well, guess what friends, I got one of those American Community Survey things in the mail this morning!
I'm a bit flummoxed by it. It really and truly is invasive.
Here's the GOV site discussing it.
Census.gov: American Community Survey
I'm a bit flummoxed by it. It really and truly is invasive.
Here's the GOV site discussing it.
Census.gov: American Community Survey
here's a site talking about it
What to do with the American Community Survey
Also, don't miss this great article on Downward Spiral from the ever popular Bill Hicks!
Professional Trolling: Meet The 20-Somethings Who Dumb Down American PoliticsKudos to the following contributors! RJ at the Global Glass Onion and the Ozarker at Conflicted Doomer , and to Doug at 3Es News and David at ETF Daily, Thank you all for your support of this blog and for sending in good stories for us!
Also make sure you go by and visit the forums linked at the bottom of this post.
Peak Oil and Energy News
PopSci: Video: An Inflatable, Flying Turbine Goes Higher to Find Stronger Winds
CNNMoney: Drilling into Big Oil's big job claims
I really need a "You gotta be joking" section for stories like the following.
Jerome Corsi was on Coast to Coast so this has to be true, right? LOL Thanks to our good friend RJ for this little gem!
WND: How did dinosaurs get miles under the earth?: The Bakken formation in North Dakota, Montana and Canada now is estimated to hold up to 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, only it’s available primarily when the price of oil is above a bargain rate – as the oil is located miles deep and drilling costs are substantial. So a new book about oil, “The Great Oil Conspiracy: How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People” by New York Times bestselling author Jerome Corsi, asks how did the dinosaurs that died and became part of those “fossil fuels” get to be tens of thousands of feet under the surface? That’s just one of the many questions addressed in the book that takes many traditional beliefs about oil – it’s finite, it’s made through the process of various life forms dying and decaying, and others – and explains that they are just wrong.
CNNMoney: Exxon Mobil profit declines
UPI: Oil worries grow over Iranian sanctions - PARIS, April 25 (UPI) -- Saudi Arabia can provide only a small amount of relief in the energy sector once U.S. and European sanctions on Iran go into force in July, an analyst said. CNBC: The World’s Biggest Oil Producers
TheOilDrum: Flex-Fuel Humans
CreditWritedowns: OPEC: near record production, spare capacity a concern
OilPrice: Oil Prices Could Follow Gas Prices Down as Demand Decreases - In the short term, it is difficult to see how prices can go any way but up. As the Economist Intelligence Unit wrote last week, the price for dated Brent Blend averaged US $125.50 per barrel in March, up from US $119.70 per barrel in February and just US$107.90 per barrel in December 2011. These price movements were driven in large part by fears of supply, particularly supply disruption due to the standoff with Iran, but also because of an accumulation of small disruptions in Africa, the Middle East and the North Sea.
Global Conflict
TheAtlantic: Congo Mother Survives Cannibalism to Save Her Children: Why Her Photo Matters - In 2003, Maria joined the victims of a terrible crime in the Ituri conflict.
We don't know much about Maria. A photographer named Marcus Bleasdale met her in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August of 2003. She was breastfeeding one of her three children, resting the infant's head on her good arm. Her other arm ends at the elbow, where it's capped by a fresh cast that reads "31/8," probably meaning that it can be removed on August 31. Her older son is also in the frame, bandages dangling from his scalp.Maria told the photorapher that she lost the limb defending her children from one of the militant groups then terrorizing Ituri province, her home. Soldiers hacked it off at the elbow and ate the flesh. Maria does not say if the soldiers forced her to watch as they cooked and consumed her arm, but she would not have been the first in Ituri's war. When the sub-conflict of the Congolese Civil War peaked from 1999 to 2003, stories of cannibalism started to trickle out.Hosted: Nigeria: 6 killed in newspaper office bombings
TheAtlantic: What Did the Israeli Army Chief Actually Say About Iran?
MSNBC: Aiding terrorists? Syrian women risk all to help dissidents
BEIRUT - When the aspirin and alcohol swabs fell from under her clothes at a Syrian army checkpoint, Rania stood petrified, looking first down at her fallen contraband and then up at the soldier who stared straight back at her.(the above article reminds me that, "A hero is someone who does the right thing when no one is looking.)
Rania knew that smuggling food and medicine to Syrian opposition activists was considered by security forces to be "aiding terrorists" and treated as severely as weapons smuggling.
"I thought to myself: I am dead," said Rania, 27, recalling the incident on the outskirts of Damascus.
She was in luck. The soldier was a sympathizer.
CNN: Taylor: Lay preacher and feared warlord
LAT: Former Liberian President Charles Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes - LONDON -- In a landmark case, former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity through his arming of ruthless rebel groups in neighboring Sierra Leone in exchange for so-called blood diamonds.
