Skipper BO Steers Course Onto the Rocks, Blames Others

Worst unemployment picture since WWII

Obama Doesn't Know What He's Doing

Long-term unemployment skyrockets

Middle class collapsing

Dependency on government a growing addiction for Americans

This is the Obama - Pelosi age, the age of the oxymoron "social justice." Destroying the country to save it is the path that radical revolutionaries often take -- from Mugabe to Castro to Chavez to Kim to Pol Pot to Stalin to Hitler and so on.

Captain Obama at the wheel, the USS America headed onto the rocks, and in the ballroom Pelosi is gathered with Greenpeace, the trial lawyers, labour union bosses, the IPCC, Al Gore and the carbon traders, and a host of lobbyists, singing "Happy Days are Here Again!"

Pay no attention to those deep grinding noises coming from below. Those are just some noises left over from the previous administration. Captain BO has increased speed to full ahead, so we will soon be out of the rough spots.

Stun Gun Cannon Will Keep Neighbors at Bay

If you are the type of person who doesn't like intrusive neighbors, you may be interested in the new sonic cannon device from Israel. If you are tired of neighbors using your landscaped lawn and gardens as a shortcut -- or as a place for their dog Rover to relieve himself -- consider the stun cannon, and a few other non-lethal devices that may serve to keep outsiders on the proper side of the line.

Using a patented process involving Pulse Detonation Technology (PDT), the system feeds the gas-air mixture into one or more so-called impulse chambers or cannon barrels, where the burning fuel detonates and intensifies in force as it travels through the chamber, exiting in a rapid-fire succession of high-velocity shock bursts.

A small battery-powered control system - about twice the size of a pack of cigarettes - measures fuel pressure, temperature and flow rates while monitoring the continuous intake of the air-gas mixture.

According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.

The resulting shocks create a double deterrent to rioters and potential intruders, developers here say, by the extreme air pressure and sonic boom effect generated once the mixture propagates and expands through the air. One standard 12-kilogram LPG gas canister (retail cost: about $25) can produce up to 5,000 shock bursts. _DefenseNews

This powerful stun cannon can now take its place alongside the infrasonic disruptor, the microwave skin burn, and a large variety of lasers, electric-stun, and impact-stun weapons meant to discourage unwelcome guests.

We are talking about riot control, repelling pirates, and perhaps border control. As the ability to stun-at-a-distance gets better and less permanently damaging, remotely operated non-lethal antipersonnel emplacements will likely be installed along difficult stretches of border.

For Israelis, the issue is clear. Good fences make good neighbors. For the rest of us, the ability to control the dangerous and unruly mob has never been more necessary.

Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.

Another Century of Crude Oil?

The following is excerpted from the October 2009 Scientific American article by Leonardo Maugeri, "Another Century of Oil?"

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.

Chevron began to markedly increase production in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a kind of oil cornucopia.

Kern River is not an isolated case. According to common wisdom, a field’s production should follow a bell-shaped trajectory known as the Hubbert curve (after the late Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert) and peak when half of the known oil has been extracted. Instead most of the world’s oil fields have revived over time. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.

Many analysts now prophesy that global oil production will peak in the next few years and then decline, following the Hubbert curve. But I believe that those projections will prove wrong, just as similar “peak oil” predictions [see “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère; Scientific American, March 1998] have been mistaken in the past. New exploration methods have revealed more of the earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once inaccessible areas and in places where drilling used to be uneconomic. Advanced exploration and extraction methods can keep oil production growing for decades to come and could allow oil supplies to last at least another century.

Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind
At a time when the world increasingly fears an approaching peak and subsequent decline in oil production, it may be surprising to learn that most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground and that even more still wait to be discovered.

On the face of it, oil should last only a few more decades. In 2008, just before the economic meltdown slashed consumption, the world burned about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. Assuming that in the near future consumption resumed at 2008 levels and then stayed constant, our planet’s proven reserves of oil—currently estimated at between 1.1 trillion and 1.3 trillion barrels—would have about 40 years to go.

But proven reserves are only estimates and not fixed numbers. They are defined as the amount of known oil that can be recovered economically with current technology, so the definition changes as technology develops and as the price of crude varies. In particular, if supply tightens or demand increases, resale prices go up, and oil that was once too expensive to extract becomes part of the proven reserves. That is why most oil fields have produced much more than the initial estimates of their reserves assumed and even more than the initial estimates of their total content. Today only 35 percent of the oil in the average oil field is recovered, meaning that about two thirds of the oil in known fields remains underground. That resource is rarely mentioned in the debate on the future of oil.

Even a mature oil country such as the U.S., whose oil production has been declining since the 1970s (if not as fast as the Hubbert curve predicted), still holds huge volumes of unexploited oil under its surface. Although the country’s proven oil reserves are now only 29 billion barrels, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1,124 billion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion barrels would be recoverable with current technology.

On a global scale, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the earth’s remaining conventional oil (petroleum) deposits to be around seven trillion to eight trillion barrels. But with today’s technology, know-how and prices, only part of that oil can be recovered economically and is thus classified as a proven reserve.

And there is more.

Only one third of the sedimentary basins of our planet—the geologic formations that may contain oil—has been thoroughly explored with modern technologies. Moreover, the USGS data do not include unconventional oils, such as ultraheavy oils, tar sands, oil shales and bituminous schist, which together are at least as abundant as conventional oil.

