Cuban Subsea Pyramid Complex

It appears that they have taken the sonar data and successfully reconstructed a 3D image of the structure lying on the ocean floor just off Cuba. This is solid and completely convincing. I got this link originally from Dale Drinnon in his recent Frontiers of Antropology.

More importantly these structures are certainly contemporaneous with the Egyptian complex whatever is been said. This means inspired by the Atlantean Bronze Age sea trade based civilization of which we have posted extensively.

Way more important in terms of my many interlinked conjectures, this confirms a major subsidence event dating around 1159 BC. I had linked it to an eruption at Hekla, but that looks like a side show. At the time uplifted portions of the Mid Atlantic Ridge subsided also including Lyonese and the home islands and land mass around the Azores. Even if that had not happened, this subsidence was amply large enough.

This would have produced an orthogonal pressure forcing subsidence to either East or West. Since the ridge between Cuba and Yucatan is the natural point of weakness between the Gulf subsidence basin and the Caribbean subsidence basin, it naturally subsided deeply. The driver for all this was the hydrostatic changes brought about by both the original crustal shift of 12900 years ago that I have called the Pleistocene Nonconformity and the slow uplift of the Hudson Bay Basin brought about by the ending of the Ice Age. I suspect that we are all pretty safe now.

Even if we only recognize the Hudson Bay Uplift the Cuban Subsidence is a natural adjustment.

I suspect that all these major subsidence events happened at the same time although that is not necessary.

Pyramid Structures Near Western Cuba.

http://www.utaot.com/2012/09/24/pyramid-structures-near-western-cuba/

Pyramids under the waters of Cuba were discovered by two scientists Paul Weinzweig and Pauline Zalitzki. They found the ruins of ancient buildings for about a mile below the sea and considered them to be Atlantis.

Paulina found elsewhere in Cuba ancient descriptions and symbols that was identical to those on the waterfront structures below.

The two scientists used submarines to found tremendous pyramid structures (that remainds giza in Egypt), built of stones weighing hundreds of tons.

They found sphinxes, stones that arranged like Stonehenge, and a written language engraved on the stones.

Why it was not discovered before?

The U.S. government discovered the alleged place during the Cuban missile crisis in the sixties, Nuclear submarines cruising in the Gulf (in deep sea) met pyramid structures. They immediately shut down the site and took control of him and the objects,in order that it will not come to Russians hands.

A whistleblower from the army,that used to serve in Montego Bay told they are still working on the site and recover objects and instruments (including those who still work) since the 60th.

This area in Cuba could not be over waterfront less than 10,000 years ago…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klRbcEnLPbU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk6SWtumdK0&feature=related

http://www.luismarianofernandez.com/AtlantidaEnCuba4.html

Amazing Medical Advances Healing Wounded Troops

 It is obvious that a revolution is under way in terms of tissue restoration. For that reason, money is rapidly flowing into the sector and results are accelerating. This is great. Most problems are approaching solvability and the day of the handicapped is ending inside the lifetimes of even middle aged victims.

It will be a very welcome development and will release a lot of human energy.

Accidents will always happen and restoration is a welcome option.

Amazing Medical Advances Heal Wounded Troops

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE 09/10/12 04:26 AM ET

Tom Cervantes, a research engineer at the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital, displays a titanium frame designed for the reconstruction of a human ear, left, and a three dimensional plastic ear model, right, at the lab, in Boston.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/10/heal-wounded-troops-medical-advances_n_1870376.html

BOSTON -- Scientists are growing ears, bone and skin in the lab, and doctors are planning more face transplants and other extreme plastic surgeries. Around the country, the most advanced medical tools that exist are now being deployed to help America's newest veterans and wounded troops.

_In Los Angeles, surgeons used part of Michael Mills' forehead to rebuild his nose after a bomb disfigured him in Iraq.

_In Pittsburgh, doctors used an experimental therapy from pig tissue to help regrow part of a thigh muscle that Ron Strang lost in a blast in Afghanistan.

_In Boston, scientists are making plans for the first implants of lab-grown ears for wounded troops after successful experiments in sheep and rats.

_In San Antonio and other cities, doctors are testing sprayed-on skin cells and lab-made sheets of skin to heal burns and other wounds. The ingenuity is impressive: One product was developed from foreskin left over from circumcisions.

Much of this comes from taxpayer-funded research. Four years ago, the federal government created AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a network of top hospitals and universities, and gave $300 million in grants to spur new treatments using cell science and advanced plastic surgery.

"The whole idea is to bring all these researchers together to develop these great technologies that were in early science to eventually be ready for the troops," said AFIRM's recently retired director, Terry Irgens.

Now those who served are coming home, and projects that once had been languishing in labs are making strides and starting to move into clinics.

Strang is among those benefiting. The 28-year-old Marine sergeant from Pittsburgh lost half of a thigh muscle to shrapnel, leaving too little to stabilize his gait. "My knee would buckle and I'd fall over," he said.

Now, after an experimental treatment at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, "I'm able to run a little bit" and play a light football game with friends, he said. "It's been a huge improvement."

It's one example of the "new medicine" in the works for troops. The Associated Press conducted more than a dozen interviews and reviewed the latest medical research to measure the progress and extent of novel treatments under way for wounded warriors. The results point to some surprising feats of surgery and bioengineering.

___

Growing new ears

Up to a thousand troops might need an ear, and prosthetics are not a great solution. A rod or other fastener is required to attach them to the head. They don't look or feel natural and they wear out every couple of years. A matching ear grown from a patient's own cells would be a huge improvement.

"People have been working on this for 20 years" but haven't been able to overcome obstacles to making it practical, said Cathryn Sundback, director of the tissue engineering lab at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Her lab thinks it's found the solution. Using a computer model of a patient's remaining ear, scientists craft a titanium framework covered in collagen, the stuff that gives skin elasticity and strength.

They take a snip of cartilage from inside the nose or between the ribs and seed the scaffold with these cells. This is incubated for about two weeks in a lab dish to grow more cartilage. When it's ready to implant, a skin graft is taken from the patient to cover the cartilage and the ear is stitched into place.