NYT: Heavy Casualties Reported in Syrian Explosion - BEIRUT, Lebanon — A large number of Syrian civilians died in a poor neighborhood of Hama after their houses crashed down on them, but the government and the opposition offered widely different accounts on Thursday of the cause of the episode.
And just to remind folks, here's a little blast from the past about Pat "Howdy Doodie" Robertson's connections to his fellow preacher, the war criminal, Charles Taylor.
WashingtonPost: Pat Robertson's Gold
...What's more, to hear Robertson tell it, one of the abominations prompting God to hide his face from America is this country's self-indulgence, pursuit of financial gain and focus on wealth.RealityZone: Iran and Israel: Comparing military machines
Which is the subject of today's column, and the basis for this humble question: What, pray tell, does the Good Lord make of Pat Robertson's gold-mining venture in Liberia with Charles Taylor, international pariah and one of the most ruthless, greedy and terror-producing heads of state in all of sub-Saharan Africa?
Spiegel: Caring for the US Military’s Traumatized Soldiers - Once again, disturbing images from Afghanistan -- this time showing US soldiers posing with body parts of slain enemy fighters -- have surfaced. Are the perpetrators psychologically ill or has there been an increase in the number of violence-prone recruits finding their way into the American military?
Guardian: Syria: 'rocket attack' shatters fragile ceasefire - live updates
PhotoBlogMSNBC: Analysts say North Korea's new missiles are fakes
TheAtlantic: The End of Pax Americana: How Western Decline Became Inevitable
Wired: U.S. Drones Can Now Kill Joe Schmoe Militants in Yemen
OWS/Protests
CNN: 76 arrested in Capitol protest over Medicaid cuts
Washington (CNN) -- Seventy-six people, including actor Noah Wyle, were arrested Monday at a demonstration protesting cuts in Medicaid proposed by the House Republican leadership, authorities said.PreppingToSurvive: Student Riots in Montreal
Hundreds of demonstrators filled the ornate rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building for the protests. The 76 were arrested on suspicion of unlawful conduct and demonstrating in a Capitol building, police said.
“Riot police used tear gas and concussion grenades on hundreds of students protesting outside Montreal’s Palais des congrès Friday, where Premier Jean Charest was speaking at a symposium on northern development.” So begins a news report on CBC News.
Hacker and Wikileaks News
CNN: Rupert Murdoch admits phone-hacking 'cover-up,' apologizes
BBC: I missed NoW 'cover-up' - Murdoch - Rupert Murdoch tells the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics there was a "cover-up" at the News of the World but that it was kept hidden from him.
SeattleTimes: Judge weighs dismissal of some WikiLeaks charges - A military judge in Maryland is poised to rule on whether some of the 22 charges against a soldier accused of giving government secrets to WikiLeaks should be dismissed.
Domestic Financial News
HarvardBusinessReview: Three Tips for Hiring Recent GraduatesCNNMoney: Unemployment claims hold steady at high level
Time: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week
There’s been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids. Apparently she’s been doing this for years, but only recently “came out of the closet,” as it were.BusinessInsider: Meredith Whitney: State Finances Are Still Doomed, And These Three States Are In The Most Trouble
What’s insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there’s a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.
Forbes: On Wall Street, Fears Of New Crisis Growing
“Here we are three years-plus after, and very little has changed,” says Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in a report airing on PBS news program Frontline. “In many respects, the financial crisis never ended.”GlobeAndMail: U.S. durable goods orders post biggest fall in 3-years
GlobeAndMail: Fed largely hamstrung as U.S. approaches ‘fiscal cliff’
CNNMoney: Plan to fix Postal Service passes Senate - WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- The Senate on Wednesday passed a plan to save the struggling U.S. Postal Service, an effort that could save thousands of jobs and 100 mail processing plants now slated to be closed or consolidated next month.
ModeledBehavior: Bernanke’s Totem - Paul Krugman thinks Bernanke has been assimilated Ben Bernanke responds to my magazine piece; as I see it, in effect he declared that he has been assimilated by the Fed Borg: But, I think it’s a bit different. He’s in a dream inside of dream, suffering from Monetary Inception. I mean this only half-jokingly.
AngryBear: SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY SIMPLIFIED -The Trustees Report came out again this week. And all the newspeople told us again that we are doomed. Doomed. "Social Security is running out of money!" Except it isn't. And all the Professional Defenders of Social Security rushed out to tell us, "We can save Social Security: just make the rich pay for it!" Except they won't. And they really shouldn't. And we shouldn't want them to. Most workers understand that Their Social Security is Their money. They paid for it. They need to know that IT'S NOT WELFARE.
CapitalSpectator: Has The Labor Market Hit A Wall... Again? - Weekly claims for new unemployment benefits are in a holding pattern these days. But holding for what?
