hope you all are headed into good weekends.
Here's something for you folks in the midwest to be on the lookout for.
Thanks RJ!
PatriciaShannon: Gulf of Mexico water temperatures the warmest on record; Dangerous tornado outbreak expected Saturday - A dangerous tornado outbreak is expected on Saturday over the Plains, says NOAA's Storm Prediction Center (SPC). Warm, moist air flowing northwards from a Gulf of Mexico that has record-warm waters will collide with cold air funneling down from Canada, creating a highly unstable air mass capable of creating strong thunderstorm updrafts. An impressive upper-level low, accompanied by a jet stream with 105 - 125 mph winds at middle levels of the atmosphere, will create plenty of wind shear, giving the air the spin it needs to form tornadoes. SPC has has issued their highest level of alert, a "High Risk," for portions of Oklahoma and Kansas for Saturday. Included in the "High Risk" area are the cities of Wichita and Oklahoma City. This is the second time SPC has issued a "High Risk" forecast this year; the first "High Risk" forecast came for the March 2 tornado outbreak, which killed 41 people and did $1.5 - $2 billion in damage. It is very unusual for SPC to issue a "High Risk" forecast more than a day in advance of a suspected tornado outbreak; Temperatures in the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico were the 3rd - 7th warmest on record during the first three months of 2012, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. This allowed Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) in the Gulf of Mexico (25 - 30°N, 85 - 90°W) to climb to 1.4°C (2.5°F) above average during March 2012, according to a wunderground analysis of the Hadley Centre SST data set. This is the warmest March value on record for the Gulf of Mexico, going back over a century of record keeping. During the first two weeks of April, Gulf of Mexico waters remained about 1.5°C above average, putting April on pace to have the warmest April water temperatures on record.
Much thanks also to RJ at the Global Glass Onion and the Ozarker at Conflicted Doomer , and to Doug at 3Es News and David at ETF Daily, for their help today! These good friends help make this blog what it is so do, go by and help support their efforts and hard work.
RJ posts his big Friday wrapup this afternoon and I Ozarker posts on Saturday afternoon. Be sure to visit their blogs and say howdy!
also,
don't forget to visit the forums linked at the bottom of the post.
Peak Oil and Energy News
TAE: Downstream Demand Destruction for Oil
FuelFix: Natural gas prices stay at 10-year low
DesdemonaDespair: Graph of the Day: Growth in World Oil Supplies, 1983-2011
BusinessInsider: The New EIA Oil Supply Data Confirms Your Peak Oil Fears
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently released full-year 2011 world oil production data. In this post, I would like show some graphs of recent data, and provide some views as to where this leads with respect to future production.
World oil supply is not growing very much
Global Conflict
BBC: UN to send Syria truce monitors
BBC: 'Shots fired' at Syria protesters
Guardian: Syrians demonstrate against Assad as uneasy ceasefire holds
Reuters: Five die as violence mars Syria truce, protests muted
Time: The Victims of Assad Voice Their Stories: Portraits by Peter Hapak
Hosted: Syrian protesters test fragile truce
McClatchy: After Himalayan avalanche, many in Pakistan call for patching ties with India
Bloomberg: Philippines Pushes to End China Sea Standoff Before Weekend Trip
LAT: North Korea rocket launch reportedly fails (gee, imagine that.)
CBSNews: North Korea may follow up failed rocket launch with more provocative nuclear test, experts say - CBS/AP) SEOUL, South Korea - After North Korea's rocket launch ended in failure, its next move could be even more provocative: a nuclear test.
That's what North Korea did following launches in 2006 and 2009. Experts suspect the government is under even more pressure to do so now after its latest rocket burst apart after liftoff Friday.
NYT: Failed Launch Is Setback for North Korea’s New Leader - Defying warnings of more censure and sanctions, North Korea launched a rocket Friday.
NYT: International Condemnation Follows North Korea's Failed Rocket Launch
Guardian: Obama engagement policy 'in tatters' after North Korean rocket defiance
MSNBC: US cancels N. Korea food aid after rocket launch
PopSci: Pentagon Announces New Strategy: Rapidly Develop Cyberweapons to Attack Specific Targets - The Pentagon wants cyberweapons, and it wants them fast. Deftly recognizing that cyberweapons are nothing like the materiel of physical warfare, the DoD is devising a means to fast-track and field certain cyberweapons, some of which will take only days to go from development to deployment.
