Extremely cool tool. The possibilities are beyond current comprehension. These techniques will no doubt be used in induced stem cell studies, and in all kinds of differentiation - dedifferentiation studies. And that is only the beginning.

The dream is consilience -- the unified study of knowledge in real time. This type of tool allows for one small part of the dream.

The Perils of Trusting Chinese Growth Figures

With the dismal 2009 economic performance of the US and Europe thus far, everyone seems to be looking at China for a global economic boost. How far can you trust China's claims for 6.1% first quarter growth? No further than you can throw them, like all Chinese government claims. But where can you look for a deeper understanding of what may be going on behind the bamboo curtain? Here is one possible answer:

Welcome to China's growth puzzle. China's claim of 6.1 percent annualized gross domestic product growth in the first quarter is very difficult to reconcile with the electricity output figures from the China Electricity Council, the Southern Power Grid Co. and the Coal Council, each of which gives slightly different figures, though the overall trends are very similar.

The China Coal Council breaks down industrial and domestic consumption and suggests that domestic electricity consumption fell by 5.2 percent in the first quarter but that industrial consumption fell by 8.38 percent. These are striking falls, particularly when compared with national electricity-consumption growth rates of 14.8 percent in 2007 and 5.2 percent for the whole of 2008.

The issue of China's energy use is important because China's recovery is the first hopeful sign that the world is starting to haul itself out of the Great Recession, the most promising of the "green shoots" detected by U.S. President Barack Obama and other optimistic assessments. _Walker

China's official state pronouncements have never been trustworthy. To understand the true picture of China's economy requires a great deal of sleuthing for information. Government spending does not necessarily go toward meaningful or sustainable growth, as Americans are learning from the corrupt Obama / Pelosi reich. China is no less corrupt than the current US kleptocracy, and even more secretive and dishonest (if you can believe it).

With much of the world sinking into the destructive quagmire of "cap and trade", "carbon taxes", and hyper-regulatory energy starvation, it seems to be up to China and India to provide much of the world's energy-intensive dirty work. But if there is no global demand for China's production, all the government spending on Potemkin production will not mean a thing in terms of global recovery.

China's prosperity reflects a global prosperity -- at least it has up until now. The relationship has never worked in the reverse direction. Before we can believe that China has its act together well enough to perform as the world's economic spark plug, we will need more than government pronouncements.

Update 6May2009: More on industrial and energy reductions in China

In World Demographics Timing is Everything

Image from La Griffe du Lion

Despite their many uncertainties, demographic projections have become an essential tool. Governments, international agencies, and private corporations depend on them in planning strategy and making ­long-­term investments. They seek to estimate such things as the number of pensioners, the cost of health care, and the size of the labor force many years into the future. But the detailed statistical work of demographers tends to seep out to the general public in crude form, and sensationalist headlines [and sometimes wishful thinking _AF] soon become common ­wisdom. _WilsonQuarterly

"The World's New Numbers" by Martin Walker is an ambitious article-length look at the coming world demographics of the 21st century. Part fact and part wishful thinking, it is nonetheless worth a look for anyone who wants to know how the world's changing demographics will affect the balance of power -- and thus the future of humankind.

It is important for the interested onlooker to understand that populations trends -- like weather forecases -- are only informed guesses. When political entities [such as the UN] get involved in predicting populations and climates, the credibility of the predictions falls precipitously. Take this bit of political wishful thinking:

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Only two Arab countries still have high fertility rates: Yemen and the Palestinian ­territories. _WQ

Anyone with an understanding of human population dynamics knows enough not to bet against the urge of youngsters to mate, and procreate. If a country does indeed have a high proportion of young people under the age of 25, predicting a steady drop in fertility rates for the foreseeable future is an exercise in self-blinding. An interesting visual rendering of a country's age distribution is its population pyramid. A bottom-heavy (more young people) population pyramid points toward a higher fertility rate than a top-heavy (more old people) population pyramid, as a rule of thumb.

Whatever the underlying reasons for the apparent trends on demographics for any specific country, those reasons are subject to change at very short notice. Extreme affluence or extreme poverty can both suppress fertility. Most of the world's peoples live well within the extremes, and might well experience upward and/or downward movement multiple times within a lifespan. Such fluctuations in well-being may appear insignificant to a distant observer, but make all the difference in the world in a person's fertility plans.

It is with the ongoing demographic transformation of Europe, that the author of the WQ piece appears to exercise the greatest amount of denial and wishful thinking.

Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century. _WQ

The author admits that a sizeable (eg 80% or more for the US) amount of increase in fertility is due to immigration, but almost immediately denies that immigration is the main cause of Europe's "quasi-increase." If 30% of the increase in Western Europe's fertility is due to immigrants from Eastern Europe, it is likely that at least 50% is due to Muslim immigrants who originate within far more fecund populations than those of Eastern Europe.

Anyone who claims that European women are increasing their fertility in any meaningful way, must account for the ever higher proportion of Muslims in the labour and delivery wards of Europe, in the schools of Europe, and every other institution catering to the young and very young. Certainly the population pyramid of Muslims in Europe looks considerably different than the population pyramid of indigenous Europeans. Why all the denial?

In terms of IQ transformation, the average European IQ is 100, compared with an average middle eastern population IQ of 85, and an average Sub-Saharan African IQ of 70 to 75. Certainly the brainpower portion of Europe's human capital is undergoing a significant change. Far fewer scientists, engineers, architects, physicians, dentists, or patent attorneys to be sure, even taking into account the ongoing brain drain from the third world.

The only populations that will be able to drive the future, will be the populations with a high enough "smart fraction" to field the majour league players in the intellectual disciplines. It is uncertain how well Europe will be able to hold up under the onslaught of third world bodies.

In world demographics, timing is everything. The west shut down its baby-making apparatus a full generation or two before the emerging world. And the emerging world is a generation or two ahead of the third world on that score. It is no good taking comfort from a trend that is happening too late to save you.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

Exxon vs. Gazprom: What Does it Mean?

When comparing Russia with the United States, sometimes it helps to look at a specific sector of the economies. Taking Russia's strongest sector -- energy -- and comparing Gazprom with the US' strongest energy company -- Exxon -- might be instructive.

Exxon posted a record profit of $45 billion in 2008. Its fourth-quarter results were down because of falling prices for crude oil, but just 33%, and it rose to the top of Fortune 500 for the year. And Gazprom? Russia’s entry in the competition, a monopoly run by the Russian government itself, saw its profts fall by a whopping, truly breathtaking 84% in the fourth quarter of last year. Its total profits for the year were less than $30 billion, one third less that of Exxon Mobile, a single private American firm, and well below the market’s expectations.

This pure domination continues in the wider economic picture:

The world learned last week, for instance, that Russia’s GDP shrank 9.5% in the first quarter of 2009, even more than the 7% that that the Kremlin had originally reported. Here again, Russia’s performance was one-third worse than America’s. The U.S. economy shrank just 6% in the first quarter. The World Bank puts the value of Russia’s GDP at $1.3 trillion. The U.S. GDP is ten times larger, at $13.8 trillion. The difference, of course, is expanding rapidly as the Russian economy contracts much more dramatically.

Russia has only five companies on the list of the world’s 500 largest, a pathetic 1% of the total that must be shocking for those who imagine Russia to be an economic titan and “energy superpower.” Not one of Russia’s companies has revenues in excess of $100 billion. America has 153 companies on the list, nearly one-third of the total, thirty times more than Russia. Fifteen of the American firms have revenues in excess of $100 billion. McKesson, the smallest of the 15, has significantly more revenues than Gazprom, which is the largest of Russia’s enterprises.

Russia has just 32 billionaires, none worth as much as $10 billion. America has twenty times that number, twenty of whom have more than $10 billion in net worth.

We could go on, and on. By any standard, America and Russia are in two entirely different universes of economic power, and that of course translates into wholly incomparable levels of military power and living standards. Americans are #30/191 nations when ranked for lifespan, Russians are a miserable #128/191. _LaRussophobe

The long term prospects for the US -- once Obama and his army of mindless zombies are properly disposed of -- are sunny and warm. The long term prospects for Russia, on the other hand, are dismal at best. Russia's sky-high death rates combined with her low-low birth rates tell the tale of a nation that is not long for this Earth.

When the technological breakthroughs that allow a widespread passage through the singularity into the next level occur, the US population will be one of the best positioned nations on Earth to take advantage of the opportunity. It is not certain that Russia will even exist by then.

Albany University Officials Guilty of Cover-Up of Academic Fraud by Climate Researcher?

Academics have been properly thrown in prison for doing the same thing the Albany University researcher is accused of having done.

Professor Wei-Chyung Wang is a star scientist in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the University at Albany, New York. He is a key player in the climate change debate (see his self-description here). Wang has been accused of scientific fraud.

...The case is also of interest because it provides yet another example of how *not* to create trust in a scientific misconduct investigation. It adds to the litany of cases suggesting that Universities cannot be allowed to investigate misconduct of their own star academics. The University response has so far been incoherent on its face.