ETFDaily: Dollar’s Dominance Ending: Countries Around The World Are Already Starting To Ditch The Dollar
MyBudget360: The young and the jobless – Half of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 are unemployed or underemployed, in the US. Social Security short fall highlights deeper reality of economy.
CharlesHughSmith: Peak Dow, Peak GDP and Peak Oil
Global Financial News
EnergyBulletin: A History of the World, BRIC by BRIC
by Pepe Escobar
Neoliberal Dragons, Eurasian Wet Dreams, and Robocop Fantasies
Goldman Sachs -- via economist Jim O’Neill -- invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t help calling it the “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept.”Zerohedge: There Goes Greek GDP: Nazional Lampoons Greek Vacation Just Got Cancelled
Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.
VoxEu: The euro’s salvation lies in a little less Europe; not more Europe
BusinessInsider: The Incredible UK Economic Catastrophe Chart That Everyone Is Talking About
CreditWritedowns: Japan’s fuel imports driving trade deficit to record
Zerohedge: Germany Folding? Europe's Insolvent Banks To Get Direct Funding From ESM - We start today's story of the day by pointing out that Deutsche Bank - easily Europe's most critical financial institution - reported results that were far worse than expected, following a decline in equity and debt trading revenues of 23% and 8%, but primarily due to Europe simply "not being fixed yet" despite what its various politicians tell us.
Commodities/Metals
Mineweb: Possible imminent Eurozone collapse a game-changer for gold
CommodityOnline: Indian Gold buying during festival season pales compared to 2011
Environmental
USGS
M 4.4, southwestern Siberia, Russia
ArchdruidReport: Seascape With Methane Plumes
...In the great days of European maritime exploration, any number of expeditions wrecked themselves in Arctic ice in futile attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage; now, for the first time in recorded history, it’s a routine trip for a freighter, and as often as not the route is blue water all the way without an ice floe in sight. (Somehow global warming denialists never get around to talking about this.) Last autumn, though, crew members aboard several ships reported seeing, for the first time, patches of sea that appeared to be bubbling, and initial tests indicated that the bubbles were methane.
SilentCountry: Gulf of Mexico. Closed to Shrimping due to deformed shrimp
now, behold the backpedaling LOL
WEARTV: Waters Closed to Shrimping
Alabama - The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has temporarily closed some local waterways to shrimping. The waters were closed to shrimping on Monday.Here is a video posted at Hubberts Arms by Redreamer, thanks Red! a must see video.
The areas include all waters in the Mississippi Sound, Mobile Bay, areas of Bon Secour, Wolf Bay, and Little Lagoon.
The closure is in response to routine shrimp sampling that indicated the average size were smaller than 68 head-on shrimp per pound. Meaning biologists found smaller than average shrimp in the waters causing the temporary closure. They will continue to take samples in these areas and determine any modifications to the closures.
And we'd like to clarify that the closures were not due to lesions being found on shrimp as we reported earlier this weekend and Monday morning.
ABC: Tree Deaths
DestinyCalls: Weather Derivatives: Hedging on Mother Nature
SkepticalScience: The Escalator
CNN: Preparing for tsunami debris, wherever it may make landfall
CNN) -- First came the stuff that floats on the surface and is pushed by wind: Buoys, a soccer ball, flotation devices. And, most notably, a rust-stained unmanned fishing trawler in Alaskan waters.BusinessInsider: If You See A Weird, Toxic-Looking Green Cloud Over Moscow Today — Don't Panic
Communities in Alaska, Hawaii, the West Coast and Canada are preparing for the main event from debris pushed offshore by last year's massive Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
Earlier today a number of Moscow dwellers took to Twitter to express their concern over a huge green cloud hanging over the city.
"This is simply the year we are having. It became warm in just one day, and the birch started to bloom, the pollen falls from stamens," the head of the Institute of Nature's conservation laboratory, Boris Samoilov, told Gazeta.ru.
Of course, pollen has its own dangers:
America in Decline
PopSci: Who is Flying Drones in the U.S. and Where Are They Flying?
CBSNews: For citizens and illegal immigrants alike, Arizona law hits hard
Chron: Ariz. migrant case could lead to sweeping changes - PHOENIX (AP) — The United States could see an official about-face in the coming months in how it confronts illegal immigration if the Supreme Court follows through on its suggestion that it would let local police enforce the most controversial part of Arizona's immigration law.
(beware of this one, it will start with the idea they are stopping illegal aliens from coming into the US but, it will morph over time into a TSA fondle and feel for "terrorists" ever time you get stopped for a traffic violation. Wait and see.)
WashingtonPost: Grandma: TSA agents forced crying 4-year-old to undergo TSA pat-down at Kan ...
WashingtonPost: TSA lets airports hire before clearances completed because of backlog in ...