BusinessInsider: This New $7 Billion Warship Is Part Of The US Response To China's Military Buildup
LegitGov: US ruling over rendition evidence offers impunity to British spies, warns UN
TomDispatch: Juan Cole, The Iran Conundrum - Negotiators for Iran, the U.S., Britain, China, France, Russia, and Germany are to meet in Turkey this Friday, face to face, for the first time in more than a year. There are small signs of possible future compromise on both sides when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program (and a semi-public demand from Washington that could be an instant deal-breaker). Looking at the big picture, though, there’s a remarkable amount we simply don’t know about Washington’s highly militarized policy toward Iran. Every now and then, like a flash of lightning in a dark sky, some corner of it -- and its enormity and longevity -- is illuminated. For example, in 2008, the New Yorker’s indefatigable Seymour Hersh reported that the previous year Congress had granted a Bush administration request for up to $400 million “to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” including “cross-border” operations from Iraq. Just recently, Hersh offered a window into another little part of the U.S. program: the way, starting in 2005, the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command spent years secretly training members of M.E.K., an Iranian opposition-group-cum-cult that’s on the State Department’s terror list, at a Department of Energy site in the Nevada desert.
AJC: Egypt Islamists rally against ex-regime candidates
Bloomberg: Guinea Bissau Prime Minister's Residence Attacked by Soldiers
Guardian: Iran raises hopes of nuclear trade off to halt oil sanctions
Domestic Financial News
CharlesHughSmith: Is 2012 a Reprise of 2008?
BusinessInsider: More Evidence The Market Sweet Spot Is Ending - Over the past two weeks even more evidence has emerged that the “sweet spot” the market has been enjoying in the last few months is coming to an end.
TechFortune: America's Energy Job Machine is Heating Up - Along the Texas coast it's easy to spot the effects of America's oil and gas renaissance in new hotels built in the past five years (many of them now populated by itinerant oilfield workers), in the multiplying numbers of overnight "shale-ionaires," in rising home values, expanding car and truck dealerships, and effectively full employment. What really excites experts is that these signs of prosperity in the gulf point to a larger trend.
CalculatedRisk: Analyst: Rising Rents "could tip the cost of housing in favor of ownership"
NewDeal20: For Capitalism to Survive, Crime Must Not Pay - Capitalism is not an abstract idea. It is an economic system with a distinct set of underlying principles that must exist in order for the system to work. One of these principles is equal justice. In its absence, parties will stop entering into transactions that create overall wealth for our society. Justice must be blind so that both parties — whether weak or powerful — can assume that an agreement between them will be equally enforced by the courts.
DanAriely: Taxes and Cheating - Will Rogers once said that “The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf” and I worry that he was correct.
FT: Banks look to cherry-pick Fed portfolio - Wall Street banks and investors are looking to cherry-pick $7.5bn of mortgage-related securities from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s sale of the assets used in the most controversial bailout of the financial crisis.
AdvisorPerspective: Inflation Watch: Year-over-Year Headline and Core CPI Little Changed - The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the CPI data for last month this morning.
13abc: At least 4,100 Detroit teachers get layoff notices - At least 4,100 Detroit Public Schools teachers have received layoff notices and are being told that they can reapply for their jobs next month.
RealEstateEconomyWatch: Foreclosure Flood Ready to Burst - Even though foreclosure activity over past three months hit the lowest level in five years, don’t break out the bubbly. We’re enjoying the calm before the storm.
AdvisorPerspective: What Inflation Means to You: Inside the Consumer Price Index - The Fed justified the previous round of quantitative easing "to promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate" (full text).
HuffingtonPost: Women's Jobs Axed By State Austerity Policies
LAT: An ugly foreclosure story, starring Bank of America
BusinessInsider: How Companies Got People To Become Obsessed With Their Brands
Global Financial News
ArsTechnica: World Bank decides to make its research open access
BusinessInsider: JP MORGAN: China's Slow Down Was Expected, Here's Why Growth Will Heat Up In The Second Half Of The Year - China's GDP growth rate slowed to 8.1 percent, which was well below economists' average estimate calling for 8.4 percent growth.
However, JP Morgan's Jing Ulrich isn't too worried. Ulrich is chairman of global markets for China.
"We were looking for 8.2 percent," said Ulrich in an interview with Bloomberg Television this morning. "Considering the headwinds China is facing in exports. Considering the slowdown in China's property sector. The 8.1 percent was in line with expectations."