Thus, a country or a company may increase its reserves of black gold even without tapping new areas and frontiers, if it is capable of recovering more oil from known fields. Still, doing so is not always easy.

A Rocky Start
Contrary to common belief, oil is not held in great underground lakes or caves. If you could “see” an oil reservoir, you would notice only a rocky structure seeming to have no room for oil. But beyond the reach of the human eye, a world of often invisible pores and microfractures entraps minuscule droplets of oil, together with water and natural gas.

Nature created these formations over millions of years. It started when huge deposits of vegetation and dead microorganisms piled up at the bottom of ancient seas, decomposed and became buried under successive layers of rock. High temperatures and pressures then slowly transformed the organic sediments into today’s oil and gas. These fossil fuels soak the porous underground rock almost like water soaks pumice.

When such a reservoir is drilled, it behaves a bit like an uncorked bottle of champagne. The oil is freed from its ancient rocky prison, and the reservoir’s internal pressure pushes it to the surface (along with stones, mud and other debris). The process goes on until the pressure peters out, usually after several years. This initial, or primary, stage of recovery can usually yield between 10 and 15 percent of the oil in place. From then on, recovery must be assisted.

About one third of the oil left in a reservoir after the initial “champagne” release is called immobile oil—drops trapped by strong capillary forces within isolated pores in the rock. No technique exists yet to extract this part of the oil. The remaining two thirds, though mobile, will not necessarily flow into the wells on its own. In fact, usually about half of the mobile oil stays stuck inside the reservoir because of geologic barriers or low permeability, which happens when the pores are too narrow. The situation is even worse when the oil is not a light liquid but a heavy, viscous, molasseslike substance.

To help some of the remaining oil seep through the pores in the rock and come out of the wells, operators usually inject natural gas and water into the reservoir, in what is called secondary recovery. Injecting gas restores the lost pressure and forces oil that is sufficiently fluid to seep through the rock’s pores. Meanwhile, because oil is lighter than water, injection of water raises the oil toward the well, just like pouring water in a glass filled with olive oil would send the oil upward.

In the past decade or so, the distinction between primary and secondary recovery has blurred as companies have begun to apply advanced technology from the outset. One of the most important developments so far has been the horizontal well, an L-shaped structure able to deliver dramatically more oil than the traditional vertical drilling that has been used since the inception of the oil industry. The L shape enables horizontal wells to change direction and penetrate sections of a reservoir that would otherwise be unreachable. The method, first adopted commercially in the 1980s, is particularly suitable in reservoirs where oil and natural gas occupy thin, horizontal layers.

Exploration tools have also improved over the years. Advanced 3-D imaging of the underground, for instance, which is based on how seismic waves bounce off the boundaries between layers of different rock composition, now offers more detailed understanding of the structure of existing fields, which helps in choosing where to drill to optimize recovery.

Imaging technologies now enable geologists to “see” what lies underneath layers of salt that sit unevenly distributed below the seabed and are sometimes thicker than 5,000 meters. Similar to frozen waters, salt formations used to represent a formidable obstacle because they blurred the seismic waves used to reconstruct an accurate image of the underground.

Such imaging breakthroughs, combined with more advanced offshore technologies, have made new parts of the oceans accessible to oil developers. At the time when the North Sea oil fields were developed in the 1970s, it seemed as if offshore technology had reached its most daunting milestone, tapping fields that lay below 100 to 200 meters of water and 1,000 meters under the seabed. But in the past few years the industry has succeeded in striking oil at depths below 3,000 meters of water and 6,000 meters of rock and salt. There have been at least three major ultradeep offshore discoveries: Thunder Horse and Jack in the Gulf of Mexico and Tupi off the coast of Brazil.

Scraping the Barrel
As wells have gone farther and deeper than ever before, technologies have also evolved to get more oil out of the rock after the first lines of recovery have run their course. Primary and secondary recovery stages together can bring the recovery rate to between 20 and 40 percent. To go beyond that, in what experts call tertiary recovery, it is usually necessary to make the remaining oil less viscous, which can be accomplished using heat, gases, chemicals and even microbes. Steam injection, among the oldest heat-based methods, was decisive in the revival of the Kern River Oil Field back in the early 1960s. The injected steam heats the overlying formation and enables oil to move. To this day, Kern River’s steam-injection project is among the largest of its kind in the world. A variant of steam-assisted recovery has been applied to tar sand deposits in Alberta that are too deep to be surface-mined.

Another heat-based process that has been tested in the field is burning a part of the reservoir’s hydrocarbons by igniting it with a heater while pumping air into a well to feed the combustion. The fire generates heat and carbon dioxide (CO2), both of which make oil less viscous; much of the CO2 also remains underground and helps to push the oil out. At the same time, the fire itself breaks the larger and heavier molecules of oil, once again making it mobile. The airflow can be controlled to limit oil that gets burned and to prevent the release of pollution into the surrounding environment.

A more common method is the high-pressure injection of gases such as CO2 or nitrogen into the reservoir. These gases can restore or maintain a reservoir’s pressure and can also mix with oil, reducing both its viscosity and the forces that can keep the oil trapped. In the U.S., CO2 extracted from volcanoes or from waste gases from power stations has been applied to oil recovery since the 1970s. The process is in use in about 100 ongoing projects, with dedicated pipeline networks totaling more than 2,500 kilometers.

