Oil, Government Fraud, Kodak and Neighborhood Nuclear Modules

I've been away all day so I'm only now catching up on the news.

And this is very good news.  GAO: Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming 'About Equal to Entire World's Proven Oil Reserves

The Green River Formation, a largely vacant area of mostly federal land that covers the territory where Colorado, Utah and Wyoming come together, contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress on Thursday.

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves.”

Think of the implications of creating  tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs,  of becoming truly energy self reliant, free from troublesome tyrants in the Mideast.

What an amazing world.

photo of earth from Russian weather satellite

The bad news is that about 75% of it is controlled by the Federal Government's Bureau of Land Management. 

It's news, but not surprising news, that Public Employees Second Only to Financial Pros in Fraud according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the world's arrest anti-fraud organization.

A congressional staffer who has worked to combat fraud at the federal level agreed that the amount of money being spent has stretched the government thin and left limited accountability. A culture has developed that excuses lavish spending programs, he said, pointing to the GSA’s $800,000 Las Vegas retreat, which has resulted in several firings and resignations.

“The federal government is sending all of this money out and there’s no follow up, no accountability,” the staffer said. “It’s part of the culture.”

It doesn't help that states are gaming the system too.

This is astonishing,  Kodak Had a Secret Nuclear Reactor Loaded with Enriched Uranium Hidden in a Basement in Rochester, N.Y.

Kodak's purpose for the reactor wasn't sinister: they used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core.

The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. …It wasn't until 2006, well after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that it was decided to dismantle it.

This story brought to mind stories of neighborhood nuclear plants from 2008.  Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a kilowatt hour anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. '

So what is Hyperion doing today?

Hyperion Power Generation plans to build one of its first modular nuclear devices at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River test site in South Carolina.

And it changed its name.  SMR Developer Hyperion Power Now Gen4 Energy

The Gen4 Module (formerly the Hyperion Power Module) is a small next generation nuclear power reactor that will not require refueling during its 10-year operational lifetime, as well as no on-site access to nuclear fuel, which reduces safety and proliferation concerns.  According to the release, G4M technology has the potential to provide power to undeveloped regions, demonstrate unmatched nuclear safety, as well as provide a cleaner energy source by emitting no greenhouse gasses.  The G4M will produce 25 MW of safe and reliable electric power that is manufactured in a factory and transported to the installation site completely sealed. After its useful life it is replaced with an entirely new power module.

Don't bother recycling eyeglasses

Virginia Postrel says Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money

In a paper published in March in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, four researchers compare the full costs of delivering used glasses to the costs of instead delivering ready-made glasses in standard powers (like my drugstore readers, but for myopia as well). The authors find that recycled glasses cost nearly twice as much per usable pair.
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Recycling old glasses makes people feel generous and thrifty. They believe they’re helping people and saving money. They think the glasses they donate are “free,” because they don’t consider all the hidden costs of sorting and shipping them. And they don’t realize just how cheap manufacturing new glasses has become. If they really wanted to help people see, they’d send money. Unlike leftovers, it’s guaranteed to fit.

Life in a Green Paradise

In Spiegel Online,  Green-Extremes: Germany's Failing Environmental Projects.

The energy-saving light bulb ends up as hazardous waste, too much insulation promotes mold and household drains are emitting a putrid odor because everyone is saving water. Many of Germany's efforts to protect the environment are a chronic failure, but that's unlikely to change. 
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Gone are the days when it was enough for a shower head to simply distribute water. Today an aerosol is generated through a complicated process in the interior of the shower head. The moisture content in the resulting air-water mixture is so low and the air content so high that taking a shower feels more like getting blow-dried.

The government is even teaching our smallest citizens how important it is to treat precious water responsibly. The Environment Ministry's children's website admonishes them to "Think about how you can save water! Taking a shower is better for the environment than taking a bath. Turn off the water when you're soaping yourself. Never let the water run when you're not using it. And maybe you can spend less time in the shower, too."

This is all very well and good, but there's only one problem: It stinks. Our street is filled with the stench of decay. It's especially bad in the summer, when half of Berlin is under a cloud of gas.
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WATER. ...Our consumption has declined so much that there is not enough water going through the pipes to wash away fecal matter, urine and food waste, causing blockages. The inert brown sludge sloshes back and forth in the pipes, which are now much too big, releasing its full aroma.