Scientists in her lab have maintained lab-grown sheep ears on those animals for 20 weeks, proving it can be done successfully and last long-term. They also have grown anatomically correct human ears from cells. These have been implanted on the backs of lab rats to keep them nourished and allow further research. But that wouldn't happen with ears destined for patients – they would just be grown in a lab dish until they're ready to implant.

"We've solved all the technical problems," Sundback said, and now they are ready to seek approval from the Food and Drug Administration to implant these into patients – probably in about a year. "It's amazing how much progress we've made with the AFIRM funding."

___

Bioengineering muscles, bone and skin

A soldier lucky enough to keep his arms and legs after a bomb blast still might lose so much of a key muscle, like biceps or quadriceps, that the limb can't be used properly. In some cases, "the patient has lost so much muscle that there's nothing left for the surgeon to sew together," said Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regenerative medicine specialist at the University of Pittsburgh.

He is testing implants of "extracellular matrix" – connective tissue that holds cells together – to boost muscle mass. The matrix is thought to release chemical signals that promote regrowth of healthy tissue instead of scar tissue.

"It changes the body from thinking, `I need to respond to injured tissue,' to `I need to rebuild this tissue,'" Badylak said.

The material is supplied by a private company – ACell Inc. of Columbia, Md. – and comes from pigs. The immune system tolerates it because it doesn't contain cells. It comes in multi-layered sheets like slightly stiff gauze and can be cut or molded to fit the needed shape.

Strang, who lost half of a thigh muscle, is among the five patients treated so far in an 80-patient study. Doctors wait at least six months after an injury to make sure all natural healing has occurred, and put patients through intensive physical therapy before implanting the matrix.

"We want to be able to say after the surgery that they were as good as they could be" and that the matrix accounted for any improvement, Badylak explained.

In early testing, "They've shown up to 10 to 20 percent improvement" in strength of the muscle after treatment, said Irgens, the director of AFIRM, which funded some of the early work. The Department of Defense is sponsoring the study under way now, which includes non-military patients as well as former troops. The new study is measuring changes in strength and muscle volume, and doctors are aiming for the kind of quality-of-life improvement Strang has enjoyed.

In other efforts, Pittsburgh and Rice University scientists are working on growing bone to fix jawbone and other facial defects. Researchers at Massachusetts General and Rutgers University are trying to grow eyelid muscles. Blindness can result from not being able to close an eyelid.

Doctors also are testing various ways to make skin. In one method, doctors take a postage stamp-sized piece of a patient's skin, process it in the lab and spray these cells onto a burn or other wound. The sprayer device that is used for this treatment is already licensed in seven countries, and AFIRM is sponsoring a study aimed at winning U.S. approval so the treatment can be offered here.

The second approach uses sheets of skin developed from cells in the lab that originally came from foreskin after circumcisions.

"That's in clinical trials now and they're having tremendous results," Irgens said.

___

Beyond "bionic arms" to transplants

For all the advances that have been made in modern prosthetics, the arms and hands are not as effective as the legs and feet. Dozens of wounded troops would rather try a transplant.

The government also estimates that up to 200 troops might need face transplants, although Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Boston surgeon who has done four face transplants on non-military patients, thinks only 50 to 100 ultimately will get one.

One reason is the lifelong drugs needed to prevent rejection. They have side effects and raise the risk of cancer.

Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chairman at Johns Hopkins University, has been working to minimize those risks. Previously, at the University of Pittsburgh, he led hand transplants on five patients with minimal immune suppression, giving them bone marrow taken from their donors along with the hands to help them better tolerate the new tissue. All five patients have done well and four now take just one anti-rejection drug.

"There's really no reason to think faces will be any different," he said.

He also showed that rejection can often be stopped by rubbing on a cream containing immune-suppressing medicine.

"Skin is the primary target of the rejection," he explained, so with a hand transplant, "we can detect rejection much earlier than we can for organ transplants. The patient literally calls us. They notice a rash on the skin first thing in the morning. We just tell them to put the cream on."

With military funding, a host of doctors are evaluating troops as potential face transplant candidates. Pomahac told of one man who lost much of his face, jaw and lips in a bomb blast. Despite 25 operations, he still can't move one side of his face or lips and drools all the time.

"He walks around with a towel on his shoulder. It's a major quality-of-life issue," Pomahac said.

Advancing reconstructive surgery

Many troops remain disfigured or impaired despite multiple reconstructive operations. Tackling the toughest cases is the goal of Operation Mend, a program of the UCLA Medical Center, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and the Veterans Affairs-Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System.

Army Staff Sgt. Michael Mills, 47, who lives in Freeport, Minn., northwest of Minneapolis, is one such patient. He was injured in Iraq in 2005 by a bomb that left him with major burns and broken bones all over. He lost a finger and thumb. He has a dozen pins in bones and a plate in his hip. He was missing part of an ear and part of his nose.

Mills had 10 surgeries with Operation Mend, including three on his hands. Surgeons repaired his nose with part of his forehead.

"I'm very happy with the new look I have now," Mills said. "I don't let my disability run my life. I run my disability."

Some wounds remain, though. Mills said he suffers from a mild traumatic brain injury, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Counseling through the Department of Veterans Affairs has helped him cope, and he said he no longer has flashbacks and night sweats and is more able to control anger.

"I have more good days now than I do bad days," he said. Doctors can fix his bones and his nose, but "they can't heal what's inside," Mills said. "Only I can do that."

___

Appeasement

Welcome o the blindness of outright appeasement. It will gain nothing except accelerating body bags throughout the world. Barbarism always mistakes civilization for weakness. Sometimes they are right. Today the toys available are somewhat more serious and the potential for a atomic bomb in their hands is as real as it could ever be. Worse, the potential for a dirty bomb is already real. Just what do you think that Iran is manufacturing?

Now imagine an Improvised Explosive Device loaded with waste radioactives loaded into a container and arriving at a port near you. My point is that even you could in theory pull off the logistics involved and a little insider knowledge could well get you on target.

We are in fact cruising toward a very serious crisis and it is scary. I do not think the real folks are even slightly asleep which is why things keep blowing up in Iran.

Have a nice day!