The know-how accumulated in CO2 injection has opened the way for the capture and storage of CO2 from power plants—procedures that could help slash emissions of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and instead keep it underground for hundreds of years. The first commercial carbon capture and storage project has been active at the Sleipner field, off the coast of Norway, since 1996, and is storing one million metric tons of CO2 a year. This amount is small, considering that human activity alone is estimated to eject into the atmosphere greenhouse gases equivalent to around 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. But the plant’s success serves as a proof of concept.

Continue reading here

Peak oil has never been an intelligent religion, but it is growing less and less bright every day.   If peak oilers knew one tenth as much about what is going to happen with oil supplies and prices as they pretend, they would be stinking rich from crafty investing.  

Between the Peak Oil Religion and the Climate Catastrophe Religion, a huge proportion of the world's nutcases can be grouped.  Add the Fundamentalist Muslim Religion and you have largely covered the world's majour delusions and problem children.  Throw in the Obama Zombies and that just about does it.   While still delusionary, the rest of the religions are not a significant threat to the future of abundance and sustainability.

Reinventing the Wheel Again, Once More

Tires and wheels that can change configuration to suit the purpose at hand, might come in handy. Modern tires that can assume only one shape are of limited use in an all-purpose, amphibious vehicle.The wheels / tires shown above are capable of changing from conventional round tires, to a stepped snow tire shape, to a water-wheel configuration. That should prove useful, should you wish to cross the river without a bridge.The system above is known as the intelligent wheel system. Its 3 configurations can serve well on the highway, on snow - mud - or sand, and in the water.

Freedom of Movement for the Fourth of July

The Aeroyacht 110has been dubbed “the world’s most innovative super catamaran” by its designers and, while that’s a pretty big claim, it’s certainly an audacious concept. Capable of speeds of over 32 knots but able to cruise effortlessly at 20, boasting a superbly-appointed 32ft wide salon with 360º sea views and with its own fold-up amphibious plane as a tender, the Aeroyacht 110 looks to be the ne plus ultra of luxury sailing.

Designed from scratch by Gregor Tarjan, founder of Aeroyacht International, together with naval architect Pete Melvin, of the world-renowned Morrelli & Melvin multihull architects, the Aeroyacht 110 was designed from the outside-in. Tarjan started with the concept for a “pure sailing machine” and, once its streamlined shape was established, only then worked out how many people it could and should accommodate.Source

The amphibious tender ICON A5 adds a completely new dimension of freedom to the maritime ensemble. All that is lacking is a small submarine. Perhaps the Aeroyacht people can correct that oversight by the time the super cat hits the market.

First Send Them Back to the Stone Age, Then Make Their Home Into a Parking Lot

And you can do it all without messy invasions or nuclear weapons! First send that pesky enemy back to the stone age with EMP weapons -- you don't even need to use nukes! This will create havoc with military command and control, and largely break civilian morale within a few days.Then you can destroy transportation arteries and vital infrastructures such as powerplants, fuel refineries, pipelines and military installations from a distance -- using kinetic weapons fired by electromagnetic cannon!

This one-two punch can be assembled with off-the-shelf components taking very little time and expense.

A smart world conqueror might put off invasion plans until nano-weaponry becomes more advanced. Nothing clears a space so well as nano-invaders capable of stripping a land cleaner than locust. Stealthy in, quick working, then dissolving into the landscape. Entire nations could be turned over, ready for radical makeover practically overnight!

The social democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania have allowed humans to take a vacation from history for the past half century or more. This pax cannot possibly last much longer, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Obama devastation of the world economy.

Soon, the world populations will be thrust back into the hands of the warlords, the conquerors, the absolute destroyers of lands and peoples. Again. History coming to life, just when you thought it was obsolete.

Modern weapons research is a bit uneven. Most projects, perhaps, will not survive due to poor conceptualisation and a lack of robustness on the field of battle. But enough of the tools of "the new warfare" will succeed, to change the face of the planet a million times more than the hyped up global warming scare of Gore and Obama.

Buckle up.

Hobbit Home: The Shire Located in Wales

A pilot doing an aerial survey of Wales spotted this outpost of the Shire down below. Apparently the hobbit-builder maintains a website, and explains just how to build a hobbit home.

Some key points of the design and construction:

* Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
* Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
* Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
* Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
* Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
* Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
* Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
* Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
* Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring...)
* Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
* Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
* Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
* Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
* Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
* Water by gravity from nearby spring
* Compost toilet
* Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.
_woodlandhome_more photos here

Hobbit Homes Movie Set New Zealand
Hobbits are normally secretive, but apparently the author of the hobbit website linked above is a human : hobbit mixed-blood who married into a hobbit family. That explains his willingness to interact with the human world over the internet.

Bad Skin, Bad Brain

Scientists have learned that skin fibroblasts share many of the same peculiar cellular mechanisms as brain neurons. This suggests that the study of skin cells in persons with brain diseases such as schizophrenia, might provide almost as much information as the study of brain cells obtained from potentially dangerous brain biopsies.

Until now diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been difficult to study biologically, since this would entail taking samples from the patient’s brain. But new research findings from Örebro University in Sweden show that it is just as good to study a certain type of skin cells, since they function in a way that is similar to a type of brain cells that are suspected of playing a major role in both disorders.