BusinessInsider: TSA Agents Arrested On Drug Trafficking Charges
ACloserLook: Taxed by the boss: 16 states redirect income taxes to corporate profiteers instead of education, public safety - Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday. The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.
BlacklistedNews: Private Prison Corporations Are Slave Traders
The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.
For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.
Food and Water
Cryptogon: Another Way to Kill U.S. Farmers: Seize Their Bank Accounts on Phony Charges
WebMD: Mad Cow in US Raises Food Safety Questions
VOA: Scientists Say Africa Sits on Huge Reservoir of Water
MSNBC: Burger King vows cage-free chicken and pork - Decision by the US No. 3 burger chain raises the bar for its rivals
BigPictureAgriculture: Agriculture News April 26, 2012
Internet and Online Privacy News
ABCNews: CISPA cybersecurity bill gets veto threat from Obama
GadgetBox: Get ready for indoor GPS that tracks your every step
It's called IPS, or indoor positioning service, and it's not quite as far along as the satellite service we use to find the nearest coffee shop. But the idea is the same: your phone, tablet, or maybe even your Google Glasses would be constantly tracking certain signals in your locale, from Bluetooth signals to ultrasonic beacons.Wired: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Wired: Your Google Drive Files Can End Up in Ads
Science and Technology
ScientificAmerican: Tetris Shown to Lessen PTSD and Flashbacks
StarTribune: Experts stumped by large fossil said to be 450 million years old, found by Ohioan in Kentucky - DAYTON, Ohio - Experts are trying to figure out what a fossil dubbed "Godzillus" used to be.
The 150-pound fossil recovered last year in northern Kentucky is more than 6 feet long and 3 feet wide. To the untrained eye, it looks like a bunch of rocks or a concrete blob. Experts are trying to determine whether it was an animal, mineral or a form of plant life from a time when the Cincinnati region was underwater.
PhotoBlogMSNBC: Northern lights blaze again on video
RedditScience: A new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.
Medical and Health
TranshumanTech: Samsung Invents Implantable Medical Device for the BrainApril 24, 2012 Samsung Invents Implantable Medical Device for the Brain We recently learned, via a CNN Special report, that experimental procedures involving electrodes strategically implanted into the human brain could be the next door to be opened in the medical field for treating severe depression.
ScienceDaily: Obesity epidemic fueling rise in rheumatoid arthritis among women
TheChart: Do allergies actually benefit your health?
Vitals: Hand-me-down kidney transplanted twice in two weeks
Doomsteading, Gardening, Urban Farming
CityFarmer: City couple turns to farming and grows Wasabi
WaldenEffect: Blackberry winter chicks
CanadianDoomer: Bones!
ModernSurvival: 1-2-3 Survival
Other News
CNN: Dad plants bug on autistic son to confirm school mistreatment
NYDaily: Attacker says anger over Trayvon Martin fueled beat-down
MiamiHerald: Drug war will change course in 2013 - When the recent Summit of the Americas in Colombia decided to commission a study on whether to decriminalize drugs, many thought that would be the end of it, and the whole thing would be quickly forgotten. Well, maybe not.
USAToday: Secret Service investigating another incident
WBIR: TN Governor signs saggy pants bill
The Boston Bruins and Washington Capitals went into overtime in game seven last night, and the Capitals came out on top.BlacklistedNews: Anders Behring Breivik, Islam, And Israel
Joel Ward scored the winning goal for the Capitals beating the defending Stanley Cup Champions, and the Twitter world went nuts with racism.
Politics
TimesUnion: Gingrich to Romney: I'll back you
Chron: Texas AG releases voters' Social Security numbers in mix-up
AUSTIN — State Attorney General Greg Abbott's office inadvertently gave the Social Security numbers of millions of Texas voters to opposing lawyers in the voter ID case but said on Wednesday the information never was exposed publicly.PoliticalTicker: Rubio's foreign policy more VP than tea party
The slip occurred when Texas was ordered to give lawyers challenging the voter ID law a voter database for analysis.
Forums
TinfoilPalace: Safe Pole Shift Locations (Zetatalk)
TinfoilPalace: 2012 Olympic Cloud
TheOilAge: Jeffrey Brown; update on global net oil exports
TheOilAge: The Arctic Cold War is coming!
HubbertsArms: This pings the whiskey, tango , foxtrot meter : Fema warning
HubbertsArms: Fracking requires a minimum distance of at least 0.6 kilometers from sensitive rock strata
SilentCountry: Gulf of Mexico. Closed to Shrimping due to deformed shrimp
SilentCountry: National Hug An Australian Day
DestinyCalls: Weather Derivatives: Hedging on Mother Nature
DestinyCalls: Electromagnetic Effects On The Human Brain, Prepare For Cosmic Intervention
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