The water authorities are trying to offset the stench with odor filters and perfumed gels that come in lavender, citrus and spruce scents. But toxic heavy metals like copper, nickel and lead are also accumulating in the sewage system. Sulfuric acid is corroding the pipes, causing steel to rust and concrete to crumble. It's a problem that no amount of deodorant can solve.

The waterworks must now periodically flush their pipes and conduits. The water we save with our low-flow toilets is simply being pumped directly through hoses into the sewage system below. On some days, an additional half a million cubic meters of tap water is run through the Berlin drainage system to ensure what officials call the "necessary flow rate."

Germany has a lot of water. It has many rivers and lakes. The amount of rain that falls from the skies over Germany is five times as much as the entire water requirements of the entire population and industry. Less than 3 percent of the country's water reserves would be enough to supply all households.
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LIGHT…Mercury is a dangerous substance. It evaporates at room temperature. Even small amounts can damage the liver, lungs and brain. Paracelsus, the famous physician, inadvertently killed himself with mercury. Since then, doctors have advised against inhaling it.

This makes the renaissance of the toxic heavy metal in our homes all the more astonishing. Like all good Europeans, we are in the process of replacing our old light bulbs with modern energy-saving light bulbs. This is what the European Commission has decreed. The fact that each of these new light bulbs contains up to five milligrams of mercury is seen as a necessary evil, because they consume less electricity than conventional light bulbs.
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Scientists with the German Federal Environment Agency have done tests to determine how dangerous energy-saving light bulbs are. They broke bulbs from the product line of a European brand-name manufacturer. Then they measured the concentration of toxic materials in the air of the room, once after five minutes and a second time after five hours.

All readings were well above permissible levels. In some cases, the mercury level was 20 times as high as the benchmark value. Even after five hours, there was still so much mercury in the air that it would have endangered the health of pregnant women, young children and sensitive individuals.

Because of the mercury, throwing broken energy-saving light bulbs into the ordinary trash is of course prohibited. A waste disposal company from Nuremberg in southern Germany has invented a machine that carefully cuts apart each light bulb and sucks out the fluorescent material and mercury. The mixture is then packed into airtight bags and filled into blue, 300-kilogram barrels. The barrels are loaded onto a truck and taken to a former salt mine in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. Thus, the energy-saving light bulb ends up in an underground waste depot, where it will remain forever as contaminated waste.

FDR's Introduction to Supply-side Economics by a 'Great American'.

We all know that it took WWII to bring America out of the Great Depression, but I didn't know about the man who did it, FDR's arch nemesis General Motors President William Knudsen.

The FDR Lesson Obama Should Follow.

FDR—architect of the New Deal and outspoken opponent of Big Business—was forced by the collapse of Europe's democracies under Hitler's blitzkrieg to turn to the corporate sector to prepare America for war.
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Yet Knudsen's answer to the appeal from FDR was immediate. He quit GM and moved to Washington to mobilize his friends in the private sector to get America ready for war. He joined with U.S. Steel's Edward Stettinius, Sears, Roebuck's Don Nelson and other corporate executives and engineers who left their jobs to accept a federal salary of $1 a year. Together, they made Roosevelt a promise.

If the president gave them 18 months, they would persuade enough of American industry to convert their plants to making planes, tanks, ships and munitions without throwing the rest of the economy into a tail spin. The result, they pledged, would be the most massive outpouring of weaponry the world had ever seen.

Roosevelt was under intense pressure from his own administration—and from his wife Eleanor—not to agree. They believed it was impossible to convert to a wartime footing without a comprehensive, centrally directed plan for total mobilization and a single commanding figure in charge—in short, a war-production czar.
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This proposal was in effect Roosevelt's first introduction to supply-side economics. To arm the nation for war, Roosevelt not only had to agree to set aside his own ideological misgivings but almost a decade of his own failed economic policies. "Dr. New Deal," Roosevelt told the press, was going to have to make way for "Dr. Win the War."

The results, as Knudsen had promised, were staggering. Barely a year later—by the time Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941—the scale of American war production was fast approaching that of Nazi Germany.
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Many feared that with the end of government wartime spending—almost $300 billion worth, or $3 trillion in today's dollars—unemployment would boomerang, wages (which wartime work had driven up by an average of 70%) would fall and hopes for prosperity would be extinguished. Instead, private investment came roaring back, triggering steady economic growth that pushed the U.S. into a new era, as the most prosperous society in history.

