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I honestly believe this is a controlled devaluation of the system as a whole. Or I should say, a forced devaluation.

I've read all of the economist views on this, from Austrian to Keynesian, from gold and silverbugs to dollar hegemonists. Here's my opinion.

As we've seen, this is a forced devaluation. First they hit the banking sector, to get rid of the toxic stuff 'under the table.' Has there been any transparancy or willingness by the banks? Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan do not count in this, for reasons I will not get into here, as I'm sure most of you know already.

The dollar suddenly goes through the roof in value, above other currencies in comparison. Gotta keep America at the top, so foreign investors still see the US Dollar as a reserve currency.

Then, they hit the commodities sector. Total devaluation by mass deleveraging. Oil is hitting the floor despite OPECs attempts to arrest this. Gold and silver are being driven down by PAPER COMEX prices (now that's one HELL of an illusion). Leave the market to believe that there is NOWHERE to run.

With hedges down, hedge funds and mutual funds shrink, die, or flee to the dollar. Look how much money has dissapeared already from this. All that wealth, gone. Wealth that wasn't really there.

Now, the DOW and other markets are in a controlled crash, to keep people from panic selling. Seriously, every time it goes into a dive, there's a sudden 300-900 point jump back up to near positive territory or above. A sudden crash would force their hands and rush their plans.

When enough people dive into the dollar as an escape from the wealth confiscation, don't be suprised by the rate cut and mass devaluation of the dollar that happens VERY quickly, at a time that will leave few without warning with the ability to move back into hedges against the dollar. Imagine how much wealth will be lost through this move.

Now, there will be huge winners in this plan. Everyone's losing money, because the whole system has to move down from the grossly inflated numbers that are still there. Some estimates are DOW back down to near 5000. You take a guess, just don't be suprised. Those who play this with foreknowledge will jump out of hedges, or buy the hedges when low, and make a mass move to the dollar like what is happening now. Right before the dollar drops, you'll see mass buy-ups from big players, likely in commodities in their lows. Everyone else will drop like a rollercoaster on a broken track.

Those of you who are cringing over the gold and silver markets, remember that the central banks have all but stopped leasing their hoards. They are making every attempt to pull their gold and silver back into their vaults and low prices, trying to shake out all the small investors they can. Even CFTC investigators are perplexed over this mass devaluation of g/s when you would think it would be shooting through the roof. But is it so suprising? The powers that be can't have people publicly rushing into gold and silver, which in the larger scheme of things, they can't completely devalue. They WANT people in the dollar, for reasons already stated.

Now, I'm not necessarily advising you to rush all your money into physical metals, because I'm not a professional advisor, and you're gonna need cash for a while. Besides, good luck finding metals to take possession of even close to spot, in any amount that will matter.

So you have my prediction. There is nowhere to run, unless you have plans to hold for the long run. The worst place to stash your wealth is the USD. For now it's a great idea, but you better have plans to put it into something equitable and/or tangible. Like canned goods.

WHERE WE'RE HEADED




By Robert A. Waters
April 7, 2003
NewsWithViews.com

You're sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way.


With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks both thugs to the floor.

One writhes and screams while the second man crawls to the front door and lurches outside. As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you're in trouble. In your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few that are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless. Yours was never registered.

Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm. When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: authorities will probably plea the case down to manslaughter. "What kind of sentence will I get?" you ask. "Only ten-to-twelve years," he replies, as if that's nothing. "Behave yourself, and you'll be out in seven."

The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. Somehow, you're portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choir boys. Their friends and relatives can't find an unkind word to say about them. Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both "victims" have been arrested numerous times. But the next day's headline says it all: "Lovable Rogue Son Didn't Deserve to Die." The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters.

As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up, then the international media. The surviving burglar has become a folk hero.

Your attorney says the thief is preparing to sue you, and he'll probably win. The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you've been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects. After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time.

The District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.

A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven't been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man. It doesn't take long for the jury to convict you of all charges.

The judge sentences you to life in prison.

This case really happened.

On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk, England, killed one burglar and wounded a second. In April, 2000, he was convicted and is now serving a life term.

How did it become a crime to defend one's own life in the once great British Empire?

It started with the Pistols Act of 1903. This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license.

The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns.

Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns.

Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the streets shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.

The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of "gun control", demanded even tougher restrictions. (The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.)

Nine years later, at Dunblane, Scotland, Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school.

For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable, or worse, criminals.

Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners. Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns. The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearms still owned by private citizens. During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism. Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released.

Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying, "We cannot have people take the law into their own hands." All of Martin's neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences. Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars.

When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn't were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn't comply. Police later bragged that they'd taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens. How did the authorities know who had handguns?

The guns had been registered and licensed. Kinda like cars.

Sound familiar?

WAKE UP AMERICA, THIS IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION.

"..It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.."
--Samuel Adams

© 2003 Robert A. Waters - All Rights Reserve

Money and the Crisis of Civilization
Charles Eisenstein

http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization

Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.

Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.

Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can't. I try to hush this embarrassing fact up as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million dollars back -- in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!

So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.

This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power of their wages. However, to see the current crisis as merely the result of a big con is to miss its true significance.

I think we all sense that we are nearing the end of an era. On the most superficial level, it is the era of unregulated casino-style financial manipulation that is ending. But the current efforts of the political elites to fix the crisis at this level will only reveal its deeper dimensions. In fact, the crisis goes "all the way to the bottom." It arises from the very nature of money and property in the world today, and it will persist and continue to intensify until money itself is transformed. A process centuries in the making is in its final stages of unfoldment.

Money as we know it today has crisis and collapse built into its basic design. That is because money seeks interest, bears interest, and indeed is born of interest. To see how this works, let's go back to some finance basics. Money is created when somebody takes out a loan from a bank (or more recently, a disguised loan from some other kind of institution). A debt is a promise to pay money in the future in order to buy something today; in other words, borrowing money is a form of delayed trading. I receive something now (bought with the money I borrowed) and agree to give something in the future (a good or service which I will sell for the money to pay back the debt). A bank or any other lender will ordinarily only agree to lend you money if there is a reasonable expectation you will pay it back; in other words, if there is a reasonable expectation you will produce goods or services of equivalent value. This "reasonable expectation" can be guaranteed in the form of collateral, or it can be encoded in one's credit rating.

Any time you use money, you are essentially guaranteeing "I have performed a service or provided a good of equivalent value to the one I am buying." If the money is borrowed money, you are saying that you will provide an equivalent good/service in the future.

Now enter interest. What motivates a bank to lend anyone money in the first place? It is interest. Interest drives the creation of money today. Any time money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.

If the volume of money grows faster than the volume of goods and services, the result is inflation. If it grows more slowly -- for example through a slowdown in lending -- the result is bankruptcies, recession, or deflation. The government can increase or decrease the supply of money in several ways. First, it can create money by borrowing it from the central bank, or in America, from the Federal Reserve. This money ends up as bank deposits, which in turn give banks more margin reserves on which to extend loans. You see, a bank's capacity to create money is limited by margin reserve requirements. Typically, a bank must hold cash (or central bank deposits) equal to about 10% of its total customer deposits. The other 90%, it can loan out, thus creating new money. This money ends up back in a bank as deposits, allowing another 81% of it (90% of 90%) to be lent out again. In this way, each dollar of initial deposits ends up as $9 of new money. Government spending of money borrowed from the central bank acts a seed for new money creation. (Of course, this depends on banks' willingness to lend! In a credit freeze such as happened this week, banks hoard excess reserves and the repeated injections of government money have little effect.)