Doug Keenan, the mathematician who raised the case of Wang.....maintains that “almost by itself, the withholding of their raw data by [climate] scientists tells us that they are not scientists”. _ScientificMisconduct_via_Wattsupwiththat_via_BennyPeiserCCNet

The full summary of the case is too long to include here, but go to Watts Up With That for more specific information. If you are currently naive to the widespread fraud within the "climate science" community, you are in for a big surprise.

Unfortunately, several prominent climate researchers are guilty of the same type of fraud and misconduct as alleged above. The best place to read about these dishonest "researchers" is at Climate Audit blog.

For an academic institution such as Albany University to apparently cover-up scientific fraud and misconduct intentionally, is a sad commentary on the state of American academia. And yet, significant evidence points to the widespread occurrence of such coverups within not only academia, but also within scientific journals (Nature, Science, etc.).

Under these circumstances, it is most unlikely that the underlying science regarding climate will receive a fair hearing in the halls of academia, the halls of government, or within the media.

Cycles Within Cycles: The Unquiet Climate

It is folly to talk about "climate change" when the climate is always changing and chaotic. Further, it is folly to claim that "the science is in" or "the debate is settled" when in fact the science has barely begun to come in, and the debate is but in the earliest stages.

Dr Akasofu, experienced analyst with the International Arctic Research Center, points out that the temperature have been rising steadily at a trend rate of 0.5°C per century since the end of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter; it last froze over in 1804). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction:

1882 – 1910 Cooling
1910 – 1944 Warming
1944 – 1975 Cooling
1975 – 2001 Warming

The green arrow in Figure 1 points to the situation today with temperature leveling off. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030, obviously quite bearish for temperatures in the medium term. Though not so for the carbon-credit market itself, since that appears to move completely independently of the climate.

....The IPCC is strongly supported by government funding, scientists in the media, famous ex-politicians, celebrities, multiple scientific committees, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Normally this would be an exceptionally persuasive mix, but the ability of large bureaucracies to influence planetary cycles has a poor track record. Now that the bull market trend of the late 1990s has clearly been broken, bearish analysts like Dr Akasofu have been gaining more respect. _JoNova_via_ImpactLab

Trust the Obama / Pelosi / Boxer reich to attempt to completely overturn the US economy on the basis of "climate change". Trust the arrogant unthinking fools to strip the country of its ability to provide vital energy and power to homes, industries, and commercial enterprises. Trust them to bring about destructive change, built upon ignorance and deception. They possess nothing else.

Obama Officially Owns This Depression

Whether President Obama-prompter makes you sleepy, skeptical, bored, or scared, you should be aware that the man is now in charge -- and therefore responsible for what happens. The Obama Depression itself is aptly named, since it is the threat of an Obama presidency that foreshadowed the OD as early as August or September of 2008, and the reality of the Obama election and subsequent presidency that finally set the drop into depression from November 2008 into the indefinite future.

Economists are wondering why members of the public at large do not seem more concerned about their economic future than they do.

A review of prominent events in the depression scares of 1974-75 and 1978-82 suggests that they stemmed at least in part from a sense that inflation was dangerously out of control. During both periods, inflation moved into the double-digit range. There was widespread concern that the Federal Reserve had no good options and might need to plunge the economy into a depression to control inflation.

And in these two periods, energy crises — the first and second “oil shocks” — contributed to the negative outlook....Now that oil prices have moderated, it’s possible that most people have less vivid worries than they did in 1974-75 or 1979-82 because their economic problems are not evident every time they shop or drive their cars.

During those earlier two scares, out-of-control inflation was widely visible, but today many people haven’t personally experienced rising unemployment and foreclosures. And it’s possible that the optimistic tone of the president and the Fed has assuaged some fears, and that people might believe that the government is fixing their problems. _NYT

Imagine the current cascading failure of banks, businesses, and building trades combined with doubled or tripled gasoline prices plus widespread inflation as was seen under President Carter? The public panic would be more palpable than is currently felt.

In other words, the crash in oil prices (from the world deflationary crisis) plus the apparent lack of inflation (also caused by deflationary stresses) are allowing people to tell themselves that nothing is really wrong. Even as the Obama / Pelosi reich takes the wrecking ball to the economy, and hands control of the future of every American down the the third and fourth generation to friends and financiers in the labour movement, in the legal industry, in the banking and finance industries, and in the radical activist anti-energy dieoff.orgiast industry.

Obama owns this depression. He is working as fast as he can to dig the hole under the economy as deeply as possible. So far, no one seems any the wiser. The economic devastation for the near and medium future is already immense. The stresses on the integrity of the nation as a whole are starting to exceed allowable levels. But Obama-prompter is not likely to stop at the limits. He is certainly not aware of them.