“Among other benefits, this makes it considerably easier to develop and test new drugs,” says Ravi Vumma, and the head of the research group Nikolaos Venizelos who is presenting the findings in the journal Neuroscience Letters.

One of the causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (previously called manic-depressive syndrome) is assumed to be that the level of important transmitter substances in the brain is too low, which negatively impacts the transmission of signals. That, in turn, is because the cells in the blood-brain barrier are not transporting enough of the amino acids that are needed for the brain to be able to produce signal substances like dopamine, noradrenalin, and serotonin.

“Altered transport of the amino acids tyrosine and tryptophan may be one explanation for the disrupted signal transmission in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” Ravi Vumma explains.

We have therefore mapped how the transport of the two amino acids takes place, what paths they take into the cell. Various amino acids use different transport systems, and to enhance our knowledge about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder it is necessary to identify which systems are relevant for tyrosine and tryptophan.

Moreover, we want to find out whether connective tissue cells in the skin, fibroblasts, transport amino acids in the same way as endothelial cells in the brain, as this would constitute a dramatic enhancement of our ability to study how substances pass through the blood-brain barrier. The two cell types have a similar membrane function, to close out undesirable substances and only transport substances the body needs.

“The research shows that tyrosine and tryptophan largely use the same transport system and that it functions in the same way in both skin fibroblasts and the endothelial cells of the blood-brain barrier.”

On top of this we were able to determine that the inward transport of tyrosine in fibroblasts was lower in patients with bipolar disorder compared with a healthy control group. Since previous research has shown that it was lower in individuals with schizophrenia, his discovery indicates that the two diseases involve a common alteration that is probably caused by a common genetic variation. _SD

Gasification: Coal and Biomass to Liquid Fuels

Plasma Gasification - Funny home videos are a click away
Gasification of coal and biomass to liquid fuels is one emphatic answer to the peak oil hysteria that afflicts so many otherwise intelligent humans. This video presents the gasification process in easy to understand terms.

Coal gasification is a cleaner way of using coal, and allows for carbon sequestration -- or preferably diverting of CO2 to algae bioreactors or controlled atmosphere greenhouses.

Biomass gasification allows for a sustained renewable form of solar energy that can provide either liquid fuels, high value chemicals, or clean baseload electricity.

A Nation of Sluts? Brazil Goes Globo

Girls learn to be women -- and women learn to be sluts -- from the media. Romance novels, films, and especially soap operas and "soap Oprahs". Brazil's population of women is being taken over by the popular soap "Globo."

How much impact do the soaps have on real life? As recounted in papers from the Inter-American Development Bank, researchers tracked Globo’s expansion across the country and compared this to data on fertility and divorce.*

The results are most striking for the total fertility rate, which dropped from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 in 2000, despite contraception being officially discouraged for some of that time. This was because women moved to cities and opted to have fewer babies. The papers argue that the small, happy families portrayed on television contributed to this trend. Controlling for other factors, the arrival of Globo was associated with a decline of 0.6 percentage points in the probability of a woman giving birth in a given year. That is equivalent to the drop in the birth rate associated with a woman having two extra years of schooling

The effect on divorce was smaller, but noticeable. The researchers found that between 1975, when divorce was first mooted, and 1984 about one in five of the main characters in Globo soaps were divorced or separated, a higher percentage than in the real Brazil. These break-ups were not just a result of machismo: from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s about 30% of female lead characters in novelas were unfaithful to their partners. The researchers find that the arrival of Globo in an area was associated with a rise of 0.1-0.2 percentage points in the share of women aged 15-49 who were divorced or separated. The authors reckon that watching “empowered” women having fun in Rio made other women (a few of them anyway) more independent. _ImpactLab

One person's "empowered woman" may be another person's slut -- it depends upon a person's perspective.

I wonder if ancient Rome had soap operas, right up until the end? Would you like to know, "who were Rome's soap Oprahs?" Women take their cues from the herd, as they interpret it. The soap Oprahs of the world exert a huge impact on female behaviour, and on society at large. You may be a slave to a loosely knit web of puppet masters and puppet mistresses, pulling the strings on female behaviour everywhere except perhaps within the Muslim world. And how much longer can that bastion of male dominance hold out?

Cross-posted at Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

Is Competence Dying Out In the Obama Age?

Within the next five years, an estimated 45 percent of engineers in U.S. electrical utilities will be eligible for retirement or will leave for other reasons, according to a 2008 survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. That percentage translates into some 7,000 power engineers that will be needed in the electric utility industry alone. But the problem doesn't stop there. According to the report, two to three times as many electric power engineers may be needed to fulfill the needs of the entire economy. PW

The shortage of qualified engineers for the power industry, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, the construction industry, and many other industries, threatens to stifle plans for a vibrant, sustainable future. Without the manpower to turn ideas into working industries, jobs, and economies, you may as well start mixing the final kool-aid.

This looming shortage of competence is the end result of a designed dumbing down of schools -- from K-12 through the university. The substitution in the curricula of political indoctrination in the place of competence-building procedural and declarative knowledge has created at least one lost generation so far. Under Obama, the process toward brain-wasting will only accelerate.