Another way to increase the money supply is to lower margin reserve requirements. In practice this is rarely done, at least directly. However, in the last decade, various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin reserve requirement, through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you've been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original equity has been leveraged not to nine times it original value, as in traditional banking, but to 70 times or even more. This has allowed returns on investment far beyond the 5% or so available from traditional banking, along with "compensation" packages beyond the dreams of avarice.

Each new dollar that is created comes with a new dollar of debt -- more than a dollar of debt, because of interest. The debt is eventually redeemed either with goods and services, or with more borrowed money, which in turn can be redeemed with yet more borrowed money... but eventually it will be used to buy goods and services. The interest has to come from somewhere. Borrowing more money to make the interest payments on an existing loan merely postpones the day of reckoning by deferring the need to create new goods and services.

The whole system of interest-bearing money works fine as long as the volume of goods and services exchanged for money keeps growing. The crisis we are seeing today is in part because new money has been created much faster than goods and services have, and much faster than has been historically sustainable. There are only two ways out of such a situation: inflation and bankruptcies. Each involve the destruction of money. The current convulsions of the financial and political elites basically come down to a futile attempt to prevent both. Their first concern is to prevent the evaporation of money through massive bankruptcies, because it is, after all, their money.

There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service." In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, "I watched my neighbor's kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service." GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes "good" when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?

Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

The result is that the supply of money -- and the corresponding volume of debt -- has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a vast, systemic scale.

Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now. Unfortunately, simply stopping this practice isn't going to solve the underlying problem. A collapse is coming, unavoidably. The government's bailout plan will at best postpone it for a year or two (who knows, maybe until 2012!), long enough for the big players to move their money to a safe haven. They will discover, though, that there is no safe haven. As the US dollar loses its safe-haven status (which will happen all the more certainly when the government takes over Wall Street's bad debts), you can expect capital to chase various commodities in an inflationary surge before a deflationary depression takes hold. If a credit freeze overpowers the government's inflationary measures, depression will come all the sooner.

The present crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s. Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940. Nuclear weapons and a shift in human consciousness have limited the solution of endless military escalation. Other solutions -- globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and technology-enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally financial auto-cannibalism -- have similarly run their course. Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer.

In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.

We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money -- to accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest -- to remove things from the realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will reemerge.

In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money.

In previous essays I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own inseparateness, from each other and from the totality of all life. Interest denies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self and the expense of something external, something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective. The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.

European bank bail-out could push EU into crisis
A bail-out of the toxic assets held by European banks' could plunge the European Union into crisis, according to a confidential Brussels document.


By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
Last Updated: 3:50PM GMT 11 Feb 2009

“Estimates of total expected asset write-downs suggest that the budgetary costs – actual and contingent - of asset relief could be very large both in absolute terms and relative to GDP in member states,” the EC document, seen by The Daily Telegraph, cautioned.

"It is essential that government support through asset relief should not be on a scale that raises concern about over-indebtedness or financing problems.”

The secret 17-page paper was discussed by finance ministers, including the Chancellor Alistair Darling on Tuesday.

National leaders and EU officials share fears that a second bank bail-out in Europe will raise government borrowing at a time when investors - particularly those who lend money to European governments - have growing doubts over the ability of countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Britain to pay it back.

The Commission figure is significant because of the role EU officials will play in devising rules to evaluate “toxic” bank assets later this month. New moves to bail out banks will be discussed at an emergency EU summit at the end of February. The EU is deeply worried at widening spreads on bonds sold by different European countries.

In line with the risk, and the weak performance of some EU economies compared to others, investors are demanding increasingly higher interest to lend to countries such as Italy instead of Germany. Ministers and officials fear that the process could lead to vicious spiral that threatens to tear both the euro and the EU apart.

“Such considerations are particularly important in the current context of widening budget deficits, rising public debt levels and challenges in sovereign bond issuance,” the EC paper warned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Nearly 700 people apply for 1 janitor job at middle school

Associated Press

Last update: March 7, 2009 - 9:34 AM


MASSILON, Ohio - Evidence of the slumping economy is stacking up at an Ohio school which has nearly 700 applications for one open janitorial job.

Officials at Perry Local Schools near Canton in northeast Ohio say they've extended the deadline until Monday to accommodate the overwhelming response to the week-old posting.

The full-time position at Edison Junior High School pays $15 to $16 an hour plus benefits.

Superintendent John Richard says many applicants are laid-off workers with heart-wrenching stories about the tough economic times.

Forty-nine-year-old Donna Croston says she applied after losing jobs at two nearby factories that closed.

Croston says her chances of being hired amid the hundreds of applicants are slim, but she's hoping to get lucky.

___

Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough

Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

"Our finding is very significant," said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.

"To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device," added the study's co-author in a statement.

The study's results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The city is also the site of an infamous presentation on cold fusion 20 years ago by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons that sent shockwaves across the world.

Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.

Scientists have been working for years to produce cold fusion reactions, a potentially cheap, limitless and environmentally-clean source of energy.

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss's published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

"It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons," he told the Houston Chronicle.

"The whole point of fusion is, you?re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow."

But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was "big" and could open a new scientific field.

The neutrons produced in the experiments "may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process," added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.

"We're talking about a new field of science that's a hybrid between chemistry and physics."


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The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.

The headlines were all about creating a national cyber-security czar reporting directly to the president, but the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced April 1 in the U.S. Senate would also give the president unprecedented authority over private-sector Internet services, applications and software.

According to the bill's language, the president would have broad authority to designate various private networks as a "critical infrastructure system or network" and, with no other review, "may declare a cyber-security emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from" the designated the private-sector system or network.

The 51-page bill does not define what private sector networks would be considered critical to the nation's security, but the Center for Democracy and Technology fears it could include communications networks in addition to the more traditional security concerns over the financial and transportation networks and the electrical grid.

"I'd be very surprised if it doesn't include communications systems, which are certainly critical infrastructure," CDT General Counsel Greg Nojeim told eWEEK. "The president would decide not only what is critical infrastructure but also what is an emergency."

The bill would also impose mandates for designated private networks and systems, including standardized security software, testing, licensing and certification of cyber-security professionals.

"Requiring firms to get government approval for new software would hamper innovation and would have a negative effect on security," Nojeim said. "If everyone builds to the same standard and the bad guys know those standards it makes it easier for the bad guys."

The legislation also calls for a public-private clearinghouse for cyber-threats and vulnerability information under Department of Commerce authority. The Secretary of Commerce would have the authority to access "all relevant data concerning such networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access."

In another section of the bill, though, the president is required to report to Congress on the feasibility of an identity management and authentication program "with appropriate civil liberties and privacy protections."

Nojeim complained the bill is "not only vague but also broad. Its very broad language is intended to confer broad powers." Nojeim also speculated that the bill's vague language and authority may prove to be powerful incentive for the private sector to improve its cyber-security measures.

