NakedCapitalism: Apocalypse: The Rise of Hitler - Furzy mouse highly recommended this National Geographic documentary. I’ve only looked at the beginning, but the comments about it at YouTube (as opposed to the ones arguing related historical issues) are very positive. And sadly, as the world moves in a more authoritarian direction, it becomes more and more necessary to study history if we are to have any hope of preventing extremists from putting a new social order in place.
Much thanks to RJ at the Global Glass Onion and the Ozarker at Conflicted Doomer , and to Doug at 3Es News and David at ETF Daily
And do take time to visit the forums linked at the bottom of this post.
Peak Oil and Energy News
Guardian: Biofuel fails EU sustainability test, German researchers claim - Study says EU-grown rapeseed biodiesel falls under 35% marker, adding weight to calls to end food biofuels
Global Conflict
Businessweek: Japan activists land, raise flags on disputed isle
VOA: Anti-Japan Protests Held Across China
WashingtonPost: Attackers kill 4 Afghans including police chief, 3 NATO troops during major Muslim holiday
MSNBC: Deadly car bombs rock Libyan capital
LAT: Panetta urges Karzai to toughen recruiting standards to stop 'insider' shootings
TulsaWorld: Egypt president to visit Iran, a first in decades
Reuters: Iraqis helping Iran skirt sanctions - NY Times
SeattlePI: Militants attack Yemen intelligence HQ, killing 20
Reuters: UN monitors leave Syria, battles hit Damascus suburb
OWS/Protests
GlobeAndMail: S.Africa platinum mine reopens after deadly clashes: Lonmin
Hacker News/Wikileaks
CBSNews: Assange to Obama: Stop WikiLeaks "witch hunt"
BBC: Julian Assange row: Ecuador backed by South America
SMH: US intends to chase Assange, cables show
Domestic Financial News
WSJ: Number of the Week: Millions of Americans Don’t Get Paid - 55 million: The number of American workers who didn’t get any paid vacation time in 2011. It’s August, which means that if you aren’t reading this from a beach somewhere, the odds are at least one of your coworkers is. But no matter how empty the employee parking lot may have seemed this week, paid vacation is far from a universal benefit in the American workplace.
CalculatedRisk: Unofficial Problem Bank list declines to 899 Institutions
SoberLook: US Treasury shrinking the GSEs, capping taxpayer support - The US Treasury has restructured its holdings in the GSEs with the ultimate goal of shrinking the US government's dominant role in the mortgage market. Hosted: Credit agency sees greater chance of municipal bankruptcies, bond defaults in Calif.
Atlantic: Long-Term Unemployment Is Much Worse Than You Think
FT: Wall St. Widens Income Gap as Bonuses Take a Leap
Zerohedge: The Only 'Un-Manipulated' Chart Of The Real Un-Recovery You'll Ever Need
CapitalGainsAndGames: Federal Spending Is VERY Popular: Episode 1 - As I said back in June, in spite of all of the discussion about the need to cut federal spending, the gospel truth is that it's VERY popular and cutting anything -- including the always denigrated foreign aid and the constantly belittled waste, fraud and abuse -- will be much, much harder than anyone ever admits.
Economist'sView: Fed Watch: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
MSNBC: As school bells ring, retailers listen for sleigh bells
Rob Carrick’s Reader: The cult of the stock market is dead
NewYorker: Immigration and Skilled Workers - The U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for foreign students, hundreds of thousands of whom go to college and graduate school here. . But there’s also a missed opportunity for the U.S.: many of these foreign students would prefer to stay and put their skills to work here after they graduate, but they can’t get work visas. What’s more, studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of highly skilled immigrants already working here find themselves stuck in immigration limbo for years, waiting for visa and green-card applications to be approved. These are well-educated, motivated workers who want to play for our side. Yet we’re making it difficult for them to do so.
Zerohedge: The Modern Debt Jubilee - The modern “debt jubilee” is characterised as “quantitative easing for the public”. It has been boiled down to a procedure where the central bank does not create new money by buying the sovereign debt of the government. Instead, it takes an arbitrary number, writes a check for that number, and deposits it in the bank account of every individual in the nation. Debtors must use the newly-created money to pay down or pay off debt. Those who are not in debt can use it as a free windfall to spend or “invest” as they see fit. This, it is said, is the only way left to restart economic “growth” and finally get the spectre of unending financial crisis out of the headlines. It is the latest of a long string of “print to cover” remedies.