But competent generations eventually retire, and die off. If all you are left with is psychological neotenates, academic lobotomates, and incompetent Obama zombies, your future will be dismal. But that is precisely the direction the western world is headed.

Even if universities and colleges were teeming with engineering students, the educational institutions may not be well equipped to handle the demand. The Collaborative estimated that within the next five years, 40 percent of full-time senior engineering faculty will be eligible for retirement and that 27 percent may actually do so. A number of historically strong power engineering programs have ended or are close to doing so. _PW

The rapidly depleting supply of competent engineers is just the beginning of the problem. As young minds are being rapidly destroyed by a dysfunctional educational system and popular culture, their dimming consciousness is incapable of selecting career paths for the future.

The recent debacle on Wall Street involving faulty computer models and suicidal risk instrument derivatives suggests that the mind rot extends all the way to the Ivy League cream of the crop. And under Obama, millionaire investment bankers are being bailed out by custodians, auto mechanics, garbage collectors, and taxi cab drivers -- via forced taxation of hard-earned income. Corruption on top of incompetence! Is this the future of hope and change? It seems so.

Clueless Clown, Hapless Harlequin, Zombie King

A combination of wishful thinking and abject stupidity has landed the US (and the world) in a toxic pit of hazard. It is bad enough having an inexperienced, incompetent, and ideologically blindered clown of a president in control. Unfortunately, the US Congress is led by a group of corrupt and unscrupulous quasi-criminals the likes of which has not been seen in well over a century of government corruption in the US. To top it off, everyone that Obama appoints to the executive and to the courts appears to share in these global Obama-style inadequacies and failure to lead responsibly. This will be a very rough 4 years. Even a radical rearrangement of the House of Representatives in 2010 will not be enough to reverse the destruction of Obama's first 6 months, let alone the next two years. Decades will be required to recover from this episode of failure by American voters and media.

Abandoning a Nuclear Deterrent Out of Wishful Thinking

Obama's War On Business

Obama's Recovery Plan Can Only Fail

Obama Prefers the UN to the US

Entering an Obama Dark Age

China's Support for Jihad in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan



H/T Reverse Spins

Are Lawyers Getting Stupider?

I would not have thought it possible for lawyers to get more stupid, but according to a study from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) at Bristol University, the IQs of lawyers are dropping toward the population average. Thinking about the attorneys currently running the US government, however, it becomes easier to believe the decline. In fact, are they absolutely sure that average attorney IQ has not dropped below population average IQ?

The CMPO study.... found that, although the comparative wealth of lawyers’ parents had increased between the two study groups – born in 1958 and 1970 – their scores in IQ tests had moved closer to the average.

BPP College principle Carl Lygo argues that a relative fall in ability might not be such a bad thing. “This doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “Opportunities are ­widening – there are all kinds of people out there who need all kinds of different lawyers.”

He points to the growing number of people embarking on a law career, adding: “The law doesn’t need to be the ­preserve of the elite.”.....

.....Researchers tracked some 18,000 people from birth to age 34, recording vital data along the way. The 1970 group is the latest study (apart from one carried out in 2000, which is of little use when analysing today’s lawyers). The results of the 1970 survey were only released a couple of years ago and it was not until this year that the data was broken down by ability and income for each profession. The ­participants of the 1970 survey are now well established in law firms and ­chambers, making this the best data available, given that large-scale ­economic studies are thin on the ground. _The Lawyer_via TaxProfBlog_via_NewsAlert

If a pilot is incompetent, the plane may well crash. If the surgeon is incompetent, the patient may die or have the wrong leg amputated. But if a lawyer is incompetent, he fits right in with most of the other lawyers and judges, so there is generally no penalty.

Even if an attorney graduated from Harvard or Yale, due to affirmative action, grade inflation, and widespread cheating, there is little reason to expect him to be competent. Look at Obama. Case closed.

A Liberal Gets Uneasy About Obama's Leftism

Stuart Taylor is a respected liberal legal scholar and author who has supported Obama out of a belief that Obama was "one of us." By "one of us", Taylor meant that he thought that Obama was really a "good liberal", and not a wild-eyed leftist like those right wingers were claiming. But even a "baby leftist" can start to wake up. Being taken for a chump is not easy to admit, but Taylor may be beginning to comprehend how easily he has been led down the path.

I have taken certain liberties with the excerpted text below, from Taylor's timid "mea culpa." Text inside the square brackets is editorial comment from Al Fin. _Al Fin

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be [crafting] what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

....But with the nation already plunging deep into [gratuitous] debt to [drown] the crippled financial system and stimulate the economy, Obama's proposals for many hundreds of billions in additional spending on universal health care, universal postsecondary education, a massive overhaul of the energy economy, and other liberal programs seem grandiose and unaffordable.

With little in the way of offsetting savings likely to materialize, the Obama agenda would probably generate trillion-dollar deficits with no end in sight, or send middle-class taxes soaring to record levels, or both.

All this from a man who told the nation last week that he doesn't "believe in bigger government" and who promised tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans.

The president's suggestions that all the necessary tax increases can be squeezed out of the richest 2 percent are [devious and ] deceptive and [designed] to stir class resentment. And his apparent cave-ins to [leftist revolutionary] interest groups [will] change the country for the worse.