"The bill will encourage private-sector solutions to make the more troubling sections of the bill unnecessary," he said.

According to a number of media reports, the bill was crafted with the cooperation of the White House. The legislation aims to create a fully integrated, coordinated public-private partnership on cyber-security in addition to pushing for innovation and creativity in cyber-security solutions.

"We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs—from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records—the list goes on," Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), bill co-sponsor, said in a statement. "It's an understatement to say that cyber-security is one of the most important issues we face; the increasingly connected nature of our lives only amplifies our vulnerability to cyber-attacks and we must act now."

Fellow co-sponsor Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) added, "America's vulnerability to massive cyber-crime, global cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks has emerged as one of the most urgent national security problems facing our country today. Importantly, this legislation loosely parallels the recommendations in the CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies] blue-ribbon panel report to President Obama and has been embraced by a number of industry and government thought leaders."

The CDT's Nojeim stressed that are a "number of good things in the bill," including creation of a cyber-security czar, scholarships for cyber-security programs and collaborations between the government and the private sector. While urging Congress to change the bill, he argued that the "problematic provisions shouldn't crowd out the beneficial provisions of the bill."

I must be naive. I really thought the administration would welcome the return of bank bailout money. Some $340 million in TARP cash flowed back this week from four small banks in Louisiana, New York, Indiana and California. This isn't much when we routinely talk in trillions, but clearly that money has not been wasted or otherwise sunk down Wall Street's black hole. So why no cheering as the cash comes back?

My answer: The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell 'em what to do. Control. Direct. Command.

It is not for nothing that rage has been turned on those wicked financiers. The banks are at the core of the administration's thrust: By managing the money, government can steer the whole economy even more firmly down the left fork in the road.

If the banks are forced to keep TARP cash -- which was often forced on them in the first place -- the Obama team can work its will on the financial system to unprecedented degree. That's what's happening right now.

Here's a true story first reported by my Fox News colleague Andrew Napolitano (with the names and some details obscured to prevent retaliation). Under the Bush team a prominent and profitable bank, under threat of a damaging public audit, was forced to accept less than $1 billion of TARP money. The government insisted on buying a new class of preferred stock which gave it a tiny, minority position. The money flowed to the bank. Arguably, back then, the Bush administration was acting for purely economic reasons. It wanted to recapitalize the banks to halt a financial panic.

Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

Think about it: If Rick Wagoner can be fired and compact cars can be mandated, why can't a bank with a vault full of TARP money be told where to lend? And since politics drives this administration, why can't special loans and terms be offered to favored constituents, favored industries, or even favored regions? Our prosperity has never been based on the political allocation of credit -- until now.

Which brings me to the Pay for Performance Act, just passed by the House. This is an outstanding example of class warfare. I'm an Englishman. We invented class warfare, and I know it when I see it. This legislation allows the administration to dictate pay for anyone working in any company that takes a dime of TARP money. This is a whip with which to thrash the unpopular bankers, a tool to advance the Obama administration's goal of controlling the financial system.

After 35 years in America, I never thought I would see this. I still can't quite believe we will sit by as this crisis is used to hand control of our economy over to government. But here we are, on the brink. Clearly, I have been naive.

The Marijuana Conspiracy
in

* Health

The reason hemp is illegal
(Nothing to do with its effects on the mind and body)

By Doug Yurchey - Article from The Dot Connector

They say marijuana is dangerous. pot is not harmful to the human body or mind. marijuana does not pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana is very much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industries and a large number of chemical corporations. Big businesses, with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from the people. The truth is, if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercial products, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! The super rich have conspired to spread misinformation about the plant that, if used properly, would ruin their companies.

Where did the word ‘marijuana’ come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant – as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in the Encyclopedia Britannica which was printed on hemp paper for 150 years:

✔ All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s. (Jack Frazier. Hemp Paper Reconsidered. 1974.)

✔ It was legal to pay taxes with hemp in America from 1631 until the early 1800s. (LA Times. Aug. 12, 1981.)

✔ Refusing to grow hemp in America during the 17th and 18th centuries was against the law! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1769 (G. M. Herdon. Hemp in Colonial Virginia).

✔ George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers grew hemp. (Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.)

✔ Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America, and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow’s export to England. (Jack Herer. Emperor Wears No Clothes.)
✔ For thousands of years, 90% of all ships’ sails and rope were made from hemp. The word ‘canvas’ is Dutch for cannabis. (Webster’s New World Dictionary.)

✔ 80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc.,were made from hemp until the 1820s, with the introduction of the cotton gin.

✔ The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross’s flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp. (U.S. Government Archives.)

✔ The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons.Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th century. (State Archives.)

✔ Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 5000 years in China, although hemp industrialization probably goes back to ancient Egypt.

✔ Rembrandt’s, Van Gogh’s, Gainsborough’s, as well as most early canvas paintings, were principally painted on hemp linen.

✔ In 1916, the U.S. Government predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down. Government studies report that 1 acre of hemp equals 4.1 acres of trees. Plans were in the works to implement such programs. (U.S. Department of Agriculture Archives.)

✔ Quality paints and varnishes were made from hemp seed oil until 1937. 58,000 tons of hemp seeds were used in America for paint products in 1935. (Sherman Williams Paint Co. testimony before the U.S.Congress against the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.)

✔ Henry Ford’s first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the car itself was constructed from hemp! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, ‘grown from the soil,’ had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel. (Popular Mechanics, 1941.)

✔ In 1938, hemp was called ‘Billion Dollar Crop.’ It was the first time a cash crop had a business potential to exceed a billion dollars. (Popular Mechanics, Feb. 1938.)

✔ Mechanical Engineering Magazine (Feb. 1938) published an article entitled ‘The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown.’ It stated that if hemp was cultivated using 20th century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The following information comes directly from the United States Department of Agriculture’s 1942 14-minute film encouraging and instructing ‘patriotic American farmers’ to grow 350,000 acres of hemp each year for the war effort:

“…[When] Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable… Now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese… American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries… The Navy’s rapidly dwindling reserves.When that is gone, American hemp will go on duty again; hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious
with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for victory!”

Certified proof from the Library of Congress, found by the research of Jack Herer, refutes claims of other government agencies that the 1942 USDA film ‘Hemp for Victory’ did not exist.

Hemp cultivation and production do not harm the environment. The USDA Bulletin #404 concluded that hemp produces four times as much pulp with at least four to seven times less pollution.

From Popular Mechanics, February 1938:
“It has a short growing season… It can be grown in any state… The long roots penetrate and break the soil to leave it in perfect condition for the next year’s crop. The dense shock of leaves, 8 to 12 feet above the ground, chokes out weeds. …Hemp, this new crop can add immeasurably to American agriculture and industry.” In the 1930s, innovations in farm machinery would have caused an industrial revolution when applied to hemp. This single resource could have created millions of new jobs generating thousands of quality products. Hemp, if not made illegal,would have brought America out of the Great Depression.

THE CONSPIRACY
William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division of Kimberly Clark owned vast acreage of timberlands. The Hearst Company supplied most paper products. Patty Hearst’s grandfather, a destroyer of nature for his own personal profit, stood to lose billions because of hemp.