You Can Never Awaken a Man Who Is Pretending to be Asleep

http://www.politicalislam.com/

The White House and media response to the events in the US embassies in Egypt and Libya can be characterized by the fact they speak like they have never seen Sharia mob justice before in their lives. Or, at least, you would think that from the knowledge and wisdom they display in their analysis.

For the last 11 years since 9/11, we have watched the same events unroll in the Islamic world and the same response come from our so-called leaders in the government, media, schools and the pulpits. The establishment view: Those Muslims are extremists, not real Muslims. We should be careful not to offend the religion of peace. When Muslims are offended by movies, Koran burnings and Mohammed cartoons, it is our fault.

The clue phone is ringing, pick it up. Here are the clues:

The murder of intellectuals and artists who criticize Mohammed is Sunna. Sunna is the perfect example of Mohammed’s life. When Mohammed captured Mecca, he first prayed, then he destroyed all religious art and then he issued death warrants for the artists and intellectuals who had opposed him. There are only two new facts in the Koran, a derivative work. The first new fact is that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, and the second new truth is that if you don’t believe he is prophet of Allah, you can be killed.

Violence is what brings Islam success. In Mohammed’s life, he preached the religion of Islam for 13 years and garnered 150 new followers. When he went to Medina and became a politician and a warlord, when he died every Arab was a Muslim. Jihad violence was what made Islam successful. If Mohammed practice jihad, Muslims must use the technique of jihad.

Hello establishment experts, the black flag is not an Al Qaeda flag. The black flag with the Shahada, “There is no god, but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet” and the swords goes back to the Golden Age of Islam in Baghdad in the 9th century. (The establishment professors never tell you about this jihad aspect of the Islamic Golden Age.) This jihad flag is ancient.

Current news is that Ambassador Stevens was raped before he was killed. If so, then this is pure jihad doctrine. The rules for rape of captured Kafirs (unbelievers) are Sunna. At the conquest of the Jews in Khaybar, the Hadith are explicit that captured Kafirs can be raped.

The mob is a manifestation of the Sharia and the umma (the Islamic community). Notice that when a fatwa is issued, such as the famous fatwa by Khomeini against Salmon Rushdie for his artistic work The Satanic Verses, the fatwa is not to be fulfilled by the Islamic police. No, the murder is to be carried by any member of the umma. This is vigilante justice, Sharia justice, mob justice. Pay attention to how often Muslims riot to make political gain.

The shortest hadith is: war is deceit. So here come all of the “good” Muslims to explain how the murder and riots are not real Islam. And they are so upset about what Arabs are doing at the US embassies. But, they still can tell us that Islam is the religion of peace, without a single trace of irony.

The idea that we should not blaspheme Islam, Mohammed or Allah is pure Sharia and the position of the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation). It seems that none of the establishment experts have the foggiest idea of what Sharia blasphemy entails. Not believing that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, that a woman is a second class citizen, that jihad is part of Islam is all blasphemy. Critical thought is blasphemy. The Golden Rule is blasphemy. Any well-founded religion can survive blasphemy, except Islam, and that is the reason it is forbidden. But the worst part of this travesty is the refrain from Obama and Hillary that we should subvert our freedom of speech to the demands of the Sharia. The Sharia is Allah’s law and our Constitution is a document of ignorance to be removed from the world. So say the imams and Obama and Hillary.

And now for the last tired response from the apologists: those violent people are an extremist fringe. NO! The mobs are main-line Islam.

You can awaken a man who is asleep, but you will never awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.

That is the reason that we find our experts in the government, media, education and the pulpits to be such dhimmis. They have refused to learn a single thing about Islamic doctrine and history since 9/11. But, cheer up! When the dhimmis write about the beauty of Islam and how the Kafirs are wrong, read the comments. You will find that the common man knows far, far more about Islam than the experts. The higher you go, the less they know.

Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study of Political Islam

Permalink: http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/you-can-never-awaken-a-man-who-is/

copyright (c) CBSX, LLC, politicalislam.com

www.politicalislam.com

Sinusitis Linked to Microbial Diversity

 The good news is that restoring a natural microbial foundation will induce recovery. Doing that is the trick.

My own problem was solved by the application of dilute hydrogen peroxide. This obviously blew out the microbes and then natural restoration rest the colonies.

It also explains the general failure of antibiotics as a curative. Not only are the antibiotics internal to an external issue, the reduction of the colonies will never be complete and their recovery will likely mirror the original situation.

At least now we know which is which and can target the problem directly and make the solution far better.

Sinusitis Linked to Microbial Diversity

Released: 9/12/2012 3:00 PM EDT

Source: University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/593568/?sc=dwhn

UCSF Study Suggests New Approach for Dealing with Common Ailment

Newswise — A common bacteria ever-present on the human skin and previously considered harmless, may, in fact, be the culprit behind chronic sinusitis, a painful, recurring swelling of the sinuses that strikes more than one in ten Americans each year, according to a study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco.

The team reports this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine that sinusitis may be linked to the loss of normal microbial diversity within the sinuses following an infection and the subsequent colonization of the sinuses by the culprit bacterium, which is called Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum.

In their study, the researchers compared the microbial communities in samples from the sinuses of 10 patients with sinusitis and from 10 healthy people, and showed that the sinusitis patients lacked a slew of bacteria that were present in the healthy individuals. The patients also had large increases in the amount of Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum in their sinuses, which are located in the forehead, cheeks and eyes.

The team also identified a common bacterium found within the sinuses of healthy people called Lactobacillus sakei that seems to help the body naturally ward off sinusitis. In laboratory experiments, inoculating mice with this one bacterium defended them against the condition.

“Presumably these are sinus-protective species,” said Susan Lynch, PhD, an associate professor of medicine and director of the Colitis and Crohn’s Disease Microbiome Research Core at UCSF.

What it all suggests, she added, is that the sinuses are home to a diverse “microbiome” that includes protective bacteria. These “microbial shields” are lost during chronic sinusitis, she said, and restoring the natural microbial ecology may be a way of mitigating this common condition.

A Painful, Costly Condition

Sinuses are air-filled cavities in the front of the skull that connect to the nasal passages and are lined with mucosal surfaces. They are somewhat shrouded in mystery. Scientists are not entirely sure what they do. They may exist to heat air as it passes into the body, they may be associated with the immune system, or as Lynch and her colleagues speculate, they may represent a site of microbial surveillance just inside the nose where the body can sample bacteria and other microbes entering the body.