Such concerns [will] help explain why the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 17 percent from the morning of Inauguration Day (8,280) to its close on March 4 (6,876). The markets have also been deeply shaken by Obama's alarming failure to come up with a clear plan for fixing the crippled financial system -- which has loomed since his election four months ago as by far his most urgent challenge -- or for working with foreign leaders to arrest the meltdown of the world economy.

Stuart Taylor

Papercrete Dome Project

Here is an interesting tutorial on how to build a papercrete dome by a couple who are building a life in rural New Mexico.

Their first papercrete dome was a simple project to house their PV battery bank. With only minor modification, it should be possible to use the same technique to build any small shelter from a child's playhouse to a simple guest house. Reinforced papercrete domes are both strong and weather resistant, if the proper finishing layers are applied. Insulation properties are good, and could be modified to the particular location. Thermal mass characteristics can likewise be adapted to location, with simple modifications. Creative possibilities in design are immense with these building techniques.

H/T to MAKE and Wired

Jet Engine / Gas Turbine No Birds, Please!!!

These precisely machined engines do not take kindly to a meal of flying birds. The result of such a meal is not pretty, and makes for a very hair-raising trip back to Earth. Just ask Sully.

Searching for a Secular Morality

Each of us has grown up in a world in which moral judgments already exist. These judgments are passed every day by everyone on the conduct of everyone else. Each of us not only finds himself approving or disapproving how other people act, but approving or disapproving certain actions, and even certain rules or principles of action, wholly apart from his feelings about those who perform or follow them. So deep does this go that most of us even apply these judgments to our own conduct, and approve or disapprove of our own conduct in so far as we judge it to have conformed to the principles or standards by which we judge others. When we have failed, in our own judgment, to live up to the moral code which we habitually apply to others, we feel "guilty"; our "conscience" bothers us.
Henry Hazlitt, The Foundations of Morality

Across the western nations, religion has lost its hold over the people. Tragically, there is no other system of ethical guidance that has achieved any level of authority even closely approaching the prior authority of religion. In terms of ethics, most westerners appear to be "running blind." Many Al Fin readers have watched this developing ethical vacuum growing, with its concomitant rise in crime and societal and sub-societal dysfunction. In a multi-traditional, multi-religious, multi-ethnic society such as most western nations are becoming, a common moral and ethical system is absolutely vital to prevent the type of violence and societal schisms which are a constant threat to any society's present and future well-being.

Muslim societies solve this problem by declaring the supremacy of Islam, and forcing all other religions and belief systems into an uncomfortably subservient position. Communist societies solve the problem by establishing the communist state as a de facto religion and arbiter of morality, with all other belief systems considered irrelevant and obsolete -- if not treasonous.

Societies which pride themselves on their tolerance can not easily utilise either of those strategies. As a result, when the original basis of law and morality of a society begins to lose authority at the same time as the society grows much more strongly multi-traditional, the scene is set for violent clashes and schisms within the society.

The need for a widely accepted cross-traditional basis for ethical and moral behaviour is self-evident, but the devising of such a cross-traditional ethical system is hampered by all of the factions which are firmly attached to their own system of ethics. Most of these "strongly attached" factions are not willing to accept the need for any other system of ethics than their own. Hence, religious and ideological wars throughout history.

Where would one start, when attempting to devise a secular, or cross-traditional, system of ethics? Well, to begin with, one would not publicly begin such an effort in Iran or Saudi Arabia -- not if one valued his head. Even in Holland, Theo van Gogh discovered that publishing ideas that point out shortcomings in other ethical systems comes with a cost. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, various Muhammed cartoonists, and others across Europe have learned the same lesson and lived to tell the story.

For those who are interested in this project, I would like to make one suggestion: The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt (long PDF). Before you click on the link, you should know that the PDF is a 24 MB book-length treatment, so you may want to right click and use the "Save Link As" option. That will download the document to your computer or removable drive, leaving your browser to function normally without bogging down.

I have found Hazlitt's approach to be quite valuable. As a disclaimer I will say that I am also comfortable with Hazlitt's viewpoints of market economics and libertarian politics as well. That comfort allows me greater play in the mental wrestling that goes on reading the book, than a person antagonistic to Hazlitt's strong individualist stance would have. Such a person would likely not survive the first few chapters. Which only highlights the problem of devising a cross-traditional, cross-ideological system of ethics.

In the end, such a system can only be agreed upon out of a pragmatic desire for a society that intermeshes cleanly, despite the many different traditions, religions, ethnic groupings, and nationalities of origin. Without the will to create such a cleanly meshing society of inevitable sub-societies, all is lost.

If the disparate components of a multi-traditional society are unwilling to admit a common secular morality into the areas where the different traditions interact, clearly the word "society" no longer means what most people think it means. If such is the case, an increase in crime, violence, and ill will between sub-societies of multi-traditional nations is inevitable -- perhaps leading to the type of dissolution that occurred in the former Yugoslavia, for large sections of several western nations. Or perhaps leading to something very much worse.

We are caught in the lurch, and many of us fail to recognise the problem. What are the odds that a common and workable system of ethics will find its way back into the lives of most people living in western countries? Slim to none. But the concept is worth working on, for the sake of emerging groups of more far thinking individuals. Next Level Humans.

Is the UK Education Debacle to be the Future of Education in the United States?