In 1937, DuPont patented the processes to make plastics from oil and coal. DuPont’s Annual Report urged stockholders to invest in its new petrochemical division. Synthetics such as plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, Dacron, etc., could now be made from oil.Natural hemp industrialization would have ruined over 80% of DuPont’s business.

Andrew Mellon became Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury and DuPont’s primary investor. He appointed his future nephew-in-law,Harry J.Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. These men took an obscure Mexican slang word: ‘marijuana’ and pushed it into the consciousness of America.

MEDIA MANIPULATION
A media blitz of ‘yellow journalism’ raged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hearst’s newspapers ran stories emphasizing the horrors of marijuana. The menace of marijuana made headlines. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from car accidents to loose morality.

Films like Reefer Madness (1936), Marijuana: Assassin of Youth (1935) and Marijuana: The Devil’s Weed (1936) were propaganda designed by these industrialists to create an enemy. Their purpose was to gain public support so that anti-marijuana laws could be passed.

Examine the following quotes from The Burning Question, aka Reefer Madness:

* a violent narcotic;
* acts of shocking violence;
* incurable insanity;
* soul-destroying effects;
* under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an ax;
* more vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine) is the menace of marijuana!

Reefer Madness did not end with the usual ‘the end.’ The film concluded with these words plastered on the screen: ‘Tell your children.’

In the 1930s, people were very naive, even to the point of ignorance. The masses were like sheep waiting to be led by the few in power. They did not challenge authority. If the news was in print or on the radio, they believed it had to be true. They told their children, and their children grew up to be the parents of the babyboomers.

On April 14, 1937, the prohibitive Marijuana Tax Law, or the bill that outlawed hemp, was directly brought to the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is the only one that can introduce a bill to the House floor without it being debated by other committees. The Chairman of the U.S. Senate, Ways and Means Committee, at the time,Robert Doughton, was a DuPont supporter. He insured that the bill would pass Congress.

Dr. James Woodward, a physician and attorney, testified too late on behalf of the American Medical Association. He told the committee that the reason the AMA had not denounced the Marijuana Tax Law sooner was that the Association had just discovered that marijuana was hemp.

Few people, at the time, realized that the deadly menace they had been reading about on Hearst’s front pages was in fact passive hemp. The AMA understood cannabis to be a medicine found in numerous healing products sold over the last hundred years.

In September of 1937, hemp became illegal. The most useful crop known became a drug and our planet has been suffering ever since.

Congress banned hemp because it was said to be the most violence-causing drug known. Harry Anslinger, head of the Drug Commission for 31 years, promoted the idea that marijuana made users act extremely violent. In the 1950s, under the Communist threat ofMcCarthyism, Anslinger then said the exact opposite: marijuana will pacify you so much that soldiers would not want to fight.

Today, our planet is in desperate trouble. Earth is suffocating as large tracts of rain forests disappear. Pollution, poisons and chemicals are killing people. These great problems could be reversed if we industrialized hemp. Natural biomass could provide all of the planet’s energy needs that are currently supplied by fossil fuels.We have consumed 80% of our oil and gas reserves.We need a renewable resource. Hemp could be the solution to soaring gas prices.

THE WONDER PLANT
Hemp has a higher quality fiber than wood fiber. Far fewer caustic chemicals are required to make paper from hemp than from trees. Hemp paper does not turn yellow and is very durable. The plant grows quickly to maturity in a season where trees take a lifetime.



All plastic products should be made from hemp seed oil. Hempen plastics are biodegradable! Over time, they would break down and not harm the environment. Oil-based plastics, the ones we are very familiar with, help ruin nature. They do not break down and will do great harm in the future. The process to produce the vast array of natural (hempen) plastics will not ruin the rivers as DuPont and other petrochemical companies have done. Ecology does not fit in with the plans of the oil industry and the political machine.Hemp products are safe and natural.

Medicines should be made from hemp. We should go back to the days when the AMA supported cannabis cures.‘Medical Marijuana’ is given out legally to only a handful of people while the rest of us are forced into a system that relies on chemicals. Pot is only healthy for the human body.

World hunger could end. A large variety of food products can be generated from hemp. The seeds contain one of the highest sources of protein in nature. Also: They have two essential fatty acids that clean your body of cholesterol. These essential fatty acids are not found anywhere else in nature! Consuming pot seeds is the best thing you could do for your body. Eat uncooked hemp seeds.

Clothes should be made from hemp. Hemp clothing is extremely strong and durable over time.You could hand clothing, made from pot, down to your grandchildren. Today, there are American companies that make hemp clothing; usually 50% hemp. Hemp fabrics should be everywhere. Instead, they are almost underground. Superior hemp products are not allowed to advertise on fascist television.

Kentucky, once the top hemp producing state, made it illegal to wear hemp clothing! Can you imagine being thrown into jail for wearing quality jeans?

The world is crazy. But that does not mean you have to join the insanity. Get together. Spread the news. Tell people, and that includes your children, the truth. Use hemp products. Eliminate the word ’marijuana.’Realize the history that created it.Make it politically incorrect to say or print the M-word. Fight against the propaganda (designed to favor the agenda of the super rich) and the bullshit.Hemp must be utilized in the future.We need a clean energy source to save our planet. Industrialize hemp!

The liquor, tobacco and oil companies fund more than a million dollars a day to Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other similar agencies.We have all seen their commercials. Now, their motto is: ‘It’s more dangerous than we thought.’ Lies from the powerful corporations, that began with Hearst, are still alive and well today.

The brainwashing continues. Now, the commercials say: If you buy a joint, you contribute to murders and gang wars. The latest anti-pot commercials say: If you buy a joint… you are promoting terrorism! The new enemy (terrorism) has paved the road to brainwash you any way they see fit.

There is only one enemy: the friendly people you pay your taxes to, the war-makers and nature destroyers.With your funding, they are killing the world right in front of your eyes.

Half a million deaths each year are caused by tobacco. Half a million deaths each year are caused by alcohol. No one has ever, ever died from smoking pot!!

In the entire history of the human race, not one death can be attributed to cannabis. Our society has outlawed grass but condones the use of the killers: tobacco and alcohol.

Hemp should be declassified and placed in drug stores to relieve stress. Hardening and constriction of the arteries are bad, but hemp usage actually enlarges the arteries, which is a healthy condition. We have been so conditioned to think that smoking is harmful. That is not the case for passive pot.

Ingesting THC, hemp’s active agent, has a positive effect: relieving asthma and glaucoma. A joint tends to alleviate the nausea caused by chemotherapy. You are able to eat on hemp. This is a healthy state of being.

[one personal note. During the pregnancy of my wife, she was having some difficulty gaining weight.We were in the hospital. A nurse called us to one side and said: “Off the record, if you smoke pot… you’d get something called the munchies and you’ll gain weight.” I swear that is a true story.]

The stereotype for a pothead is similar to a drunk, bubble-brain.Yet, the truth is one’s creative abilities can be enhanced under its influence. The perception of time slightly slows and one can become more sensitive.You can more appreciate all arts, be closer to nature and generally feel more under the influence of cannabis. It is, in fact, the exact opposite state of mind and body as the drunken state. You can be more aware with pot.