"You are the great American," Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson told Knudsen at the war's end.

'Earned Success' Makes You Happier than 'Learned Helplessness'

Arthur Brooks quit his government paid job as a French horn player in the Barcelona Symphony and pulled up stakes to emigrate to America.  He didn't have a college degree and his wife's English was 'limited'.  Today he is President of the American Enterprise Institute and this article published in the Wall St Journal.

America and the Value of 'Earned Success' 

To friends in Barcelona, this move was ridiculous. Quitting a job in Spain often meant permanent unemployment. As we departed, my in-laws tearfully gave us a gold bracelet which, they said, we could pawn in the coming hard times.
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In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between earned success and learned helplessness.

Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life's "profit" however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.
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The opposite of earned success is "learned helplessness," ...refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.
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Learned helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets, and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep unearned government benefits.

Meanwhile, their collective happiness—already relatively low—has withered. According to the nonprofit World Values Survey, 20% of Spaniards said they were "very happy" about their lives in 1981. This fell to 14% by 2007, even before the economic downturn.

The Most Read Books in the World

This info graphic by graphic artist Jared Fanning shows the top 10 most popular books by sales over the past 50 years.

Advice for graduates of "the least knowledgeable graduating class in history" "

Seems to me that commencement addresses this year aren't as lyrical as in years past, but more hard-hitting and with better advice.

Bret Stephens:  Attention graduates: Tone down your egos, shape up your minds

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
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Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in history.
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Fact Two: Your competition is global. Shape up
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Fact Three: Your prospective employers can smell BS from miles away. And most of you don't even know how badly you stink.
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if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!

Remember that 80% of seniors from fifty-five of the country's most prestigious colleges received a D or F when asked basic questions about American history like identifying the Gettysburg address or recognizing fundamental constitutional principles

Depression and purpose, strawberries and blueberries

If you're depressed, don't delay getting treatment;

A Kaiser Permanente analysis shows Subjects Who Were Depressed in Middle Age Had an Elevated Risk of Dementia

The findings, published in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, add to the evidence that late-in-life depression is a likely early sign of Alzheimer's disease and suggest that chronic depression appears to increase the risk of developing vascular dementia. Adequate treatment for depression in midlife could cut the risk of developing dementia.
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To look at links between depression and dementia, Dr. Whitmer and other researchers looked at 13,535 long-term Kaiser Permanente members who had enrolled in a larger study in the period from 1964 to 1973 at ages ranging from 40 to 55 years old. Health information, including a survey that asked about depression, was collected at the time.

Eat plenty of strawberries and blueberries.

Strawberries and blueberries could delay cognitive decline among the elderly (over 65) by up to two and half years.  Researchers from the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School says its all in the flavonoids which are extremely powerful anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory substances.

And find new purpose in life.

Purpose in Life May Protect Against Harmful Changes in the Brain Associated with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Researchers at the Rush University Medical Center  explain

“Our study showed that people who reported greater purpose in life exhibited better cognition than those with less purpose in life even as plaques and tangles accumulated in their brains,” said Patricia A. Boyle, PhD.

“These findings suggest that purpose in life protects against the harmful effects of plaques and tangles on memory and other thinking abilities. This is encouraging and suggests that engaging in meaningful and purposeful activities promotes cognitive health in old age.”

Justice for Sale

Why haven't any of the people responsible for the financial crash been charged and brought to trial?

Justice for Sale

In an explosive Newsweek article set to rock official Washington, reporter Peter Boyer and Breitbart contributing editor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer reveal how Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice are operating under a “justice for sale” strategy by forgoing criminal prosecution of Wall Street executives at big financial institutions who just so happen to be clients of the white-shoe law firms where Holder and his top DOJ lieutenants worked.
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Not surprisingly, of the elite bundlers who made up Obama’s 2008 campaign, the second most represented industry after law was the securities and investment industry.
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As Boyer and Schweizer report, Department of Justice criminal prosecutions are at 20-year lows for corporate securities and bank fraud. And while large financial institutions have faced civil prosecution, those typically end in settlement fees with the major banks that represent a fraction of their profits, often paid through special taxes on mortgage-backed securities.

