Cover of Red Dawn (Collector's Edition)The shared experience of absurdity: Charlie Todd on TED.com
Charlie Todd causes bizarre, hilarious, and unexpected public scenes:
An environmental activist recently captured audio from a media strategy session of an industry conference where energy companies discussed incorporating military strategies when dealing with citizens concerned about fracking.
As war, the economy and persecution by Muslim extremists push Arab Christians and religious minorities out of the Middle East, the refugees are quietly settling in small pockets across the U.S.
They are reviving old, dormant churches, bringing together families torn apart by war and praying collectively in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Religious experts say their growing presence in the U.S. is all about survival as Christians and religious minorities continue to get pushed out of the Holy Land. Religious leaders said if violence continues, more can be expected to seek safety in the U.S. while disappearing in lands where they're lived for 2,000 years.
The Mortgage Electronic Registration System was created in the 1990s by 3,000 of the nation's largest lenders to "streamline the mortgage sale process by using e-commerce to replace paperwork," according to the company's website.
In recent years, the Virginia-based registry has exploded across the U.S. as mortgages increasingly were bundled and sold as commodities in rapid churn to investors.
Lenders then began relying solely on MERS to track their transactions, officials said, forgoing a centuries-old system of filing loan documents in county courthouses. As a result, public records are in shambles, according to county officials in Texas and across the nation, and millions of dollars in recording fees have gone unpaid.
For homeowners, the potential impact is dire, experts say. Without a clear and accurate document trail of who holds a lien on a property, a homeowner could face trouble selling and buying, and the risk of losing a home in a foreclosure proceeding could rise
Lost in the Greek of It... The Mire of Political Gibberish, and the Nonsense of Bureaucracy that Comes with It
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don´t need it." ~ Bob Hope
Common sense and a basic knowledge of history will recognize the folly of curing a debt crisis with more debt. To clean up the mess, a default on the debt and the elimination of government´s complete power over money is required. The concept of sound money is where the solution lies.
Unfortunately, we won´t get there easily or voluntarily. It will take a severe recession / depression first. Politicians are not prepared to accept the fallacies of the welfare state and the current fiat currency system. It certainly would not secure them a re-election.
Instead, they are all tangled up in the political and bureaucratic gibberish, in the complexities of the treaties, the rules and the mechanics of a flawed system they have created over the past decades. The media is all too happy to go along for the ride. Most of what is being broadcast and then regurgitated many times over has, therefore, become overly convoluted and confusing.
Today, we have literally gotten lost "in the Greek of it." The focus of mainstream media is on Papandreou and his political contortions. It's on the social unrest in Athens and Berlusconi's personal escapades. We are hammered with abbreviations such as IMF, EFSF, CDS and the like. We try to keep up with Merkel's comments on fiscal sanity and Sarkozy's rhetoric of saving Europe (as if that were a French possibility). And, if you stay entangled in the system and principles of 'their world,' you will be lost in the mire as well. It's impossible to keep up, easy to give up...
( Note : 'the government's 'complete power over money'...does not exist. )
Santa Cruz County passed a unanimous resolution against methyl iodide on Tuesay, and other local governments are also stepping up in the effort to ban the cancer-causing pesticide.
But pesticide manufacturers and fumigant applicators aren’t taking the news sitting down; they’re doing everything in their power to hold back the tide of safe strawberry farming.
Opposition to methyl iodide has been brewing throughout Santa Cruz County for over a year. Local school districts have taken a stand against the chemical and numerous organizations in strawberry country have urged Gov. Jerry Brown to pull the pesticide off the market. Santa Cruz County further cemented those concerns when the County Supervisors passed a unanimous resolution against the chemical on Tuesday. And local governments are now joining the swelling ranks of scientists, farmers and farmworkers who oppose the chemical’s use.