The pot plant is an alien plant. There is physical evidence that cannabis is not like any other plant on this planet. One could conclude that it was brought here for the benefit of humanity. Hemp is the only plant where the males appear one way and the females appear very different, physically!

No one ever speaks of males and females in regard to the plant kingdom because plants do not show their sexes. Except for cannabis. To determine what sex a certain, normal, earthly plant is, you have to look internally, at its DNA. A male blade of grass (physically) looks exactly like a female blade of grass. The hemp plant has an intense sexuality. Growers know to kill the males before they fertilize the females. Yes, folks, the most potent pot comes from ‘horny females.’

The reason this amazing, very sophisticated, ET plant from the future is illegal has nothing to do with how it physically affects us.

Pot is illegal because billionaires want to remain billionaires!

“And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land.” – Ezekiel 34:29.

p.s. I think the word ‘drugs’ should not be used as an umbrella-word that covers all chemical agents. Drugs have come to be known as something bad. Are you aware there are legal drugstores?! Yep, in every city. Unbelievable. Each so-called drug should be considered individually. Cannabis is a medicine and not a drug. We should dare to speak the truth no matter what the law is.

http://www.tpuc.org/content/marijuana-conspiracy

Emerging Threats
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Walker's World: New food crisis looms
By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Editor Emeritus
Published: April 6, 2009 at 11:41 AM
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Today's Price of Crude Oil

WASHINGTON, April 6 (UPI) -- We tend to forget that the worldwide plunge into recession last year was the result of three separate phenomena that combined to breed disaster. The financial crisis was joined by a food crisis and a fuel crisis as the prices of food and energy soared, triggering food riots across the world. [remember this? I posted about it last year in someone's blog]

And now there are ominous signs of another food crisis in the making this year, spurred in part by the ongoing credit crunch that has made it difficult for farmers to get loans.

"I think the world would like to focus on one crisis at a time, but we really can't afford to," warned Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. Food supplies are tight and prices still high, she said, and more people in poor countries are unable to afford what they need because of the recession.

"These are not separate crises. The food crisis and the financial one are linking and compounding," she noted, adding that food shortages often trigger political instability. "I'm really putting out the warning that we're in an era now where supplies are still very tight, very low and very expensive."

Alarm bells are starting to ring about another food crisis this summer. Last week's acreage report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 7 million fewer acres were being planted for all crops. This came after the USDA's January report that noted that winter wheat acreage was down 7 percent.

This means lower output from the United States, the world's top food producer, at a time when world stocks are already low, and farmers are blaming the difficulty in getting credit and the high costs of key inputs like fertilizer.

Mother Nature is making things worse, with the worst drought in almost 70 years hitting northern China and devastating the winter wheat crop. More than 200 million acres in China's top six grain-producing provinces have been hit, and yields are down by as much as 40 percent.

The problem is not just hitting grains. With world soybean stocks 9 percent lower than they were this time last year, a further drought in Latin America is a new concern. Yields in southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina are also running at 40 percent of last year's levels. All this is triggering concern in the markets, where analysts are warning that price hikes are looming, and the speculators coming into the market could drive prices even higher.

"It's my opinion that producers feeding livestock need to protect against a possible sharp rise in corn prices," said Dennis Smith, a food-price specialist at Archer Financial Services. "This trade idea would also apply to a speculator looking to profit from a sharp move upward in the corn prices as well."

Smith also factors in the prospect of biofuels distorting the markets again, as they did last year when high oil prices triggered a demand for biofuels like ethanol, which sent crop prices higher. "What happens if crude oil prices continue to move higher and ethanol margins expand?" Smith asked.

Sheeran, whose World Food Program stands between the world's poor and starvation, said she will need about $6 billion this year for food aid, which feeds about 100 million of the world's poorest people in 77 countries. That is slightly more than she raised last year, when food riots erupted across Asia and the Middle East. As of March, donor countries had pledged less than 10 percent of the sums required, or $453 million, mostly thanks to $172 million from the United States and $129 million from Japan.[those people will probably starve]

The one relatively bright spot is in rice, where stocks are relatively high. But concern is rising across Asia. Arthur Yap, agriculture secretary for the Philippines, has warned the United Nations that he fears his country will not be able to secure enough food this year. And Ralph Hautman, the Asia Pacific marketing and global finance officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization, warned last week that the credit crunch is pressuring farmers to reduce the amount of land they cultivate.

"If farmers or agriculture producers have less access to credit, they are less likely to buy a lot of new seeds and fertilizers, and they're also less likely to expand their production areas," Hautman said. "Then there would be less agriculture production. This is the concern. The lower production of food crops caused by the lower availability of credit may lead to lower food stocks and shortages."

This is precisely what has happened in Brazil, where farmers encouraged by last year's high food prices borrowed money to put more acreage under cultivation and buy new farming equipment, only to face bankruptcy when the squeezed banks called in the loans and foreclosed on their farms and tractors.

Part of the problem is underproduction in some parts of the world, where for various reasons of national planning and priorities, farmers are not free to respond to market signals. This is particularly acute in Russia; analysts at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development noted that 16 percent of the world's arable land is in Russia, but it produces only 6 percent of the world's food because of a shortage of both public and private investment.

A 'Copper Standard' for the world's currency system?
Hard money enthusiasts have long watched for signs that China is switching its foreign reserves from US Treasury bonds into gold bullion. They may have been eyeing the wrong metal.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 2:41PM BST 16 Apr 2009

Comments 83 | Comment on this article

China's State Reserves Bureau (SRB) has instead been buying copper and other industrial metals over recent months on a scale that appears to go beyond the usual rebuilding of stocks for commercial reasons.

Nobu Su, head of Taiwan's TMT group, which ships commodities to China, said Beijing is trying to extricate itself from dollar dependency as fast as it can.

"China has woken up. The West is a black hole with all this money being printed. The Chinese are buying raw materials because it is a much better way to use their $1.9 trillion of reserves. They get ten times the impact, and can cover their infrastructure for 50 years."

"The next industrial revolution is going to be led by hybrid cars, and that needs copper. You can see the subtle way that China is moving into 30 or 40 countries with resources," he said.

The SRB has also been accumulating aluminium, zinc, nickel, and rarer metals such as titanium, indium (thin-film technology), rhodium (catalytic converters) and praseodymium (glass).

While it makes sense for China to take advantage of last year's commodity crash to restock cheaply, there is clearly more behind the move. "They are definitely buying metals to diversify out of US Treasuries and dollar holdings," said Jim Lennon, head of commodities at Macquarie Bank.

John Reade, metals chief at UBS, said Beijing may have a made strategic decision to stockpile metal as an alternative to foreign bonds. "We're very surprised by Chinese demand. They are buying much more copper than they will need this year. If this is strategic, there may be no effective limit on the purchases as China's pockets are deep."

Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, piqued the interest of metal buffs last month by calling for a world currency modelled on the "Bancor", floated by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods in 1944.

The Bancor was to be anchored on 30 commodities - a broader base than the Gold Standard, which had caused so much grief in the 1930s. Mr Zhou said such a currency would prevent the sort of "credit-based" excess that has brought the global finance to its knees.