CreditWritedowns: LTRO operation is pushing Spanish banking system closer to collapse
eXiled: Dispatch from Greece: Translation of Austerity Suicide Note Left By Pensioner Dimitris Christoulas
NakedCapitalism: Spain Has Only Denial - There seems to be a pattern emerging as stressed Eurozone nations struggle against the austerity based policy that slowly strangles them.The collaborationist Tsolakoglou [see note below —eXiled] government has annihilated my ability for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone (without any state sponsoring) paid for 35 years.Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamic reaction (although if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be the second after him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Piazza Loreto in Milan).
FuelFix: Chinese economy shifts to lower gear
NYT: China’s Inquiry of Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai Widens to Their Wealth
SFGate: Spain Banks Boost Borrowing From ECB by 50 Percent in March -- Spanish banks' borrowings from the European Central Bank jumped by almost 50 percent in March, reaching the most on record, as lenders tap emergency loans and channel some of it into sovereign debt purchases.
Yahoo: Cost of aging rising faster than expected-IMF - People worldwide are living three years longer than expected on average, pushing up the costs of aging by 50 percent, and governments and pension funds are ill prepared, the International Monetary Fund said.
CuriousCapitalist: China’s Economic Growth Falls to Nearly Three-year Low - China’s economic growth fell to its lowest level in nearly three years in the first quarter but analysts said the economy should rebound in coming months.
Economist: Free exchange: Capital controversy - China’s “overinvestment” problem may be greatly overstated - THE IMF says so.
Commodities/Metals
ETFDaily: Dennis Gartman Is A Fraud—In Yen Terms
Mineweb: China's March copper, aluminium output near record
Zerohedge: Gold To Repeat April, May And Q2 / Q3 2011 Gains In 2012?
Environmental
USGS
M 5.0, near the east coast of Honshu, Japan
IcelandVolcano/Earthquake: Harmonic tremor event in Hamarinn volcano
ABC: Europe's highest active volcano, Italy's Mount Etna has erupted again, spewing molten lava and white ash into the air. USAToday: Drought expands throughout USA
WildlifeNews: Rocky Barker: Idaho Fish and Game releases details of its wolf-trapper investigation
DesdemonaDespair: Are dolphins doomed? They’re certainly taking a hit
UPI: Study: Wind turbines low risk to birds - A majority of the bird population in Great Britain can thrive near major wind energy projects though risks remain during project development, a study finds.
Guardian: Arctic oil rush will ruin ecosystem, warns Lloyd's of London - The report, by Chatham House analysts, warns: 'Other than the direct release of pollutants … there are multiple ways in which ecosystems could be disturbed.
DesdemonaDespair: Climate change helps then quickly stunts plant growth, decade-long study shows - Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University.
The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly.
ClimateChangePsychology: Arctic Warming is Altering Weather Patterns, Study - By showing that Arctic climate change is no longer just a problem for the polar bear, a new study may finally dispel the view that what happens in the Arctic, stays in the Arctic. The study, by Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ties rapid Arctic climate change to high-impact, extreme weather events in the U.S. and Europe. The study shows that by changing the temperature balance between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, rapid Arctic warming is altering the course of the jet stream, which steers weather systems from west to east around the hemisphere. The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, due to a combination of human emissions of greenhouse gases and unique feedbacks built into the Arctic climate system.
ClimateProgress: New Science Reveals Agriculture’s True Climate Impact
America in Decline
HongPong: Meet the new Boss in Town: ICE spawns... HSI Homeland Security Investigations, for great justice & cocaine cowboys
CommonDreams: Long Range Acoustic Devices to be Used on Chicago Protesters | Common Dreams: Chicago police said they plan on using noise devices to control crowds during G-8/NATO Summit - Chicago police are preparing to use Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) on protesters during the G-8/NATO Summit. LRAD devices send sounds, warnings and tones that are painful to the human ear. The use of LRAD devices are controversial. According to the ACLU of Pennsylvania, a bystander during the Pittsburgh protests in 2009 has sued the city of Pittsburgh for hearing loss and pain resulting from the use of LRAD. The summit begins in Chicago on May 20 and will last several days. Protesters are expected to turn out in large numbers. Chicago police say they will attempt to learn from the Pittsburgh police's handling of protests at the G20 Summit in 2009, where LRAD machines were used as well.
MyBudget360: Educating students to debt – Student loan debt now second largest sector of household debt approaching $1 trillion. 14 percent of consumers have one account in collections.
BusinessInsider: The White House Gives Up On Stopping Big Upfront Credit Card Fees - The Obama administration's consumer financial watchdog agency is backing off a plan to limit big upfront fees on credit cards, a move that could hit borrowers with poor credit histories especially hard.