Breitbart reports Top DOJ officials were Obama bundlers with Wall St Ties

Four of the top officials at the Department of Justice were all big money fundraisers for President Obama’s 2008 campaign with strong ties to Wall Street—the very entity the Obama Administration has said must be criminally prosecuted for bringing about the biggest financial crisis in U.S. history.
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The nexus between big money campaign fundraising and senior appointments at the Department of Justice raises numerous questions and appearances of conflict of interest that go far beyond mere recusal from certain cases. Furthermore, many of the financial institutions the Department of Justice claims to be criminally investigating for financial fraud are former clients of the law firms from which DOJ’s top brass hail.

Where's the justice?  Where's the deterrent to future reckless Wall Street criminal shenanigans?

Commodifying human life: Designer babies, brood mothers, baby flesh pills and donor daddies

In 2010 an eminent Chicago IVF doctor left his practice of creating babies in Petri dishes.  This is his story, Change of Heart

Dr Anthony J. Caruso is a Chicago doctor who worked in the field of in vitro fertilization for 15 years before he quit in 2010. We interviewed him by email about the reasons for his change of heart.

In 2008 I was increasingly concerned about the kind of procedures we were doing. Initially it was the demands of same-sex couples. Then it was the way in which everybody looked at the embryos that had undergone pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Finally, it was the realization that the embryos that we were producing were just as important as the embryos that were transferred.
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People who are going through IVF largely refuse to seek emotional or psychological support. And people who have not gone through the process do not understand what it entails. Perhaps the most interesting response that I have gotten to the presentations I am giving is from those who did not know exactly what happened during this process. Once they learn, the spectrum goes from rationalization to horror.
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Every child is a gift from God. However, the process that brought them into existence has led to an attitude towards the embryo that is no different than any other commodity.

If you add pre-implantation diagnosis into the equation, then you really have a situation that is no different than an auto dealership or a department store. “I will take two of these and then freeze these and toss these.” The very people who are showing off their beautiful children will not answer questions about how many frozen embryos are still present or how many they asked to be destroyed.
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IVF does not cure infertility. It bypasses the barriers to natural fertility. As such, it is really a business. Just think about the number of clinics that offer cash-back programs. They guarantee that if the couple does not conceive within a certain number of cycles, they will get some or all of their money back. Where is the “medicine” in that?

Here is a story about a Designer baby factory where eggs from beautiful Eastern Europeans are joined with sperm of wealthy Westerners and embryos implanted in desperate women.

For under an astonishing — and many will think nightmarishly futuristic — program devised to make the most efficient use of resources, or ‘optimize’ their baby producing system, as they put it, Wyzax and their partner agencies now source and assemble the ‘components’ of some babies in a variety of different countries before flying the resulting embryo to India to be implanted in the surrogate.
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Once created, the embryos are frozen to minus 196c, placed in liquid nitrogen canisters resembling small milk-churns, then flown 8,000 miles from the U.S. to cities such as Delhi and Bombay, where they are implanted.
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the women who incubate and hatch these identikit children would be better compared to brood mares.  They are so desperate to feed, clothe and educate their own families that they are prepared to risk being shunned by their husbands and communities for a fee of up to £4,000; an amount they wouldn’t earn in ten years working in their traditional jobs as domestic servants. All they need do to reap this vast sum — or so these often illiterate souls are told when they make agreements often put together by shady fixers — is to lie around watching TV all day, eating nutritious food they would never ordinarily be able to afford, and be dosed with vitamins and hormones.
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the sale of cheap, designer babies, made from Ukrainian eggs and British sperm, concocted in an American lab, and spawned in a factory in the backstreets of India, should send chills down the spine.

Thousands of pills filled with powdered human baby flesh discovered by customs officials in South Korea

Thousands of pills filled with powdered human flesh have been discovered by customs officials in South Korea, it was revealed today.  The capsules are in demand because they are viewed as being a medicinal 'cure-all'.

The grim trade is being run from China where corrupt medical staff are said to be tipping off medical companies when babies are aborted or delivered still-born.

The tiny corpses are then bought, stored in household refrigerators in homes of those involved in the trade before they are removed and taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.  Once the skin is tinder dry, it is pummeled into powder and then processed into capsules along with herbs to disguise the true ingredients from health investigators and customs officers.

Never before heard of human tragedies are emerging and not just with children who grow up a hole in their lives because their  daddy was a donor.    Donor daddies can ruin their own marriages.    Sperm donor 'left me for babies

The heartbroken wife of a politician who secretly acted as a sperm donor behind her back says he has left her to be with babies conceived with other women.  Speaking from her home in the United States, Kathy Johnson says her husband Bill has returned to live in New Zealand where he donated sperm to at least 10 women without her knowledge.