If his thoughts reflect Communist Party thinking, it would explain the bizarre moves in commodity markets over recent weeks. Copper prices have surged 49pc this year to $4,925 a tonne despite estimates by the CRU copper group that world demand will fall 15pc to 20pc this year as construction wilts.

Analysts say "short covering" by funds betting on price falls has played a role. But the jump is largely due to Chinese imports, which reached a record 329,000 tonnes in February, and a further 375,000 tonnes in March. Chinese industrial demand cannot explain this. China has been badly hit by global recession. Its exports - almost half GDP - fell 17pc in March.

While Beijing's fiscal stimulus package and credit expansion has helped lift demand, China faces a property downturn of its own. One government adviser warned this week that house prices could fall 50pc.

One thing is clear: Beijing suspects that the US Federal Reserve is engineering a covert default on America's debt by printing money. Premier Wen Jiabao issued a blunt warning last month that China was tiring of US bonds. "We have lent a huge amount of money to the US, so of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets," he said.

This is slightly disingenuous. China has the world's largest reserves - $1.95 trillion, mostly in dollars - because it has been holding down the yuan to boost exports. This mercantilist strategy has reached its limits.

The beauty of recycling China's surplus into metals instead of US bonds is that it kills so many birds with one stone: it stops the yuan rising, without provoking complaints of currency manipulation by Washington; metals are easily stored in warehouses, unlike oil; the holdings are likely to rise in value over time since the earth's crust is gradually depleting its accessible ores. Above all, such a policy safeguards China's industrial revolution, while the West may one day face a supply crisis.

Beijing may yet buy gold as well, although it has not done so yet. The gold share of reserves has fallen to 1pc, far below the historic norm in Asia. But if a metal-based currency ever emerges to end the reign of fiat paper, it is just as likely to be a "Copper Standard" as a "Gold Standard".

http://www.seanet.com/~barkonwd/school/DELPHI.HTM

THE DELPHI TECHNIQUE

How to achieve a workable consensus within time limits

by Lynn Stuter

The Delphi Technique was originally conceived as a way to obtain the opinion of experts without necessarily bringing them together face to face. In Educating for the New World Order by Bev Eakman, the reader finds reference upon reference for the need to preserve the illusion that there is "Lay, or community, participation in the decision­making process), while in fact lay citizens are being squeezed out."

A specialized use of this technique was developed for teachers, the "Alinsky Method" (ibid., p. 123). The setting or group is, however, immaterial the point is that people in groups tend to share a certain knowledge base and display certain identifiable characteristics (known as group dynamics). This allows for a special application of a basic technique. The "change agent" or "facilitator" goes through the motions of acting as an organizer, getting each person in the target group to elicit expression of their concerns about a program, project, or policy in question. The facilitator listens attentively, forms "task forces," "urges everyone to make lists," and so on. While she is doing this, the facilitator learns something about each member of the target group. He/she identifies the "leaders," the "loud mouths," as well as those who frequently turn sides during the argument ­ the "weak or non­committal."

Suddenly, the amiable facilitator becomes "devil's advocate." He/she dons his professional agitator hat. Using the "divide and conquer" technique, he/she manipulates one group opinion against the other. This is accomplished by manipulating those who are out of step to appear "ridiculous, unknowledgeable, inarticulate, or dogmatic." He/she wants certain members of the group to become angry, thereby forcing tensions to accelerate. The facilitator is well trained in psychological manipulation. S/He is able to predict the reactions of each group member. Individuals in opposition to the policy or program will be shut out of the group.


The method works. It is very effective with parents, teachers, school children, and any community group. The "targets" rarely, if ever, know that they are being manipulated. If they do suspect this is happening, they do not know how to end the process. The desired result is for group polarization, and for the facilitator to become accepted as a member of the group and group process. He/she will then throw the desired idea on the table and ask for opinions during discussion. Very soon his/her associates from the divided group begin to adopt the idea as if it were their own, and pressure the entire group to accept the proposition.


This technique is a very unethical method of achieving consensus on a controversial topic in group settings. It requires well­trained professionals who deliberately escalate tension among group members, pitting one faction against the other, so as to make one viewpoint appear ridiculous so the other becomes "sensible" whether such is warranted or not.

DISRUPTING THE DELPHI

Note: The Delphi is being used at all levels of government to move meetings to preset conclusions. For the purposes of this dissertation, "facilitator" references anyone who has been trained in use of the Delphi and who is running a meeting.

There are three steps to diffusing the Delphi Technique when facilitators want to steer a group in a specific direction.

1. Always be charming. Smile. be pleasant. Be Courteous. Moderate your voice so as not to come across as belligerent or aggressive.

2. Stay focused. If at all possible, write your question down to help you stay focused. Facilitators, when asked questions they dent want to answer, often digress from the issue raised and try to work the conversation around to where they can make the individual asking the question look foolish or feel foolish, appear belligerent or aggressive. The goal is to put the one asking the question on the defensive. Do not fall for this tactic. Always be charming, thus deflecting any insinuation. Innuendo, etc. that may be thrown at you in their attempt to put you on the defensive, but bring them back to the question you asked. If they rephrase your question into an accusatory statement (a favorite tactic) simply state, "That is not what I stated. What I asked was... [repeat your question.]" Stay focused on your question.


3. Be persistent. If putting you on the defensive doesn't work, facilitators often resort to long, drawn out dissertations on some off­the­wall and usually unrelated or vaguely related subject that drags on for several minutes. During that time, the crowd or group usually loses focus on the question asked (which is the intent). Let them finish with their dissertation or expose. Then nicely with focus and persistence, state, "But you didn't answer my question. My question was...[repeat your question.]"

Always be charming, stay focused and be persistent. Never, under any circumstance, become angry. Anger directed at the facilitator will immediately make the facilitator the victim. This defeats the purpose which is to make you the victim. The goal of the facilitator is to make those they are facilitating like them, alienating anyone who might pose a threat to the realization of their agenda. [People with fixed belief systems, who know what they believe and stand on what they believe are obvious threats.] If the participant becomes the victim. the facilitator loses face and favor with the crowd. This is why crowds are broken up into groups of seven or eight, why objections are written on cards, not voiced aloud where they are open to public discussion and public debate. It's called crowd control.


It is always good to have someone else, or two or three others who know the Delphi Technique dispersed through the crowd; who, when the facilitator digresses from the question. will stand up and say nicely, "But you didn't answer that lady (/gentleman)'s question The facilitator, even if suspecting you are together, certainly will not want to alienate the crowd by making that accusation. Sometimes it only takes one occurrence of this type for the crowd to figure out what s going on. Sometimes it takes more than one.


If you have an organized group, meet before the meting to strategize. Everyone should know their part. Meet after the meeting to analyze what went right, what went wrong and why, and what needs to happen the next time around. Never meet during the meeting. One of the favorite tactics of the facilitator if the meeting is not going the way they want if they are meeting measurable resistance, is to call a recess. During the recess, the facilitator and his/her spotters (people who wander the room during the course of the meeting, watching the crowd) watch the crowd to see who congregates where, especially those who have offered measurable resistance. If the resistors congregate in one place, a spotter will usually gravitate to that group to join in the conversation and will report back to the facilitator. When the meeting resumes. the facilitator wi11 steer clear of those who are resistors . Do not congregate. Hang loose and work the crowd. Move to where the facilitators or spotters are. Listen to what they have to say, but do not gravitate to where another member of your team is. This strategy also works in a face to face, one on one, meeting with anyone who has been trained in how to use the Delphi Technique.