Though the sinuses’ underlying purpose is still unclear, they are all too familiar to American doctors and their patients because of what happens when the thin tissues lining them become inflamed, as occurs in chronic sinusitis—one of the most common reasons why people go to the doctor in the United States. There are about 30 million cases each year, and the cost to the healthcare system is an estimated $2.4 billion dollars annually.

The pain of sinusitis can last for months. Doctors typically prescribe bacteria-killing antibiotics and, in more severe and long-lasting cases, conduct sinus surgeries. However, said Andrew Goldberg, MSCE, MD, the director of rhinology and sinus surgery at UCSF and a co-author on the paper, “the premise for our understanding of chronic sinusitis and therapeutic treatment appears to be wrong, and a different therapeutic strategy seems appropriate.”

The new work suggests that if the underlying cause of sinusitis is due to changes to the microbiome of bacterial species colonizing sinus tissue, restoring the naturally-occurring, protective bacteria to these cavities may be an effective way to treat this condition.

However, the UCSF-led team warned that the promise of this discovery does not offer an immediate new treatment or cure for sinusitis. Any new approaches based on these observations still have to be developed and tested for safety and effectiveness in human clinical trials.

The article, “Sinus Microbiome Diversity Depletion and Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum Enrichment Mediates Rhinosinusitis” by Nicole A. Abreu, Nabeetha A. Nagalingam, Yuanlin Song, Frederick C. Roediger, Steven D. Pletcher, Andrew N. Goldberg, and Susan V. Lynch appears in the September 12, 2012, issue of Science Translational Medicine. See: http://stm.sciencemag.org/

In addition to UCSF, authors on this study are affiliated with San Francisco State University, the University of California Berkley, and Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

This study was supported by the American Rhinological Society, the Rainin Foundation, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (one of the National Institutes of Health), the Minority Biomedical Research Support-Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (MBRS-RISE), the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the Rebecca Susan Buffett Foundation.

Lynch is a member of the advisory board of Second Genome, which is developing treatments for human diseases based on microbiome research, and she is one of three co-authors on the paper who have filed a patent application for sinusitis diagnostics and treatments.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

Curiosity Nails Streambed

 This really cannot be much more important since it eliminates any reasonable doubt over the existence of a hydraulic environment. We have a stream bed with rounded pebbles representing ages of water flowing. Whatever came of the nearby high ground did it for a very long time.

For curiosity this is mission accomplished and now everything else is a bonus. Hopefully that means many years of operations.

A though. I do not know if curiosity is well enough equipped but recent comment has suggested that extracting samples and returning them to Earth is on the agenda. In that case it would be appropriate to collect samples and place them at collection points for possible later retrieval.

Right now it appears that our technology is good enough to send several more such missions if we wanted to and could justify the program. Thus it is possible to envisage a collection point to which samples are returned periodically before the explorer heads out on an alternative trip.

Thus the exploration of Mars has really begun.

Curiosity Finds Old Streambed on Mars

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/27sep_streambed/

Sept. 27, 2012: NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.

"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. Earlier imaging of the region from Mars orbit allows for additional interpretation of the gravel-bearing conglomerate. The imagery shows an alluvial fan of material washed down from the rim, streaked by many apparent channels, sitting uphill of the new finds.

The rounded shape of some stones in the conglomerate indicates long-distance transport from above the rim, where a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years.

The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called "Hottah" and "Link," with the telephoto capability of Curiosity's mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Project's rover, touched down.

"Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient streambed," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The gravels in conglomerates at both outcrops range in size from a grain of sand to a golf ball. Some are angular, but many are rounded.

"The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow," said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

The science team may use Curiosity to learn the elemental composition of the material, which holds the conglomerate together, revealing more characteristics of the wet environment that formed these deposits. The stones in the conglomerate provide a sampling from above the crater rim, so the team may also examine several of them to learn about broader regional geology.

The slope of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater remains the rover's main destination. Clay and sulfate minerals detected there from orbit can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.

"A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment," said Grotzinger. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."

The Battle to Find Sasquatch

The wake up call for myself came when I decided to review the available literature on the Sasquatch back in the late nineties. Prior to that I had read odds and ends over the years including the work of Ivan Sanderson who deserves serious credit for inspiring a generation of interest in cryptozoology. That was enough to alert my interest and at least to reserve judgment.

I no longer recall why I sat down and specifically decided to do a close review except perhaps it was the most likely to be rewarding in that field. Besides there was real archeological evidence supporting the plausibility.

I came across John Green's tome on the subject. He had gathered all the creditable reports that he could over his long career as a small town newspaperman and had gone way beyond that and searched other sources everywhere he could accumulating hundreds of individual accounts. This data clearly shaped the case. It also lead directly to my establishing a conforming evidence protocol for the investigation of any unknown. This was described and developed in my manuscript ' Paradigms shift'.

The advent of the internet has nicely augmented his pioneering effort and has now cataloged and checked thousands of individual reports to date. The data base is likely the best in existence for something that is supposed to not exist.

What has clearly happened over the past decade is that serious researchers from the field itself have begun to stand up. Bildernagal and Meldrum have led the charge and as noted, with the advent of increasing evidence of several contemporary hominid species in existence throughout human existence, support is steadily building.

We still have to figure out how to convince a couple to come in from the cold and visit a laboratory or two to finish the job but I suspect that may even be possible if we get smart about it.

It is going to take a number of expeditions and smart strategies to produce hard results. After all this creature is adept at staying out of our way although not so concerned so as to not use the convenient roads and trails we have made. He is also curious about us and should respond warmly to food gifts.

The battle to find sasquatch

By Richard Watts, Times Colonist September 27, 2012 7:02 AM

Read more:

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/battle+find+sasquatch/7307698/story.html#ixzz27gRpaXmW

The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author.

“And we have what has to be the best sasquatch habitat anywhere on the planet right here on the B.C. coast,” said Courtenay’s John Bindernagel, author of the 2010 book The Discovery of the Sasquatch.
“The question for me is no longer ‘Does the sasquatch exist or not?’ but ‘Why has the existence of the sasquatch been resisted for so long?’ ” Bindernagel said.