"He wants me to move over there. He's not coming back.  I will not chase him to the other side of the world so he can be a part-time father to children he created with other women."

Mrs Johnson said she had fought for five months to save her marriage but could not break her husband's fixation on the babies he had biologically fathered.

"He's back there now. He says he has a commitment to them. He says he created these children and he has a responsibility to them," she says. "I said 'what about your commitment to your wife'. He walked out."

Mrs Johnson is a two-time Mrs America finalist with three children from a former marriage while Mr. Johnson was a candidate for the gubernatorial nomination three years ago in Alabama.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was considered science fiction when it came out.  Who would ever believe that natural procreation would be done away with babies created, decanted and raised in hatcheries and conditioning centers? 

‘Nobody has ever grown a nose before.’

Making organ donation a thing of the past - the British lab growing human spare parts

'This is a nose we’re growing for a patient next month,’ Professor Alexander Seifalian says matter-of-factly, plucking a Petri dish from the bench beside him.  Inside is an utterly lifelike appendage, swimming in red goo. Alongside it is another dish containing an ear.

‘It’s a world first,’ he says smiling.



Seifalian leads University College London’s (UCL) Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine, which he jokingly calls the ‘human body parts store’. Seifalian and his team are focusing on growing replacement organs and body parts to order using a patient's own cells

As he takes me on a tour of his lab I’m bombarded with one medical breakthrough after another. At one desk he picks up a glass mould that shaped the trachea – windpipe – used in the world’s first synthetic organ transplant.  At another are the ingredients for the revolutionary nano material at the heart of his creations, and just beyond that is a large machine with a pale, gossamer-thin cable inside that’s pulsing with what looks like a heartbeat. It’s an artery.

‘We are the first in the world working on this,’ Seifalian says casually.

‘Other groups have tried to tackle nose replacement with implants but we’ve found they don’t last,’ says Adelola Oseni, one of Seifalian’s team. ‘They migrate, the shape of the nose changes. But our one will hold itself completely, as it’s an entire nose shape made out of polymer.’

Looking like very thin Latex rubber, the polymer is made up of billions of molecules, each measuring just over one nanometre (a billionth of a metro), or 40,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Working at molecular level allows the material itself to be intricately detailed.

‘Inside this nano material are thousands of small holes,’ says Seifalian. ‘Tissue grows into these and becomes part of it. It becomes the same as a nose and will even feel like one.’

When the nose is transferred to the patient, it doesn’t go directly onto the face but will be placed inside a balloon inserted beneath the skin on their arm.  After four weeks, during which time skin and blood vessels can grow, the nose can be monitored, then it can be transplanted to the face.

At the Mayo Clinic, similar exciting work is going on as they as also Growing Your Own Organs, in this case, heart tissue.

A lot of people aren't working

The Washington Post on The shrinking labor participation rate

If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.1 percent.

chart from Calculatedriskblog.com

David Goldman on the Disappearing Labor Force  with lots of charts.

The big news in Friday’s employment report was not the miserable 115,000 jobs the economy added in April, but the disappearance of 340,000 workers from the labor force. We haven’t seen unemployment on this scale since the Great Depression. Indeed, since Obama took office, the labor force participation rate has fallen from 66% to 63% as almost 5 million American adults stopped looking for work. About a fifth of working-age Americans aren’t working — and a fifth of all personal income is transfer payments.
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Not since the 1970s has the overall labor force participation rate been this low.  As women began entering the labor force in large numbers, the overall participation rose. Truly alarming, though, is the labor force participation rate for men:
has just fallen below the 70% mark for the first time in history. Again, the number means that 3 out of 10 working-age American men who are not in prison or the armed forces are not counted in the labor force. They are not looking for work to begin with.

For Americans with only a high school diploma, the results are even more dismal: fewer than 3 out of 5 Americans with only a high school education are counted in the labor force…For Americans without a high school diploma, the labor force participation rate is only 45%. Fewer than half are counted in the labor force, that is. The official unemployment rate for the least-educated cohort is 12.5%. That means that fewer than 2 out of 5 adult Americans without a H.S. diploma not in the military or prison actually have a job.

