Maps you just have to see: ➡
– dennis
Some very fun maps…
August 10th, 2013Traveling in the USA -new mobile number here is 1-509-491-8769
June 11th, 2013I passed out an earlier one privately by email but it turned out to be BOGUS (it was 509-460-1557 and it is bad so toss it!).
This new number is good until July 1st when Colette and I depart for France.
dennis
For Insurers, No Doubts on Climate Change
June 7th, 2013If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right?
From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating$35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the average over the last decade.
And the industry expects the situation will get worse. “Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term,” said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the reinsurance giant Munich Re. “The rise in sea level caused by climate change will further increase the risk of storm surge.” Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming.
“Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.”
– More… ➡
World Bank Insider Blows Whistle on Corruption, Federal Reserve
May 29th, 2013
Nothing to see here ... move along
– I don’t think this is new information. Just a confirmation of what many of us have suspected for some time.
– But, the gathering awareness doesn’t seem to be enough to change things.
– We are all too apathetic and ‘they’ have got far too much control at this point for anything short of a revolution or a major breakdown of the world’s structures to shake them loose (visualize blood-sucking ticks, and you’ll have it).
– dennis
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A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview withThe New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.
Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”
According to the peer-reviewed paper, which presented the first global investigation of ownership architecture in the international economy, transnational corporations form a “giant bow-tie structure.” A large portion of control, meanwhile, “flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions.” The researchers described the core as an “economic ‘super-entity’” that raises important issues for policymakers and researchers. Of course, the implications are enormous for citizens as well.
Hudes, an attorney who spent some two decades working in the World Bank’s legal department, has observed the machinations of the network up close. “I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt,” she told The New American in a phone interview. “The pillars of the U.S. government — some of them — are dysfunctional because of state capture; this is a big story, this is a big cover up.”
At the heart of the network, Hudes said, are 147 financial institutions and central banks — especially the Federal Reserve, which was created by Congress but is owned by essentially a cartel of private banks. “This is a story about how the international financial system was secretly gamed, mostly by central banks — they’re the ones we are talking about,” she explained. “The central bankers have been gaming the system. I would say that this is a power grab.”
– More… ➡
– research thanks to Carol S.
Hackers ‘raid US weapons’
May 29th, 2013
Cultural Revolution
– If China doesn’t implode from its own internal pressures (the failure of the Mandate of Heaven concept), then it is likely that we’re all going to be living in a Chinese dominated world.
– Most of the rest of us are living in debt ridden societies with few realistic ideas of how to break the debt cycles. (Oh, yeah, let’s have another WalMart or Warehouse store so we can buy really cheap shit – that’ll sort things out).
– So here, the Chinese, apparently, have stolen the heart of America’s weapon system designs. They’ve denied it? Well, what would you expect them to say?
– Clearly, they are winning the game against the west and they’ve used our own Capitalistic Systems and greed against us, brilliantly.
– All we can hope for is that their own greed, corruption, and their failure to understand that they too are subject to the consequences of pollution, climate change and global overshoot, is going to pull their system apart before they can take over ours.
– Then, at least, we can all live equally in a ruined world rather than having to be serfs in a ruined world that they dominate.
– Do you think after reading this that I am prejudiced against the Chinese?
– No, I’m not. I differentiate between the people and their culture. I know and value a number of excellent friends among the Chinese.
– But their culture is another thing. These are, after all, the same people that gave the world the spectacle of The Cultural Revolution just a few decades ago. These same folks drive the Shark Fin markets, the Bear Gall Bladder Markets, the Ivory Markets, and etc.
– They don’t seem to mind poisoning each other, and other nationalities, in their pursuits of profit. (Granted, we’ve not been much better). And, like other cultures before them (and here I very much include ours), they think they are superior, that they are right and that it is their mandate to rule.
– In the end, I think I’d prefer our own assholes to theirs.
– dennis
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Some of America’s key defence items compromised but the culprits are not known.
Designs for some of America’s most important and sensitive weapons systems have been compromised by Chinese hackers, according to a confidential report.
More than two dozen key weapons systems had been affected, including missile defences, fighter jets, helicopters and navy vessels, the report said.
Among those listed are the advanced Patriot missile system, or PAC-3, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the Black Hawk helicopter and the V-22 Osprey, which is able to land and take off vertically.
It was not clear from the report, extracts of which were published by theWashington Post, when or how the designs had been compromised.
Its authors _ the Defence Science Board, an influential advisory body _ stopped short of accusing the Chinese Government of attempting to steal the information.
But senior military sources pointed the finger directly at Beijing, saying the security breaches were part of a “widening Chinese campaign of espionage against US defence contractors and government agencies”.
– More… ➡
– Thanks to Kierin M for the Mandate of Heaven concept.
‘Monsanto Protection Act’ slips silently through US Congress
May 18th, 2013
The future approaching
– This was perhaps for me the last straw with President Obama. That he signed this bill is unforgivable and deeply inconsistent with the values I’d hoped he represented.
– Monsanto represents what is so deeply disquieting about the gathering ascendancy of corporate power and money over governmental processes which are suppose to act in and for the good of a nation’s people.
– dennis
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The US House of Representatives quietly passed a last-minute addition to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill for 2013 last week – including a provision protecting genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks.
The rider, which is officially known as the Farmer Assurance Provision, has been derided by opponents of biotech lobbying as the “Monsanto Protection Act,” as it would strip federal courts of the authority to immediately halt the planting and sale of genetically modified (GMO) seed crop regardless of any consumer health concerns.
The provision, also decried as a “biotech rider,” should have gone through the Agricultural or Judiciary Committees for review. Instead, no hearings were held, and the piece was evidently unknown to most Democrats (who hold the majority in the Senate) prior to its approval as part of HR 993, the short-term funding bill that was approved to avoid a federal government shutdown.
Senator John Tester (D-MT) proved to be the lone dissenter to the so-called Monsanto Protection Act, though his proposed amendment to strip the rider from the bill was never put to a vote.
As the US legal system functions today, and largely as a result of prior lawsuits, the USDA is required to complete environmental impact statements (EIS) prior to both the planting and sale of GMO crops. The extent and effectiveness to which the USDA exercises this rule is in itself a source of serious dispute.
The reviews have been the focus of heated debate between food safety advocacy groups and the biotech industry in the past. In December of 2009, for example, Food Democracy Now collected signatures during the EIS commenting period in a bid to prevent the approval of Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa, which many feared would contaminate organic feed used by dairy farmers; it was approved regardless.
Previously discovered pathogens in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn and soy are suspected of causing infertility in livestock and to impact the health of plants.
So, just how much of a victory is this for biotech companies like Monsanto? Critics are thus far alarmed by the very way in which the provision made it through Congress — the rider was introduced anonymously as the larger bill progressed through the Senate Appropriations Committee. Now, groups like the Center for Food Safety are holding Senator Mikulski (D-MD), chairman of that committee, to task and lobbing accusations of a “backroom deal” with the biotech industry.
– more… ➡