Now 70, he believes enough sightings, tracks and other evidence of the large ape-like sasquatch — Coast Salish for hairy man — have been collected to provide evidence of the creature’s existence in B.C. and North America.

Bindernagel has collected casts of massive, human-like tracks from Strathcona Provincial Park and even heard a “whoo, whoo, whoop” call. It’s similar to a chimpanzee’s call in Uganda, but he believes it is a sasquatch calling out for its own kind.

Bindernagel comes to the investigation of the sasquatch as a scientist. He studied at the University of Guelph and the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in wildlife biology. He has worked in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, teaching, conducting research, surveys and preparing and implementing wildlife management plans and conservation measures before returning to Vancouver Island, where he worked as a consultant.

The Discovery of the Sasquatch is Bindernagel’s second book on the subject and the most scholarly in its approach. Even he admits his first book, North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch, was undertaken with a hobbyist’s approach to the subject. 

But the first book attracted the interest of some of the world’s best-known biologists, including chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. And after its publication, Bindernagel said something unusual started to happen: People began contacting him with reports of sightings. But before they even began to talk with him, they wanted to know one thing.

“They would ask, ‘Are you serious about this?’ ” said Bindernagel. “That was always the question — ‘Are you serious about this?’ 

“I had to say, ‘Yeah, obviously I am.’ ”

So he began to collect their reports. Bindernagel also began to collect and document details of other reported sightings and bring them together, looking for patterns or repeated details.
But he started to run into what he calls a roadblock of “prevailing knowledge.” Too many scientists were unwilling to look at evidence from various sightings. They refused to give much credence to the plaster casts of tracks. “We can’t get our papers accepted at professional conferences, so our colleagues have remained ignorant of the  evidence,” Bindernagel said.

“The scientific gatekeepers keep saying, ‘No, no, no, having Bigfoot on our agenda would taint our whole conference.’ ” 

So in his latest book, he attempts to take a scholarly approach, reviewing and summarizing the existing evidence. He also tries to put it in the context of scientists’ approach to “the discovery process.”
It’s a process he contends is taking far longer than it should because of scientific reluctance. “We have scientists demanding evidence, like DNA,” Bindernagel said. “At the same time, they are ignoring the evidence we do have.

“Not having the evidence you would like doesn’t excuse you from examining the evidence that’s available.”

However, scientists such as Grant Keddie, curator of archeology at the Royal B.C. Museum, take exception to the notion scientists are ignoring the evidence. There just isn’t any to study, they say.
Keddie said in the past, he has conducted investigations into several sightings, including one report of a creature running in front of a passenger-filled bus near Errock in the Fraser Valley in the mid 1970s.
He said he went to the site, conducted a methodical, systematic grid search, as used in archeology, and found nothing. Samples of scat turned out to be coyote droppings. 

Newspaper reports had described footprints so deep they could only have been made by a creature weighing at least 800 pounds. But Keddie said he made deeper prints running in hiking boots.
Police investigators were called in and turned up four men who had rented a gorilla suit, then waited for a bus, before one ran across the road.

Another report came from a man with no experience in the B.C. backcountry. An interview revealed the sighting came after a stint in a pub, where locals joked the man was heading into sasquatch country.
But Keddie said when stories are refuted, the proven falsehoods don’t seem to gain the same traction in the public mind. Nobody remembers them when the next report becomes public. People again start blaming “scientists” for ignoring the evidence.

Keddie said if any evidence was to emerge that was even remotely solid, such as a bone or tooth, the top physical anthropologists in Canada would be on the next plane to B.C.

“So when I get asked, ‘Have you ever talked to anyone who is really believable or who has good solid evidence?’ I say, ‘So far I haven’t,’ ” Keddie said.

But Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, said it’s only a matter of time before such evidence surfaces.

Meldrum said in a telephone interview that within the last 15 years, new discoveries have scuttled ideas of human evolution being a linear process to modern homo sapiens. It now looks more likely that as many as six early humans, or hominin, occupied the world at the same time in human prehistory. 

Discoveries like the 2003 find in Indonesia of homo floresiensis, the remains of a one-metre-tall creature dubbed “the Hobbit,” have rocked previous theories. Estimated at 18,000 years old, this creature was clearly living at the same time as early humans.

Meldrum said such discoveries have seen even previous sasquatch skeptics starting to consider more seriously the idea of a North American ape-like creature, another species of hominin living now.
“The prospect that such populations might have persisted into the present is not so far-fetched,” he said.

“The scientific community is coming around to recognize that this is a very legitimate question.”

Read more:

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/battle+find+sasquatch/7307698/story.html#ixzz27gRxzgay

How to tackle U.S. debt: Just do it

There are many tweaks and fixes available to generally improve overall economic performance including implementing a national capitalization plan around some obvious medium term objective like completely replacing infrastructure. Yet there is this.

Getting your house in order is a simple as just doing it.

That happens and massive investment will flood the USA and swiftly end this stagnation. It is all sitting there waiting to believe.

How to tackle U.S. debt: Just do it

BRIAN LEE CROWLEY AND ROBERT MURPHY

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Sep. 18 2012, 2:00 AM EDT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/how-to-tackle-us-debt-just-do-it/article4549984/

Canadians can be forgiven for feeling both pleased and a little perplexed over the raging debate in the United States on how to fix its fiscal mess. On the one hand, it is not often that Canadian accomplishments get mentioned in U.S. election campaigns, as Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan did when he praised our fiscal reforms. On the other hand, many Canadians don’t quite understand what all the Sturm und Drang south of the border is about. Fiscally speaking, we’ve been there, done that.

Canada faced an even larger fiscal crisis in the mid-1990s than America does today, and our achievement dwarfs anything being proposed in Washington. By acting decisively, Canada resolved its crisis quickly and with surprisingly little pain. Since the memory of this momentous achievement is fading, or is unknown to the younger generation, it is worth recalling how it unfolded.