Global Financial News
BlacklistedNews: What The Threat Of A Global Food Crisis Means For World Markets
GlobeAndMail: Video: Italy looks to end of crisis, Best Buy looks for fresh start
Bloomberg: Toyota Faces 20% Drop in Japan Industry Sales as Aid Ends
NYT: Merkel Seems to Side With E.C.B. on Spain and Italy
MarketDay: Deutsche Bank probed over ties to Iran, Sudan
Zerohedge: ECB's Latest Deja Vu Bluff: Rate Caps On Sovereign Bonds
Reuters: Spain says there must be no limit set on ECB bond buying
Commodities/Metals
ETFDailyNews: Morning Call: Don’t Fight the Trend, but Stay on Your Toes in Thin Tape (GLD, SPY, SLV)
CommodityOnline: Gold sluggish on weak India demand China appetite strong: Barclays
Platts: Iron ore swaps hit $100 on weaker Chinese steel prices (news feature)
Environmental
USGS
M 3.0, 92km N of Chirikof Island, Alaska
MSNBC: Storm Helene slams Mexico coast
DesdemonaDespair: Image of the Day: Satellite view of smoke from wildfires in the U.S. West spreading eastward, 12-14 August 2012
ENENews: Gundersen: It’s almost “unimaginably unimaginable” how close we came to losing 14 nuclear reactors after 3/11 (AUDIO)
ENENews: NHK: “The unimaginable was happening” — Workers say part of Reactor 2 containment vessel destroyed — After alarming pressure readings, “we heard a loud bang… pressure is now zero” (VIDEO)
ENENews: Officials: Sinkhole growing in direction of drilling rig there to investigate troubled salt cavern — Now about 900 feet from edge
CNN: Hurricane Gordon makes landfall in Azores
CNN: Indonesia earthquake leaves 6 dead, officials say
NBC: Eyes in the sky aim to cut down illegal logging
DesdemonaDespair: Drought-stricken Farm Belt not headed for another Dust Bowl, say seed companies
America in Decline
Rawstory: LAPD filmed punching man for skateboarding on wrong side of street
Zerohedge: Chart Of The Day: Americans At Or Below 125% Of The Poverty Level
Food and Water
MSNBC: Salmonella cantaloupe sickens 141, kills 2
Eatocracy: Cantaloupes linked to deadly multi-state salmonella outbreak - Two deaths and multiple cases of illness across 20 states have been linked to cantaloupes contaminated with salmonella, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
NewScientist: US drought could spur civil unrest around the world - As prices rise, tempers fray. The US drought has pushed up global food prices and is likely to continue to do so. Some say riots and unrest may follow.
MSNBC: Sale of Niger nomad's last camel is sign of hunger - In a part of the world where the worth of a man is measured by his animals, Tuareg nomad Soumaila Wantala has come to this market to do the unthinkable: Sell his last camel. He crouches in the shade of a thorn tree as traders haggle over the 4-year-old male animal, Yedi.
Privacy News
Guardian: The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology - A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military. Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant. Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd.
OccupyCoorproatism: Disney, Biometrics and the Department of Defense
Science and Technology
ScienceDaily: Meddling with male malaria mosquito 'mating plug' to control an epidemic
CNN: Curiosity 'interrogates' Martian rock with laser
NBC: Mars rover has summit in its sights
Medical and Health
ScienceDaily: War is not necessarily the cause of post-traumatic stress disorder - Surprisingly, the majority of soldiers exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome were suffering from poor mental health before they were posted to a war zone, new research suggests.
(wow, talk about blaming the victim! )
ScienceDaily: Red wine compound could help seniors walk away from mobility problems
MSNBC: Needle-free vaccines: How about a patch instead?
Vitals: Is spraying for West Nile virus safe?
NYT: Testing Standard Medical Practices - BY 1990, many doctors were recommending hormone replacement therapy to healthy middle-aged women and P.S.A. screening for prostate cancer to older men. Both interventions had become standard medical practice. But in 2002, a randomized trial showed that preventive hormone replacement caused more problems (more heart disease and breast cancer) than it solved (fewer hip fractures and colon cancer). Then, in 2009, trials showed that P.S.A. screening led to many unnecessary surgeries and had a dubious effect on prostate cancer deaths. How would you have felt — after over a decade of following your doctor’s advice — to learn that high-quality randomized trials of these standard practices had only just been completed? And that they showed that both did more harm than good? Justifiably furious, I’d say.
Other News
MSNBC: Two 15-year-olds accused of school murder plot
Hosted: Ala. man fights to keep wife buried in front yard
MSNBC: Wife of disgraced Chinese leader gets death sentence with reprieve
Newsday: Tony Scott dead; 'Top Gun' director jumped from bridge, authorities say
CNN: At least 4 people shot at a Texas Walmart
CNN: Pregnant Dominican teen at center of abortion debate dies
Entertainment.NBC: Musician Willie Nelson hospitalized due to breathing problems
Politics
LaneKenworthy: Mitt Romney’s peculiar approach to tax fairness
Telegraph: Republican congressman says 'legitimate rape' does not cause pregnancy
Republican congressman Todd Akin has sparked fury by claiming that victims of "legitimate rape" rarely get pregnant.
NYT: Senate Candidate Provokes Ire With 'Legitimate Rape' Comment
CBSNews: Romney abortion view overrides Ryan in Akin response
McCaskill: Rape remarks are a ‘window into Todd Akin’s mind’
TheOval: Obama-Romney-Ryan Medicare debate takes surprising turn
DailyBeast: Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go
Reuters: When auto shutdown loomed, Ryan backed off fiscal hawk stance
CNN: Are 'Swift Boat' attacks on Obama bogus?
Krugman: Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition - There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says: The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period. Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Forums
TinfoilPalace: New research on Morgellons
TinfoilPalace: Apocalypse NOT
OilAge: Politics and Doomcasting...
OilAge: World Markets - URL
HubbertsArms: Heads up! Ebola outbreak.
HubbertsArms: German court relaxes limit to use of army at home
SilentCountry: DOW WATCH THREAD 06 - 10 August 2012
SilentCountry: Just a couple more nails in the coffin of humanity - or should that be the planet?
DestinyCalls: Doom pushed back to early 2013 P
DestinyCalls: The Newton Manuscripts Online
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