The UK is fading as an important world power. Its human capital is being squandered, its very foundation of potential accomplishment allowed to crumble from neglect. The government pushes adolescents to attend university, but then stands by and watches as more and more choose nonsense courses that leave them without income potential are useful knowledge. Is this what Barak Obama wishes to emulate, to make the US "more like Europe and the rest of the world?"

In Reform's report, it said the drift was leading to a skills shortage in the UK, forcing many firms to rely on foreign labour...."Removing individual involvement and decisions from the process has the danger of undermining the values of successful education - personal discipline, curiosity, independence of thought and hard work," said the report.

"It has helped to create a something for nothing culture. One result is the growth of spoon-fed generation that wants to receive education passively and without effort. This generation prefers the X-Factor to A grades."

...Just 6.2 per cent of British university degrees are in engineering, manufacturing and construction, compared to more than nine per cent in North American and 15 per cent in continental Europe, said the study. _Telegraph

If you provide an environment for adolescents to hang out, drinking and using drugs, with free hooking up privileges, taking nonsense classes and generally wasting themselves into oblivion, most young people will take you up on the offer. Particularly if nothing in their past has instilled into them any deeper sense of values or self-motivation.

For the past few decades, at least, the adults of society have been distracted from the function of mind-formation of youth. Consequently, the youths have raised themselves into perpetual adolescence, of a most incompetent and self-destructive nature. Are you surprised at the outcome?

It appears that rather than lifting up the third world, the first world is heading downward itself.

H/T An Englishman's Castle

Counter-Intuitive Graphics

This graphic demonstrates an inverse relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature. Watts Up With That?
This graphic demonstrates the growth of US government spending in the human resources sector while spending on national defense and everything else stagnates or even declines slightly. Under a President Obama defense spending would drop significantly while increases in human resources and new spending would likely be ten times the cuts in defense.

The "Catch 22" of human resource spending is that it is tied to cost of living, and can only go up. As the elderly population grows older, as the highly skilled craftsmen of industry grow old and retire and are not replaced, as high IQ populations die off and are replaced by lower IQ immigrants who can never take their place--paying for the exponential increases in government spending coming down the pipe will be impossible.

Can Obama Keep His Promise to Black Males?

There is a sense of optimism among many US blacks regarding the so-far successful candidacy of Barak Obama. This ecstatic burst of utopianism extends well beyond the US black community into Europe--even to Islamic terror organisations--but it is US blacks whose hopes are elevated to the most rapturous levels.

If Obama could do anything to help black males in the US, perhaps it would be worth it to elect him president just for that. What are the challenges?

In examining graduation rates, the report finds a national graduation rate for black males (47 percent) that is 28 percentage points lower than the graduation rate for white males (75 percent). In ten states, the difference in graduation rates for black males and white males is 30 percentage points or more...In addition to low graduation rates, black males also have "consistently low educational attainment levels, are more chronically unemployed and underemployed, are less healthy and have access to fewer health care resources, die much younger, and are many times more likely to be sent to jail for periods significantly longer than males of other racial/ethnic groups," according to the report. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

As a group, black males are the chronic statistical laggards of US society. Can Barak Obama do anything at all to help them? The problem is vast and begins at a very early age.

In the country as a whole, the number of Black students in Special Education classes is disproportionately high and the number in Gifted/Talented programs is disproportionately low. The number of Black students, particularly Black male students, who receive out-of-school suspensions and are expelled is also disproportionately high. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

A quick look at the chart above shows that as bad as young black males are doing in school, their sisters--born of the same parents, raised in the same homes, and eating the same foods--are actually doing fairly well.

Why are black girls doing reasonably well by comparison? Black girls, in contrast to the boys, get pretty good grades, go to college at decent rates and graduate from college at very good rates, earning degrees as twice the rate of men. _Source_via_JoanneJacobs

Black males are staggeringly over-represented in the prison population--44% of prisoners, and only 5% or so of the population (black males of prison age). The overall IQ average for American blacks is 85. That is 1 standard deviation below the overall mean of roughly 100. It very possible that the black male average IQ is even less than the overall US black average IQ, looking at comparative life success.

We know that executive function (EF) is more important than IQ for life success, although EF lacks a comparably accepted metric to IQ, so it is more difficult to compare EF statistics. EF can be improved by training (Posner, Rothbart), which should be done not much later than age 6. Even so, EF--like IQ--is highly heritable, so that there are limits to what training can do. Still, better trained than not.

Finally, if Barak Obama becomes US President next January, will the IQ's and EF's of black males magically and instantly normalise? Will we see abrupt drops in criminal and delinquent behaviour from black males? Will black males suddenly begin succeeding in school--from kindergarten through college? Will the exaggerated strut of young black males suddenly have a full complement of efficacy and competence backing it up?

Probably not. Not immediately, and not for a very long time. Then what will become of all of the magical expectations floating around the messianic candidacy of Barak Obama?

Obama has no substantive achievements, no particular experience or accomplishments to prepare him for the challenges he would face as chief executive of the world's only superpower. But never mind all that. Born of a white mother, raised largely by a white family, and only absorbing the victimist culture of black America secondhand--what has prepared Obama to pull black males out of the incredibly deep hole they are in?