If you are like most of the herd, you will see no reason to modify your behaviours in light of the narcissist in chief's full scale assault on the market economy. You will believe the news and entertainment media that the world is now in good hands. But if you are intelligent, you will calmly and deliberately begin making contingency plans just in case they are wrong.

Khan Academy: A Constantly Growing Universe

The Khan Academy video on the normal distribution above, was uploaded 3 days ago. As of today, there are 821 videos at Khan Academy on YouTube. The goal and ongoing mission of Khan Academy is to provide videos to "help anyone learn anything they want to learn".

As ambitious and impressive as it is, Khan Academy is just one man's attempt to help increase the human intellectual capital of the planet. The internet makes this kind of free, distributed, long-distance, learn-at-your-own-pace education much easier to provide. But it is the human mind of Salman Khan that conceived, created, and committed his time to making Khan Academy work.

Only a few humans, relatively speaking, possess the multi-disciplinary knowledge, expertise, and competence that the creator of Khan Academy possesses. But humans are capable of teaming up to provide a broad range of shared expertise, insight, wisdom, and experience across many different fields of knowledge. It is becoming possible to give oneself an incredibly broad education for the cost of your time and internet access. Thousands of capable humans are committed to making that option possible for you. If you know of someone who might benefit from their efforts, pass it on.

Mental Tug of War Is Built Into Your Brain

Image SourceConflict and competition is just the way the brain works. One part of your brain wants to do one thing, but another part wants to stop it, or to do something else instead. This is the war of the whorls, the way evolution built animal consciousness. The research described in the article quoted below involves a mental tug of war between two parts of the pre-frontal cortex. But this is a game the entire brain has to play.

Those who made good decisions and employed self-control exhibited more activity in the DLPFC region of the brain, where as the amount of activity in the vmPFC was similar in both groups. According to the lead author of the paper Todd Hare, "the vmPFC works during every decision. The DLPFC, on the other hand, is more active when you're employing self-control."

Based on their findings, the authors speculate on the evolution of our brains and the nature of self-control. They argue that the vmPFC originally evolved to predict or forecast the "short-term value of stimuli," and that humans gained the ability to examine the long-term considerations as structures such as the DLPFC evolved to modulate the short-term desire signal. While the experiments were limited to diet choices, the authors state that understanding the origins of self-control can have implications for areas as diverse as addiction science, economic policy, and even into determining whether someone is in full command of their decision-making facilities under the eyes of the law.

Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1168450

_ArsTechnica

The simultaneous activation of tens of thousands of massively interconnected cortical columns and other brain centers leads to a somewhat limited number of "attractor states" of global brain activation. These states may last for an extremely brief instant before transitioning into other attractor states of global activation.

It happens much too quickly for the conscious mind to follow. You might say that the conscious mind is something of a dunce, in terms of what the brain itself is capable of. The conscious mind has to "freeze frame" simplified brain states via the rather clumsy imaging methods that humans have devised so far. If humans could devise an imaging system based upon the multi-level massive parallelism of the brain itself, progress in neuroscience would move a lot more quickly.

Carbon Hysteria Threatens World Economies

Yes, it's true. Carbon hysteria in Europe, Australia, the US, and elsewhere threatens to shut down businesses and industry, eliminate many millions of jobs, and raise the living costs of average people to an alarming degree. In the US:

Greenhouse gas cap-and-trade legislation such as that proposed by the Obama administration and under discussion in the House could result in the loss of more than 3 million jobs by 2030, according to a recently released report.

In addition, the legislation could cost the average household $2,100 annually, according to the report compiled on behalf of the Coalition for Affordable American Energy _Workforce

And in Australia:

AUSTRALIA'S electricity generators have warned the Rudd Government that power stations could face insolvency this year under an emissions trading scheme that forced such rapid change it risked "blowing up in their faces".

The National Generators Forum told a Senate committee yesterday that many power stations would simply not be able to afford the 100 to 200 per cent increase in operating costs under the current plan to require them to buy more than 80 per cent of necessary emissions permits. This would leave some insolvent and all struggling to find $50 billion in new and refinancing capital over the next five years. _Australian

The tragedy of these governmental policy blunders is that they are all totally unnecessary. There is no climate catastrophe brewing. The likely sea level rise between now and the year 2100 is approximately 3 1/2 inches. Antarctica is not losing ice -- in fact Antarctica is gaining sea ice at a startling rate. The far more realistic threat is global cooling, with deadly cold winters, shorter growing seasons and less rainfall leading to more global hunger.