In the mid-1990s, the Canadian federal government had been in budget deficit for two decades. A third of all federal revenue was being frittered away on interest on the debt. A Wall Street Journal editorial from Jan. 12, 1995, declared that the country “has now become an honorary member of the Third World in the unmanageability of its debt problem … it has lost its triple-A credit rating and can’t assume that lenders will be willing to refinance its growing debt.”

Deliverance came the following month when the centre-left Liberal government tabled its historic budget. This document was a defining moment in Canada’s fiscal history.

More astonishing than the bold plans for a massive rollback was the fact that Ottawa actually did what the document said. Total spending fell by more than 7 per cent over two years, while program spending (excluding interest) fell by almost 10 per cent. As a share of the economy, federal spending fell from almost 22 per cent to 19 per cent during the same period. By January, 1998, federal employment was down 51,000 – about 14 per cent. Ottawa ran 11 consecutive budget surpluses beginning in 1997/98. With the federal government paying down its debt and the economy expanding, total public debt plummeted over the following decade.

To take the full measure of Canada’s achievement, compare it with the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and so-called Ryan plans to tackle the deficit. Compared to the status quo, Bowles-Simpson never cuts absolute federal spending. The Ryan plan does propose actual spending cuts, but they are not nearly as vigorous as Canada’s. By the fourth year of reform, total Canadian federal spending was still slightly less than it had been the year prior to reform. In contrast, in year four, the Ryan plan projects spending to be almost 2 per cent higher than its year-zero baseline, while Bowles-Simpson projects spending to be more than 10 per cent higher.

By the 10th year of reform, Bowles-Simpson projects spending to stabilize at about 22 per cent of GDP, while the Ryan plan aspires to reduce federal spending to just under 20 per cent.

Canada’s federal spending actually fell from 21.5 per cent of GDP in 1994 to 15.2 per cent in 2004. The allegedly draconian Ryan plan calls for a medium-term level of federal spending that is almost a third higher than what the Canadian government achieved.

Finally, we come to the deficit and debt. In a mere two years, the Canadian government transformed a $32-billion deficit (4 per cent of GDP) into a surplus of $2.5-billion. In contrast, neither Bowles-Simpson nor House budget resolutions even attempt to balance the budget in the medium term; they simply stabilize the federal deficit at about 1 per cent of GDP. The Ryan plan explicitly calls for more red ink for the next 27 years.

These inadequate plans are all premised on the notion that reining in out-of-control public spending is painful and politically dangerous and must be approached defensively and fearfully. Canada’s experience was quite different. Once politicians explained why reform was indispensable, it was cheered on by voters. Reforming governments, of whatever stripe, were consistently re-elected. Most importantly, in the decade after reform, Canada outperformed all other G7 nations in economic growth, investment and job creation, while the number of low-income Canadians fell by two-fifths and universal health care remained in place.

The U.S. faces a serious fiscal crisis, as all sides are beginning to recognize. The rather timid response of the two political parties is based on an underestimation of voter appetite for fiscal responsibility and an overestimation of the pain required to fix the problem. As Canada showed in the 1990s, bold and skillful politicians can take a plan for fiscal austerity and turn it into a recipe for political and economic success. All America has to do now is find some bold and skillful politicians. Should be easy, right?

Brian Lee Crowley is managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank in Ottawa. Robert P. Murphy is principal at Consulting by RPM. They are the authors of Northern Light: Lessons for America from Canada’s Fiscal Fix.

Fitting Dark Matter into Relativity

This may be useful but do not count on it. It joins a long history of natural patches to the General Theory that attempt to fit in additional effects. Right now dark matter is an additional effect supported by observation.

I have every reason to think I know exactly what dark matter is and my conjecture strongly suggests that it is for all intents and purposes uniformly distributed. By the by, since when did we come to believe that the visible content of the universe is uniformly distributed?

In the event, this will be a highly untestable improvement on the general theory.

Mathematician offers unified theory of dark matter, dark energy, altering Einstein field equations

Posted by TANN

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2012/09/mathematician-offers-unified-theory-of.html

A pair of mathematicians -- one from Indiana University and the other from Sichuan University in China -- have proposed a unified theory of dark matter and dark energy that alters Einstein's equations describing the fundamentals of gravity.

Shouhong Wang, a professor in the IU College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Mathematics, and Tian Ma, a professor at Sichuan University, suggest the law of energy and momentum conservation in spacetime is valid only when normal matter, dark matter and dark energy are all taken into account. For normal matter alone, energy and momentum are no longer conserved, they argue.

While still employing the metric of curved spacetime that Einstein used in his field equations, the researchers argue the presence of dark matter and dark energy -- which scientists believe accounts for at least 95 percent of the universe -- requires a new set of gravitational field equations that take into account a new type of energy caused by the non-uniform distribution of matter in the universe. This new energy can be both positive and negative, and the total over spacetime is conserved, Wang said.

It is curved spacetime, along with a new scalar potential field representing the new energy density, and the interactions between the two that form the foundation for the new gravitational field equations.

"Many people have come up with different theories for dark energy," Wang said. "Unfortunately, the mystery remains, and in fact, the nature of dark energy is now perhaps the most profound mystery in cosmology and astrophysics. It is considered the most outstanding problem in theoretical physics.

"The other great mystery concerning our universe is that it contains much more matter than can be accounted for in our visible stars. The missing mass is termed as dark matter, and despite many attempts at detecting dark matter, the mystery remains and even deepens."

The researchers postulate that the energy-momentum tensor of normal matter is no longer conserved and that new gravitational field equations follow from Einstein's principles of equivalence and general relativity, and the principle of Lagrangian dynamics, just as Einstein derived his field equations. Wang said the new equations were the unique outcome of the non-conservation of the energy-momentum tensor of normal matter.

When Einstein developed his theory, dark energy and dark matter had not yet been discovered, so it was natural for him to start his theory using the conservation law of energy and momentum of normal matter, Wang added.

"The difference between the new field equations and Einstein's equations is the addition of a second-order covariant derivative of a scalar potential field," he said. "Gravity theory is fundamentally changed and is now described by the metric of the curved spacetime, the new scalar potential field and their interactions."