Chemistry: New Insight Into 100-Year-Old Haber-Bbosch Process of Converting Nitrogen to Ammonia
Holland and his team, which included Meghan Rodriguez and William Brennessel at the University of Rochester and Eckhard Bill of the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Germany, succeeded in mimicking the process in solution. They discovered that an iron complex combined with potassium was capable of breaking the strong bonds between the nitrogen (N) atoms and forming a complex with an Fe3N2core, which indicates that three iron (Fe) atoms work together in order to break the N-N bonds. The new complex then reacts with hydrogen (H2) and acid to form ammonia (NH3) -- something that had never been done by iron in solution before
Williams and his team figured out a way to release hydrogen from an innocuous chemical material -- a nitrogen-boron complex, ammonia borane -- that can be stored as a stable solid.
Now the team has developed a catalyst system that releases enough hydrogen from its storage in ammonia borane to make it usable as a fuel source. Moreover, the system is air-stable and re-usable, unlike other systems for hydrogen storage on boron and metal hydrides.
Climate blame: send for the lawyers
The truth is that we know little about how climate change will pan out - still less how it will influence climate disasters. The Stern Review, published for the UK government in 2006, argued that super-hurricanes, mega heatwaves and the like will cause trillions of dollars in damage annually by 2100.
As one measure of the uncertainties, the review's arch critic, Yale University economist Robert Mendelsohn, now says it will be more like tens of billions of dollars in a study that the World Bank has been dithering about publishing. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme climate events due out later this month won't take us much further.
If, as many suspect, our fingerprints are all over recent climate disasters, then we have a crime scene. But before the lawyers can do their stuff, we have to send for forensics.
Now there's the specter of a giant solar flare turning the Earth into a crispy critter sometime next year. But don't worry, our friends at NASA cheerfully assure us in a recent post on the agency's Web site, this version of the apocalypse isn't likely to occur either.
High Uric Acid Linked to Both Gout and Diabetes
Study Shows People With High Uric Acid Levels May Have Higher Risk for Diabetes
Containing the diabetes epidemic
The “fetal origin of disease” hypothesis proposes that gestational programming may critically influence adult health and disease. Gestational programming (intrauterine programming) is a process whereby stimuli or stresses that occur at critical or sensitive periods of development, permanently change structure, physiology and metabolism, which predispose individuals to disease in adult life.
The primary prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (Type 2 DM) is more important than post primary prevention, as this effort is likely to reverse or halt the epidemic of the disease.
Maternal inheritance is attributed to mutation in the gene(s) present in mitochondrial DNA and is transmitted invariably by an affected mother to her progeny. However, exposure to diabetic environment in utero was associated with increased occurrence of impaired glucose tolerance and a defective insulin secretory response in adult offspring, independent of genetic predisposition to Type 2 DM. A study of Pima Indians revealed that children exposed in utero to maternal diabetes are at a higher risk of obesity and diabetes than their unexposed siblings, suggesting that the increased risk to the exposed offspring is not exclusively genetic. These observations clearly indicate the need to focus on the intra uterine environment. Alterations of intrauterine environment, in particular, the development of hyperinsulinemia is strongly associated with the development of obesity and prediabetes during childhood and puberty.
. Speculation that the rise in Type 2 DM in Indian urban population may have been triggered by mild obesity in mothers, leading to glucose intolerance during pregnancy, macrocosmic changes in the fetus and insulin deficiency in adult life. Type 2 DM may be programmed in fetal life, hence diabetes prevention will have to start in early life (in utero) and continue in later life.
The timely action taken now in screening all pregnant women for glucose intolerance, achieving euglycemia in them and ensuring adequate nutrition may prevent in all probability the vicious cycle of transmitting glucose intolerance from one generation to another. To contain the epidemic of diabetes we have to “Focus on the Fetus for the Future.”
Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal
A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist
Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.
When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.
Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.
When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company's financial demands, senior officials replaced the government's lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.
When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.
Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a "sole-source" procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation's biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government's specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.
February 13, 2011 
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