And yet the idiot governments of the world insist upon shooting their citizens in the pocketbooks and in their livelihoods. Here is a short and incomplete list of the damaging effects of misguided government energy and climate policy:

1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
2. It Will Not Make A Substantive Impact on the Environment
3. It Will Kill Jobs
4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing or Haircuts.
7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” under a cap-and-trade program. (January 2008) _Heritage_via_TomNelson

H/T Bennie Peiser's CCNet Newsletter

Foldable Helicopter: Perfect for Urban Survival!

If you live in a high rise apartment, deep inside a large city, you may have wondered how you could escape the unruly urban jungle, should the fecal matter hit the fan. Here is your answer: the Hummel Helicopter, which can be folded up and kept in a closet until it is needed. Simply roll the folded vehicle down the hallway to the elevator, go up to roof level, unfold the machine, and fly off to your retreat. Having a birds-eye view of miles of vehicles backed-up on the panic clogged freeways below, is an added bonus.

The “Hummel” (”bumble bee”) is a light helicopter for [a total of] two passengers. It can be used for passenger transport (air taxi), as well as for e.g. emergency transports like organs or units of stored blood and of course for conventional tasks of a helicopter like monitoring (e.g. coast guard, police, army, scientists) and to be mobile. The tandem rotor design guarantees a more efficient aircraft performance as the main-tail rotor design, without wasting fuel. _ImpactLab_via_dVice_via_Zoobota_via_DesignBlog

Terrafugia's Transition "driveable airplane" is another possibility, if you can find a long enough open stretch of pavement to use for a runway. Another alternative for those who live near a river, lake, or bay, is to keep an amphibious plane handy that can take off and land on either water or solid surface.

If you have ever been caught up in a large-scale evacuation of a large city, you will immediately understand the seriousness behind the silliness. In the past, such an evacuation might have been prompted by the approach of a hurricane. In the future, growing numbers of potentially predictable and emergent threats might trigger such an outrush of people.

Imagine if the current Swine Flu had been genengineered for maximum contagion and lethality? Just a few cases in the local emergency room might have been enough to trigger wide-scale panic and impromptu evacuation. A simple radioactive "dirty bomb" could accomplish the same mindless stampede without so much as a single fatality. As earthquakes and volcanoes become more predictable, evacuation plans will grow apace. Face it: getting out of a city in the midst of full-scale panic would not be easy or risk-free.

Check in with Survival Blog regularly, for a wide array of commentary on this and other survival topics.

Obama Depression Continues to Unfold

Every day in the new Obama economy brings new surprises. The quasi-fascist economic policies of the new reich are making things very hard for businessmen and investors. A market economy is based upon a hard-won trust between the economic players. After a mere 100 days of Obama, that vital trust is being obliterated.

The latest ominous cloud on the horizon floats over the commercial mortgage market.

"On the street, the rumor is it is coming and it's going to come fast and furious. Some people are predicting September," said Paul Waters, a New York-based executive vice president of brokerage operations in North America for NAI Global, a top-five commercial real estate brokerage with operations around the globe.

Just as the housing meltdown did, the commercial real estate crunch is likely to begin as a slow bleed that gains momentum. It's likely to be spread evenly across the nation, in large part because of an outgoing economic tide that's spared few companies anywhere.

"There's going to be a lot of trouble on Main Street with some of these commercial and industrial buildings. The biggest impact will be on some of the smaller owners," Waters said. "The smaller local regional players that are stretched thin may have some great difficulties with their mortgages." _McClatchy_via_NewsAlert

As usual, governments are far too slow in reacting to the commercial real estate crisis to do any good. One state government is even pretending that there is no problem at all. Part of the problem may be the movement of jobs away from city centers.

Another aspect of the problem is demographic change. The US rust belt is being deserted in favour of the sun belt. Some cities and regions are simply dying off, like Europe. Much of the commercial and industrial infrastructure in those areas may lie neglected indefinitely, especially if the Obama / Pelosi reich's economic wrecking ball is allowed to continue for much longer.

Everything Obama does in the name of solving a problem, seems to make the problem worse in addition to creating new -- and worse -- problems. But as long as he has the news and entertainment media acting as enthusiastic cheerleaders and smokescreen machines, most of the oblivious public will remain oblivious.

Recruitment for Obama's "zombie sqad" brownshirt civilian enforcers should be quite brisk, as the productive economy continues to fall by the wayside. He promised change, and his wife promised he would make us all sacrifice. Even the Obamas' close friends in the Chicago law community are feeling the pinch. Perhaps before they can spread the wealth, they must first "spread the misery?"