Tensors provide a concise framework for solving general relativity problems and the energy-momentum tensor quantifies the density and current of energy and momentum in spacetime. The second-order covariant derivative would be the geometric analog of a second order derivative in calculus which measures how the rate of change of a quantity is itself changing.

Associated with the scalar field is a scalar potential energy density consisting of positive and negative energies and representing a new type of energy caused by the non-uniform distribution of matter in the universe. The scalar potential energy density varies as the galaxies move and matter redistributes, affecting every part of the universe as a field.

Wang said negative energy produces attraction while the positive energy produces a repelling force fundamentally different from the four forces -- gravity, electromagnetism, the weak interaction and the strong interaction -- recognized in physics today.

"Most importantly, this new energy and the new field equations offer a unified theory for both dark energy and dark matter, which until now have been considered as two totally different beasts sharing only 'dark' in name," he said. "Both dark matter and dark energy can now be represented by the sum of the new scalar potential energy density and the coupling energy between the energy-momentum tensor and the scalar potential field."

The negative part of this sum represents the dark matter, which produces attraction, and the positive part represents the dark energy, which drives the acceleration of expanding galaxies, he said.

"In a nutshell, we believe that new gravity theory will change our view on energy, gravitational interactions, and the structure and formation of our universe," Wang said.

Kevin Zumbrun, chair of the Department of Mathematics at IU Bloomington, said the new unified theory looked sound in principle.

"It is speculative at the cosmological level, since one must match with experiment, but the math is solid," he said. "It's a new and elegant angle on things, and if this does match experiment, it is a huge discovery. Quite exciting!"

Wang said the new field equations also lead to a modified Newtonian gravitational force formula, which shows that dark matter plays a more important role in a galactic scale at about 1,000 to 100,000 light years, but is less important in the larger scale, where dark energy will be significant (more than 10 million light years).

"This unified theory is consistent with general characterizations of dark energy and dark matter, and further tests of the theory up to measured precisions of cosmic observations are certainly crucial for an eventual validation of the theory," Wang added.

The full research paper, "Gravitational Field Equations and Theory of Dark Energy and Dark Matter," is available at the open access online preprint archive arXiv, and the work was supported by funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

America Sucks With Nick Hodge

The USA is suffering from serious problems in governance. This item by Nick Hodge lists a litany of unchallenged abuses driven by mandated agencies literally running amok. It presents a public sector were everything can be gamed with money.

It is also obvious that suicide by cop is becoming the method of choice.

Last night I took in a Seattle local newscast. There were three separate incidents reported in which a gang of cops piled on a suspect all guns blazing and the target giving as good as he got. A hundred miles north, we are hard put to have one such scenario a year. There is a huge training issue here or the lack of it.

It is just not that so much is wrong, but that errors are accumulating year after year and there is no demonstrative will to fix anything. The drug trade fuels organized crime, better described as organized barbarism, and a bloated public security system that drains the public coffers with absolutely no change in the terms of engagement or visible progress.

The medical monopoly has ballooned its depredations on the public purse and the top two thirds of the population while effectively abandoning the third who cannot pay the dollars involved. This is all done while charging a third more per capita than anyone else.

The Banking casino hardly needs an introduction. They are all waiting for the statutes of limitations run out before they go at it again.

The persuasive sense of corruption pervades the legislative bodies and almost no one steps up or if they do they are viciously attacked. This cannot endure.

America Sucks

By Nick Hodge | Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

http://www.energyandcapital.com/

America sucks.

It hasn't always. But it does right now.

And it doesn't have to stay that way. You can change it...

Of course, some people won't agree with me. They'll say it's the greatest nation on earth. The freest. Home of the brave.

To them I ask: Would the freest nation on earth publicly execute a wheelchair-bound double amputee at a home for the mentally ill?

It happened last week in Houston. The courageous men in blue there opened fire on the man who was wielding a pen after he demanded a cigarette and a soda.

This guy had one arm and one leg and was mentally ill. Houston cops shot him in the head.

How brave they were. How free we are.

Six Michigan police fired 46 bullets at a mentally ill homeless man in July.

Michigan's finest, well-trained, and noble officers hit the man 11 times — with fewer than 25% of their shots. Two of those fine Michigan men have been reprimanded; one has been demoted. Their names were not released.

These are the kind of militarized morons policing our country. Protecting us no more, their job is to instill fear and keep the populace at bay.

But that's how it is, isn't it? A veil of secrecy has been erected between the government (and its enforcers) and the people.

You vote for a candidate who pledges to do X or to repeal Y, and what do you get?Nothing. Their agenda is their own, formulated at the request of the highest bidder, meant only to further entrench their power and line their pockets...

Big Pharma. Big Retail. Big Tobacco. Big Health Care. Big Oil. Big Agriculture. Big Banks. Big Government.

Take Two Every 8 Hours, Stay Off Drugs

Prescription pills kill 140,000 people every year in the United States, severely injure one million, and send two million to the hospital.

Side effects include brain damage, stroke, pulmonary disease, cardiac arrest, perforated ulcers, cancer, liver failure, and addiction.

Those are legal drugs.

Illegal drugs kill about 5,000 Americans per year, mostly from cocaine and heroine.

Tell me, on which drugs should we wage a war?

The facts are clear. But Big Government and Big Pharma — which spends $100 million per year lobbying (bribing) politicians — can't get a cut from the “bad” drugs.

So 1.5 million Americans are locked up each year for illegal drug-related crimes, while Big Pharma drug reps make great livings taking doctors out for expensive lunches every day so they push their pills. 

And 80% of those 1.5 million arrests are for possession, so those fine cops mentioned earlier aren't even getting the distributors.

What's more, 44% of possession arrests are for marijuana — which kills no one — rather than for the harder stuff that does.

Yet since the 1980s over a quarter-trillion of your taxes have gone to fight a war on drugs that kills millions fewer people than the legal ones executives and congressmen are profiting from.

Drug dealing isn't drug dealing when it's state sanctioned.

To quote Gerald Celente, whose book What Zizi Gave Honeyboy inspired this essay: “It actually all makes perfect sense in a system in which justice is measured by the size of political campaign contributions."

And it's not only pharmaceutical drugs; the hypocrisy is multiplied when you inspect alcohol and tobacco, which do tens of billions each year in sales and spend hundreds of millions bribing so-called 'lawmakers.'

