Thanks to Fred Elbel for this Wall Street Journal article.
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Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms.

Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts.

Deficit as national-security threat?

For full article, visit:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/our-debt-time-bomb-is-ready-to-go-ka-boom-2010-02-02

Thanks to Steven Orr and Sally Erikson for this article.
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Close your eyes for a moment and cast your mind back to the dominant news stories of early 2010. The economy in tatters? Certainly. Global stalemate on climate negotiations and unbreakable gridlock in Congress? Of course. And don’t forget the terror — on Christmas Eve, 2009, a lone Nigerian man boards an airplane in Lagos and travels some 18 hours toward Detroit in what can only have been a dizzying combination of anxiety, fear and elation, and a grandiose sense of his own destiny. It all ends with a little ineffectual fumbling in the underpants, cut short by the heroism of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fellow passengers.

The official response to the underwear bomber reveals the usual inability of large bureaucracies to connect the dots or take meaningful action on real threats. Instead of understanding and reassessment, we get yet another late, inappropriate and costly escalation in airport security and political infighting about the treatment of Abdulmutallab — all of it embedded in an unacknowledged but resolute refusal to see the bigger picture.

For full article, visit:
http://www.truth-out.org/make-birth-control-not-war58525

Thanks to Don Collins for the following OpEd.
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“The Population Bomb,” Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 best-selling book that warned of mass starvation in the 1970s and ’80s, was wrong, but only on its time prediction. His famous bomb has already detonated! Only instead of being one bomb, the rise of population has caused multiple detonations that will continue now and in the years ahead.

Adding 2 billion to 4 billion more humans to our current 6.7 billion won’t help, but the real impact of population growth is the main story, a dire situation that we must treat urgently. Human numbers remain the elephant in the living room — consistently and dangerously ignored by most leaders of both developed and undeveloped nations.

For full article, visit:
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_679487.html

Thanks to Sally Mattison for this article from Grist.
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While leaders in Washington have been war-gaming the national security risks of climate change, they’ve only started to connect the dots to the closely related threats emanating from the growing crisis of global freshwater scarcity. At first blush, water and national security may not seem to be interlinked. But the reality, as narrated in my new book WATER: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, is that the unfolding global water crisis increasingly influences the outcome of America’s two wars, homeland defense against international terrorism, and other key U.S. national-security interests, including the transforming planetary environment and world geopolitical order.

For full article, visit:
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-02-water-and-the-war-on-terror

Thanks to Bob Walker for this article by Paul Farrell.
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So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wwiii-population-wars-a-12-bomb-equation-2009-09-29

Thanks to Mary De Lavalette for sending this article.
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When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a memberof the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust – a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html?emc=eta1

This editorial by Bob Walker was distributed to 800 U.S. newspapers and magazines by the Cagle Syndication Service. This editorial is reminds me of the short animated film, The Stork is the Bird of War. Thanks to Earl Babbie for sending the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh-hdLKITZA.

Thanks also to Bob Fireovid for this link to a media story on the “Discovery” network.
http://health.discovery.com/videos/19-kids-and-counting-the-early-arrival.html.
Continue Reading »

Thanks to Kent Welton for this article. As Kent says, the lack of quiet places is a result of population growth.
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Silence is something you assume you will always be able to find if you need it. All you have to do is drive far enough in the right direction, trek through quiet fields or woods, or dive into the sea’s belly. For true silence is not noiselessness. As audio ecologist Gordon Hempton defines it, silence is “the complete absence of all audible mechanical vibrations, leaving only the sounds of nature at her most natural. Silence is the presence of everything, undisturbed.”

And silence, Hempton believes, is rapidly disappearing, even in the most remote places. He says there are fewer than a dozen places of silence—areas “where natural silence reigns over many square miles”—remaining in America, and none in Europe. In his book, One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World, written with John Grossman, Hempton argues that silence—a precious, underrated commodity—is facing extinction. Over the past three decades Hempton has circled the earth three times, recording sound on every continent except Antarctica: butterfly wings fluttering, coyotes singing, snow melting, waterfalls crashing, traffic clanging, birds singing. His work has been used in film soundtracks, videogames, and museums.

For full article, visit:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/01/27/an-unquiet-nation.html

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.
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Vail’s aquatic playground in the spring, summer and fall months — the Upper Colorado, or Upper C — is under increasing pressure from residential and energy development.

Some water experts warn the river is an endangered species if current residential growth patterns and water consumption patterns continue along the state’s Front Range, and they’re increasingly concerned proposed energy production on the Western Slope will accelerate its demise.

For full article, visit:
http://www.realvail.com/TheOReport

Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article.
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Sixty years ago, the late Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield resisted helping to pay for Lake Lanier, a new federal reservoir being built north of town. Atlanta had plenty of water, he wrote Congress. Thanks, but no thanks.

Those words came back to haunt Atlanta last year. A federal judge ruled that the city has been illegally tapping Lanier for years as its primary water source. Unless Congress reclassifies the lake as a water supply, the judge ruled, Atlanta will be cut off by 2012.

The question now is how many other cities might be in the same boat, according to experts interviewed by The Associated Press. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which sells water from 135 federal reservoirs around the country, recently gave Congress a preliminary list of 40 projects in 14 states that were not initially authorized for supplying water but are being used for that purpose.

For full article, visit:
http://www.forbes.com