FROM A REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC TO A PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY


With the advent of education reform, the ensuing turmoil among the citizenry, and the grassroots research that has been sparked therefrom, a consistent pattern with respect to public participation and input has emerged, giving cause for alarm among people who cherish the form of government established by our founding fathers. Recent events, both inside and outside education have brought the emerging picture into focus.

In the not too distant past. The hiring of a consultant by the City of Spokane to the tune of $47.000 to facilitate the direction of city government brought a hue and or from the populace at large. Eerily, this scenario held great similarity to what has bean happening in education reform. The final link came in the form of an editorial comment made by

Chris Peck regarding the "Pizza papers." The editorial talks about how groups of disenfranchised citizens were brought together to enter into a discussion of what they felt (as opposed to know) needed to be changed at the local level . The outcome of the compilation of those discussions influenced the writing of the city/county charter.

Sounds innocuous enough. But let s examine this a little closer, Let's walk through the scenario that occurs in these facilitated meetings. First, about the facilitator. The facilitator is hired to facilitate the meeting. While his/her job is supposedly non­directive, neutral, non­judgmental, the opposite is actually true­­the facilitator is there to move the meeting in a preset conclusion. This is done through a process known as the Delphi Technique, developed by the RAND Corporation for the US. Department of Defense as a psychological warfare weapon in the 50s and 60s. Comforting, no doubt. With this established, let's move on to the semantics of the meeting.

It is imperative to the success of the agenda that the participants like the facilitator. Therefore. the facilitator first works the crowd to cause disequilibrium­­establishing a bad guy, good guy scenario. Anyone who might not agree with the facilitator must be seen by the participants as the bad guy, the facilitator the good guy. This is done by seeking out those who might not agree with the facilitator and making them look foolish, inept, or aggressive, sending a clear message to the audience that it if they don't want the same treatment to keep quiet. The facilitator is well trained in how to recognize and exploit many different psychological truisms to dothis. At the point that the opposition has bean identified and alienated, the facilitator becomes the good guy­­a friend­­and the agenda and direction of the meeting is established without the audience ever being aware of th same.

Next, the attendees are broken up into smaller groups ­ usually of seven or eight people ­ each group with a facilitator. Discussion ensues wherein the participants are encouraged to discuss preset issues, the group facilitator employing the same tactics as the lead facilitator. Usually participants are encouraged to put on paper their ideas and disagreements, these to be later compiled by others. Herein lies a very large problem. Who compiles what is written on the sheets of paper, note cards, etc.? When you ask the participants, you usually get, "Well, they compiled the results." Who is "they?" "Well, those running the meeting." Oh­h! The next question is ­ How do you know that what you wrote on your sheet of paper was incorporated into the final outcome? The answer you usually get is, "Well, you know, I've wondered about that, because what I wrote doesn't seem to be reflected here. I guess my viewpoint was in the minority." And there you have the crux of the s situation If you have fifty people in a room, each writes his/her ideas and dislikes on a sheet of paper, to be compiled later into a final outcome, each individual having no idea of what any other individual wrote. How do you know that the final outcome reflects anyone's input? The answer is ­

you don't. The same scenario holds when there is a facilitator recording your comments on paper. But the participants usually don't question this, figuring instead that their viewpoint was in the minority and thus not reflected.

So why have the meetings at all if the outcome is already established? Because it is imperative to the continued well­being of the agenda that the people be facilitated into ownership of the preset outcome. If people believe the idea is theirs, they support it: If the people believe the idea is being foisted on them, they will resist. Likewise, it is imperative to the continued well­being of the agenda that the people perceive that their input counts. This scenario is being used very effectively to move meetings to a preset conclusion, effectively changing our form of government from a representative form of government in which individuals are elected to represent the people. to a "participatory democracy" in which citizens, selected at large, are facilitated into ownership of preset outcomes, perceiving that their input resulted therein, when the reality is that the outcome was already established by people not apparent to the citizen participants.

CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones

Arms manufacturer BAE Systems developing national strategy with consortium of government agencies
Drones could be used for civilian surveillance in the UK as early as 2012. Source: BAE

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

The Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates UK airspace, has been told by BAE and Kent police that civilian UAVs would "greatly extend" the government's surveillance capacity and "revolutionise policing". The CAA is currently reluctant to license UAVs in normal airspace because of the risk of collisions with other aircraft, but adequate "sense and avoid" systems for drones are only a few years away.

Five other police forces have signed up to the scheme, which is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for "surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering". The partnership's stated mission is to introduce drones "into the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies" across the UK.

Concerned about the slow pace of progress of licensing issues, Kent police's assistant chief constable, Allyn Thomas, wrote to the CAA last March arguing that military drones would be useful "in the policing of major events, whether they be protests or the ­Olympics". He said interest in their use in the UK had "developed after the terrorist attack in Mumbai" [thank god they will stop terrorists -fof].

Stressing that he was not seeking to interfere with the regulatory process, Thomas pointed out that there was "rather more urgency in the work since Mumbai and we have a clear deadline of the 2012 Olympics".

BAE drones are programmed to take off and land on their own, stay airborne for up to 15 hours and reach heights of 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground.

Far more sophisticated than the remote-controlled rotor-blade robots that hover 50-metres above the ground – which police already use – BAE UAVs are programmed to undertake specific operations. They can, for example, deviate from a routine flightpath after encountering suspicious ­activity on the ground, or undertake numerous reconnaissance tasks simultaneously.

The surveillance data is fed back to control rooms via monitoring equipment such as high-definition cameras, radar devices and infrared sensors.

Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was intended for use over the English Channel to monitor shipping and detect immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy designed to minimise civil liberty concerns.

"There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'," a minute from the one of the earliest meetings, in July 2007, states.

Behind closed doors, the scope for UAVs has expanded significantly. Working with various policing organisations as well as the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Maritime and Fisheries Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Border Agency, BAE and Kent police have drawn up wider lists of potential uses.

One document lists "[b][detecting] theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving" as future tasks for police drones, while another states the aircraft could be used for road and railway monitoring, search and rescue, event security and covert urban surveillance.[b]

Under a section entitled "Other routine tasks (Local Councils) – surveillance", another document states the drones could be used to combat "fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal loads, waste management".

Senior officers have conceded there will be "large capital costs" involved in buying the drones, but argue this will be shared by various government agencies. [apparently sharing among government agencies reduces the cost -fof] They also say unmanned aircraft are no more intrusive than CCTV cameras and far cheaper to run than helicopters.

Partnership officials have said the UAVs could raise revenue from private companies. At one strategy meeting it was proposed the aircraft could undertake commercial work during spare time to offset some of the running costs.

There are two models of BAE drone under consideration, neither of which has been licensed to fly in non-segregated airspace by the CAA. The Herti (High Endurance Rapid Technology Insertion) is a five-metre long aircraft that the Ministry of Defence deployed in Afghanistan for tests in 2007 and 2009.