Smoking kills about 450,000 Americans each year. Alcohol kills another 150,000.

But remember, kids, Altria (Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, and Pfizer bribe the government. They have sales goals to meet. Pot growers don't.

Shit: It's What's for Dinner

Lamar Carter is a cattle farmer. He feeds his cows shit.

He's cited in a U.S. News & World report as buying 745 tons of chicken scat and stacking it 12 feet high on his farm. After it sits for seven to 10 days, it's mixed with a small amount of soy bran... and fed to his hundreds of cows.

He's quoted as saying: “My cows are fat as butterballs. If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too expensive.”

You may have also heard the recent story going around about another cattle farmer feeding candy to his cows.

And I shouldn't have to recount the squalid conditions your beef and chicken inhabit while alive, injected with hormones and antibiotics (half of the antibiotics made in the U.S. are for animals), starved, and then force-fed to produce bigger eggs, wading in their own feces until they die.

I won't even tell you where millions of euthanized dogs and cats end up.

Is it any surprise 80 million Americans contract a foodborne illness annually (over a quarter of the population), 9,000 of them meeting their maker because of it?

Have you noticed there were no warnings for eating undercooked meat or eggs 20 years ago?

But like drugs, where does the regulator's hammer come down?

Surely not on the Hormels, Cargills, Tysons, and Perdues who are so profit-hungry they feed the animals you eat feces... but on the small mom-and-pop farmers trying to make it on their own selling all-natural beef, chicken, and vegetables.

In many states, it's illegal to sell raw milk. In others, small farms have been raided at gunpoint. (By whom? By those lovely militarized police we talked about earlier.)

Guess which operations have enough to bribe the lawmakers you elected?

And then those politicians have the gumption to decry the loss of small businesses during their election campaigns when it's them putting them out of business.

America!

I could go on and on about the current injustices plaguing the American system. (And I will next week... and the one after that.)

Like how your Nobel Peace Prize-winning president increased troop levels in Afghanistan, a so-called “troop surge,” who are now coming home and “leaving behind an uncertain landscape of rising violence and political instability that threatens to undo considerable gains in security,” as the NYT reported last week.

Last year was the deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan since the war began. This year could rival it.

Soldier suicides are at an all-time high, and are beginning to outpace deaths on the battlefield. That's some kinda peace.

There was once a time when leaders like Washington and Eisenhower actually led wars. And they knew the desperation it caused — and that it should be used only as a last result.

Now we carry on wars for years, the suffering felt only by the lower classes, while draft-dodgers, community organizers, and Mormon teachers decry its necessity having never witnessed first-hand its atrocities. If they want a war so bad, I say give them a rucksack and rifle and send them out there.

Try to guess how much money Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrup Grumman spend taking your elected officials out to dinner. (It was up 11.5% in the first quarter this year to just under $16 million.)

Or how about the constant flow of banking scams at the highest level, only to never see any major prosecutions or law changes...

You might understand why if you knew the banks and their political action committees (bribe squads) spent nearly $20 million on political candidates — Democrat and Republican — in 2010.

Banks like JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America have spent $16 million since 2011 trying to get people elected who make or bend laws in their favor. Congressmen, on average, get $20,000 per year from the banks. Senators get about $30,000, but it was up near $100,000 leading up to the implosion of our economy.

No wonder they continue to bill this as "the greatest nation on earth"...

They're making money hand over fist while everyone else struggles.

What I don't understand is why the majority continue to buy into it.

It was Hitler who said if you repeat the same lie often enough, people will eventually believe it.

So How Great Is It?

It's great enough that Americans now work 160 more hours per year than they did 20 years ago.

And for what?

How's your purchasing power? Your home value? Your savings account?

It's no wonder a majority of people think the country is suffering from a moral breakdown.

To quote from Celente's book:

If the “American way” was working so well, why was “stress” cited as the primary cause for the 25% increase in sick days? Why do stress-related problems account for 60% to 90% of doctors' visits in the United States?

If “life has gotten better,” why are 5% of our children being fed Ritalin to calm them down, and why are we gulping down more than a million dollars' worth of Prozac a day to keep steady?

I think it's because they're chasing a dream they know they can't attain — or worse, no longer even exists.

Almost one-third of Americans say they've been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

For years now there's been a growing sense of something being truly wrong with our country. The Occupy Movement has been the most vocal about it, but they aren't fully representing the problem.

Bankers, for all their faults, are only leveraging the system they live in; the Supreme Court, after all, has affirmed that companies are people, and can donate limitlessly and anonymously to political campaigns.

We've allowed our country to reach a point where we've sold our happiness and sense of community to the highest bidder, and only those at the top of industry and top of government get true profit.

A family of four could once live well on one salary. Now two aren't enough to scrape by.

As Celente concludes in the chapter entitled, “Make money your God and it will plague you like the devil”:

If the facts show — and the people say — they're unhappy and morally starved, and large numbers are on the verge of cracking up, is the “American way” delivering on its promise?

When the media and politicians talk about other nations that don't have the financial and material riches of the United States, they tell us the people in those countries are “living in poverty,” but as any seasoned world traveler will tell you, “poverty” is a relative term...

It can be argued that while people living in poor nations lack our material comforts, many of them possess the wealth of community and the family prosperity that has dissipated in America and among her people.

A close friend of mine, a mid-level derivatives manager at Citi, recently quit his job to move to South America. An accountant here in my office is heading to Melbourne next month.

Departing isn't the only option, though it is increasingly appealing.

I'm going to stick it out here for a while, perhaps on a remote farm, if I can swing it...

Of course, no matter where you choose to live, acquiring and growing capital always makes it easier.

I'll continue to try to help you do that every week — while also wading through the events and policies of a stranger and stranger world.

And I'll be taking the stage at the New Orleans Investment Conference next month for the same reason.

Call it like you see it,

Nick Hodge

@nickchodge on Twitter

Nick is an editor of Energy & Capital and the Investment Director of the thousands-strong stock advisory, Early Advantage. Co-author of the best-selling book Investing in Renewable Energy: Making Money on Green Chip Stocks, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world. For more on Nick, take a look at his editor's page.