Counterpunch: Media Madness - March Madness comes once a year. Media Madness is year-round. What the mass media choose to cover and feature try to turn the priorities of any sane society upside down.
People of vice, war, money, spectator sports and business receive media attention – oftentimes ad nausem. People of virtue, peace, civics, health, labor and community engagement have to beg for media attention. Which of these two groups represents the most basic values of a civilized society that would restrain the excesses of the other group? You can guess!
MotherJones: VIDEO: Teen Is Tied Down, Shocked By Teachers at "School" for Austistic Kids
In 2007, we ran a devastating exposé of the Judge Rotenberg Center, a "school" that took mentally and psychologically troubled kids from across the country and treated them by hooking them up to electrodes and shocking them whenever they misbehaved or displayed symptoms of their disorders, like autism. Reports from former students and staff were horrific, and Jennifer Gonnerman's extensive reporting helped launch or fortify state and local investigations into the school and its founder, Matthew Israel. Yet despite the investigations and ongoing lawsuits, the school managed to stay open.
Last month the school was targeted by Anonymous, which released a video condemning the "torture" of its students. But the video that may truly take down Rotenberg for good is below. Just yesterday this footage of a Rotenberg student being restrained and shocked for hours was played in a Massachusetts courtroom:
Food and Water
NYT: Antibiotics for Livestock Will Require Prescription, F.D.A. Says - Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals, in hopes that more judicious use of the drugs will reduce the tens of thousands of human deaths that result each year from the drugs’ overuse.
PeracultureMag: How to design more resilient, food producing systems (without money and fossil fuels)
FoodRenegade: Michigan Orders Slaughter Of All Heritage Breed Pigs
CityFarmer: Burundi women tending urban fields in Atlanta
But look deeper and you’ll find that for many of these farmers, it’s a way of life, rooted in cultural history. Especially for refugees, who are trying to rebuild their lives while working alongside local communities to serve each others’ needs.
WSJ: India's Grain Storage Comes Up Short
Internet and Online Privacy News
TechReview: Facebook's Telescope on Human Behavior - One way to describe Facebook is as the most extensive data set on human social behavior that ever was. Every month more than 845 million people record and share traces of their daily lives, relationships, and online activity through their friend connections, messages, photos, check-ins, and clicks. The richness of that information goes some way to explain why the company is expected to become worth more than $80 billion when it floats on the stock market later this year.
Science and Technology
Spiegel: 'We Read Best on Paper': Cultural Resistance Hobbles German E-Book Market - Compared to the booming e-book market in the US, Germany's digital book sales are dismal.
ScienceDaily: Method developed to detect stealthy, 'hypervirulent' Salmonella strains
ArsTechnica: Recalibrated DNA clock suggests we can stop looking for early primate fossils
The earliest primate fossils unearthed thus far are only 56 million years old, but molecular estimates of the rate of primate evolution predict that there should be some dating back to the Late Cretaceous, closer to 82 million years ago. This is embarrassing for scientists, akin to the time in 1929 when Edwin Hubble measured the age of the Universe as less than half the age of the Earth.MSNBC: Viking robots found life on Mars in 1976, scientists say - Researchers put data into sets of numbers, then analyzed the results for complexity
One possible explanation is that earlier fossils are out there, but that no one has found them yet. But Michael Steiper and Erik Seiffert have proposed an alternate reconciliation in a new study of the molecular rate of evolution. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wired: Probabilistic and connectionist approaches to the Turing Test
ScientificAmerican: Secret Computer Code Threatens Science - Modern science relies upon researchers sharing their work so that their peers can check and verify success or failure. But most scientists still don't share one crucial piece of information — the source codes of the computer programs driving much of today's scientific progress.
HuffingtonPost: New Details About 'Google Glasses' Emerge
Medical and Health
ScientificAmerican: Fathomable Pharmaceuticals: Will Cameron's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Yield Breakthrough Drugs?
RedditScience: Engineered stem cells seek out, kill HIV in living organisms
ScienceDaily: Strain of common toxoplasma gondii parasite linked to severe illness in US newborns
Doomsteading, Gardening, Urban Farming
ModernSurvival: Prepping For Your Pup
WaldenEffect: Automatic chick feeder upgrade
PreppingToSurvive: Covering the Root Cellar - Winter is rapidly yielding to spring and work on our new root cellar continues.