The largest army in the world

Via American Digest comes this astonishing fact from Curmudgeonly & Skeptical, There were over 600,000 hunters this season in Wisconsin.  Allow me to restate that number in another way

Over the last several months, Wisconsin's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world. More men under arms than in Iran. More than France and Germany combined. These men deployed to the woods of a "single" American state, Wisconsin, to hunt with firearms, and no one was killed.

That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of "Pennsylvania" and Michigan's 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home safely. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and it literally establishes the that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world. And then add in the total number of hunters in the other 46 states. It's millions more.

The point? America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower. Hunting… it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security. That's why all enemies, foreign and domestic, want to see us disarmed.

Are you taking enough Vitamin D?

As more evidence piles up, Vitamin D is truly a miracle vitamin

Vitamin D supplements 'could cut blood pressure as effectively as some drugs'

Taking vitamin D supplements could cut blood pressure by as much as some drugs, claim researchers.

A new study shows supplements lowered blood pressure in patients diagnosed with hypertension - high blood pressure - compared with those taking ‘dummy’ pills.

Vitamin D deficiency has been linked with high blood pressure, but until now there has been little scientific evidence that topping up levels of the vitamin in the blood makes a difference.
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High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke.

Study leader Dr Thomas Larsen said ‘Probably the majority of Europeans have vitamin D deficiency, and many of these will also have high blood pressure.

‘What our results suggest is that hypertensive patients can benefit from vitamin D supplementation if they have vitamin D insufficiency.

Check: A high blood pressure reading is one that exceeds 140/90 millimeters of mercury

‘Vitamin D would not be a cure for hypertension in these patients, but it may help, especially in the winter months.

Radio detective, "To have the chief of the hen house stealing chickens, it is just disappointing,”

Former chief of the National Archives' audio-visual holdings, Leslie Waffen pleaded guilty last Fall to theft of U.S. government property, admitting that he stole 955 items from the Archives although prosecutors alleged he stole 2117 other recordings discovered in his house and sold more than 1000 of them.

The Washington Post tells a wonderful story, In National Archives thefts, a radio detective gets his man.

J. David Goldin, an eccentric 69-year-old with a handlebar mustache and an obsession with radio, was trolling eBay one evening in September 2010, looking for old radios and recordings, when he spotted an item that piqued his interest: the master copy of a broadcast radio interview with baseball legend Babe Ruth as he hunted for quail and pheasants on a crisp morning in 1937.

For a moment, Goldin contemplated bidding. It was the kind of historic recording that would fit perfectly in his collection of more than 100,000 radio broadcasts, all meticulously enhanced and preserved on tapes stored in thin white boxes on a maze of shelves in his humidity- and temperature-controlled basement “vault.” Then he leaned closer to his computer, adjusted his thick glasses and studied the record’s photograph and description.

What happened next would set in motion a federal investigation with a twist worthy of a classic radio drama.
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At first, Goldin thought the Archives had decided to unload his recordings and that they had found their way to a dealer. He dashed off an irritated letter demanding that the government return anything it planned to sell; it was that missive that launched the criminal probe by the inspector general.
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From the seller’s eBay profile, Goldin thought the dealer was a woman (the screen name was “hi-fi_gal”). Hoping to be helpful, Goldin purchased a recording from “hi-fi_gal,” though not one of his donations. When it arrived in the mail, Goldin ran the return address — Saddle Ridge Lane in Rockville — through a reverse directory. It came back to Leslie Waffen, who had retired the previous June as chief of the Archives’ audiovisual holdings.

Goldin was hurt. “To have the chief of the hen house stealing chickens, it is just disappointing,” Goldin said.

Over the next 18 months, Goldin helped authorities build their case, reviewing documents, submitting his original receipts from Waffen and offering up experts to help sort and appraise the cache of 6,153 recordings seized from the retired archivist’s home.

Dazzling solar halo

Rare solar halo dazzles in the sky above China

Known to weather experts as a '22 degrees halo' - because of its circular formation of 22° around the sun - the phenomenon is also known as a solar halo, icebox, sun dog and - for those who aren't into the whole brevity thing - circumzenithal arc.

The optical phenomenon is an an ice-halo formed by plate-shaped ice crystals in atmospheric clouds known as cirrus.

'Loathsome corruption' Destroying American Cities

Walter Russell Mead, a Democrat,  writes  Rogue Democrats Loot Detroit As Nation Sleeps

Detroit doesn’t matter all that much to the New York Times and many of its readers for the same reasons that Albany, Queens, Buffalo and Schenectady don’t matter. The new American elite wants to live and think as if it has transcended all that dreary provincial mess and lives on high in a world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are well dressed and well cared for.
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There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.