CAA officials are sceptical that any Herti-type drone manufacturer can develop the technology to make them airworthy for the UK before 2015 at the earliest. However the South Coast Partnership has set its sights on another BAE prototype drone, the GA22 airship, developed by Lindstrand Technologies which would be subject to different regulations. BAE and Kent police believe the 22-metre long airship could be certified for civilian use by 2012.

Military drones have been used extensively by the US to assist reconnaissance and airstrikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But their use in war zones has been blamed for high civilian death tolls.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/cctv-sky-police-plan-drones

http://www.wpxi.com/news/22311848/detail.html

PITTSBURGH -- Pittsburgh police Chief Nate Harper said three plainclothes officers have been reassigned during an internal investigation into the beating of an 18-year-old student violinist from the city's Creative and Performing Arts High School.

Police charged Jordan Miles, 18, with assault and resisting arrest Jan. 11 because, they said, he fought with the officers who thought a "heavy object" in his coat was a gun. It turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Miles said he resisted because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn't identify themselves as police.

Miles' family and attorney said he was hit with a stun gun and hospitalized after the violent Homewood struggle during which a chunk of his hair was yanked out and a tree branch went through his gums.

"I was accused for something I never had anything to do with," said Miles, an honor student at CAPA. "I was completely innocent. They couldn't find anything."

Police took Miles to a Pittsburgh hospital for treatment. The student said he had to go back after he was released from custody.

"I want my son's life restored, that's all," said Miles' mother, Terez Miles. "I just want his life to go back to the way that it was before."

City officials are conducting a full investigation, spokeswoman Diane Richard told Channel 11 News.

Reportedly the officers identified themselves as police. According to officials, the officers have been moved from plain clothes detail to uniformed duty.

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Feb 14
* Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html


U.N. climate panel admits Dutch sea level flaw
OSLO
Sat Feb 13, 2010 12:09pm EST
OSLO (Reuters) - The U.N. panel of climate experts overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level, according to a preliminary report on Saturday, admitting yet another flaw after a row last month over Himalayan glacier melt.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61C1V420100213

Utah delivers vote of no confidence for 'climate alarmists'
feb 12
The US's most Republican state passes bill disputing science of climate change, claiming emissions are 'essentially harmless'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/12/utah-climate-alarmists


US climate skeptics seize on blizzard
Feb 11 02:57 PM US/Eastern
US opponents of climate change action are seizing on a record snowfall in Washington in hopes of killing legislation to curb carbon emissions, which already faced uncertain political prospects.


UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
The United Nations' expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain tops on a student's dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-based-claims-on-student-dissertation-and-magazine-article.html


Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
Jan 30
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece


Scientists broke the law by hiding climate change data: But legal loophole means they won't be prosecuted
Last updated at 11:21 PM on 28th January 2010
Scientist at the heart of the 'Climategate' email scandal broke the law when they refused to give raw data to the public, the privacy watchdog has ruled.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246661/New-scandal-Climate-Gate-scientists-accused-hiding-data-global-warming-sceptics.html


India, China won't sign Copenhagen Accord
Jan 23
The Indian and Chinese governments have had a rethink on signing the Copenhagen Accord, officials said on Saturday, and the UN has also indefinitely postponed its Jan 31 deadline for countries to accede to the document.

An Indian official said that though the government had been thinking of signing the accord because it “did not have any legal teeth and would be good diplomatically”; it felt irked because of repeated messages from both UN officials and developed countries to accede to it.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article93870.ece?homepage=true


Calls for UN climate chief to resign
Jan 24
It is time for the embattled Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). He is steadfastly refusing to go, but his position is becoming more and more untenable by the day, and the official climate science body will continue to leach credibility while he remains in charge.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geoffreylean/100023489/pachauri-must-quit-as-head-of-official-science-panel/


Glacier alarm 'regrettable error': UN climate head
Jan 23
The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel's assessment of Himalayan glaciers.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999051.ece


UN abandons climate change deadline
Jan 20
The timetable to reach a global deal to tackle climate change lay in tatters on Wednesday after the United Nations waived the first deadline of the process laid out at last month’s fractious Copenhagen summit.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/87479ee2-0600-11df-8c97-00144feabdc0.html


Senate not seen passing climate bill in 2010
Tue Jan 19, 2010 4:22pm EST
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate is unlikely to pass climate change legislation this year after going through the contentious health care debate, and will focus on a separate energy bill that has more bipartisan support, a key Democratic senator said on Tuesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60I3NA20100119?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews&rpc=22&sp=true


Actor Danny Glover Says Quake 'Response' For Screwing Up Climate Summit In Copenhagen
Jan 15
Actor Danny Glover believes that the Haitian earthquake was caused by climate change and global warming
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/pact_with_gaia/


Climate change alliance crumbling
Dec 22 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/942fc036-7589-11db-aea1-0000779e2340.html


Climate talks deadlocked as clashes erupt outside
Dec 16 2009
COPENHAGEN (AP) - Danish police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons outside the U.N. climate conference on Wednesday, as disputes inside left major issues unresolved just two days before world leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to fight global warming.

With the talks clearly deadlocked, Connie Hedegaard, former Danish climate minister, resigned from the conference presidency to allow her boss, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen to preside as world leaders from 115 nations streamed into Copenhagen. She was to continue overseeing the closed-door negotiations.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091216/D9CKDRM00.html


Tear Gas Fired At 'Struggling' Climate Talks
Dec 16 2009
Climate talks at Copenhagen have reached a standstill despite a warning from Gordon Brown that world leaders must not "duck" the challenge of reaching a deal.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Climate-Change-Prime-Minister-Gordon-Brown-Sets-Out-To-Rescue-Foundering-Talks-In-Copenhagen/Article/200912315501340

Fewer Americans worried by climate change: survey
Dec 15 2009
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Al Gore's pitch for saving the planet from global warming appears to be falling on increasingly deaf ears, a Zogby Interactive survey shows.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BE5NO20091215?feedType=RSS&feedName=lifestyleMolt&rpc=22&sp=true


Developing countries boycott UN climate talks
Dec 14
COPENHAGEN (AP) - China, India and other developing nations boycotted U.N. climate talks on Monday, bringing negotiations to a halt with their demand that rich countries discuss much deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Representatives from developing countries - a bloc of 135 nations - said they refused to participate in any formal working groups at the 192-nation summit until the issue was resolved.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091214/D9CJ48I00.html


Hundreds Held During Climate Change Protest
10:53pm UK, Saturday December 12, 2009
Police say 968 people have been arrested during a climate change protest in the Danish capital Copenhagen.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Arrests-During-Climate-Change-Summit-Protest-Copenhagen/Article/200912215498816?lpos=World_News_Carousel_Region_1&lid=ARTICLE_15498816_Arrests_During_Climate_Change_Summit_Protest_Copenhagen

UK University to probe integrity of climate data
Dec 3 2009
LONDON (AP) - A British university said Thursday it would investigate whether scientists at its prestigious Climatic Research Unit fudged data on global warming.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9CBVM701&show_article=1


Researcher: NASA hiding climate data
Dec 3 2009
The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/