Other News
WSJ: Fearful Final Hours for Briton in China
UPI: Suit filed over school's treatment of boy
The lawsuit claims Kelly Batiste, the school's chief executive, and Terri Williams, the chief academic officer, tried to lock Thomas' 7-year-old son, a special needs student, in a closet after he allegedly misbehaved. The boy tried to run, the lawsuit states, and Williams hit him with a flyswatter, then had the school's two security guards hold him down.Cryptogon: London Data Center Readies Staff ‘Sleeping Pods’ for Olympics
"These actions were taken despite the fact that these individuals knew or should have known" the boy "was easily frightened and did not like to be touched," the lawsuit reads.
RawStory: Rome prosecutors link Vatican cleric to 29-year mystery of missing girl
The Vatican is under pressure to help resolve one of the strangest of many enigmas lingering in Italy from the cold war years.WashingtonPost: In George Zimmerman case, prosecutors may be hamstrung by Florida laws
For four years, prosecutors in Rome have been making a renewed attempt to get at the truth behind the disappearance in 1983 of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee.
They are seeking to ascertain whether she was seized by a notorious band of Rome criminals, and whether this has any bearing on the fact that the leader of the gang was buried in a Vatican basilica normally reserved for cardinals and other illustrious prelates.
Alternet: Peter TerVeer, Gay Library Of Congress Employee, Claims Facebook 'Like' Got Him Fired
LAT: Police fired more than 90 rounds at man on 101 Freeway - Eight Los Angeles police officers fired more than 90 rounds at an unarmed 19-year-old man who had led them on a high speed freeway pursuit and called 911 to threaten them with a gun, authorities said.
BBC: Mel Gibson in 'anti-Jewish' row with writer Joe Eszterhas - Gibson said the film was put on hold because Eszterhas' script was 'substandard'
Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has accused Mel Gibson of shelving a movie about Jewish hero Judah Maccabee because he "hates Jews".
Warner Bros recently halted production on The Maccabees, which Gibson was due to direct, saying Eszterhas' script lacked "a sense of triumph".
In a letter to Gibson, the writer said, "the reason you won't make [it] is the ugliest possible one. You hate Jews".
McClatchy: Zimmerman arraignment set for May 29
ABCNews: 3 Killed at Cracker Barrel Restaurant in Ohio - Police shot and killed an armed man at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Ohio where a woman and a girl had been killed and another person was wounded.
Authorities said a woman called 911 from the restaurant Thursday night, saying her husband was upset because she told him she was leaving him.
Officers heard gunshots when they arrived and saw an armed man leaving the restaurant in Brooklyn, Ohio, near Cleveland.
Boston.com: F-16 fighter jets make emergency landing at Cape Cod Coast Guard station, causing a noisy morning
Reuters: Most Americans back gun lobby, right to use deadly force
DailyKos: Gays are like the iceberg that sunk the Titanic - The anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic has led the anti-gay conservatives at Truth in Action Ministries to produce a film comparing homosexuality to, yes, the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. ...
WSJ: Murder, Hate-Crime Charges in Tulsa Shootings
DailyKos: Gays are like the iceberg that sunk the Titanic - The anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic has led the anti-gay conservatives at Truth in Action Ministries to produce a film comparing homosexuality to, yes, the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. ...
WSJ: Murder, Hate-Crime Charges in Tulsa Shootings
Politics
RawStory: Palin PAC has yet to give to candidates
Hosted: Hasn't worked? Obama stands up for Romney's wife
The Nation: Why Hilary Rosen Is Right - There's nothing there about stay-at-home moms, or the idea that that raising children isn't work. Rosen was referring to the fact that Ann Romney — an incredibly rich and elite woman — likely does not understand the economic concerns of most American women. Again, it was unfortunate choice of words — but she wasn't wrong.
HuffingtonPost: Elected Office As An Escape From Unemployment
WSJ: Henninger: Demolishing Paul Ryan
Forums
TinfoilPalace: My New Cool Plant for the Garden!
TinfoilPalace: On the Brink of Anunnaki New World Order
TheOilAge: Urban Location: how to survive in it (1 of 3: on your marks)
TheOilAge: EPA clears use of Agent Orange on Crops
HubbertsArms: Will A Mutiny In The Gulf Lead To An American Military Coup?
HubbertsArms: Time to put the doomed euro out of its misery
SilentCountry: 7th Sign level event
SilentCountry: Self-checkout crime wave hits supermarkets
DestinyCalls: Russians crack crop circle code
DestinyCalls: Dream on : What's on your wetware dvd player ?
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