American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.

Ballroom of Les Plaza Hotel by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre

Featured a few weeks ago in the MailOnline was  Dying Detroit Haunting photos of crumbling neighborhoods highlight the terrible  decline of America's once-great Motor City

The population of devastated Detroit has dropped by 25 per cent in the past ten years and is now at its lowest since 1910.

Empty factories, burnt-out homes, silent banks and even derelict police stations litter the place once known as the 'Motor City' - where Henry Ford built his first car.

Almost a third of the city's 140 square miles is vacant or derelict.

Portraits by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre show the breathtaking decline of once-proud buildings - allowed to rot and crumble from a former glory.

It looks more like a Hollywood film's futuristic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, than a 21st century American city.

The decay does not discriminate, public entertainment venues such as cinemas lie in ruins alongside banks and medical centers.

Financial Infidelity

First comes love, then comes lying: HALF of all people keep financial secrets from their partners

A new study has found that 46 percent of all people have lied to their partner about money and one-third of all people believe that financial infidelity leads to sexual infidelity.

The Today show's website, Today.com, and SELF magazine jointly surveyed their thousands of website visitors on all questions of dishonesty for their 'Financial Infidelity' report.

The analysis of their collective 23,000 responses was released this Tuesday, revealing how what couple's have in the bank can affect what happens in the bedroom.

'Our survey makes it clear that money can be a huge stumbling block for relationships if couples don't take the time to talk about it frankly,' said Martin Wolk, TODAY.com's executive business editor.

The survey was conducted from January 23-27 and a total of 23,230 readers between the ages of 18 and 80 participated.

Respondents confessed to a wide range of money secrets, including lying about purchases, hiding them in the back of the closet and secretly withdrawing money from joint accounts.

But that's going to get harder to do as the Wall St Journal reports in Hiding Money from Your Spouse

Electronic discovery is making it a lot easier to uncover all that covert activity.

Suspicious spouses might dig around in their partners' Web-surfing history and social networks to find traces of hidden bank accounts and business deals. They might install software on home computers that records every keystroke their spouses make—whether it's secret stock trades or cash transfers to paramours—and use smartphone and GPS tools to show when they've been making sneaky withdrawals from ATMs.

Meanwhile, divorce lawyers and forensic experts are employing new strategies of their own. Instead of having to sift through reams of paper records to find irregularities, they're now able to use advanced search tools to analyze thousands of digital bank statements, credit-card bills and other files in the blink of an eye.

"While in the past a paper trail might be hidden by a second set of books or the shredding of documents, the trail left by files on a computer is etched onto a hard drive somewhere, just waiting to be discovered," says Ken Altshuler, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Break-ups and the 'love myth'

I think is probably hardest for those in their 20s and 30s.  Settling on the right mate and right career is not easy.  Nor is losing friends which is what happens when people break up.

The REAL cost of a break-up: We lose EIGHT friends when a long-term relationship ends

A typical adult loses eight friends when a long-term relationship ends, a study found today.

Researchers found the taking of sides and the rights and wrongs of the circumstances of the split are the biggest reasons for broken friendships.

Around one in ten people said their fed-up friends had stopped speaking to both them and their former partner after the break-up.

More than 27 per cent of people even admitted to staying in a relationship longer than they really wanted to because of their fears about the impact it would have on their friendships.
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The eight friends who will be lost are likely to be three friends of the ex-partner and three mutual friends made during the relationship.

The other two were known before the relationship even started, but either ended up siding with the other half - or got fed up hearing about the conflict.

Of the 2,000 people polled - who have recently split from a partner - 31 per cent now regret their actions during the break-up because of the effect it had on their friendships.

Could all these false starts and break-ups have something to do with The 'Love Myth' in Pop Culture?

[There is]  a deeply embedded belief in our pop culture that the experience of being in love must meet a very specific set of criteria. This is the "love myth."

Haidt explains:

As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. (It’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth; Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is even more romanticized.)
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Companionate love is less exciting, but more lasting: “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”

The problem with passionate love is that it eventually fades. And that creates major problems for the person who decides to marry someone based on the expectation that passionate love will last forever--the most major of the problems being, of course, divorce.
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So does true love exist? Haidt thinks that it does:

True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.