Reinventing the Wheel: Airless Tire

The military is trying to develop a tire for HumVees and other vehicles running on pneumatic tires, that cannot be punctured or shot out from under the vehicle. The "airless tire" is a project being worked on by the US DOD with the help of Resilient Technologies and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“You see reports all the time of troops who were injured by an IED or their convoys got stranded because their tires were shot out,” says Mike Veihl, general manager of Resilient. “There’s all sorts of armor on the vehicle, but if you’re running in the theater and get your tire shot out, what have you got? You’ve got a bunch of armor in the middle of a field.”

...The Wisconsin design breakthrough, first developed by Resilient’s in-house design and development team, takes a page from nature. “The goal was to reduce the variation in the stiffness of the tire, to make it transmit loads uniformly and become more homogenous,” Osswald says. “And the best design, as nature gives it to us, is really the honeycomb.”

...The patent pending Resilient design relies on a precise pattern of six-sided cells that are arranged, like a honeycomb, in a way that best mimics the “ride feel” of pneumatic tires. The honeycomb geometry also does a great job of reducing noise levels and reducing heat generated during usage - two common problems with past applications. “We definitely brainstormed,” says Foltz. “We wanted to create more of a matrix of cells within the tire, and it seemed kind of natural to go with the honeycomb’s hexagon shape. We tried some other shapes, such as diamond shapes, and they didn’t perform as well.” _Source

Honeycomb designs make sense for load distribution, but I suspect there is a better design waiting to be tried. A pneumatic tire distributes the load almost uniformly in continuously alternating tension-compression in the tire, distributed by the compressed air inside the tire.

This is the type of relatively simple engineering problem that computer models should be capable of handling. In terms of vehicle maneuverability, we may find that the pneumatic tire is not the best type of tire.

Interestingly, some of the same problems that need to be solved to design the best airless tire also need to be solved in the design of the modular seastead. The outer "rim" of the seasted needs to absorb the energy of the surrounding seas, protecting the sensitive living and working areas within.

Interesting work.

New Jet Engine Incrementally Better

The new Pratt and Whitney geared turbofan is an excellent innovation in gas turbines for jet aircraft. By allowing the compressor to spin at a slower speed than the drive turbine fans, the overall engine system can burn 12 to 15 % less fuel per amount of thrust. In a time of high fuel prices, that level of improvement in efficiency matters.

Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. Then it's blown through a turbine, generating thrust. It works, but it's inefficient because the fan is connected to the engine and turns at the same speed as the turbine. Fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

Pratt & Whitney solved that problem with a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and it spins at one-third the speed of the turbine, creating a quieter, more powerful engine the company says requires less fuel, emits less C02 and costs 30 percent less to maintain. Pratt & Whitney has been torture-testing the engines, and its engineers have simulated more than 40,000 takeoffs and landings. __Wired

A nice incremental improvement, and quite timely. More on the new engine:

...the Geared Turbofan will have operating costs 10% lower than current engines and maintenance costs that are 30% less. According to Pratt & Whitney, that translates into $600,000 $1.5 million in annual cost savings for a 120- to 180-passenger aircraft. __Source

For the airlines that survive the current fuel price peak, this should help.

Top Dystopian Novels List

In general, I separate dystopian novels from science fiction, mentally. There is a lot of overlap, naturally. Still, books on this list are generally not also on the SF list.

1. 1984
2. Fahrenheit 451
3. Brave New World
4. Lord of the Flies
5. Handmaid's Tale
6. Animal Farm
7. We
8. This Perfect Day
9. Anthem
10. Atlas Shrugged
11. Camp Concentration
12. Planet of the Apes
13. The Sheep Look Up
14. Stand on Zanzibar
15. Logan's Run
16. 334
17. A Clockwork Orange
18. Mockingbird (Tevis)
19. The Diamond Age
20. The Castle
21. The Dispossessed
22. Alongside Night
23. The Last Starship from Earth

More to follow as I think of them.

Here is the Wiki Category: Dystopian Novels, which contains quite a few more.

When George Bush II was elected US President, there were a lot of predictions that the US would descend into a dystopian world very much like 1984, Handmaid's Tale, or Fahrenheit 451. The reason so many people made these predictions, is that they never truly learned the lessons of the dystopian authors. Nor had they ever truly studied the real world dystopias honestly--Castro's Cuba, Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Sandinista Nicaragua, Chavez' developing dystopia in Venezuela, etc. Their predictions were ideologically based, rather than based on any realistic conceptual or evidence-based foundation.

In reality, it is the candidate that is supported most enthusiastically by the news media, entertainment media, and academicians that is most likely to cross into dystopian territory. In the 2008 US election, that likely candidate is not difficult to identify.

Musical Genes Located In Finland

Collaborating researchers from Finland and the USA have discovered genes for musical aptitude in Finnish families.

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude. Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.

The identified regions contain genes affecting cell extension and migration during neural development. Interestingly, an overlapping region previously associated with genetic locus for dyslexia was found raising a question about common evolutionary background of music and language faculties. The results show that musical aptitude is likely to be regulated by several predisposing genes/variants __SciDaily

It sounds as if the genes involved in musical aptitude are also involved in other functions as well. Brain functions involved in the sorting of syntax, rhythm, amplitude, scale, ratio and proportion, and many other facilities involved in skilled musical ability and interpretation will necessarily be utilised by other brain ensembles.

Still, little by little scientists studying gene expression are connecting the dots between genetic codes and real world skill. That is a cause for at least a small celebration.