"Don't try to be great"

Commencement season begins with Charles Whelan writing in the Wall St Journal about the 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won't Tell You

6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7. Your parents don't want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn't always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, "It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy's mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.
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10. Don't try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn't, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

End of the world

Boy is the mood of the country in a bad way.

22% of Americans believe world will end in their lifetime (and 10% think the apocalypse is coming this year)

Worldwide, 10 per cent believe the Mayan calendar on December 21  signifies the apocalypse will happen in 2012, according to a new poll.

Ipsos Global Public Affairs carried out the poll on behalf of news agency Reuters.

Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos said: 'Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming.

The French, typically, are most relaxed about it all, with only six per cent believing in Armageddon in their lifetime in contrast to 22 per cent in the US and Turkey.

In the UK, eight percent feared apocalypse during their lives.

Globally, around 10 people fear there will be no 2013, with the highest percentage in Russia and Poland and the fewest in Great Britain.

People with lower education or income, as well as those under 35, were more likely to believe in an apocalypse during their lifetime or in 2012.

Old before their time

The phrase 'old before their time' is often applied to children who have seen terrible things - but it seems to be literally true.

Old before their time: Children exposed to violence and abuse age PHYSICALLY - and DNA damage could shorten their lives

Children who have been abused actually age faster - with the stress affecting DNA in a way that could shorten their lives.

Children who have been exposed to violence and abuse have physical changes in a DNA sequence that dictates how often cells can rejuvenate.

The abuse actually shortens their lives.

A study found that the DNA of ten year olds who had experience abuse showed signs of wear and tear normally associated with aging.

Scientists at the Duke Institute believe that stress may shorten their telomeres - DNA sequences found at the tips of chromosomes which have been linked to aging.

On top of the world and the bride wore white

On top of the world… couple become first to tie the knot at the North Pole

Arctic explorer Bxrge Ousland is feeling on top of the world after he and wife Hege became the first couple to get married at to the northern most point on in the world.

They flew to the remote frozen frontier with a party of 15 - including the best man, bridesmaid and a helicopter crew.

Bxrge, 49 from Oslo, Norway, said: 'The North pole is a big part of my life so I felt it needed to play some part in my wedding too.
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'Thankfully, we found a priest called Dag Henrik Berggrav who was willing to marry us.'

The explorer, who has completed dozens of trips to the chilly frontier, added: 'There were 15 people present in total.

'But that included the helicopter crew who ferried us up to the north pole.

Just as it finished something truly bizarre happened - a solo skier just happened to be passing.
'The skier Mark came along and shared a glass of champagne with us and passed on his congratulations.

'It was very surreal - we were in one of the remotest places in the world and there was this guy casually skiing along.

'We then headed back to the Russian research base and had a big party there.'

Garlic and food poisoning

It may be the last thing you want to do when you have food poisoning, but eating raw garlic may be the best thing you can do to get over it.

Garlic is 100 times more potent than antibiotics when it comes to food poisoning

A key ingredient in garlic is 100 times more powerful than two popular antibiotics at fighting a leading cause of food poisoning, scientists have found.

Tests discovered that the  compound, dilly sulphide, can easily breach a slimy protective biofilm employed by the bug to make it harder to destroy.

Not only is it a lot more powerful than antibiotics erythromycin and ciprofloxacin, it also takes a fraction of the time to work.

The discovery, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, could open the door to new treatments for raw and processed meats, and food preparation surfaces, that would reduce the toll of Campylobacter food poisoning.

"Obama's crew has nothing on the team that got drunk before JFK's assassination"

In the wake of the Secret Service scandal, here's something I didn't know. 

The Biggest Secret Service Failure of All Time

Obama's crew has nothing on the team that got drunk before JFK's assassination.

Congressman Pete King, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, calls the scandal involving prostitutes in Colombia “the worst moment in the history of the Secret Service.”

He’s wrong about that. The worst moment in the history of the Secret Service was November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. It was the first and only time since the Secret Service was put fully in charge of protecting the president in 1902 that a president was assassinated.

William Manchester, in his 1967 book about the Kennedy assassination, The Death of the President, reports that nine agents of the White House Secret Service detail were out after midnight on November 22, starting with “beer and mixed drinks.” One agent was out until 5 a.m. Manchester wrote, “Fellow drinkers during those early morning hours included four agents who were to ride in the president’s follow-up care in Dallas, and whose alertness was vital to his safety.”